Rachel Strickland

Casting Sand Flying Glass

A sculpture by artist Katie Paterson and architectural studio Zeller & Moye, Mirage consists of 448 cast glass cylinders that were made of sands collected from 70 deserts around the Earth. This video chronicles the fabrication of Mirage and its installation in an olive grove.

Olive for Steve

At a streetcorner in San Francisco's Mission district, on February 12, 2022, Friends of the Urban Forest planted a tree to honor the memory of Steve Gano. Come listen to Steve's tree, the birds and the emptiness, when the wind carries you to that vicinity. Olea europaea (olive) habit: evergreen tree up to 30 feet tall native range: Mediterranean Europe, Asia, Africa location: 37°45'25.6"N 122°25'10.8"W planting date: 20220212 source: Frantz Nursery, Hickman, CA

Emptiness Can Hold Things

Places—like stories, but different—are structures of communication and collective memory. A place is an organization, and memory is often an articulation of space. Something about space escapes our attempts to look at it from above. At intervals and thresholds of an urban landscape, EMPTINESS CAN HOLD THINGS improvises on techniques of polylinear perspective long practiced in Japanese painting and landscape design, in order to explore experiential principles inherent in the definitions of place. Merging architectural space with cinematic construction, this experiment pursues a cinematic language for the genius loci, captured in manifold perspectives and composed with reference to a mobile viewpoint that is propelled by feet.

Tree Listening Test

If trees had ears? In this preliminary study for The Social Lives of Urban Trees we brought an accelerometer, a hydrophone, an ultrasonic microphone, and various special purpose transducers to audition a London planetree (Platanus x acerifolia) planted at a city streetcorner. The ears of humans and many animals use air as the vector for sound transmission. Trees are said to be more receptive to earthborne vibrations, which they sense through their roots. Although we can only speculate what a tree might hear, our intention was figuring out how to listen to the tree’s presence among its urban milieu.

Unnamed Work in Progress

Jim Campbell's sculptural installation for Cowles Commons in Des Moines consists of 8000 LED's that chase one another around 9 elliptical rings suspended above the plaza. The project subsequently became known as SWIRL, and was officially illuminated on Tuesday 19 January 2016.

Folia

Calculating how short-duration cinema might set about to examine the experience of a tree that plays out in year-long cycles, this 24-minute video experimented with polylinear construction and polytemporal scaling of sound and image that were recorded during one 24-hour slice of street life in the span of a city block. A preliminary study for THE SOCIAL LIVES OF URBAN TREES, Folia combined observational cinema techniques with interval recording to trace characteristic rhythms, humors, drifts, and parallel passages through the sidewalk forest.

Fly Line

Afternoon fishers rehearse the fine art of allurement without disturbing any fish. Anglers Lodge and Casting Pools at Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, 23 March 2013. 24p.

For The Birds

Semiotics is For Cinema as Ornithology is For the Birds

Allegro

In this prequel to PALLADIO POTATOES PIANO PIANO, 2 timelapse sequences condense 3 years of the villa's construction to 10 minutes 33 seconds.

Palladio Potatoes Piano Piano: Building a Villa in 29 Scenes

2005-2008. Video. In 2005 San Francisco real estate magnate Angelo Sangiacomo commissioned Strickland to make a movie that would chronicle final stages in the construction of his new house in Pebble Beach, CA. Amidst the spectacle of the building site, the videographer sought to portray a design project of operatic proportions that involved a sometimes dissonant cast of characters and took more than 6 years to unfold. The owners hoped that this video record might lend future visibility to a structure’s bones and soul that otherwise vanish from sight by the time building is completed.

Soundsurround

Just when twilight gathers the day's lingering colors, fresh air musicians can be overheard in the process of nocturnal arrangements, and musical scales swell the space where cars had parked from 9 to 5. Four times a week the band players congregate here to practice their instruments.

Fuera de Marco (Out of Frame)

Chronicle of an installation Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, where Uruguayan artist Marco Maggi employed 400 reams of white copy paper to carpet a concrete floor. Shuffled, scattered, stratified, slipped, toppled, and shifted in a “techtonic” terrain with geological faults and urban plans, 200,000 empty pages awaiting inscription travel in all directions to survey what is absent, and quiet the space like snowfall. Strickland’s camera explores Maggi’s landscape myopically, from macroscopic to microscopic perspectives, tracing the surgical precision of the artist’s hand and contemplating his intrepid enterprise through the fragile experience of paper.

The Everyday Lives of Java Developers

Who is a Java developer? How would you know if you met one on the street? What is the picture of a software engineer’s work practice over the course of a day? What resources, inspirations, and artifacts do they employ, in what states of mind, with what concentration and how many parallel processes over what periods of time? What are their algorithms for troubleshooting and information finding? In the interest of learning about processes of the developer’s art, Sun Microsystems commissioned Strickland to undertake a series of video portraits. Dramatis Personae, shown here, is a compilation of excerpts from the collection.

Dramatis Personae: Everyday Lives of Java Developers

Who is a Java developer? How would you know if you met one on the street? What is the picture of a software engineer’s work practice over the course of a day? What resources, inspirations, and artifacts do they employ, in what states of mind, with what concentration and how many parallel processes over what periods of time? What are their algorithms for troubleshooting and information finding? In the interest of learning about processes of the developer’s art, Sun Microsystems commissioned Strickland to undertake a series of video portraits. Dramatis Personae, shown here, is a compilation of excerpts from the collection.

Allons-Y Alonzo: Souvenirs of a Landscape

In 1998 a 260-kilometer stretch of the Loire River—and its adjoining parklands, vineyards, chateaux, churches, abbeys and prehistoric sites—from Sully-sur-Loire to Chalonnes, was nominated by the government of France as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Focusing on dynamic and ephemeral dimensions of the cultural landscape, Strickland adopted the shorthand of “microcinema” to portray a collection of local characters and environmental transitions that would lend animate perspective to the Loire Valley World Heritage web site. Adding the glimpses together in a 27 minute movie, Allons-y Alonzo reflects a filmmaker’s quest to glean the senses of a place and to register its Genius Loci. The web site with Strickland’s video was produced as a design prototype for UNESCO World Heritage Centre.

Placeholder

An experimental Virtual Reality project that explored potentials for narrative action on the part of players in a simulated landscape. The work incorporated elements of local mythology and actual locations in the Canadian Rockies. Three-dimensional videographic scene elements, spatialized sounds and voices, and simple character animation were employed to construct places in a virtual environment that could be visited concurrently by two physically remote participants wearing head-mounted displays. Produced at the Banff Centre for the Arts in collaboration with Brenda Laurel.

Backyard Transformations

This exploration in combinatorial media and the morphology of narrative integrates motion picture, sound, and text elements in a story construction environment for children. Introduced through a series of card games that elicit spontaneous, improvisational creation, a collection of fanciful characters, unexpected events, and imaginary viewpoints, fabricated in the storyteller’s own backyard, are shuffled and revealed like a deck of Tarot cards. 174 movie intervals furnish scenes and threads from which children construct and narrate original stories. The project was developed in Los Angeles, CA at Alan Kay’s Apple Computer Vivarium Lab.

Be There Here

Being where your body isn't. This primer on Virtual Reality, produced for Telepresence Research, contemplated fresh visions and demonstrated emerging technologies for virtual environments and remote presence. With Brenda Laurel, Scott Fisher, Scott Foster, Mark Bolas, and Michael Naimark.

Antecedence: Terence McKenna Talks Virtual Reality

On a midsummer afternoon Terence McKenna contemplated the ecological complexity of rainforests, the intelligence of ant colonies, and the proposition of modeling a forest anthill in VR.

Shuffled Stories

SHUFFLED STORIES & TALES WITH TANGLED THREADS: Teaching Language with BACKYARD TRANSFORMATIONS. Video documentation of classroom experiments, Los Angeles Open School, 1990. http://vimeo.com/8957517 storytellers: Oren Biberstein, Rahshad Braithwaite, Ben Caplan, Shiri Geuz

Recess: Incidents in the Playground

Recorded daily at Los Angeles Open School from September 1986 to June 1987, this diary of the playground distills an architectural observation that explored patterns of ritual, improvisation, and territorial dynamics in children's games. Afterword by Alan Kay.

The Flower of Pain

A semi-autobiographical film about an adolescent relationship, about emotional illiterates of a particular age and milieu. Structured as a series of fragments – so called “shards of memory” – the film follows the progressive dissolution of the affair in search for clues to its undoing.

Rebuilding an Old Japanese House

Five Japanese carpenters came to Boston that summer to reconstruct a Kyoto silkweaver's 150 year old townhouse that had been packed in crates and shipped to Boston Children's Museum. This first-hand observation of traditional tools and woodworking techniques chronicles the assembly process. In the progress of construction the contractor performed three Shinto housebuilding ceremonies.

Finger Film

A taxonomy of manipulation, gesture, and touch for a computer research project with touch-sensitive displays, Super 8 film, MIT Architecture Machine Group.

Kalopashka

Good Easter. Super 8 film. Observance of Holy Week in the island of Patmos. The monastery that rises above the village, founded in 1088, is consecrated to Saint John the Apostle, who wrote the Book of Revelation while living in exile on this Aegean island.

Solstice and Solyanka

Super 8 film. Observations of the Institute on Film, Video & Photography, Amherst, MA, summer 1975. Among the cast of characters, in order of appearance, are Robert Breer, John Terry, Steve Ascher, Richard Leacock, Jon Rubin, Frank Daniel, Ed Emshwiller, Ann McIntosh, Terry Lockhart, Standish Lawder, Jerome Liebling.

Grace Going Awkwardly

Portable cinema in Rome's Campo de' Fiori neighborhood parses the gestures and flows of everyday space as people go about routines of installing, displacing, transforming, and carting away the objects that define such adaptive architectural places as street markets and parking lots.