SPRING 2020 | ONLINE SCREENINGS
As If Sand Were Stone… is a 35 minute essay documentary examining the making and remaking of urban waterfronts in New York City. Narrated by landscape architect Gena Wirth, the film analyzes processes of dredging and sand filling as a key infrastructural process in the production of urban space. The film combines observational footage of New York’s massive harbor deepening project with a series of self-reflexive research spirals that take place within the director's imagined computer desktop. As a result, the project not only explores the making of urban coastal landscapes, but also how these sedimentary landscapes are entangled with digitally mediated spaces of discourse and image.
The film premiered in October, 2019 at the 2nd annual Rockaway Film Festival. The program, “Embodying Urban Coastal Knowledge,” also featured Nathan Kensinger’s Managed Retreat (2018, 18’) and Pat O’Neill’s Water and Power (1989, 57’).
As If Sand Were Stone also screened online via The Block Museum at Northwestern on Thursday, May 28th, 2020. The Block program, “New Digital Ecologies,” also launched the “Desktop Cinema Working Group.” This nascent collective explores the significance of computer screen capture in moving-image practices, focusing on the many ways that filmmakers deploy and destroy the space of the computer desktop. Please reach out if you’re interested in joining!
Screening + Symposium at Penn, September 2019
Geosocial Encounters connects documentary artists with researchers and scholar-filmmakers in the environmental humanities. What can video art, experimental documentary, and sensory ethnography teach us about the practice of critical urban, spatial, and environmental research? Conversely, how are scholar-filmmakers utilizing audiovisual tools and contributing to these genres of film and video art?
The symposium is co-organized by Dr. Rahul Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Television and New Media Studies, and Dr. Ben Mendelsohn, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. The event will begin with a film screening at Slought the evening of Thursday, September 19 and continue with a series of panels throughout the day on Friday, September 20.
Visit geosocial.video for more info
2017 Global Urban Coast Year In Review (2018)
This video was completed in March 2018 to reflect on the deluge of flood images throughout 2017. How should we approach this slow motion horror show of intensifying urban floods throughout the world? And knowing that the worst flooding often happens where land has been "reclaimed" from water bodies, why do humans keep trying to turn sand into land along the global urban coast?
Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors (2011)
Lower Manhattan’s 60 Hudson Street is one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity. This short documentary peeks inside, offering a glimpse of the massive material infrastructure that makes the Internet possible. Written and edited by Ben Mendelsohn, shot and animated by Alex Chohlas-Wood. Completed as part of my MA thesis in media studies at The New School, the project was advised by Shannon C. Mattern.
Protective Ecologies (2013)
Selected submission to MoMA PS1's Rockaway Call for Ideas to create a sustainable waterfront. Proposal by Gena Wirth, video by Alex Chohlas-Wood and Ben Mendelsohn. Historic Jamaica Bay map courtesy Regional Plan Association.