Still Processing

At Blue Oak Reserve I made a short video called Still Processing. It features many of the same elements that a toilet paper or paper towel commercial might—bright sunshine, pristine nature, and paper towels. However there are two major differences: it’s a cell phone video, in the youtube style of someone who is witnessing an unexpected event, first hand; and some factual information has been written on the paper towels using charcoal. 

The video is made from one long shot. It begins mise-en-scene with a view of the tree and grass blowing in the wind. As the camera approaches the tree it becomes clear there is a paper towel dispenser mounted on the tree, and that we are moving towards it. Once in front of the machine the videographer's hand appears and activates the sensor on the machine. Each activation reveals more paper towels with the names, dates, and numbers of human homes lost during major California wildfires. 

I was hoping this experimental video would engage with three different thoughts and questions. First and foremost I wanted to create a space to reflect on how it feels when the lines between witness and participant blur and fuse. Evoking this sense of fusion largely determined the format of the video. The ancient oak tree was meant to be present in two forms in this video. In one form it’s a living being, creating dappled shade as a physical manifestation of sun, earth, wind, life and energy. In another form it is present as cellulose, a paper towel, a product of human needs, desires and tools. I used the first-hand format of the video as a way to engage with the question of what it means to witness this kind of physical and metaphorical transformation, to casually activate with one’s hands one of the mechanisms reshaping forests (or metaphorically, the broader environment) into consumable and disposable forms (the paper towel, the words). For me the video is a meditation on what it's like to witness, in an expanded sense, the becoming of the anthropocene, via youtube. 

The second is about language and how the effects and events of global warming are narrated, reported, documented, archived, and acted upon, or not. For the first iteration of the video I went through a small cemetery and made rubbings on paper towels of the epitaphs on tombstones and wrote the names of species that had gone extinct alongside each epitaph. Wondering if there are specific words that are more fit for stone, I transferred words that had been carved into the surface of marble hundreds of years ago onto the delicate surface of single use paper towels. Extending J. L. Austin’s observations that there are words that do things, might there also be words that fit or enable harmful patterns of consumption and waste? What if there was a law that every word written about climate change had to be written in stone—nothing online, nothing on paper. To read about climate change you would have to feel the weight of stone. To write about it you would have to push against the very substance and core of the earth. Would the story be told differently? would it be read differently? I wrote some factual accounts of climate change on paper towels in charcoal to give the charred remains of forest and home a material referent and also to let the words smudge and glide, and transfer from paper towel to hand, to visualize the messiness of language, and to disrupt the clean of consumption it.   

The third centers hand washing and enculturated ideas of cleanliness. The paper towel dispenser is a mechanism that supports the process of washing one’s hands in a public restroom.  There is no actual washing of hands in this video. I was concerned more with the materials and social functions that support handwashing and speak to it as a practice that is equally pragmatic and ritualistic. The combination of pristine nature preserve, sunshine, oak tree, grass, hand, and paper towel, engages with associations and metaphors used to describe what it means to be clean.  Cleanliness is rooted in social and cultural expectations about boundaries, pollution, and the relationship between body and environment. Cleanness is an older biblical word that refers specifically to one’s soul. In the video I was hoping to consider handwashing as a ritual that brings these two terms into dialogue with each other. What happens when cleanness and cleanliness intertwine or swing wide of each other? What would happen if everyone in the US stopped washing their hands until we reached a net zero emissions economy?  

While it feels absurd to speak of things as broad and oblique as the Anthropocene alongside something as inconsequential as a paper towel, I think that this absurdity is one of the dominant cognitive spaces opening up in the warmth of climate change.