Research Catalogue

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Mistakes. The artist talk. HD digital video (1920x1080), colour, sound, 20'20", 2020. 'Mistakes' was made in the midst of the first Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. It was originally conceived as a remote artist talk, but can also be considered an intermediary progress report for my doctoral research. Pressed by the impossibly tight deadline of just over a week, the creation process barely discerned between conceptual conception and production. Most of the scenes were created during that time frame – with some elements lifted from unfinished projects in my hard-drive archives. As a demarcation parameter, I set a duration of twenty minutes and twenty seconds (20’20”). Mistakes combines 3d animation, text, audio, and postproduction, all of which were part of my body of work before, but adds new applications that had just become available to me, such as 3d scanning and motion capture. However, the approaching deadline forced me to abandon labour-intensive realistic scenes. Instead, the departure point of an artist talk inspired a more graphic and eclectic format of a PowerPoint slideshow presentation. My first concern was my role as the narrator in the film’s universe: it was an artist talk, after all. I quickly dismissed live recordings, because I felt inadequately represented by my physical self in the digital spaces of my virtual studio. The most straight-forward solution was to resort to using different types of avatars, virtual ‘talking heads’. Another challenge was to find coherence in the build-up of the ‘talk’. The film was made chronologically, chapter by chapter. Most of the fourteen chapters are announced by large titles appearing across the screen. Some chapters transition smoothly from one segment into another, others are hard cuts. In order to maintain an overall consistency throughout the film, I used a recurring musical soundtrack – albeit in various forms – of a looped instrumental audio sample of the song ‘I’m Sorry’ by American country artist Brenda Lee. Lee, who was 15 at the time of the recording, sings about dealing with the rejection of a love interest. In the lyrics she laments: “I’m sorry, so sorry, that I was such a fool; I didn’t know love could be so cruel”, continued by: “Mistakes are part of being young”. The ‘mistakes’ from the film’s title not only reference Lee’s song but also cover a handful of productional errors in the film that were made due to pressed time. Additionally, the film was made just over seven months in the research trajectory: some of the concepts that are introduced in the film were in a premature, exploratory phase and have since been abandoned or transformed. Because of its impromptu production that with immediacy responded to the situation, the video has become somewhat of a document of this specific and unusual period. However, the claustrophobic atmosphere of the video transcends the specific conditions in which it was made. Mistakes was followed up by NGMI in 2022. The ‘Complicit’ chapter was reworked into an installation, also in 2022. Antwerp, April 28, 2020 Wednesday, April 29, 2020 anno covidii, I was supposed to give a talk over lunch at the end of my two months involvement with Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn, New York. This, of course, took place in another universe. Instead, I flew back home to Belgium on March 15 for obvious reasons. Back in my studio, I had trouble processing all information I managed to gather during my short stay, and everything that’s connected to the current virus crisis. A weird overlap between my body of work, my research, and this Situation has occurred. I lost sight of the Universe of Former Normality, in which I was still in New York. Last week, RU’s Rachel reached out to me, asking if I would be willing to give the talk anyway, through means of a recording of some sort. I suddenly snapped out of artistic bewilderment – I’ve been starting projects since I returned, but nothing at this point really materialized in a satisfactory way – and made this 20 minute hyperspace powerpoint video work, explaining my research, using fragments and frays of halfly finalized ideas. This is by far the longest film I ever made in the shortest time available. There’s a lot more I wanted to address, but for now, this is it. Thanks for watching. Credits: All images and soundtracks by Alexandra Crouwers, except for: a fragment of Bald Terror’s ‘Rotterdam’, a sample of Brenda Lee’s ‘I’m sorry’, the Marvel character Thanos is mentioned, it uses YouTube footage of jumpstyle dancers, gifs from Giphy, two sound effects of freesound.org, and smoke effects from pixabay. This video was made possible with the kind support of Mondriaan Fonds, Kunstloc Brabant, and the Vlaamse Gemeenschap.

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NGMI Vertical HD digital video, 1080 x 1920px, colour, audio, 12'00", 2022 “Who would’ve thought the end of the world would look like mowed lawns, a holiday to Greece, or a new pair of jeans?” “what a fascinating film–i’ve never seen anything quite like it. i’m very glad to have played a small part in inspiring it!” – Bill McKibben, January 2023. NGMI is a sequel to Mistakes. The artist talk. NGMI is a string of tableaus, or chapters, connected by transitions with their own roles. Chapters: Anthem for the End of the World as We Know it Long Distance Call First Pictogram Lullaby Grief: an Alarm Call Dragons of Inaction The Review New Mythologies Generational Amnesia (They told us the metaverse was going to be So. Much. Fun.) Call Again Mistakes was made during the first pandemic lockdown of Spring 2020, as an acute response to the extraordinary circumstances at the time. NGMI expresses post-pandemic sentiments, mainly of disappointment. The pandemic provided an opportunity to implement large-scale and necessary measures to benefit the health of the planet. Instead, society’s desire to return to ‘normal’ has prevailed and change has been stalled. Both films process the emotional experience of ecosystem collapse through chapters that alternate between information, absurdity and speculation. Mistakes and NGMI also notably include ‘me’ as a narrator, in the form of avatars and superimposed text. Music is prominent in both films, contributing to Bill McKibben’s call for more crisis-aware art: “Where are the goddamn operas?“ My work has revolved around apocalyptic and post-human scenarios for years: my 1998 art school graduate paper already shows signs of what is now recognized as ‘eco-anxiety’. In the context of my doctoral research, I use a former forest destroyed by a climate-induced bark beetle infestation as a lens through which to view these larger issues. Six months after the clearing of the forest and the beginning of my artistic doctoral research, a global pandemic broke out. The connection between the demise of the forest and the upheaval of a virus was abundantly clear: both resulted from relentless human intervention in natural ecosystems. But where the clear-cut forest has slowly but surely begun to heal itself after the shock of the disappearance of the trees, our society has missed the opportunity to heal the planet that the pandemic offered. Instead, deforestation, oil drilling and overall emissions are at an all-time high. The effects of climate change and biodegradation are shattering all models and projections. It will take many, many generations to regenerate what is being lost now, if there is anything left. Writer Amitav Ghosh describes our predicament as not just an ecological crisis, but a crisis of the imagination. It seems that politics, industry and even the general public have lost the ability to imagine different futures and alternative ways of organising society, blocking the path to urgent change. As an artist working with speculative, post-human scenarios for over two decades, my work has long been informed by knowledge from fields such as evolutionary biology, archaeology and palaeoanthropology. It has influenced my perception of time and helps to put current events – and current human behaviour – into perspective: things really can be different. The opposite of NGMI is WAGMI: ‘we’re all gonna make it’. NGMI was also the title of my solo exhibition in Collectie De.Groen in 2022.

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ACRWRS_2021_Berchem_i!_thecompositor_3.jpg ⓘ Information panels in metal frames and digital sculptures, various locations, 2021 – ongoing. Information panels, print on dibond, mounted on wood, QR codes, webpages, 118 x 71cm. Berchem, Antwerp, Belgium, Summer 2021

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ACRWRS_2021_Berchem_i!_overview_2l.jpg ⓘ Information panels in metal frames and digital sculptures, various locations, 2021 – ongoing. Information panels, print on dibond, mounted on wood, QR codes, webpages, 118 x 71cm. Berchem, Antwerp, Belgium, Summer 2021

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ACRWRS_2021_Berchem_i!_overview_1l.jpg ⓘ Information panels in metal frames and digital sculptures, various locations, 2021 – ongoing. Information panels, print on dibond, mounted on wood, QR codes, webpages, 118 x 71cm. Berchem, Antwerp, Belgium, Summer 2021

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ACRWRS_2021_Berchem_i!_ipstypography_1l.jpg ⓘ Information panels in metal frames and digital sculptures, various locations, 2021 – ongoing. Information panels, print on dibond, mounted on wood, QR codes, webpages, 118 x 71cm. Berchem, Antwerp, Belgium, Summer 2021

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ACRWRS_2021_Berchem_i!_thecompositor_2.jpg ⓘ Information panels in metal frames and digital sculptures, various locations, 2021 – ongoing. Information panels, print on dibond, mounted on wood, QR codes, webpages, 118 x 71cm. Berchem, Antwerp, Belgium, Summer 2021

© Alexandra Crouwers download picture download picture
ACRWRS_2021_Berchem_i!_ipstypography_2l.jpg ⓘ Information panels in metal frames and digital sculptures, various locations, 2021 – ongoing. Information panels, print on dibond, mounted on wood, QR codes, webpages, 118 x 71cm. Berchem, Antwerp, Belgium, Summer 2021

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ACRWRS_2021_Berchem_i!_herenow_1l.jpg ⓘ Information panels in metal frames and digital sculptures, various locations, 2021 – ongoing. Information panels, print on dibond, mounted on wood, QR codes, webpages, 118 x 71cm. Berchem, Antwerp, Belgium, Summer 2021

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Summoning a Forest

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