Minerals and Buttercups DUR:14:00/US/2017

I made this film during a short and strange teaching stay in Syracuse, NY. Some of it is shot on the Canon C500, some on the 5D mark IV, some on mobile phone, and some is footage from the video game No Man's Sky combined with some of my own 3D rendered animations. No Man’s Sky was the big release that year because of its infinite procedurally generated worlds. Basically every planet and creature was unique to each player's gameplay. There was something exciting about that, initially. Like many other "survival and exploration" games, in No Man's Sky you have to gather resources and build things, but this one seemed particularly visceral in the way giant clumps of meat would jump thought the air towards you every time you killed an animal, or in the way big orbs of gold and rare minerals just jetted out of the ground for the picking. At the time I was also reading the travel journals of John Ruskin and the ideas of landscape perception and absorption from the two activities merged somehow. Everything was pixelated and leaky that year.