Two Native American geoltih sites on the California/Arizona border, and a NASA site in Arizona are scanned in 3D, rendered, and animated as flyovers as islands in deep space. An apocryphal story of an encounter between a Navaho tribal elder and the Apollo 11 astronauts, as narrated by Desmond Bovey.
A 2024 version of the 2019 video.
"Natural Intelligence (simulations)" - an excerpt is above. Natural Intelligence is “intelligence created by nature, natural evolutionary mechanisms”.. With it, “there is a dynamic movement of natural intelligence that evolves from vague, fuzzy, and unconscious states to more concrete and conscious states, and thus realizing the essence of perception” (Perlovsky and Kozma, 2007, p. 1). It is beautiful and deeply flawed, but it levels out in the end.
“The Peaceable Kingdom” is a dreamscape of various domestic and wild animals inhabiting human architectural spaces. The title is taken from a series of paintings by the Quaker minister and painter, Edward Hicks. Excerpt above.
Dear Hart, How they dream. How we dream. (excerpt above)..."Dear Hart, How they dream. How we dream" consists of animations of a hybrid Père David's deer combined with video footage where deer inhabit human space. Absent of humans, the video would depict deer interacting naturally within human settings. Convincingly real but at the same time clearly digital, they encompass a type of animal deepfake ontology.
Dear Hart, How they dream. How we dream. at Bow Arts Visions 2022 Visions in the Nunnery 2022, London... installation image, courtesy Nunnery Gallery, photo Rob Harris.
Deep Nostalgia, The Anarchists (Excerpt)
Using the Deep Nostalgia software that brings to life old photographs (utilizing motion capture technology), I focused on famous anarchists and anarchist sympathizers. I also added 3D drone scans animations of villages destroyed during the Spanish Civil War in anarchist territories.
see https://vimeo.com/user3872342/videos for more videos, and further information
A trip that I took to the Southwest US in 2021 brought home the urgency of action necessary to tackle this impending proto-apocalyptic challenge. We were surrounded by near and distant wild fires in a year of endemic climate anomalies, only to soon return to the apparent tranquility of New Zealand.
This video is a digital collage consisting of 3D drone scans, digital animations, green screens, alpha channels and 4k footage.
Green screen deer, audio and licensed music are sourced from Pond5 and Shutterstock. Stop motion wildfire clips courtesy of Arnav Kainthola. Excerpt above.
"The Killing Chain" (trailer), New Zealand’s freezing works (the “killing chains”) were once the nation’s primary industry in a monoculture that processed meat, dairy and animal by-products. This video includes both video and digital animation of ruins of three industrial freezing works/cold storage complexes in combination with a diorama and two Deep Nostalgia facial animations of AI created abattoir workers. Excerpt above.
Bush Dance - a close up of a muscular tree, reading Micho Kaku and Clifford Pickover essays on Hyperspace and dancing salsa to ambient music in a Tyvek suit.
"Ghost Zone" is an homage to Tarkovsky's “Stalker” (1979) that takes us on a journey to the original expedition into the ineffable aqueous “Zone”. It combines various locations in both New Zealand and Estonia - including the original Estonian filming sites along the formerly toxic Jägala River within the fictional "Zone". Bunkley stitches together his own actual and 3D scanned virtual footage in such a way that the landscape and buildings resemble a magic realist post-apocalyptic wasteland. Excerpt above.
The edge of the RWE open pit mine engulfed what was once a town of 900 inhabitants in 2019. Down the road, the expanding Hambach lignite mine was encroaching upon the remaining ancient Hambach forest that once covered the mine. Thousands of demonstrators, dressed in white Tyvek suits, have protested in recent years to save the remaining 200 hectares of the Hambach Forest. (The Tyvek suit sequences were videoed pre-Covid)
Blood River - trailer
The Rio Tinto river in Huelva Province runs red like blood due to iron oxides from an ancient 5000-year-old mine upstream. Uphill, the anarcho-socialist village of El Membrillos Bajo was razed to the ground by Franco's Nationalist forces in 1937.
This video presents various geothermal-like events from vape clouds to instances of geothermal hot spots rendered as geothermal activity. Some are real sites, others are fictional.
Ghost Shelter, Federation Square: Melbourne, VIC Australia
Ghost Shelter (Six Sites):
These sites encompass a variety of significant post-industrial structures all at the edge of metropolitan regions in various states of ruin.
"Godzone” is a colloquial term for New Zealand – shorthand for “God's Own Country”. In this video, industrial architecture (quaint, but ominous in their decay) vie with striking NZ landscape rendered in virtual 3D.
Pillar of Cloud (Oil Petals)
Oil, ghost towns and dust devils are aligned as tropes of climate change. Tornado-like dust devils, as canaries in the coal mine, are increasingly common in hot, barren deserts and in drought-stricken areas of the world.
Kafka’s Sisters
The Kafkaesque.... An attempt to find common ground between Franz Kafka's waking nightmares, state terrorism and neoclassicism.
Paradox of Plenty
"The work’s futuristic “ships” have a double nature that goes beyond their mirrored symmetry. They are practical and functional, like the industrial constructions they are, but also dream-like. They are aspirational, but also threatening, with a military or bomb-like aspect. However much they are altered by their mirroring, though, these remain recognisable as structures that exist now, in today’s world; structures that are vaguely dystopian: mundane, transitory, bad for the environment, or just outmoded."
Hunstman
The irrational fear of spiders is an apt trope for unfounded fear -in the colloquial sense, “paranoia”, which conditions racism, diffidence and the Hobbesian trap of violence.
Downbreak on 1, Upbeat on
Salsa is a syncretic dance form with origins from the Cuban Son and Afro-Cuban dance. Silhouetted dancers swing to the lively, sensual dance of Salsa in this video whose soundtrack is replaced by the gentle, cerebral Satie-esque piano of Deaf Center.
Fleeced
“Fleeced” is a series of interrelated video vignettes that obliquely refer to psychological, environmental, and social-political dislocations set within rural settings of the Southern North Island of New Zealand.
Up River Blues
"Up River Blues" is a dreamlike series of vignettes featuring the region surrounding the Whanganui River valley. The Whanganui River is New Zealand’s longest navigable river with rich historical significance.
Blood Angle
2012 Blood as a secular trope.