This Website is a Crash Course In Fracking
A curated collection of bibliographic resources, government documents, letters, and video investigations serves as a crash course in fracking.
Update Spotlight 🌍
Perseverance 📺
July begins with things changing form: fireworks become rain, a great tree disappears from Washington Park, and small lives continue around what remains. As smoke crosses borders and heat travels beyond where it begins, the walk becomes a way of paying attention—and attention itself becomes a demand for a vibrant, healthful world.
Networked ambient video
Earthstage Loop Room
A free ambient video experience for desktops, phones, tablets, classrooms, galleries, and live gatherings.
A networked video field
Open two or three looping videos on different devices. This arrangement allows you not just to watch, but to inhabit the videos. Earthstage becomes a temporary installation wherever you are.
The landscape arrangement is preferred, widescreen. Turn up the volume, let the videos drift in and out of the conversation at the table.
Try it with a friend: open a different loop on each device and let the screens play together.
Click for fullscreen. Rotate your phone for a wider Loop Room view.
Build Your Loop RoomUpdates 🔥
These Two Circles 📺
Walking through Ithaca, I watch streets torn open and repaired, trees pruned, workers tending the ordinary machinery of a city. This is not a war zone. Neither are other American cities made into battlefields because the government describes them as dangerous or proposes using them as military “training grounds.” September asks what happens when the language of climate, dissent, and public life is changed to obscure what is plainly before us. Reality does not yield to the words used against it.
‘Tis of Thee 📺
October is made from texture, wind, insects, water, shadow, protest, and sound. The walk stays close to the ground, then opens suddenly into public language: an Earth flag, no kings, no crowns for clowns, a national anthem played through drum roll and pennywhistle. My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness!
Family 📺
November carries public grief and cosmic scale along the same path. Carl Sagan’s apple pie opens the scale outward. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. We begin to understand this.
Brass Light 📺
December gathers snow, moon, gas globe, holidays, animals, and lights into one field of attention. What is civic and what is domestic begin to trade places. The gas globe becomes snowmen. Steam becomes the moon. A patch panel becomes birds by the lake. Holiday lights, brass light, snow light, and household light all begin speaking to one another.
Gasfract 📺
A gloved hand traces the curve of an icy orb, snow and ice held in suspension. It reminds me of a control bar for the frozen land. What looks frozen is not motionless. January holds movement inside the pause.
Soft Gun 📺
The realtime source follows February as a sequence of winter fragments: snow, bridge, art window, ice, warning, screen, moon, water. In the slowed version, the fragments dissolve into one another until danger and play begin to share the same surface.
Drum Beat 📺
I combine naturalism, history, diary, always in motion. March may be my key piece. It is the longest video, and it feels iconic to me — the right time and place. This month seems to contain the full grammar: weather, politics, friends, music, gallery light, water, mud, protest, spring, death, food, thunder, and the body walking through it all.
What brings you joy 📺
What brings me joy is gathered in signs and wonders. The slower video lets me study the vines on a wooden fence transforming into a flower head. Flies alight like fireflies by the stream. The flowers of summer open around me, and even the red painted fire hydrant appears to belong in a garden.
Parade 📺
Some things I found because they were signs. Some were flowers, raindrops, animals, clouds, painted lines, arrows, a cat sleeping in sunlight, a dead bird, an empty discarded drawer, a painting of birds, and the sky opening again and again. Sometimes I had time to stop down and frame the shot. Sometimes I reached for the camera as fast as I could.
No Boundaries 📺
In recent months, I’ve been spending more time walking through Ithaca. Most days, I leave from North Plain Street, cross Buffalo Street, past the Children’s Garden, and follow the inlet trail toward Treman Marina and Cayuga Lake before circling back home.
Boundary 📺
First shown as a two-channel, three monitor video piece on three large boxed blonde Oak black-and-white Setchell-Carlson monitors set on the stage floor. I was inspired by The Vasulkas Machine Vision series (1975-1977) to work in video that way.
Deeper Listening | Jun 2022 📺
This video requires deeper listening. Soothing, melodic, projecting fairness to the generally unseen.
Neil’s Mellow Pad 📺
Neil's Mellow Pad aligns with the intention of Earthstage: to attend to the living world as active presence—complex, fragile, and ongoing. These fragments are not arguments. They are acts of attention.
Frack Mix 🎲
A Life’s Value May Depend on the Agency, but It’s Rising
To protests from business and praise from unions, environmentalists and consumer groups, one agency…
Controversial gas ‘fracking’ extraction headed to Europe
European energy companies are scrambling to secure licenses to roll out extraction projects this…
Protests urge fracking fluid ban
Protestors outside the Buffalo offices of the Department of Environmental Conservation today called for…
