Art Lovers Film Club: Alice Bucknell, Swamp City

Taken inside the game engine swamp city imagines the Florida Everglades as a luxury ecotourism getaway in the near-future realities of severe climate change. While New York is submerged and Los Angeles is on fire, the wetlands and their precious ecosystems are demonized by the colonial worldview but justified by today’s climate scientists. , has become an unlikely center for claiming new ways of looking at nature.

swamp city operates on a non-linear chronology and is played by both human and non-human protagonists, such as an anthropomorphic crocodile who refuses to migrate, a famous opportunistic architect, and an AI-revived 3,500-year-old bald cypress tree. Narration is spoken. The film explores the tensions between developers, lifestyle capitalism, perceptual technology, and dying swamps, imagining an ecological future that exists somewhere beyond the utopian-dystopian dichotomy. increase.

Screening date:
Alice Bucknell swamp city2021, HD Video, 34 Minutes
May 23, 2023 to June 12, 2023

courtesy of the artist

About the Artist:

Alice Bucknell (born 1993, London, UK) is a North American artist and writer based in London and Los Angeles. Her work primarily explores the interrelationships of architecture, ecology, magic, non-human intelligence and machine intelligence through her engine of games and detective stories. In 2021 she founded New Mystics, a collaborative platform that hosts new forms of artistic practice that blend magic, mysticism, rituals and advanced technology. In 2022, she will curate her series of events, New Her World, at Somerset House, London, focused on the politics and poetics of emerging globalization practices. She has exhibited her video work internationally, most recently at Open system: open world Singapore Art Museum (until 10 August). i will be your mirror At the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art, Texas (2023). Vienna Museum; 17th Venice Architecture Biennale; His 3hd festival in Berlin. Fiber festival in Amsterdam. Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria. and the Serpentine Gallery in London. Bucknell is currently an Associate Lecturer in MSc Narrative Environments at UAL and frequently lectures at institutions such as SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, Fabrica in Italy and her V&A in London. She studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and critical practice at the Royal College of Art in London.