LETTERS FROM ITHACA: UNDER THE SURFACE

WHAT. We want your 20-60 second one-take videos, captured on any device at hand. Consider showing us that which might not be seen by visitors to the Finger Lakes region. Show us your Gorges. What you see might witness the abuse of or the protection of natural resources (living space, water, wilderness)! Or, show us the every-day overlooked things you see and places you inhabit. How are you in this space? Where do you work, dive, shop, drive, climb or escape to? We seek to include your contributions for a screening planned at Cornell Cinema on March 7th.

WHO. Anyone who has an image to capture and share. No previous film experience required.

HOW/WHEN: Please email your video files here: xtractionvideos@gmail.com[deadline Tuesday3/4/22 at 12noon] along with your name and a one sentence description of your image. These clips will be edited together and screened as part of the March 7th (X)-trACTION screening https://cinema.cornell.edu/x-traction. If you contribute a video, you can join us FOR FREE that night.

WHY: (X)-trACTION began in Bisbee, Arizona in January as the result of a collaborative group of media artists' inquiry into the problem of "extraction" both ecologically and aesthetically.

Mid-century postcards, front and back, offer invaluable if obscured views in Nicole Antebi's archival re-animation of la frontera. Geography plays across multiple enactments in Cathy Lee Crane's video, which asserts the primacy of water and migration in the dust of militarized landscapes. Laurie McKenna conjures desert punk power in an aggregate of memory and charcoal, and grounds national rupture in a sonic diary. Erin Wilkerson and Jason Livingston, in their contributions, draw poetic power lines through industry, reminding us that extraction, for all its local magnetism and metal lures, is a view into international dynamics.

Local Bisbee residents were invited to contribute observations of life in Bisbee which were included in that night's program as interstitial seams that made their way through the sequence of five artists' films to form a meta mash-up deposit concerned for our climate, our workers, our history and future- the beauty and the failures. Whereas the logic of extraction is violently deliberate, the operative logic of this generative media work [aka the screening program] is generous, chance-based, and playful. These might combine to tell a bigger story of regional extraction.

Your contributions will run throughout the Cornell Cinema program on 3/7 as fragments from Under the Surface of Ithaca. Be a part of the conversation.