the amoeba's offering

The Amoeba's Offering is a video installation which transports you into the watery depths of Berlin, away from its external screams and into its consciousness. We find an ancient amoeba who’s eager to tell their story of the land, reconstructing the discarded fragments of memories into a new kingdom. The Amoeba is ready to show you, but will you listen?

2 channel video and audio installation. Set dressing and sculptures were created with reycled/found plastic materials from Berlin, with projectors projecting both onto and through the materials. Audio channels through speakers and headphones.

Presented at the MA Symposium at Catalyst University: Institute for Creative Arts and Technology in Berlin.

May 2024 ; 6:00

The project investigates the extent to which film and moving image can successfully engage with and promote ecological thought, both within the subject and throughout the production process. Recognising the camera as a connected entity within the space it records, the images embed the material quality through both digital manipulation and hand printed animation.

Within its orderly walls lurk the mess embedded within nature, and the messy interrelations between humans and non-humans is no more present than within the dirty, concealed corners of the city. Observing and recording the messy, entangled sounds and images of the city, the complex relationships between human and nature reveal themselves in the present moment.

The city’s entanglement with the rest of the natural world is not restricted to the parks or ordered trees, it cannot be contained to a single space, a single image. Despite its constant desire for control, its power is relinquished with the sound. Sound echoes through the concrete corridors; the laughs, cries and groans of this ever growing entity. Construction drilling transitions into birds singing, all the while traffic grumbles along.

Nature is intangible. It is beautiful and ugly. It lurks in every corridor of the city yet remains invisible. It is visible in its traces, namely, dirt. Dirt breeds life, whether it feeds baby rats, amplifies human voices or transforms metal’s shape and colour (rust).

The project investigates the extent to which film and moving image can successfully engage with and promote ecology, both within the subject and throughout the production process.