Into the Endless Night

2025

25 min

Supported by Mondriaan Fonds and EPFL Enter-the-Hyperscientific

Part of the “Interspecies Interfaces” residency project at EPFL and featured in the Solar Biennale, presented at EPFL Pavillions in “From Solar to Nocturnal”

As a research project, “Interspecies Interfaces” engaged with emerging developments in evolving contact zones between animals, technology, and humans. From this process, Wilson has produced a film that begins as an experimental documentary on bat cognition study. The film unfolds into a fictional scenario of two researchers navigating the edge of understanding as they work with EECCOO, an artificial intelligence operating as an interspecies interface between humans and bats. Years later, the researchers rediscover the system — in an evolved, mysterious form.

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EECCOO

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As Messengers

2024

In collaboration with Emilia Tapprest

Research supported by Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at the University of Amsterdam; production generously funded by Mondriaan Fonds

Presented at Allard Pierson in Amsterdam, NL

As Messengers explores how ever-changing social imaginaries enmesh humans with the biosphere. A cast of characters traverse five alternative timelines, revealing a kaleidoscopic array of speculative ‘historical forks’: critical junctures where alternative relationalities could have unfolded. In these scenarios — and the transitional zones in between — other species act as messengers of the ongoing biodiversity crisis.

Featuring: Türkü Köksel, Hank Botwinik, Fruzsina Nagy, Negiste Yesside Johnson, Jochem de Groot, Susan Joyce, Gaba Ssantó, Justin Samgar de Verteller, Lu Wang, Judy Young, Erika Minderop, Alaska Veldt and Tristan the hawk, Chauncey Meeks-Owens, and Gustavo Ruben Valenzuela

Creative producer, casting director, and production manager: Marta Lillioja
Director of photography: Ruben van Weelden

Sound and music: Richard Burki
Editor: Marre Bonke
Visual effects/animation: Sakke Soini

(full credits to follow)

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The Hidden Layers

2023

Leena leads a research team that works with MATA, a neuroimaging and AI system, to prototype solutions for averting total climate catastrophe. Progress is threatened by the haunting presence of the program’s progenitor, Leena’s mother. After confronting this specter emerging not only from the hidden layers of MATA but of Leena’s own psyche, Leena discovers a new form of mind—symbiotic cognition.

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Overcoming the forms of the outer world

2023

This program eschews an overarching theme for a constellation of extrapolated, imagined lines between. Spread over three consecutive evenings, the films in this program carry forth a cascade of concepts and meanders among motifs. On the whole, the films privilege perception, sensation, and encounter sometimes grounded in narrative but just as often not. While not intended as a survey, a broad range of artist moving image practices are represented, from animation to speculative documentary. How the images in these films come into existence often matters as much as what they show.

The program includes films from: Zachary Formwalt, Lucy Beech, Alice dos Reis, Peng Zuqiang, James Richards, Emilia Tapprest (NVISIBLE.STUDIO), Maya Watanabe, Carlos Casas, Emilija Škarnulytė, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Jenna Sutela, Lawrence Lek, Pejvak (Rouzbeh Akhbari and Felix Kalmenson), Grace Ndiritu, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Juan Arturo García, Haig Aivazian

Film program with selections by Matthew C. Wilson, artist in residence at the School of Arts in 2023, made in partnership with the Porto city council InResidence program.

Details

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Factitious Reservoirs

2022

Simulated brines in centrifuge vials, pure silicon, videos, LED lights, electrical cords

Brine recipes of the moon Europa, the moon Enceladus, and the dwarf planet Ceres courtesy of Mark Fox-Powell (astrobiologist and planetary scientist at Open University, UK); in addition to the base recipes more speculative recipes were also developed. Video source material generated from a custom model/image data set—around the theme of alien oceans using—StyleGAN2. Developed as a site specific installation in dialogue with exhibition curator, Arkadiusz Półtorak.

Produced with the support of the Mondriaan Fonds.

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Island Attunements

2022

2022

Sound: Nuno da Luz
Animation: Sakke Soini / Veli Studio

“Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory,” wrote J.G. Ballard. In a post-collapse society, could industrialized humans evolve along an alternative axis—connecting to internalized planetary memories?

Island Attunements takes up this proposal as a video and sound installation that takes viewers into a kaleidoscopic landscape connecting outer and inner worlds. The installation is part of a larger project that investigates six “attunements” — abilities to attune with life forces within the body, the environment, and ultimately across time. The installation combines video and procedural animation with a sonic landscape developed from field recordings—across a range of frequencies, above and below aquatic and terrestrial surfaces of São Miguel Island—conjuring a meditative experience.

Attunements

2023

Forthcoming film

After a solar flare triggers a collapse of society, a mainlander finds her way to sea and eventually washes ashore on an island whose population was cut off from the chaos. The islanders continued to thrive and developed a novel way of continuing biological research through conscious means rather than technological tools. She must learn the “attunements” in order to integrate into the community.

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Artificial-Earthly-Intelligence

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F for Fact - Sandberg Institute

​See https://sandberg.nl/temporary-programme-f-for-fact

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A-GEN-CY

Forthcoming 2023

Later in the 21st century scientists use mental visualizations coupled with an AI system to prototype solutions for mitigating the accelerating climate crisis. Things become complicated when an apparition appears and one of the researchers forms a cognitive symbiosis with the AI.

Produced by Veli
With Priya Lorenz and Vanessa Vandy

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Ersatz Gardens

UHD 4k video in fullspectrum and ultraviolet

Forthcoming

Ersatz Gardens is an experimental short film about an entangled garden of vision and abstraction, experience and memory, the real and the fake. Perceptual twists transform the garden into a psychological space of images, ideas, time, and economic fragments shaken from both their historical and natural orders.

Footage has been shot after hours in Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny and a nearby 18th century garden of the Physiocrats—a group whose name means “government of nature” and who were the first thinkers to systematize economics. In the Physiocratic view, the “natural order” governed human relations; value came from the land, from agriculture; and artisans were “unproductive appendages.” The video is filmed in the unproductive part of the garden, a garden labyrinth for reflection rather than agricultural products. This estate of the Physiocrats was also visited by the “father of modern capitalism,” Adam Smith; he learned from them an their work and drew heavily on the Physiocrats’ idea that the economy was a circular process.

To these gardens, anti-counterfeiting features from currency such as the British 20-pound note featuring Adam Smith, and credit cards have been added. Anti-counterfeiting features frequently appear in ultraviolet light. While pigeons and doves—a bird which also appears on the Visa card—can see in UV humans ordinarily cannot. However, if the lens of the eye is removed it is possible to see into the UV spectrum. Claude Monet had this procedure carried out in 1923, after which time his paintings are said to have taken a notable turn towards the violet, as Monet always endeavored to “paint what you really see.”

Factitious Flora

Diverse descriptions of flora, from mystical to mechanical, reflect the range of human ideas about plants. Meanwhile, artificial selection physically shapes many plant species. Colonialism and industrialism radically redistributed and reorganized biological life on the planet. Today, automated, controlled environments bring plants into new networks of relations while synthetic biology materializes previously impossible plants. The impact of climate change on Earth’s systems and agriculture drive further vegetal variation and transformation.

Taking the form of an experimental film, Factitious Flora looks toward the ongoing emergence of new botanical possibilities—in both idea and organism—as well as future plant/human, plant/machine, and plant/planet relations. Factitious Flora is developed in close dialogue with plant scientists and horticulturists.

Supported by Forecast

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Factitious Earths

2019

Infused aluminum prints of scanning electron microscope images, glass vial with “factitious earths” custom mixture, glass vial with a platinum capsule of “factitious earths” experiment.

Working with experimental geologist Geoffrey Bromiley, a new planet’s geology was modeled on: archival research into the use of carbonic acid as a restorative gas by steam engine inventor James Watt to heal his invalid geologist son; deep earth carbon processes; runaway hot-house earth scenarios, and the speculative geology of a hypothetical exoplanet.

Project developed with the support of Talbot Rice Gallery at the University of Edinburgh

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Metaphysical Interventions

Curatorial project at Leroy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University featuring:
Jesse Bransford
Angela Ellsworth
Steve Gurysh
Karsten Krejcarek
Eduardo Navarro
Matthew Ronay
Oscar Santillan
Saya Woolfalk

spectral exchange

An interdisciplinary methodological experiment

See details at Tabakalera - International Centre for Contemporary Culture,  San Sebastián, ES or www.spectral.exchange

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Dilution Increases the Potency

2018

Water from the well Columbus drew water from to christen the “new world,” cut Canarian volcanic stone (La Gomera), volcanic stones from Canarian astronomical observatory driveways, Fonteide plastic water bottle, plastic container, tape, ultrasonic humidifier, tap water, steel

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