Brit Bunkley

Bush Dance is a video of interactions within previously unexplored bush behind our house during lock down – a close up of a muscular tree, reading Micho Kaku and Clifford Pickover essays on Hyperspace and dancing salsa to ambient music in a Tyvek suit. Readings from: “Borrowed Time: Interview with Michio Kaku” in Scientific American November 2003, and “Surfing Through Hyperspace” by Clifford A. Pickover. P. 71 Loops and sound effects by Soundsnap and Pond5 https://www.britbunkley.com/

The Rio Tinto river in Huelva Province runs red like blood due to iron oxides from an ancient 5000-year-old mine upstream (that is still mined today). Nearby the village of El Membrillos Bajo was razed to the ground by Franco's forces in 1937. The song El Tren Blindado is by the band The Ex (with their written permission) from [1986] 1936-The Spanish Revolution 7''. The royalty free loops are by Soundsnap and public domain footage

Two Native American geoltihs on the California/Arizona border and a NASA site in Arizona are scanned in 3D, rendered, and animated as flyovers as islands in deep space. An apocryphal story of an encounter between a Navaho tribal elder and the Apollo 11 astronauts is narrated in text. 1. The Topock Maze is a 600+ year old California State archaeological site which the Mojave people believe to be a part of the spiritual portal to the next life. However, one archaeologist suggested that it was simply man-made rows made from digging gravel for an adjacent railroad bridge in the 1890’s. Nevertheless, the Fort Mojave Tribe won litigation against Pacific Gas & Electric for contaminating the sacred Topock Maze with chromium-tainted wastewater. 2. The Blythe Intaglios are a group of gigantic figures incised on the ground south of the Topock Maze. They are estimated to be between 450 to 2,000 years old. They have been damaged by off-road vehicles, but are now protected by fences. 3. Cinder Lake near Flagstaff, Arizona was used to mimic lunar geology and topography for the first lunar landing of the Apollo 11 mission. In 1967 engineers blasted 47 craters in a 500-square-foot area of Cinder Lake, creating a real-life replica of the lunar landscape. 4. When the Apollo 11 astronauts were training at Cinder Lake, a local Navajo elder wandered by. He was curious as to what was going on. The astronauts told him they were training to land on the moon. The Navajo man appeared slightly taken aback. He said that his people believed there were sacred spirits on the moon whom they might encounter. He asked the astronauts if they could deliver a message to the spirits from his people. When they agreed, the tribal elder had them repeat a sentence in his native tongue, over and over, until they had memorized it. He told them that it was a secret message only allowed to be understood by his people and the moon spirits. Later, the astronauts sought someone who spoke Navajo to translate the meaning of the cryptic words. They eventually found a translator and repeated the phrase to him. The interpreter took one look at them and began laughing. He said, “It means, don’t trust a word these people are telling you. They’re here to steal your land.”

Ghost Zone is an homage to Tarkovsky's “Stalker” (1979) that takes us on a journey to the original expedition into the ineffable aqueous “Zone”. Bunkley stitches together his own footage in such a way that the landscape and buildings resemble a magic realist post-apocalyptic wasteland. Photographic composites of two rural locations has been made a lot easier with the use of drone captured imagery in that they will accommodate points of view not accessible form the ground. From this data he uses photogrammetry 3D scanning to create his eerie works as “islands of memory” - akin to the islands that feature in the science fiction film Solaris (1972) by Andrei Tarkovsky. (Photogrammetry uses multiple photographs placed within software that creates 3d printable meshes.) By extracting these images, the buildings and landscape are divorced from their surrounds while the videos resemble chunks of architecture and landscape made from an indefinable material floating in black cyberspace. Ultimately they refer to eschatology - the “end of time”.

In November 2019 I returned to the town of Immerath on the edge of the immense Garzweiler open pit mine. I had scanned (in 3D) this town that was slated for removal when I last visited it in 2016. Three houses now remained on the site. The edge of the RWE open pit mine drew closer to what was once a town of 900 inhabitants. Down the road, the expanding Hambach lignite mine was eating up the ancient Hambach forest that once covered the mine. Thousands of demonstrators have protested in recent years to save the remaining 200 hectares of the Hambach Forest. I climbed the Hambach hill to fly my drone towards the mine. Geofencing stopped the drone mid-air. I could only see a distant pit encased in fog. On the other side of the hill, wind generators arose from the fog as if floating in the clouds. music loops courtesy of Productiontrax.com and Soundsnap.

Ghost Shelter (Six Sites) encompasses a variety of significant post-industrial structures all at the edge of metropolitan regions in various states of ruin (actual or digital). They are created from 3D scans and drone footage, rendered and animated in 3D as discrete virtual entities - like the islands of memory of Tarkovsky's Solaris. 1. Chemiewerk Rüdersdorf, an abandoned chemical factory in the former German Democratic Republic 2. The Teufelsberg, a NSA listening station in Berlin built on top of a man-made hill constructed from the rubble of WW2 Berlin. 3. Immerath, a ghost town in western Germany removed in 2017 by the energy giant RWE for the expansion of their open cast coal mine, Garzweiler. 4. The Martha Project, a NZ open cast gold mine whose mining operations ground to a halt due a major landslide collapsing the north wall of the mine. 5. Domes of Case Grande, an incomplete and abandoned futuristic computer facility in Arizona. 6. The Sleeping Beauty Castle, the centrepiece of the California Disneyland Park, modelled on the late 19th century Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, Germany.