Scary Places/Shapes & Sizes 2021
Our film of Jack Cochran's erasure poem, "Scary Places," extracted from "The Geography of Nowhere" by James Howard Kunstler, combines unexpectedly unsettling images of city freeways, urban traffic patterns, and highway construction, rendered extraordinary by using two different cameras, one of whose sensors has been modified for infrared photography, to concretize the current shape of the city using Austin, TX as an exemplar, and makes effective use of Regin Petersen’s 2011 new music composition, “Shapes and Sizes,” performed by the Ensemble Kwartludium (creative commons license), melding music, text, and moving pictures together in a beautiful but alienating critique of late corporate capitalist American car culture and its disregard for the environment worthy of Jean Baudrillard.
