Departing from exploring the forms of ever-expanding land use from aerial vantage points, I am turning to working on the ground, to the vestiges of the natural world. Transnational by design, this untitled video project investigates habitat loss and rewilding. It is currently marked by my own learning about botany and soil health.

As in my previous practice, this work will be aimed at communicating an understanding of key issues, and connecting those interested in becoming active in the pursuit of conservation. This project will function interdisciplinary, dovetailing the efforts of the internationally active Mossy Earth initiative, who are dedicated to the rehabilitation and development-free zones, or Germany’s Wohllebens Waldakademie, a group protecting deciduous old-growth forests in Germany.

FLUIDS DYNAMIC is an installation video developed in conjunction with the experimental docu-mentary “California Growth Machine” in 2016. The material was filmed in collaboration with Emmy-winning cinematographer Michael Kelem (BBC Planet Earth).

This video presents a visual meditation over a shape-shifting body of water, a reservoir in Southern California, representing all fresh water as a finite resource. Over the last century, water use has grown at more than twice the rate of population increase. The result of myriad environmental, political, economic, and social forces, water scarcity is an abstract concept to many — but a stark reality for others.

In the video, a sense of impermanence and perpetual motion is visually communicated through a series of sweeping camera gestures combined with choreographed turns of the helicopter from which all footage was shot. As in California Growth Machine, the helicopter is used to interact with the surface of the water directly below by sculpting it into mercurial relief forms; though unseen, the helicopter becomes an integral part of the work itself. In a few long, nearly continuous takes, we trace the texture of liquid as it responds, following cascading sprays of water and the “eye of the storm” drawn by the wind of the rotor blades beneath.

The musical score by composer Michael Atkinson was created in response to the multiple layers of related activity evident in the movement of water in its manipulated context, from the surface to the deep.

FLUIDS DYNAMIC was filmed in high definition for large scale projection.

CALIFORNIA GROWTH MACHINE is an experimental documentary film that details the potential ramifications of unchecked urbanization and the idiosyncratic allure of sprawl developments. It was directed by Gielen, and shot by Emmy Award-winning cinematographer Michael Kelem.

This video presents five locations in California, loosely tracing a trajectory from natural setting to one of the birthplaces of sprawl at nighttime. We start our journey hovering close to the ground over arid territory, a region known to be prone to wildfires and already slated for development. It is shown in weather conditions conducive to wildfire. Here, the helicopter itself becomes an integral part of the work, as it is used to manipulate the dusty topography directly below.

Then spiraling down from high up in the air, the video features a purposefully disorienting perspective that sometimes plunges the viewer to the ground and into close proximity with the subject being filmed.

An accompanying voiceover provides the viewer with some key issues to consider while contemplating the sites, as a background audio track marked by use of distant location noise develops into an enveloping soundscape.

California Growth Machine was filmed in high definition for large-scale projection.

Exploring the rationales behind the building of maximum security prisons, “Supermax” offers rarely-heard industry insider assessments of the architectural aims behind these facilities and presents an otherwise not available opportunity to examine these places from above.

“Supermax” is conceived as a video exhibition accompanied by a discussion forum that addresses the future role of prison architecture and responds to the growing impasse facing the corrections praxis today.

Ciphers aims to examine the ramifications of building trends and growth machines that systematically generate more car-dependent, low-density developments.

Viewed from above, such patterns of suburban land-use readily disclose their disruptive spatial logic. The images capitalize on and extend the fundamental estrangement that comes from aerial photography, here recorded at steep angles, often nearly straight down. It is through a “sprawl encounter” with these land-use details that these perspectives can attain abstraction, become typological, glyphic — and provoke unease, leaving viewers with the sense of having seen the writing on the wall.

In support of understanding the consequences of climate change, my photographs also offer concrete insights as they trace the evidence of an energy-inefficient, urbanized existence. They challenge our comfort in the normal by jarring us loose from deeply held beliefs — the assumption that growth is unlimited and always beneficial — though most American planners have simply been following the path of least resistance, channeled in the postwar years by national legislation. Relying on maps, they drew subdivisions that ignored the laws of nature — rather than drawing a connection between the built environment, building practices, and climate change. Thomas Pynchon describes such sites as “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts – census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to their own freeway”.

By documenting structures of prosperity in a technically highly-developed society, I set out to provide a telling glimpse of the present impasse of finding habitation on the planet while also preserving it – and to inspire a yearning for an ecological symbiosis between nature, society, and the built form.