The Wildlife Gong by Solan Jensen play (14MB / 7min18sec)

Solan Jenson lives half the year in Alaska and half the year in Anarctica. Trickhouse asked him to produce a short video based on the hundreds of hours of unedited footage from his remote travels. The video that returned seems to be an artifact of remoteness: the gap between the timeless inhospitable landscape of the south pole and the virtual realm of the internet - how meaning can or cannot survive that distance intact.

*

All of the footage used in this short movie was shot in the interstices of the workday. In tourism, on a ship or in the field, to be in public is to be at work. And for that reason the workday is relentless (in extreme cases one is responding to questions about pelagic bird species, or the actual distance of a nautical mile, from the seat of a toilet). Thus, the act of gathering footage is consigned to an act of haste. Even the quiet moments are sort of haphazard for this reason. This grouping of shots was put together at the end of four months of continuous work in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica.

Solan Jensen