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Wherever You Go, There We Are

Jesse McLean

This video is no longer available

Staff Picks Wherever You Go, There We Are
Jesse McLean
2017

12 Minutes

Staff Picks

Date
June 1–30, 2023

In this experimental travelogue, efforts to sound human and look natural instead become artificial. The scenery is provided through photo-chromed vintage postcards, displaying not only scenic North American landscapes but also the rise of infrastructure and industry. Aspiring to look more realistic by adding color to a black and white image, the postcards (already a vulnerable method of correspondence caught between private and public) are instead documents of the fantastic. The road trip is narrated by an automated correspondent (all dialogue is taken from spam emails) who is both seductive and mercurial, his entreaties becoming increasingly foreboding and obtuse, in a relentless effort to capture our attention.

Presented on e-flux Film alongside Just Like Us (2013) as the June 2023 edition of Staff Picks featuring Jesse McLean.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Category
Film, Technology
Subject
Landscape, Human - Nonhuman Relations, Industrialization, USA
Return to Jesse McLean
Return to Staff Picks

Jesse McLean has dedicated her creative research and art practice to exploring what it is to be human in relation to what is not. Her films reveal the deep intimacies and connections formed through these relationships and contrast the finite capacities of the nonhuman with infinite human desires. She has presented her work at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide, including the CPH:DOX in Copenhagen; New York Film Festival, NY, NY; International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands; Venice Film Festival, Italy; Kassel Dokfest, Germany; Impakt Festival, Netherlands; First Look Festival, NY, NY; Imagine Science Film Festival, NY, NY; Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Switzerland; Yebizo Festival of Art + Alternative Visions, Tokyo, Japan; EXiS, Seoul, S. Korea; Mumok in Vienna, Austria; and Green Gallery, Milwaukee. She was the recipient of an International Critics Prize, (FIPRESCI Prize) at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, and a Jury Prize in the International Competition at the 2013 Videoex Festival in Switzerland. She was a featured artist at the 2014 Flaherty Seminar and a MacDowell Fellow in 2016. In 2016 she was selected for a Mary L. Nohl Individual Artist Fellowship and was a fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres within the Peck School of the Arts and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, one of the leading film programs devoted to supporting cinematic arts in the US.

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