Catalogue > At random

Steven Rowell

Parallelograms

Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 30:0 | USA | 2015

Parallelograms is an experimental documentary film and mapping project aimed at representing corruption and dark money in American politics. Political Action Committees, think tanks, trade associations, lobbying agencies, and advocacy groups are institutions where experts gather to discuss, map, and strategize, creating political and economic environments that help secure their visions of the future. This project is concerned with the multiverse of these near futures -- some more probable than others -- as well as with the present. Parallelograms is about where vectors of geography, landscape, politics, finance, and temporality intersect and how they are manifested. It also serves as a linear “cognitive mapping” experiment in which the viewer experiences a compressed, systematic tour of a dense and complex political terrain. Abstraction coexists with the real as a reflection of the current state of political discourse in America today. Corrupted power and distorted influence affects us all by exacerbating economic disparity, resource depletion, environmental degradation, and civil rights abuses. The intent of Parallelograms is not simply to present documentation from an exhaustive list, or to dictate any particular activist agenda, but rather, to extrapolate from the political landscape in a way that compels discussion about dark money.

Steve Rowell is a research-based artist who works with still and moving images, sound, installation, maps, and spatial concepts. Currently based in Los Angeles, he has lived in Berlin, Chicago, and Washington DC, over the past 20 years. His transdisciplinary practice focuses on overlapping aspects of technology, perception, and culture as related to ontology and landscape. Rowell contextualizes the built environment with the surrounding medium of nature; appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archaeologist. In addition to being Program Manager at The Center for Land Use Interpretation (Los Angeles) since 2001, he has collaborated with SIMPARCH (Chicago) and The Office of Experiments (London).