DESCRIPTIONS OF THE SOUNDS OF THE MANUAL LABOR OF HOGS, HORSES, HUMANS, & DOGS FROM MORE WESTERNS THAN I CARED TO SEE (2025, 5 min. 17 sec.) is an experimental film about the labor that brought the landscape of the American West into capitalism and the breath it took to get us there. It undertakes a systematic but ultimately failed attempt to register the bodily effort of animals (human and nonhuman) through the sounds of work described in the closed captions of Western films and TV shows. The transformation of bodily exertion into sound and then into words on a television screen later transcribed by me on my computer and overlaid on top of the video image brings to mind the phase changes necessary for respiration to be incorporated into the capitalist economy. For this found footage film, I appropriated clips from mid-20th century industrial films, videos made by steam train enthusiasts, and unintentionally cosmotechnical still images, creating novel sound/image pairings.
Westerns--usually racist, patriarchal, boring (to me)--are my least favorite of all media genres. I watched them for weeks, often in the middle of the night, as if it were a bummer of a freelance job. In the end, though, I learned to appreciate them as a speculative archive of the settler-colonial aspirations that transformed the American West.
Westerns--usually racist, patriarchal, boring (to me)--are my least favorite of all media genres. I watched them for weeks, often in the middle of the night, as if it were a bummer of a freelance job. In the end, though, I learned to appreciate them as a speculative archive of the settler-colonial aspirations that transformed the American West.
