Laura Kraning's film, Meridian Plain, featured on Labocine

Laura Kraning's film Meridian Plain is being featured on Labocine’s online science/film streaming platform in their current issue, “Data Powers”. 

Labocine is an Imagine Science Films initiative to extend their film programming to a wider audience. The March 2020 issue includes work by 20 artists and is available for the entire month. 

https://www.labocine.com/issues/data-powers

LABOCINE- MARCH 2020 - “DATA POWERS”

Knowledge is power, but data is something more than that. Data are the quanta of knowledge, the basic components of science, the foundations of theories and the biometrics that allow us new means of self-knowledge and medical intervention. If the universe is information, if the human brain represents the universe as information (as two theories run), then data form the building blocks of all we know, and all that may exist within and without ourselves. Identity, on the genetic level, is data, at least as far as the nature side of the nature/nurture equation runs. But data, now, is also a commodity. Perhaps the principle commodity driving the techno-economic present. And like all economic systems, like all power, it lends itself to abuse. The age of information has degraded into the age of data, and how we navigate it now has vast implications for the future, its risks and possibilities.

MERIDIAN PLAIN (2016) maps an enigmatic distant landscape excavated from hundreds of thousands of archival still images, forecasting visions of a possible future, transmitted from a mechanical eye. 

“With her newest project, the dazzling Meridian Plain, Kraning moves in a slightly different direction, still exploring landscape but this time working from an archive of mechanically captured still images that she laboriously organized and then worked with frame by frame, creating a magisterial portrait of a seemingly otherworldly landscape. It is yet another black-and-white project, and we might consider it not time-lapse so much as space-lapse, wherein spaces collapse and give way to each other. Through her editing, Kraning produces complex visual and almost physical rhythms, moving from staccato pulses and a roiling horizon to hovering and shaking and ultimately disintegration.” - Holly Willis