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NEOLITHOCENE by Emma Hanlon:

"For this 'cene' project, I was inspired by an exhibit I saw at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. The exhibit was entitled, 'Manifestos' and was created by Julian Rosefeldt. This exhibit was an immersive video installation, comprised of 13 separate but interconnected videos. The narrated audio of each video constituted the manifestos of the exhibit, and each narration was the result of Rosefeldt’s piecing together of quotes and excerpts from existing, noteworthy manifestos. Through the exhibit, Rosefeldt created his own manifesto. Therefore, with Rosefeldt as my inspiration, this project is my manifesto for the “Neolithocene,” created through the piecing together of readings from our class and writings on agriculture and climate change. This creative project aims to explore the lasting effects of the Neolithic revolution on the Anthropocene, and while I do not hope to claim the Neolithic revolution as the origin of our current ecological crisis, I am interested here in the remnants and lingering implications of this tremendous cultural shift in human history within our present navigation of earthly existence.

 

"The images and audio within this video are mostly my own, taken over the course of the last two months. I open with a video of two deer grazing in Lullwater park, just behind Emory’s Clairmont campus. This video was taken, somewhat spontaneously, as an Instagram story. However, I felt as if the movement of the deer and their relationship to the camera made this video relevant to this project. In my filming, I was necessarily removed from the deer, watching from a distance. I realized that my relationship with the deer was defined by spectatorship, not interaction. I encroached on their feeding, while they walked on the man-made paths. This clip epitomizes the removal of humans from nature, the ideological shift of the Neolithic revolution."

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