A pinhole film, a cheap robot voice, a makeshift history. An explorer’s tale of the unknown part of the world. Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure. —dimeshow.com
Ben Russell is an itinerant photographer, curator, and experimental film/videomaker whose works have screened in spaces ranging from 14th Century Belgian monasteries to 17th Century East Indian Trading Company buildings, police station basements to outdoor punk squats, Japanese cinematheques to Parisian storefronts, and the Sundance Film Festival to the Museum of Modern Art (solo). He has made films about the assassination of Easter Island, the divining powers of Richard Pryor, and the end of the world. A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in 2008, he began The Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island and currently resides in Chicago, Illinois, USA. —gf.org