Season 4 — DEATH & DATA—Wave 1

And we are live with Season 4! October 1st marks the release of the first three works engaging with the theme Death & Data. Each month, through December, we will release a new set of videos.

Still from emily brandt’s ghost story, prose, poetry, photos, video, web

An apocalyptic reflection, sprung from the desire for and resistance to form. A multimedia encounter with, and a rogue theory about, a canonical poem by William Butler Yeats. A collaboration with the dead. The seeds for this were an undergraduate essay written in 2000 in Boston that my professor never read, a Tiny Talk given in 2016 to a group of poets in Brooklyn, a silent retreat in Glendalough (Ireland), and night walks in a dark field on the east end of Long Island.

Still from Eva Davidova’s Menino Terrivel, 2025

Menino Terrivel started from an encounter with military police and capoeira dancers in Salvador de Bahia. I asked ChatGPT to make a script about the encounter(s), based on a poem by Zhivka Baltadzhieva. The sound is a mix between a song by Max Barulho, the script read by Daniel Rabal Davidov, and google pronunciation-hopping, making a full arc between internecine and intelligence.

Video: New Member Interview with Eva Davidova by Rah Eleh.

Still from Jillian McDonald’s Total Eclipse and the Heart, 2025, 10:00

Total Eclipse and the Heart is inspired by the solar totality of 2024. During an eclipse gone wrong, characters are drawn into nature and disappear into oblivion, sinking in water and crumbling like rocks. The video alternates between live action and footage generated by AI, and includes NASA 3D models of the Moon and the Earth. Moon rocks float by, the eclipse morphs from one strange version to the next, and the natural world takes center stage. Moss, insects, fox, lichen, walrus, and fungi thrive in the end.

We’re misled by the momentary span of each individual life, and by technology’s attempt to reduce and define us. We live in conditions actively trying to annihilate populations, and rightly, we protest and resist, and we grieve from our depths. Death inspires fear and awe and heartbreak. It’s the most primal opening into a wildly unknowable place. The data of life, its scents of flesh and blood, and death, are encoded in and created by our bodies, experiences, and technologies. This data pulls us both toward an unknowable future and our most primal ancestral past, with its ancient taboos and drives. Our ephemeral bodies create, carry, filter, and interpret all knowable data, objects, time-codes and thought-forms. Data points us toward historic relics, impressions left by the dead, coded into hard drives, digital records, and the ever-expanding web. What is this afterbody, and how does it soften into the noise of all that is?

Season 4 artists include:

Emily Brandt (Oct)
Eva Davidova (Oct)
Jillian McDonald (Oct)

We are thrilled to welcome new members Eva Davidova and Leigh Davis this season!

temp.files (aka Temporary Files) is a video publishing cooperative, online publication, streaming site, and remote residency. We are an expanding and rotating group of artists working between text, social engagement, performance and media, committed to supporting each other in the process of creating new, experimental work.