Ellen Maria Gorrissen Lecture

Remote Location

In this artist talk, Lucy Raven presents excerpts from her moving-image works that connect the iconic landscape of the American West to globally networked systems of material production that undergird it. The fantasy of the empty, pristine Western frontier is fractured in these works, which include the tracing of global copper production from an open-pit mine in Utah to a smelter in China; Hollywood’s outsourcing of visual effects work to India, China, Canada, and the UK; and the international production of the atomic bomb, carried by a plane that took off from the Utah desert, where model Japanese and German cities had been constructed by Hollywood set builders on Dugway Proving Ground to see how fast they’d burn.