MERIDIAN PLAIN (DCP 2K, 18 min, 2016)
MERIDIAN PLAIN 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 (2016), 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
"In the unique landscape film Meridian Plain hundreds of thousands of photos – from panoramas to macro shots – chart entirely unknown territory. Fabulous editing by Kraning brings the ostensibly dead, semi-desert to life in this short documentary revealing a possible scenario for the future. Meridian Plain is an exciting first-hand report of an expedition into a dusty terra incognita."- IFFR
“The film performs a feminist, post-humanist, new media critique of the space-colonizing rhetoric that dominates the techno-scientific imaginary. It speculates about a non-human world yet in the making but warns of a world we may have already lost. By interconnecting esoteric visions of Martian landscape with elusive subjectivities across space and time, Meridian Plain manifests as a cinematic site of interplanetary becoming. It questions what we perceive as the limits of being human, machine, or landscape by questioning the limits of perception itself.” - Kalpana Subramanian, “Esoteric Archeology and Interplanetary Becoming in Laura Kraning’s Meridian Plain”
SELECTED SCREENINGS
Rencontres Internationales Sciences et Cinémas (Jury Award for Short Film)
International Film Festival Rotterdam (Tiger Shorts Competition)
VideoEx Film and Video Festival, Zurich (Special Mention)
BFI London Film Festival (Experimenta Shorts)
Hamburg International Short Film Festival
REDCAT Theater, Los Angeles, "Laura Kraning: Spectral Landscapes"
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival
Athens International Film and Video Festival
Chicago Underground Film Festival
Haverhill Experimental Film Festival
Moscow International Experimental Film Festival
San Diego Underground Film Festival
25 FPS International Experimental Film and Video Festival, Zagreb
Antimatter Media Art
First Person Cinema
Strangloscope International Festival of Experimental Film, Music, & Performance, Brazil
Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival
Video Art Festival Turku, Finland
Ultracinema MX