Production still, 13BC in residence at Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, 2017.
Fatal Act is an epistolary moving image work that concerns the legacy of the atomic in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is structured around letters written between Claude Eatherly, the weather pilot whose "all clear" report enabled the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and Günther Anders, the German theorist whose work fixated on technology's capacity to outpace any human intention. Beginning with the letters' mention of an unrealized Bob Hope movie about Eatherly, Fatal Act passes through prop closets and desert test sites, Foley effects studios and Geiger counter readouts, Hollywood sets and military hospitals in order to consider the ways we attempt to give image to what refuses to be seen.
Fatal Act is currently in production. An exhibition of the four moving image works that make up Fatal Act — Straight Flush (2019), When Horses Were Coconuts (2019), Act 1 (2019), and Corpse Cleaner (2016/19) — will be presented at New York University's 80 Washington Square East Gallery between 20 June and 7 September, 2019.
The film's postscript, Corpse Cleaner, was commissioned by La Biennale de Montréal for Le Grand Balcon in 2016.
A live script-read of Straight Flush was presented at Swiss Institute, New York as part of the exhibition Fade In: Int. Art Gallery - Day. Straight Flush was subsequently co-produced by the Rosenkranz Foundation and 80 Washington Square East Gallery.
When Horses Were Coconuts is a standalone chapter of Fatal Act, with text by Robert L Mott.
Fatal Act: Straight Flush live-read, performance still, Swiss Institute, New York, 2016. Featuring actors Dana Wheeler Nicholson, Doug Barron, and Roger Clark.