Casse-tête (10:07 min, Colour, 4K) is a video collaboration by Edie Soleil and Jenn E Norton that uses a broken compression technique (data moshing) to collapse the edit and merge time, place, and composition. The video is contemplative of the anxieties surrounding climate change and how to navigate our enmeshed relationship with nature and technology.

As the famed forester and author Peter Wohlleben tells us, nature is like the mechanism of an enormous clock, in which interconnectedness and interdependence function in a delicate balance. The propensity to underestimate how difficult it is to return nature to its original working order once it has been meddled with is prevalent and wide-ranging across fields of study and industry. Media theorist and historian John Durham Peters argues, “The human steering of nature is not always smooth sailing, and stormy weather is blowing on the ship from several directions.”

We made this experimental video thinking of this complex puzzle during a time of global environmental crisis. As artists (mother and teen duo), we wanted to reflect on our relationship to nature, technology, and the existing and burgeoning information about climate change, and how to navigate it. 

This is an independent creative effort to broach these topics and anxieties while maintaining a reverence for the environment, from a personal perspective and with an experimental approach. No AI was used in the creation of Casse-tête.