Alice Bucknell is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their recent work has focused on creating cinematic universes within game worlds, exploring the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations and forms of knowledge. Their work has appeared internationally at Ars Electronica, transmediale, LUMINEX, LEV in Madrid, Serpentine in London, the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Gray Area in San Francisco, and Singapore Art Museum, among others. Bucknell received a MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. They are currently faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, where they teach courses on worlding, gaming, and philosophies of technology.
4k single-channel video, sound, colour, 38 min., 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
The Alluvials is a speculative fiction film exploring the politics of drought and water scarcity in Los Angeles. Its narrative is told through a variety of nonhuman and elemental perspectives, including the Los Angeles River, wildfire, a 400-year-old sycamore called El Aliso, and the ghost of the city’s celebrity mountain lion, P-22.
Spread across seven chapters and as many worlds, The Alluvials oscillates forwards and backward in time, exploring multiple possible futures and revisited pasts for LA. It draws on game engine world-making, drone mapping, custom stable diffusion “hallucinations”, and cinematic modding inside the GTA 5 engine to conjure a richly layered parafictional world where boundaries between fact and fiction and subject and landscape dissolve.
Acknowledging indigenous relationships to water and nonlinear time—particularly those of the Tongva, the original stewards of the region known today as Los Angeles—The Alluvials asks its audience to consider their role in the future of water systems by looking into the deep past.
close
Particolare
Sign up to receive our news and latests updates on the Particolare Exhibition.
