1
00:00:09,881 --> 00:00:12,677
[Distant siren]

2
00:00:17,318 --> 00:00:22,390
♪ Doo doo doo ♪

3
00:00:22,390 --> 00:00:24,454
♪ Doo doo doo...♪

4
00:00:27,685 --> 00:00:32,163
[Vocalizing continues]

5
00:00:41,268 --> 00:00:44,820
Diana Thater: This time of year, it's unusual to see a whale.

6
00:00:47,709 --> 00:00:50,640
Usually right now, you see maybe dolphins.

7
00:00:55,500 --> 00:00:56,160
I don't know.

8
00:00:56,160 --> 00:00:57,840
I think she went back out to sea.

9
00:00:57,977 --> 00:01:01,784
♪...doo doo doo doo ♪

10
00:01:01,784 --> 00:01:04,012
[Singing fades and stops]

11
00:01:14,026 --> 00:01:15,916
I thought for a while I would become an architect

12
00:01:15,916 --> 00:01:18,168
'cause I'm very interested in space…

13
00:01:21,267 --> 00:01:27,414
which is why I make installation 'cause 
installation is all about moving through space.

14
00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:33,780
And perhaps that's more of what 
I was really interested in,

15
00:01:33,780 --> 00:01:38,644
is dealing with the complexities 
of our relationships to space.

16
00:01:41,580 --> 00:01:44,880
And a friend of mine had 
visited this temple in India.

17
00:01:45,153 --> 00:01:49,777
It is a temple to the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman.

18
00:01:52,260 --> 00:01:56,450
You know, I'm always looking 
for these kind of amazing...

19
00:01:56,940 --> 00:02:00,180
coincidences between the 
animal and the human world,

20
00:02:00,180 --> 00:02:02,640
between animal culture and human culture.

21
00:02:04,800 --> 00:02:09,288
So I wanted to go film monkeys 
in the temple to a monkey god.

22
00:02:11,520 --> 00:02:14,820
I always have a vision or an image, like–

23
00:02:14,820 --> 00:02:17,580
like a photograph in my mind 
of what I'm going to see.

24
00:02:17,580 --> 00:02:19,200
It's never there,

25
00:02:19,200 --> 00:02:23,700
but when I get there, what's 
really there is even better.

26
00:02:26,160 --> 00:02:29,100
So when I got there, I found out that 
the temple didn't have an interior.

27
00:02:29,100 --> 00:02:31,740
It's just a facade built on a cliff.

28
00:02:34,440 --> 00:02:38,940
And when I made the installation, 
one room is the temple.

29
00:02:38,940 --> 00:02:43,080
You walk through the doorway, 
and I made my own interior.

30
00:02:46,920 --> 00:02:49,320
And of course, what you find when you go in

31
00:02:49,320 --> 00:02:54,540
is an image of theater seats 
with a viewer sitting in it,

32
00:02:54,540 --> 00:02:56,580
watching a movie of monkeys.

33
00:02:59,220 --> 00:03:02,460
So it's the theater, which is the sacred space.

34
00:03:03,660 --> 00:03:08,284
The viewer comes in, and you watch someone watch.

35
00:03:09,035 --> 00:03:15,279
[synth music]

36
00:03:16,920 --> 00:03:20,640
I've always been incredibly 
influenced by hollywood film.

37
00:03:20,640 --> 00:03:24,180
Ever since I was a child, I've 
been a sort of film fanatic.

38
00:03:27,480 --> 00:03:30,480
You know, I grew up wanting to be two things.

39
00:03:30,480 --> 00:03:33,840
I either wanted to be a movie 
star or I wanted to be an artist.

40
00:03:35,820 --> 00:03:38,340
And a really great way to become an artist is

41
00:03:38,340 --> 00:03:42,240
to go to graduate school and 
study art with real artists.

42
00:03:43,620 --> 00:03:45,120
I wanted to read a lot,

43
00:03:45,120 --> 00:03:49,740
and I wanted to learn theory and I 
wanted to work in film and video.

44
00:03:50,820 --> 00:03:53,160
I had a friend who was an architect,

45
00:03:53,880 --> 00:03:57,726
and he said all the best graduate 
schools are in Los Angeles.

46
00:03:59,700 --> 00:04:03,141
So I picked up and moved to California.

47
00:04:07,140 --> 00:04:08,816
It's almost a tradition.

48
00:04:09,612 --> 00:04:13,020
Teachers teach, the students graduate,

49
00:04:13,020 --> 00:04:16,380
they go on to become artists 
and teachers themselves.

50
00:04:17,220 --> 00:04:20,940
— So the relationship of this work 
to the work in the other galleries,

51
00:04:20,940 --> 00:04:22,800
can you talk about that for a minute?

52
00:04:22,800 --> 00:04:25,200
— I mean, living in L.A., 
you're surrounded by signs...

53
00:04:25,200 --> 00:04:25,700
— Mm-hmm.

54
00:04:25,700 --> 00:04:28,980
— Of course, so it's certainly 
inspired a lot by that.

55
00:04:30,000 --> 00:04:32,940
[Diana Thater] And I think that's 
important to L.A. artists, also,

56
00:04:32,940 --> 00:04:36,480
is if you're always involved with young people,

57
00:04:36,480 --> 00:04:38,760
if you're always involved in teaching,

58
00:04:38,760 --> 00:04:40,885
you're always talking about new ideas.

59
00:04:41,610 --> 00:04:49,591
[synth music]

60
00:04:52,276 --> 00:04:57,634
♪ ♪

61
00:05:01,297 --> 00:05:04,008
So I'm just building a tiny video wall.

62
00:05:04,008 --> 00:05:11,607
♪ ♪

63
00:05:11,607 --> 00:05:13,870
This is the installation at LACMA.

64
00:05:15,480 --> 00:05:18,180
Normally I install one piece at a time.

65
00:05:18,501 --> 00:05:21,120
But for something like this, 
it's really complicated.

66
00:05:21,848 --> 00:05:25,671
I need to be able to move around 
and look through every doorway.

67
00:05:26,940 --> 00:05:28,930
Like, you have to get down here…

68
00:05:30,540 --> 00:05:33,240
look through this doorway to this doorway,

69
00:05:34,320 --> 00:05:40,740
so you can see that every view is 
planned so that from any doorway,

70
00:05:40,740 --> 00:05:45,482
you see another color and another image.

71
00:05:46,369 --> 00:05:51,239
[synth music]

72
00:05:58,500 --> 00:06:05,520
When I first started working, 
I wanted to make something new.

73
00:06:07,860 --> 00:06:17,584
And I came to the idea that abstraction in 
art is the abstraction of the figurative.

74
00:06:20,220 --> 00:06:23,719
But abstraction in film and 
video is the abstraction of time.

75
00:06:27,480 --> 00:06:31,140
And that's how I came to working 
with images of the natural world

76
00:06:31,140 --> 00:06:35,133
because the natural world 
is not inherently narrative.

77
00:06:36,900 --> 00:06:40,359
It's another kind of time, another kind of cycle.

78
00:06:42,960 --> 00:06:47,280
I'm interested in the relationship 
between images and space and time.

79
00:06:51,480 --> 00:06:54,960
When the viewer walks in, I want them to…

80
00:06:55,959 --> 00:06:58,419
know that they're entering into a work of art.

81
00:07:00,900 --> 00:07:04,260
So how do I make you conscious 
of the space that surrounds you?

82
00:07:04,260 --> 00:07:08,340
I do that by tinting the space 
because that makes it a volume.

83
00:07:10,740 --> 00:07:14,040
And it makes you fully conscious 
of the space you occupy,

84
00:07:14,654 --> 00:07:16,229
uh, how you move through it.

85
00:07:16,229 --> 00:07:20,195
You see your shadow, you interfere with images,

86
00:07:20,309 --> 00:07:22,872
and the technology is exposed,

87
00:07:23,280 --> 00:07:25,740
so there's a kind of loss of self,

88
00:07:25,740 --> 00:07:28,020
but there's a kind of hyperconsciousness of self.

89
00:07:34,194 --> 00:07:40,422
And each of those spaces is sort of really 
choreographed to give you the opportunity

90
00:07:40,626 --> 00:07:45,606
to have a sympathetic bodily 
response to an experience.

91
00:07:47,940 --> 00:07:54,134
And that sympathy is not constructed 
intellectually or emotionally.

92
00:07:55,800 --> 00:08:04,678
It's seeing the dolphin spinning in space 
and feeling it fully within your body.

93
00:08:10,320 --> 00:08:16,560
I'm interested in you feeling the buzz and 
feeling that super-fast flutter that bees do…

94
00:08:20,760 --> 00:08:28,721
the giving viewers an opportunity to feel their full 
self in the presence of other kinds of selves.

95
00:08:34,136 --> 00:08:40,544
[Recording of birds chirping
at high speed]

96
00:08:40,800 --> 00:08:42,910
Animals are quite foreign to me.

97
00:08:43,500 --> 00:08:46,620
I want to film them, but when I'm with them,

98
00:08:46,620 --> 00:08:48,888
I am afraid of them.

99
00:08:51,540 --> 00:08:55,630
I think I'm a lot more of a city 
girl than I am anything else.

100
00:08:57,420 --> 00:09:04,022
People think I'm an adventurer just 'cause I go 
to exotic places and film gorillas or dolphins.

101
00:09:05,520 --> 00:09:07,854
It's not because I'm an adventurer.

102
00:09:08,059 --> 00:09:09,799
It's because I have to.

103
00:09:13,380 --> 00:09:16,860
This is Keebu. Every day, 
when I went up in this tower,

104
00:09:16,860 --> 00:09:21,960
Keebu would climb a tree opposite me 
and sit and watch me film every day,

105
00:09:21,960 --> 00:09:28,061
so I have tons of footage of Keebu sitting 
in this tree, and he's quite beautiful.

106
00:09:29,400 --> 00:09:35,280
"Gorillagorillagorilla" is a piece that I 
made in the Mefou National Park in Cameroon.

107
00:09:36,180 --> 00:09:39,240
The work focuses on western lowland gorillas.

108
00:09:40,500 --> 00:09:46,380
The gorillas are in these huge enclosures 
surrounded by double electrified fences.

109
00:09:46,653 --> 00:09:51,813
It's to keep them safe. It's to 
keep humans from poaching them.

110
00:09:53,760 --> 00:09:55,800
They are so endangered.

111
00:09:55,800 --> 00:09:59,630
They are so vulnerable.

112
00:10:00,360 --> 00:10:03,420
But I found that documentary 
filmmakers who had come there before me

113
00:10:03,420 --> 00:10:06,600
had built these huge towers with ladders on them

114
00:10:06,600 --> 00:10:12,334
so that they could film the gorillas 
as if they were out in the wild.

115
00:10:16,620 --> 00:10:19,473
So I decided I would film them in 3 ways:

116
00:10:21,300 --> 00:10:24,476
gorillas as explained to us by science…

117
00:10:27,600 --> 00:10:30,000
gorillas as if they're free…

118
00:10:32,220 --> 00:10:36,883
and then the third, imprisoned, 
the way they really are.

119
00:10:41,653 --> 00:10:47,067
It's really about 
questioning how we know animals,

120
00:10:48,480 --> 00:10:51,600
how is information about animals delivered to us,

121
00:10:51,600 --> 00:10:53,965
and it's delivered to us in these ways.

122
00:10:56,126 --> 00:11:01,019
[synth music]

123
00:11:03,060 --> 00:11:11,460
This is an era in which the greatest changes 
that are happening to the earth are manmade.

124
00:11:15,300 --> 00:11:18,840
There was this idea that animals 
were returning to Chernobyl,

125
00:11:18,840 --> 00:11:21,716
which is, of course, the largest 
nuclear meltdown in history.

126
00:11:26,364 --> 00:11:28,981
[Overlapping chatter]

127
00:11:28,981 --> 00:11:32,582
So I went to Chernobyl, and I 
spent 7 days living in a trailer

128
00:11:32,878 --> 00:11:34,858
with a very small crew.

129
00:11:37,620 --> 00:11:38,940
It's dangerous.

130
00:11:38,940 --> 00:11:40,400
It's radioactive.

131
00:11:41,219 --> 00:11:43,791
It's fascinating in so many ways.

132
00:11:57,780 --> 00:12:00,900
I use the abandoned movie 
theater as a movie theater,

133
00:12:01,534 --> 00:12:06,543
and I projected images of the outside 
on the interior of the movie theater.

134
00:12:11,760 --> 00:12:16,980
The one thing I never wanted was 
to reinforce the propaganda that

135
00:12:16,980 --> 00:12:19,920
animals are thriving in 
Chernobyl, which they're not.

136
00:12:21,600 --> 00:12:24,060
The whole point of the piece is the struggle,

137
00:12:24,720 --> 00:12:30,662
the will to live, and the struggle to live.

138
00:12:34,143 --> 00:12:38,176
[soft electronic tone]

139
00:12:38,176 --> 00:12:43,500
I want us to find different 
ways to think through living

140
00:12:43,935 --> 00:12:47,912
and different ways to construct power.

141
00:12:51,120 --> 00:12:57,300
How do we think about the natural 
world in a way that doesn't destroy it?

142
00:12:58,278 --> 00:13:01,501
♪ Doo doo doo doo doo
doo... ♪

143
00:13:01,501 --> 00:13:06,619
Thater: I think all artists 
want to change the world.

144
00:13:08,880 --> 00:13:11,462
I hope all artists want to change the world.

145
00:13:13,949 --> 00:13:16,997
And if there's any place that we 
can imagine a different world,

146
00:13:16,997 --> 00:13:21,261
it's through art, it's through 
literature, it's through film.

147
00:13:21,261 --> 00:13:23,640
♪ Doo doo doo doo ♪

148
00:13:23,640 --> 00:13:25,620
And I'm completely willing to say it.

149
00:13:25,620 --> 00:13:28,920
Maybe if I'm willing to say it, 
other artists will say it, too, that,

150
00:13:28,920 --> 00:13:30,273
you know, come the revolution,

151
00:13:30,273 --> 00:13:31,761
I'm going to be ready.

152
00:13:31,761 --> 00:13:35,865
♪ Doo doo doo doo ♪

153
00:13:37,225 --> 00:13:43,499
[soft electronic music]