WEBVTT

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[Distant siren]

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♪ Doo doo doo ♪

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♪ Doo doo doo...♪

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[Vocalizing continues]

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Diana Thater: This time of year, it's unusual to see a whale.

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Usually right now, you see maybe dolphins.

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I don't know.

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I think she went back out to sea.

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♪...doo doo doo doo ♪

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[Singing fades and stops]

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I thought for a while I would become an architect

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'cause I'm very interested in space…

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which is why I make installation 'cause 
installation is all about moving through space.

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And perhaps that's more of what 
I was really interested in,

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is dealing with the complexities 
of our relationships to space.

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And a friend of mine had 
visited this temple in India.

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It is a temple to the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman.

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You know, I'm always looking 
for these kind of amazing...

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coincidences between the 
animal and the human world,

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between animal culture and human culture.

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So I wanted to go film monkeys 
in the temple to a monkey god.

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I always have a vision or an image, like–

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like a photograph in my mind 
of what I'm going to see.

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It's never there,

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but when I get there, what's 
really there is even better.

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So when I got there, I found out that 
the temple didn't have an interior.

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It's just a facade built on a cliff.

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And when I made the installation, 
one room is the temple.

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You walk through the doorway, 
and I made my own interior.

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And of course, what you find when you go in

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is an image of theater seats 
with a viewer sitting in it,

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watching a movie of monkeys.

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So it's the theater, which is the sacred space.

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The viewer comes in, and you watch someone watch.

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[synth music]

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I've always been incredibly 
influenced by hollywood film.

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Ever since I was a child, I've 
been a sort of film fanatic.

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You know, I grew up wanting to be two things.

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I either wanted to be a movie 
star or I wanted to be an artist.

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And a really great way to become an artist is

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to go to graduate school and 
study art with real artists.

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I wanted to read a lot,

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and I wanted to learn theory and I 
wanted to work in film and video.

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I had a friend who was an architect,

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and he said all the best graduate 
schools are in Los Angeles.

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So I picked up and moved to California.

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It's almost a tradition.

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Teachers teach, the students graduate,

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they go on to become artists 
and teachers themselves.

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— So the relationship of this work 
to the work in the other galleries,

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can you talk about that for a minute?

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— I mean, living in L.A., 
you're surrounded by signs...

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— Mm-hmm.

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— Of course, so it's certainly 
inspired a lot by that.

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[Diana Thater] And I think that's 
important to L.A. artists, also,

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is if you're always involved with young people,

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if you're always involved in teaching,

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you're always talking about new ideas.

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[synth music]

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♪ ♪

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So I'm just building a tiny video wall.

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♪ ♪

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This is the installation at LACMA.

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Normally I install one piece at a time.

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But for something like this, 
it's really complicated.

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I need to be able to move around 
and look through every doorway.

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Like, you have to get down here…

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look through this doorway to this doorway,

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so you can see that every view is 
planned so that from any doorway,

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you see another color and another image.

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[synth music]

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When I first started working, 
I wanted to make something new.

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And I came to the idea that abstraction in 
art is the abstraction of the figurative.

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But abstraction in film and 
video is the abstraction of time.

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And that's how I came to working 
with images of the natural world

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because the natural world 
is not inherently narrative.

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It's another kind of time, another kind of cycle.

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I'm interested in the relationship 
between images and space and time.

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When the viewer walks in, I want them to…

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know that they're entering into a work of art.

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So how do I make you conscious 
of the space that surrounds you?

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I do that by tinting the space 
because that makes it a volume.

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And it makes you fully conscious 
of the space you occupy,

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uh, how you move through it.

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You see your shadow, you interfere with images,

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and the technology is exposed,

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so there's a kind of loss of self,

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but there's a kind of hyperconsciousness of self.

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And each of those spaces is sort of really 
choreographed to give you the opportunity

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to have a sympathetic bodily 
response to an experience.

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And that sympathy is not constructed 
intellectually or emotionally.

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It's seeing the dolphin spinning in space 
and feeling it fully within your body.

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I'm interested in you feeling the buzz and 
feeling that super-fast flutter that bees do…

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the giving viewers an opportunity to feel their full 
self in the presence of other kinds of selves.

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[Recording of birds chirping
at high speed]

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Animals are quite foreign to me.

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I want to film them, but when I'm with them,

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I am afraid of them.

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I think I'm a lot more of a city 
girl than I am anything else.

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People think I'm an adventurer just 'cause I go 
to exotic places and film gorillas or dolphins.

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It's not because I'm an adventurer.

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It's because I have to.

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This is Keebu. Every day, 
when I went up in this tower,

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Keebu would climb a tree opposite me 
and sit and watch me film every day,

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so I have tons of footage of Keebu sitting 
in this tree, and he's quite beautiful.

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"Gorillagorillagorilla" is a piece that I 
made in the Mefou National Park in Cameroon.

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The work focuses on western lowland gorillas.

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The gorillas are in these huge enclosures 
surrounded by double electrified fences.

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It's to keep them safe. It's to 
keep humans from poaching them.

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They are so endangered.

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They are so vulnerable.

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But I found that documentary 
filmmakers who had come there before me

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had built these huge towers with ladders on them

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so that they could film the gorillas 
as if they were out in the wild.

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So I decided I would film them in 3 ways:

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gorillas as explained to us by science…

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gorillas as if they're free…

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and then the third, imprisoned, 
the way they really are.

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It's really about 
questioning how we know animals,

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how is information about animals delivered to us,

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and it's delivered to us in these ways.

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[synth music]

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This is an era in which the greatest changes 
that are happening to the earth are manmade.

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There was this idea that animals 
were returning to Chernobyl,

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which is, of course, the largest 
nuclear meltdown in history.

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[Overlapping chatter]

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So I went to Chernobyl, and I 
spent 7 days living in a trailer

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with a very small crew.

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It's dangerous.

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It's radioactive.

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It's fascinating in so many ways.

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I use the abandoned movie 
theater as a movie theater,

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and I projected images of the outside 
on the interior of the movie theater.

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The one thing I never wanted was 
to reinforce the propaganda that

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animals are thriving in 
Chernobyl, which they're not.

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The whole point of the piece is the struggle,

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the will to live, and the struggle to live.

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[soft electronic tone]

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I want us to find different 
ways to think through living

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and different ways to construct power.

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How do we think about the natural 
world in a way that doesn't destroy it?

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♪ Doo doo doo doo doo
doo... ♪

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Thater: I think all artists 
want to change the world.

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I hope all artists want to change the world.

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And if there's any place that we 
can imagine a different world,

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it's through art, it's through 
literature, it's through film.

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♪ Doo doo doo doo ♪

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And I'm completely willing to say it.

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Maybe if I'm willing to say it, 
other artists will say it, too, that,

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you know, come the revolution,

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I'm going to be ready.

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♪ Doo doo doo doo ♪

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[soft electronic music]