Crop Circles

Super-8 film transferred to HD, 5:13 min 
Music by Espen Sommer Eide/Phonophani

The National Museum of Art, Oslo


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The film Crop Circles is a poetic documentation of the phenomenon of crop circles. Filmed with a Super-8 camera, the colours and tones dissolve into one another, giving an almost impressionistic character to the film. The filming shifts between a bird’s-eye perspective and a ground level perspective. We are witness to an impressive visual array of corn circles in all their many guises – geometric forms, animated bird-like shapes and intricate symbols. The circular forms contrast with the repetitive lines of carefully planted corn. The central motif is the cultivated landscape of fields, with sparse areas of habitation, pointing out the liminal zone between nature and culture. In this film however, it´s unsure whats separating the two. Similar to Robert Smithsons documentation films of his land art sculpture Spiral Jetty, patterns and forms occur in the overviewed landscape. But in contrast to Smithsons idea of entropy, in Crop Circles, nature´s "movement towards disorder" is changed to a determination towards organizing and the construction of meaning