LA based filmmaker Dalena Tran's new animation is a combination of algorithm-made texture, using a kinetic charge of quickly altering photographic images, and ancient anthropology-like storytelling. From lone mosquito to fisherman to the wider public, the piece presents a seamless trail of communicable disease in a way that's both poetic and unsettling.

The music video for 'Harm,' a song from Beacon's fourth album, is a meditation on mother nature's disease. Inspired, if that can be said, by covid - the song delves into the history of human civilisation's consistent struggle with an invading ecology, one that affects both body, and thereafter mind, mind of individual, mind of society. The focus, in this song's case, Malaria.

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Dalena Tran 'Using Beacon's song and source material, I began working with the history of tobacco cultivation in North America. In one of Charles E Mann's chapters, this lucrative crop created the perfect breeding ground for Malaria, which ravaged the population. It shaped not just the ecology of the land, but also impacted labor and had long-lasting consequences to the present day in unexpected ways. So for this video, I was thinking about trade or exchange in both the economic and ecological sense.

I wanted to visualize the environment as a living, changing network. I used a multiplicity of photographic images generated from a machine-learning algorithm as the textures for the 3D scenes. For instance, hundreds of synthesized water images are placed over the lake in succession. This depicts a lake in the video while also stretching the timescale of the lake from its present representation into compositions of a past and future lake in the span of four minutes.'

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Beacon album 'Along The Lethe' - https://beacon.lnk.to/alongthelethe