Folding Ideas

Clickbait Title: Can this magical metal make you immortal? Godkings hate this one weird trick! This was a lot of fun to work on because I got to spend a lot of time learning THE TRUTH ABOUT GOLD and by that I mean actually interesting facts about how humans use gold. The mythology of gold actually makes a lot of sense through the lens of its physical properties, the fact that ancient humans could make things out of it and those things would outlive generations. It's just rare enough that societal elites can monopolize it, but common enough you can gather enough to actually make stuff with it. So these things, namely jewellery for the leaders, are so resistant to the elements that you can see how the gold itself became representative of the power of the kings, of their claimed immortality. Written and performed by Dan Olson

PHOTO-SENSITIVITY WARNING: occasional subtle flickering between 19:00 and 24:36 If ever there were a video I've made that required a companion essay or some kind of artist statement to go along with it I suppose it would be this one. It's a strange project that I've been working on for the better part of six months now, a process of trying to disentangle myself from myself. It's about a lot of different things, it's about James Rolfe but also not about him because we have so many versions of him and we can only react to those imperfect projections. He's been doing this for basically 20 years at this point, and out of that arise a million different ways to tell the story: AVGN is deeply influential, but what does that influence mean? I found myself fascinated with his creative fixations, the motifs and stories that he keeps coming back to, and felt like the only way to engage with that honestly was to expose all my own fixations, insecurities, and fears.