Organum

Close photo of an orchid such that it resembles an orifice of the human body.

Organum

Film Stills by Greg Niemeyer, Chris Chafe, & Christine Liu
Exhibit
Thursday, Aug 28, 2003 12:00 am -

The Townsend Center, in conjunction with the BAM show Gene(sis), presented a suite of 22 film stills fromOrganum, the computer graphics animation film by Greg Niemeyer, Chris Chafe, and Christine Liu. The stills present a linear narrative on which the complete film is based (although the film itself is non-linear).Organum premiered in a screen version at the Pacific Film Archive on October 30, 2003 and in a Dome-Theater version later that year at the LodeStar Planetarium in Albuquerque, NM. Organum is a surreal computer graphics animation about semi-human creatures who wander a desolate valley living, fighting, mating, and always singing. Their internal organs, especially the vocal tracts, are visible to plain sight, and respond to waves of sound in the air.  Their day-to-day struggle is to find enough water to survive. But into their midst is thrown a catalyst of change—a technology that promises to help them, but will ultimately change them forever. Organum was funded by the University of New Mexico, The Rockefeller Foundation, Intel Corporation, UC Berkeley, the Hellman Foundation, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.