AlexanderPorter

Topography

A multi-format documentary project exploring the histories and futures of land use.

Period
2021–present
Status
Active / Ongoing
Form
Multi-format documentary project
Virtual Ecologies Symposium — Terrain scan study

The project

Topography is an ongoing multi-format documentary project that includes films, live-edited performances, interactive experiences, and community collaborations. Set in and around America’s public lands, the project spends time in the Badlands, Death Valley, Fire Island, and Zion. Paleontologists, medicinal plant experts, rangers, ranchers, motel workers, and tourists describe land at different scales and from different positions. Across these forms, Topography fragments across time, species, scales, and histories to reveal how different perspectives shape the land and its futures.

Documentary field notes

We aspire to apply the most appropriate form to each subject. Hannah and I spend time with people, landscapes, archives, images and sounds, then ask what form the material needs. A film can follow someone over years. A live performance can recombine images and voices in front of an audience. An installation can let visitors move through a scanned place. Sometimes one subject needs several approaches, so the forms produce material for one another.

A bighorn sheep stands at the summit of a pale eroded Badlands peak against a blue-gray sky.
Bighorn sheep on eroded peak
01 / 08

My role

I co-lead Topography with filmmaker Hannah Jayanti. My work moves between directing, producing, virtual cinematography, spatial imaging, and the design of live and interactive systems.

Supported by

Selected credits

Alexander Porter
Director / Producer / Virtual Cinematographer
Delfina Vincenti
Associate Producer
Hannah Jayanti
Director / Producer / Cinematographer / Editor / Sound
Jacob Burke
Game Developer
Juan Pedro Agurcia
Associate Producer
Katayoun Dibamehr
Immersive Co-Producer
Keith Wilson
Documentary Producer
Linus Gruszewski
Architect
Michele Graffieti
Designer
Richard T. Sherman
Consulting Producer

Links & presentations

Feature-film formBadlands

In the otherworldly Badlands of South Dakota, a seemingly ‘bad’ land is revealed to be teeming with life, buried histories, and urgent lessons about environmental protection.

Touring live formStrata / Performance

A live-edited documentary performance constructed inside a fifty-meter 3D scan of the Badlands.

Installation formStrata / Installation

Strata is an immersive installation that transforms the Badlands of South Dakota into an explorable landscape.

Short film from the same field researchMissile Command

A story told at a game console inside a nuclear control facility.

Explorable game formStrata (Game)

The shared documentary terrain is being developed as an explorable game.