Mitch McCabe
CIVIL WAR SURVEILLANCE POEMS is a five-part project of experimental and hybrid-form short films contemplating a second American civil war via lyrical nonfiction, mixing call-in radio, twenty years of verité footage from the filmmaker’s archive, and robots. Conceptually, the project is made from a specific time and historical vantage point: it’s 2036 and America is in a protracted civil war. Partly nostalgic political travelogue, partly a quest to mine the archive for what went wrong, and part prewar surveillance records, the project deconstructs and builds to a clashing ideology, culminating in an installation of sound sculpture, four-walled video and artifacts.