Robert Gerard Pietrusko The Room: Remastering Eden

What if humans used the media archive to resurrect former ecologies asks designer and composer Robert Gerard Pietrusko and filmmaker Courtney Stephens, who have come together in collaboration for The Room: Restoring Eden, a beautiful, quietly probing video collage featuring The Room, a track from Robert Gerard Pietruskos latest album, Elegiya. Stitching together footage lifted from 20th century Soviet archives, Stephens ruminates on what he terms the hypernatural beauty of the natural world caught on film in an exploration of our changing biosphere. By charting a throughline between 16mm archival footage, early video and computer graphics, Stephens seeks to enact a filmic resurrection of our fallen world, reconfiguring our focus through the magic of light and sound. Scientists now estimate that humaninduced climate change was underway by the mid19th century. This means that the entire history of nonfiction cinema, regardless of its original intent, has also been a documentation of our c