The script for Our Work Wasn't Done was made in dialogue with the images that went into the video essay. The writing involves extensive mind maps and endless amounts of screen captures within screen captures. It is as much a video editing process as it’s a writing process.

I developed this method of writing during my PhD. Recently I was asked to give a keynote on the topic of Nordic Extractionism. My PhD work was around the Danish extraction of cryolite from Ivittuut in Greenland. Greenland’s new geopolitical reality has re-actualised my research specifically in relation to the cryolite mine, and when performing one of my video essays from five years ago it took on a very interesting new meaning. 

The liveness embedded in the visual appearance of the screen capture lends, first, a degree of intimacy to the performance and, second, makes ambiguous what is happening live and what is pre-recorded. And it subtly reflects the shifts in society and technology that have taken place in the intervening time when the video essay is performed years later.