This video is based on a Woody Guthrie song "This Land is Your Land," written as a critical response to Irving Berlin’s "God Bless America" in 1940. Guthrie’s song romanced about the American landscape while protesting its privatization and the treatment of Dust Bowl and Depression era refugees. As a tribute to Guthrie’s song, my "This Land" series also puzzles over the myopic concept of divine blessing and the provinciality of an Earth-bound meaning for “land,” as well as any notion of “our land" in a solar system full of land objects. The piece is meant to be optimistic about how science re-scales our perspectives and disrupts an understanding of where we live, what is ours, and how we fit in.
