ARK 3: Crossover Chronicles, 25-minute HD video & ARK 3: Crossover Chronicles 3 (a shorter 11-minute version)

ARK 3: Crossover Chronicles is the culminating single-channel version of Burns and Martin’s ARK 3 series that also included variable installations and a performance series. The first part of the title takes its name from an obscure and short-lived children’s television series named Ark II from 1976, where a group of young scientists accompanied by a talking chimpanzee attempt to bring new hope to a post-apocalyptic world that has been ravaged by pollution and waste. Their science fiction mobile lab roams a landscape populated with feral children, feudal barons, and supernatural beings. In ARK 3, we re-imagine this mobile lab to be colorful inflatable orbs, and its occupants, as performed by the artists and willing workshop participants are evolved bodies rather than glamorous youths. Void of their protective hides and genetically modified to be in communion with the animal and insect worlds, these earth bound bio-nauts mine the environment around them looking for clues to their ancestral past as a way to pave a way into their possible simulated futures. These emissaries of prop movement greet the Great Wall of China and Mexico’s Teotihuacán Pyramids as destinations of ritual to be shared, not by beings of a post apocalyptic universe, but by tourists vying for their own survival through manifested selfie pics. Crossover takes on multiple meanings as another live action series, Land of the Lost mixes into the under appreciated pre-historic caverns in the center of a spectral amusement park. Distant future and distant past find themselves conflated in an unsettled present.