Strata | Documentary Performance

Variable Duration | Transmediale, 2023

“A live-edited documentary performance traversing a vast terrain without leaving a tiny patch of land.”

Strata is a live-edited, improvisational documentary performance. Each iteration is a unique call and response between a virtual landscape with documentary audio and live-edited footage. Strata is part of the multi-format documentary project, Topography.

Set in a small 3D scanned region of the Badlands of South Dakota, viewers piece together a chorus of diverse perspectives while performers construct it live. Voices carry you from paleontology to foraging, wildlife management to nuclear arms and geopolitics, and indigenous herbalism to cattle ranching. Strata layers histories, economics, natural sciences, deep time, and personal anecdotes within a unique immersive landscape that invites you into a meditation on the complex histories embedded in all lands and how profoundly human perspectives shape and define its future.

Strata is a part of Topography, an ongoing multi-format documentary project that includes films, live-edited performances, interactive experiences, and community collaborations.

  • Director, Producer, Performer | Alexander Porter, Hannah Jayanti

    Creative Direction, 3D Capture | Alexander Porter

    (Live) Editor, Cinematography | Hannah Jayanti

    Game Developer | Jacob Burke

    Consulting Immersive Producer | Juan Pedro Agurcia

    Visual Design Consultant | Michele Graffieti

    Science Communication Advisor | Francesco Fiondella

    Field Producer, Additional Scanning | Christian Knutson

  • Transmediale (Berlin, Germany, 2023)

    Camden International Film Festival (Maine, USA, 2023)

    Plasmata (Ioannina, Greece, 2023)

    First Look Festival, Museum of the Moving Image (Queens, NY, 2021).

  • Supported by Catapult Documentary Film Fund, Brown Institute Center for Media Innovation, Headlands Center for the Arts Residency & Project Space, McEvoy Family Award for Film/Video, Ken Corday FDM Grow Grant, UCSC, Badlands National Park Arts Residency, Fire Island National Seashore Residency, National Park Arts Foundation.


    Developed, in part, while in residence at ONX Studio, a collaborative initiative of the Onassis Foundation and NEW INC.