Hi! I’m Zane!
I am a filmmaker, writer, recovering academic, and an artist fervently trying to understand what it means to be a real, fleshy, emotional person in this increasingly unrecognizable world.
I have a background in experimental film, but I have spent the last ten years navigating the labyrinthine bureaucracy of academia as a researcher of tech infrastructure. However, as the world warms and descends into techno-fascism, the only thing keeping me sane anymore is the idea that I can make meaningful work from the depths of my heart, not just my mind.
So, at a loss for what to do to keep from going completely insane, I’m writing and making films again. Most of my writing deals with the complex, messy, and sometimes terrifying ways we relate to technology, and how the tendrils of those relations wind through our personal, social, political, and ecological lives.
Contact me!
SELECTED PAST PROJECTS
Alchemical Infrastructures is a multimedia exhibition that explores the social, environmental, and political dimensions of the cryptocurrency mining industry in Iceland.
It includes a VR documentary short, an experimental sound art piece, and a portrait series. During the length of the physical exhibit in Philadelphia, we also mined cryptocurrency live in the exhibit space, documenting its revenue and energy use.
The VR short was a finalist at the 2020 Cannes XR Development Showcase.
Mayflies is an experimental, proof-of-concept post-apocalyptic sci-fi film about a world in which all humans are born, grow up, reproduce, and die in the span of 24 hours—all except for one man named Harvey. The film explores themes of loneliness, loss, love, parenthood, and finding even just a modicum of joy in tragedy.
Mayflies was an Official Selection at NewFilmmakers NY in 2012.
This multimedia exhibition, funded by the Internet Society Foundation, explores the lives of electronic waste across the tech supply chain. This story takes us from rare earth mining in Greenland, to semiconductor manufacturing in Silicon Valley and Taiwan, to data center and logistics operations in Virginia and Southern California, and to e-waste dumps in Zimbabwe. It was displayed phyically at the Annenberg School for Communication in Philadelphia, as well as at the Virginia Tech library in Blacksburg. It now lives online at:
Zane G.T. Cooper 