by Olivia Hunter Willke, Staff Writer

Michael Robinson's work mutilates pop culture, tearing it limb from limb, and resurrecting something completely different from the remnants. Light is Waiting disembowels a Full House special and what emerges from the depths of its mangled body is a blinding, overwhelming nightmare that has always been lurking within it. In These Hammers Don't Hurt Us, a fantasy of aesthetic narrative is harvested by weaving between Michael Jackson's Egyptian-themed music video for "Remember The Time" and Elizabeth Taylor's starring role in the 1963 epic Cleopatra. The realm that Robinson's work occupies could be described as video collage, but it is his utilization of popular cultural artifacts and unearthing of storylines from mined visual and auditory tangents that is so singular. His newest short, Polycephaly in D, made its debut at TIFF in 2021, but remained on the festival circuit throughout early 2022. It was made available to me through Media City Film Festival's online programming in the time of COVID.

Polycephaly in D is a work drowned in the dread of the modern world. Not the old modern world–of a 9-5, holding your tongue during Thanksgiving dinner, and ultrasounds of a baby on the way–but the new modern world. A world of pandemics and mass deaths, a collapsing ecosystem, unbreathable air, social decay beyond what could've been predicted. AI, CGI, and eyes that have witnessed horrors they can't comprehend. And most importantly, the apocalyptic proliferation of media and technology encroaching on every aspect of human life, every second of every day. We, as a society, are dogged by images and audio. They appear in our hand, on our many screens, on the side of the street 40 feet in the air splashed across an illuminated board, whispered into our ears. Our children are nestled within this constant bombardment, our dogs and cats watch YouTube videos of birds or squirrels while we sit at a desk 20 miles away, our grandparents are on TikTok, our babies hold iPads.

What Polycephaly in D does best, more than any other piece of art I've seen this year, is insert our collective trauma into a collection of seemingly unrelated images and construct a haunting encompassing monolith of a dying culture. Humans have been swallowed by our creations, we've surrendered or have become so fractured by infighting that they have overtaken us with ease. Robinson is simply organizing and broadcasting these signals of impending doom and he does so by way of communication between two telepaths who have been somehow separated. They speak through subtitles and an archive of the internet, glimpses and (literal) flashes of this new modern world. A group of Langur monkeys grieve over a monkey puppet with camera eyes that was meant to capture their activity but falls to its death. Overnight superstar musician Lil Nas X slides down a stripper pole to hell and proceeds to give the devil a lapdance. A particularly inspired sequence interlaces the 2005 King Kong remake, The Hunger Games, and hunk-era Michael Douglas. As I write these sentences, I can't help but stop and muse that they sound artificially generated from the depths of some form of intelligence that has been sentenced to mine the internet for eternity, a punishment for the sins of being a creation by man for man's use.

It's a film that could easily slip into frustration, the frustration of isolation, of craving (connection or communication), of general unpleasantness being situated in this plane of existence. But D remains exploratory in its approach, not naively, but with an understanding that time simply is and what happens to propel it forward has as much detrimental or beneficial effect as our consciousness assigns, regardless of our reality and doom. This isn't to say that Robinson finds us or what we perceive insignificant, quite the opposite. Polycephaly in D is a bombastic monument to humanity in a time of an extinction of our own making. Being cannibalized can be beautiful if we find meaning in the end. How else should we die? Tell me telepathically, I'm listening.