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HD video, stereo sound, 2015, filmed in Skagaströnd, Iceland.

Utilizing a series of questions traditionally posed by cognitive scientists to autistic patients, Deserts of the Interior works as a dialogue between the filmmaker, the town of Skagaströnd, Iceland, and the town’s residents as measured on a scale of Global and Local Coherence. The subjects give basic answers to sentence stems, either completing them in a Globally Coherent way or a Locally Coherent way. These answers are then synthesized to create new and impossible sounds, establishing a collection of responses to either work with or against in the creation of the video’s narrative segments. Part landscape film, part documentary, Deserts of the Interior forgoes any traditional narrative structure to instead exist as an absurd companion to these coherency tests. It is also a document of living in northern Iceland during the months of April and May with a rapidly adjusting frame of mind. In total, the video attempts to confound visual logic and emphasize an oscillation between Global and Local ways of thinking inherent to the majority of people.