Across layers of deep time, the Los Angeles region has existed as both arid desert and muddy swampland. Intensive climate engineering in the 19th and 20th centuries at the hands of speculative property tycoons, combined with the contrived image of LA as a palm tree-stuffed paradise put forward by Hollywood moguls, is enough to wipe clean the region’s ecological history from the minds of its present-day human inhabitants. Desert Diffusion offers an extended hallucination of these environmental past lives, where images of the river and sprawling freeway systems poke through a non-linear timeline that’s always on the cusp of reinventing itself.

Alice Bucknell, Desert Diffusion, 0:36 runtime, single-channel full-HD video file, 2023.