End of America Double Feature: WTO/99 + Hello Dankness

Presented as a double feature, as well as individually (viewer’s choice 🙂 Ian Bell’s WTO/99 and Soda Jerk’s Hello Dankness trace more than two decades of political rupture from the streets of Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization protests to the fractured media landscape of the Trump era. 

WTO/99

An immersive archival documentary that reanimates the clash between the then-emerging World Trade Organization (WTO) and the more than 40,000 people who took to the streets of Seattle to protest the WTO’s impacts on human rights, labor, and the environment

Hello Dankness

Comprised entirely of hundreds of pirated film samples, Hello Dankness is a bent suburban musical that bears witness to the psychotropic cultural spectacle of the period 2016 to 2021. Set in the American suburbs, the film follows a neighbourhood through these years as consensus reality disintegrates into conspiracies and other political contagions. Part political satire, zombie stoner film, and Greek tragedy, the work is also informed by the encrypted memetics of contemporary internet culture.