“ULTIMATUM” is a commentary on human disruption of nature—whether that be in the form of excessive work and the anxiety that comes with it, climate change and environmental destruction, or capitalism. In this four-part collaborative series, the viewer is taken on a journey of the chaos that ensues when trying to navigate through these realities.

Alexandra Skora wrote an upbeat song about a road trip through California, “The Bay,” but in the video Tanya Gupta created, distressing images of climate change are shown in juxtaposition to the lyrics. This is meant to demonstrate how while many people romanticize nature and may not see the physical impacts of climate change when engaging with the natural environment, it is very real and threatening. 

Ryan Gross’s “Global Warning” builds off of a lush soundscape using synthesizer sounds and pairing them with images of nature. Subliminal doomsday images are inter-spliced throughout the short film and begin to appear more and more rapidly as mechanical sounds overtly begin to overpower the musical arrangement. With Ryan’s direction, Tanya collected video clips and edited them with Roza Chervinsky’s selection of subliminal images for this video. The piece aims to highlight how moments of beauty are all around us, but are often interrupted or ignored for the sake of individual productivity, career, advancement, shareholder value, and profit in a capitalist society that forces us to sacrifice so much of ourselves and the natural world around us. 

In “CryptoForest,” Tanya created an animated self-portrait video of the internal dilemmas and anxiety caused when trying to figure out how to navigate the realm of cryptocurrency and its impact on the climate. As an artist it is difficult enough to figure out how to earn a living on solely your art, but when trying to figure that out in a sustainable and environmentally-conscious way, it feels almost every new advancement in opportunity leads to another potential road block, resulting in an absurd amount of indecisiveness. Ryan’s build-up on the music integrated with Alexandra’s whispered recording of Roza’s spoken word helps to give sound to the artist’s inner chaos. 

Roza’s “Ching of Wing” is a game-ified metaphor of the absurdity around trying to make the right choices. She was inspired by the very ominous test for the Director’s Guild of America trainee program, for which she was not allowed to prepare. The experience felt like a terrible way to show that someone is capable of being a director, and was somewhat degrading. To make fun of this process, “Ching of Wing” exposes its upsetting qualification indicators and asks us to question its purpose and effectiveness.