Video Series Archives

Earth Day Rewind: 🍃 Botany with Bobby 🍃 Episodes 1–3

Lily Hansen on Apr 12 2024

Since 2022, we’ve followed the adventures of Bobby McCullough, SAM Facilities and Landscape Manager, at the Olympic Sculpture Park as part of our video series 🍃 Botany with Bobby 🍃. In each episode, Bobby offers viewers an up-close look at the natural ecosystems living and thriving at the park as well as insight into its continued development and the art that resides within it. With Earth Day coming up on April 22, we’re taking it back to the beginning with a round up of the series’s first three episodes.

More episodes of 🍃 Botany with Bobby 🍃 are on the way! Until then, catch up on all eleven available episodes via our YouTube channel.

Episode 1: Bobby’s Top Five Favorite Plants

SAM is lucky to have a beautiful piece of earth to take care of: the Olympic Sculpture Park. And Bobby McCullough is dedicated to doing just that! In this inaugural episode of 🍃 Botany with Bobby 🍃, SAM’s Facilities and Landscape Manager discusses his five favorite natural plants visitors can find at the park: Check out our first installation of Botany with Bobby for his top five favorite plants at the park.

Episode 2: Climate Change at the Olympic Sculpture Park

The effects of climate change can be seen in local and global environments both big and small. In this episode, Bobby shares how its effects have manifested in the native plants living and growing at the Olympic Sculpture Park, paying particular attention to the Dawn Redwood—a plant previously believed to be extinct in the United States—and the Ginkgo Biloba.

Episode 3: King Bunny 🐰

The Olympic Sculpture Park’s booming rabbit population can be linked back to one particular coney: 👑 King Bunny. In this episode, Bobby spots King Bunny among the park’s plants and shares his admiration for the illusive four-legged ‘beast.’ Be sure to keep an eye out for this mischievous long-eared mammal next time you’re at the park!

– Lily Hansen, SAM Marketing Content Creator

Photo: L. Fried.

Curator Foong Ping Invites You to Look Again

Rachel Eggers on Feb 29 2024

“I looked really carefully at the object; I found a Chinese character that nobody has noticed before.”
– Foong Ping, Foster Foundation Curator of American Art

Look Again is a new series that joins curator Foong Ping as she uncovers mysteries and celebrates hidden details of beloved works in SAM’s collection.

In the above video, Foong gets you up close with the Dragon Tamer Luohan, a dynamic 14th–century wood statue that has been in the museum’s collection since 1936. The sculpture is now on view in the “Bringing Blessings” gallery of Boundless: Stories of Asian Art at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. In this exhibition, works across cultures and time periods tell diverse stories of Asia in a series of thematic galleries.

According to Chinese Buddhism, Luohans (also known as Arhats) are the original disciples of the Buddha. They are enlightened beings with distinctive pursuits and supernatural powers. In this video, Foong discusses her discovery of a Chinese character on the sculpture that no one had noticed before. The character identifies this Luohan as a tamer of dragons—a creature long associated with life-giving, spring rains. Ping also notes her favorite part: His gritted teeth as he summons the dragon from the heavens with a powerful hiss.

And don’t miss the first edition of Look Again, in which Foong introduces you to the nearly 1,000 pound, earthquake-proof Buddha statue—with tiny elegant feet—that stands in the Alvord Park Lobby and gazes out upon the surrounding Volunteer Park.

Stay tuned for more art discoveries with Foong Ping in future episodes to come!

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Object of the Week: Serious Games I-IV

Elisabeth Smith on Aug 20 2021

The link between new technologies and the violence of war—physical and psychological—is a focus for artist Harun Farocki (1944–2014), whose essayistic films and videos pointedly address the ways in which the production and circulation of images are inextricable from, among many aspects of contemporary life, geopolitics and the development of the military apparatus.

His four-part video Serious Games I-IV (2009-10) is an installation comprised of four video works that examine the use of virtual reality and gaming for United States military recruitment, training, and therapy. Hauntingly, many of the simulations and trainings captured were in preparation for missions in Afghanistan.

A still of Farocki's Serious Games in which marines complete simulated missions.

In one video, Marine recruits stationed in 29 Palms, California, attend simulation exercises where the distinction between combat and gaming is blurred. Focusing on four Marines and their laptop-based drills, Farocki highlights the ways in which such virtual computer environments have become a substitute for the real, and vice versa, ultimately prompting us to consider the ways in which technology, politics, and violence intersect. In another video, Farocki presents a workshop organized by the Institute for Creative Technologies, a research institute developing therapeutic tools for veterans experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Perversely, the same virtual reality and simulation technologies used for military recruitment and training are used in its aftermath.

As the United States is confronted with the serious and heartbreaking consequences of its 20-year presence and withdrawal from Afghanistan, Serious Games is a critical document that reflects just one arena within a series of systems and decisions that brought us to this moment. And while Farocki’s term “operative images” was used to describe his 2001 video work Eye/Machine, it can most certainly extend to Serious Games: “These are images that do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation.”¹

– Elisabeth Smith, SAM Collections and Provenance Associate

1 Harun Farocki, “Phantom Images,” in Public, no. 29 (2004): 17.

Serious Games I-IV, 2009-10, Harun Farocki, Three two-channel color video installations, one single-channel color video installation, 44 min. Anne Gerber Fund, Helen and Max Gurvich Fund and General Acquisition Fund, 2012.12.1.4 © Harun Farocki.