I do not wish to impose. (Trailer), 2026
"I do not wish to impose." Yet you are. The phrase is a small hypocrisy, and this video lives inside it. The desire not to intrude, but the decision to do it anyway. The faux niceties we, and our LLM imitators, feel obligated to impart before doing exactly what we wanted to do, or in some cases what we were designed to do.
The video builds its symbolism from what's missing as much as what's there. Human figures and human-shaped holes, mirrors left abandoned in the woods, fallen trees, and manmade barriers. The soundscape echoes the visuals, pushing on the line between reality and invention. Live action video transforms into smears of pixels on screen. Field recordings transform into replicas. Recorded human speech is shaped into the pitch and rhythm of birdsong, wind, the rustle of leaves. Mimesis and obfuscation lays down a throughline within the composition. Woven in are long droning tones created by the artist experimenting with a web synth and her computer's keyboard, typing the words "impose, impart, and imprint" in varying speeds and rhythms.
"I do not wish to impose." turns over the interdependent triangle that is human, nature, and technology. A triangle whose sides are becoming increasingly blurred and enormously unequal.
Director’s Statement and Making of “I do not wish to impose.”
Sometimes it feels like we're just ghosts in the woods. A haunting presence.
The concept for this experimental short film had been fermenting for some time. I had this vision of a human-shaped hole traversing landscapes, and how a symbolic, conceptual story might unfold from that image. A confluence of things let this idea take shape: an opportunity to spend a week at a remote creative retreat in the woods, a clearer vision of direction and setting, and, of course, the will to see it through. So in the summer of 2026, I packed up my car, my dog, and myself, and drove up to a little cabin on a nature preserve in central Michigan, and immersed myself in the production of "I do not wish to impose."
I think it may just be the cultural moment, the tech issue of our time, but I couldn't help wondering how AI might relate to the images I was making in the woods. The core elements, in no particular order: human, hole in the shape of a human, forest, mirror, forest detritus, both natural and manmade. Layered and edited as I've edited them, there's a sense of urgency, of panic, of clawing back space, but also of dancing, of unison, of contemplative reflection. The colors are the right colors for the forest, but they've been graded for a cinematic look, and so, made unnatural. The primary subject is clearly a human figure, but never shows any facial features. I feels like grasping for invisible forces at play, in the triad of nature, human, and technology.
The film begins and ends with the leaves blowing, blustering, turbulence.
Looking at how I made this, the scale is small. It usually is. Not because my ideas lack ambition. They just fit the size of something I can tackle and control. Sometimes we don't need much to do a lot. In this case, a minuscule budget. A car packed with food and provisions. A week in a cabin with my dog. This allowed for a deep immersion into the work, the ideas, the visuals, the vision.
Formally, I kept returning to doubling and mismatch: a plain, unframed mirror; a human-shaped cutout over a shifting landscape; figures almost human but not quite — one shimmering silver, one solid red, one solid black — so "human" here is never singular, never fixed. Sound moves in the same way. I use my own voice to mimic birdsong and wind, mislabeling one thing as another, folded into a keyboard-based web synth spelling out impose, impart, impact.
The challenge was being alone. Every shot, every setup, every reset, on my own. I ran into only three other people during my entire weeklong stay. But there's another kind of alone. Artists talk about residencies in billowy language. They talk of solitude, time, space, how generative it all is. And it was. It was also, some nights, very scary. I'm a woman, alone in the woods, and felt a real haunting. I felt the hairs standing up on the back of my neck, nights where I didn't sleep, the dark and quiet pressing in. That fear is in the film too. I felt like a ghost at times, and like there were ghosts, too, during the summer solstice, when the long days feel dreamy, tied to the turning of the earth.
The message and throughline take a squishy and not straightforward path, sitting somewhere uncomfortable, poking at a reminder we're implicated in forces bigger than us, often without knowing it, and that noticing that is itself a kind of first step.