Signs of our Times

A seemingly endless parade of empty platitudes and paradoxical life affirmations trouble entitlement and question who determines and owns the American Dream. Original footage serve as visuals for a slightly redacted found audio track from a 1960 film in the public domain called “Your Name Here”, produced by The Calvin Company as a spoof on the industrial film.

  • Lisa Birke
    Director
    The Land of Milk and Honey, The Knits, Bombshell, Endgame, Red Carpet
  • Lisa Birke
    Key Cast
    "Spokesmodel"
    The Land of Milk and Honey, The Knits, Bombshell, Endgame, Red Carpet
  • Qihang Liang
    Animation
    The Land of Milk and Honey
  • Leanne Read
    Animation
    the bridge, Water You Waiting For?
  • Lisa Birke
    Animation
  • The Calvin Company
    Writer
    Public Domain (The Prelinger Archives)
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    9 minutes 50 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    August 4, 2022
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada
  • Country of Filming:
    Canada
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital 1080HD
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Tortona IndieFilm Session
    Tortona
    Italy
    November 14, 2022
    European Premiere
    Official Selection
  • The Magikal Charm Experimental Video & Film Fest
    New York
    United States
    December 29, 2022
    US Premiere
    Official Selection
  • PAVED Arts
    Saskatoon
    Canada
    March 17, 2023
    Exhibition
  • Moving-Image-Arts International Short Film Festival
    Toronto
    Canada
    March 30, 2023
    Canada
    Official Selection
  • Arizona International Film Festival
    Tucson
    United States
    April 24, 2023
    Best Experimental Short
Director Biography - Lisa Birke

Lisa Birke is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is a result of the collision of video, performance art, and installation. She is interested in the stories that we re-cite and re-brand and how these inform our conception of the world and the tragi-comic perception of ourselves. Recently, Birke has been exploring immersive multi-media approaches using special effects, AR, and 360 video. Her award-winning video work has seen more than100 screenings and installations at film festivals, media centers and in galleries and museums internationally, including Vancouver International Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, Florida Film Festival, International Short Film Week Regensburg, TIME is Love, The New Museum of Networked Art and Remai Modern. Birke is Assistant Professor of Digital and Extended Media in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Saskatchewan.

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Director Statement

In Signs of our Times, a blond spokesmodel marches across a succession of natural backdrops, out-of-place in her inexhaustible wardrobe of slinky gowns à la Vanna White. The woman holds aloft a series of digitally composited 3D signs, advertising platitudes to a barren landscape, yet marching to a soundtrack full of pretension and nationalism. Empty and prescriptive, tongue-in-cheek phrases such as "live large," "go with the flow," and "survival of the fittest" create uncomfortable juxtapositions with the public domain audio track produced by The Calvin Company as a spoof industrial film production in the 1960s (eerily ahead of its time). The juxtapositions of image and sound bring up questions of entitlement, systems of colonialism, how meaning is created and demanded of our lives by society and mass culture, for whom, and at what cost?