Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure
15 minutes
2006

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure marks Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby return to the episodic structure of their earlier works Rapt and Happy, Being Fucked Up and Bad Ideas for Paradise. As with earlier works, Songs of Praise takes on difficult, often painful subject matter.  Themes of addiction, violence, the destruction of the natural world and the agonies of adolescence are woven through the work, but as Sarah Milroy writes for the Globe and Mail, the work is "anything but depressing... [it is founded in] a sense of wonder at the endearing weirdness of life and all the vulnerable, furry little creatures immersed in it (especially us)."

The New Freedom Founders
26 minutes
2005

In this three channel video installation, Duke and Battersby explore basic philosophical issues such as time, language, revolution, and the paradigms of insanity.

Each of the three channels runs a different short narrative. The narratives deploy tropes from genres as diverse as science fiction, French New Wave Cinema, Hollywood Film and Television, and 70's conceptual video.

The work interrogates identification without abandoning it as a strategy, simultaneously engaging the viewer with the characters, and exposing the ridiculous nature of that engagement.

“With this project, we aim to clear a psycho-spiritual space for the viewer which was not cleared before. We want this space to contain empathy (identification) and joy. We want to achieve, in the making of the works, a sensation of ecstatic transformation, because it is our conviction that if such a sensation is present in the making of the works, that sensation will become available to the viewer.

In order to clear this new space, we must not default to familiar tropes. The work must seem mostly unfamiliar, even uncanny. It cannot, however, be so unfamiliar as to repel the viewer. Offering the viewer a place to sit between convention or cliché and confusion, boredom or repulsion is our project with The New Freedom Founders.

We know we are destined to mostly fail, but we believe that by simply representing our attempt, we will in some measure reach our goal.”

--Duke & Battersby.

Perfect Nature World
In collaboration with Shary Boyle.
3.5 minutes
2002

Perfect Nature World is a short single-channel animation. The genesis for the work was Emily Duke's song of the same name, which describes the feelings of longing and inadequacy we experience when faced with the exquisite indifference of the natural world. The song was beautifully illustrated on a twenty foot scroll of butter-coloured paper by Shary Boyle and then animated by Cooper Battersby.

Curious About Existence
11 minutes
2003

Curious about Existence is collection of short episodes incorporating music, animation, and live action. It employs a deft combination of humour and humanism to maintain the engagement of the viewer as s/he is drawn through a number of divergent narrative worlds. The thread that holds these worlds together is a persistent curiosity about the spiritual and material world and its inhabitants: humans, animals, the laws of nature, and so on.

Bad Ideas For Paradise
20 minutes
2001

Steve Reinke on Bad Ideas for Paradise: "There is no such thing as self-esteem. Self-esteem as a construct is illogical and contradictory, so its frequent deployment as the lynch-pin of New Age discourse seems to me satisfyingly appropriate. I don't trust anyone who doesn&139; have frequent bouts of self-loathing. There is something truly monstrous about the self-righteous. Eating a well-balanced diet is a horrible act of aggression. Whenever I hear the word "culture" I think of bacteria mutating under an ultraviolet light and I'm happy again for a while. Within the petri dish: unfettered egoless desire, the proliferation of new possibilities ideas made flesh, uncaring and finally airborne. Empathy is a tool for making the cruelty more precise. Beauty is independent of taste; the sublime only works for suckers. Whenever I laugh I feel guilty."
Bad Ideas for Paradise is a 20-minute episodic videotape. Funny, touching and ambitious in scope, Bad Ideas continues to deal with many of the themes addressed in Duke and Battersby's earlier works: addiction, spirituality, identity, relationship dynamics and the ongoing quest for joy.

The Fine Arts
3 minutes
2001

"I hate the fine arts. I hate and am disgusted by the fine arts, because, um, the fine arts are always made with artifice."
The Fine Arts is a short, funny, well-conceived video work about the perils of making images and narratives.

Being Fucked Up
10 minutes
2000

"This ordinary life is hopeless. I have no mission or strong conviction. It seems like everything I find beautiful is crying about this hopelessness, and about the irreducibility of being alone. I wish I was a pervert with something inside me that burned and could never be made manifest. My secrets are so boring. I don't believe in art or socialism. I am bitterly jealous of people who are good or successful. I think romantic passion is by nature fleeting. I lie to my mother. I hate myself..." So begins the Robot in Duke and Battersby's "Monologue for Robots", part of their ten minute episodic videotape Being Fucked Up. The work incorporates simple animation and live action sequences to create a portrait of the artist's lives as they struggle with addiction, gender identity and alienation. Ultimately hopeful, Being Fucked Up touches on central human themes through a use of narrative which is unconventional yet intelligible, spontaneous yet precise.

My Heart the Lumberjack
13 seconds
2000

Sickening and funny, My Heart the Lumberjack is a fifteen second excerpt from the American television program "Blind Date".

Rapt and Happy
17 minutes
1998

Rapt and Happy is a structurally innovative seventeen minute episodic narrative. It is made up of 16 short pieces, combining drawings, animation, performance and typographical experiments to create a work that is diaristic without being boring, melancholic without being depressing. As Cameron Bailey wrote in Now Magazine, “Rapt and Happy [makes] the everyday entrancing.”

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