San San Trilogy and Nova Heat

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s San San Universe is partially based on a futurist theory put forth by Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Weiner in their book The Year 2000 (1967), which speculated that San Diego and San Francisco would merge into one giant metropolis by the turn of the twenty-first century. Although this prediction never came to pass, the theory is foundational to Freeman and Lowe’s creation: an adjacent world that parallels modern-day reality and illuminates our society’s relationships to technology, music, drugs, subcultures, and politics. Film is an essential element in Freeman and Lowe’s work, allowing for a discursive elaboration on the narratives and ideas embedded in their immersive installations.

San San Trilogy (2014–16) consists of three autonomous chapters (The Floating Chain, Scenario in the Shade, and Mercury City) created alongside previous San San installations. The trilogy takes the form of a spliced, faux-ethnographic film illustrated through a series of objects and environments that are devoid of the human body. A kind of cinematic still life, the artists describe the aesthetic of the films as “inspired by the surrealistic banality of a breakfast cereal commercial.” Nova Heat (2022–24) is directly correlated with the Modern’s special exhibition, Sunset Corridor. Reminiscent of a planetarium-style nature film, Nova Heat uses a collage format to weave the web of cultural, political, scientific, and technological events that have led to this particular moment in the San San Universe.