“Softheaded” would be more like it. There isn’t much real science on this program of short videos, thought there’s lots of facile, self-conscious irony and cuteness. Peter Brinson’s It Did It (2000), a depressingly self-indulgent video about his own depression, morphs from a “hypothesis” that’s too vague to be testable into a paean to Zoloft. The fictional human cloning experiments in Rachel Mayeri’s Stories From the Genome (2003)—one “colony” is raised with “education but not love”—are unilluminating, but I liked the jagged lines in Sean Dockray’s Ameising 1 (2003), which he made by tracing the paths of ants. The best piece, Jim Trainor’s animated The Bats (1998), loses much of its creepiness by being shown on video. 65 min.
