The moving images in this film are the result of over a year of collaboration between the visual artist Scott Kolbo and the amazing group of musicians who made up the contemporary chamber music quartet Torch (Brian Chin, Eric Likkel, Steve Schermer, and Ben Thomas). The participants talked about some of the big ideas contained the ancient idea of “The Five Elements,” and in the end decided to approach the theme through a series of short vignettes that utilize composed music, video footage, digital animation, and static drawings. This allowed them to play with the deeper concepts that lurk behind our traditional understandings of Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. They loosely interpreted these metaphors, placing them in contemporary situations and settings.

The visual artist Scott Kolbo often uses reoccurring “stock characters,” so these videos portray several figures that have appeared in his work over the years. The videos feature Jeremiah (a self-styled religious prophet) and Heavy Man (a sad-sack middle class man who battles an affliction that causes him to become spontaneously “heavy” when he is overwhelmed by the world around him). Kolbo also created several new characters to explore the universal themes. He invented a young woman who obsessively creates piles of folded origami, and a newborn baby who represents the joy and mystery of new life (and the continuity of humans throughout history). Kolbo attempted to link these four characters by picturing them in a state of sleep (a universal human experience). In these four promenades the characters slumber peacefully, snore, curse, and perhaps even enter into states of transcendence.

Some ancient philosophers wrote about an unknown fifth element… “Aether.” This was thought of as the unseen substance that fills in the spaces between what we are capable of perceiving with our senses. For “The Elements” the collaborators have attempted to distill this unknowable substance into an improvisational performance of composed music. Drawing the threads together from the themes in the previous pieces and resulting in something new and unexpected.