Preceded by short: Diderot and the Last Luminare (Erika Suderburg, USA, 1992). A fanciful look at the 18th-century Encyclopedists and the mechanics of orderly knowledge. (32 mins, Color, 3/4" video, From artist) Is Classic Coke the real thing? Or is it Coke before Classic? Scott Rankin's intriguing essay The Pure scans the globe searching for authenticity amid the clutter of contamination. The central subject of this visually immaculate work is not purity but rather the reverence paid to the authentic, and most particularly to the culturally authentic. In a parody of a PBS "think piece," the narrator magically appears in sites throughout the world, binding locales together with a complex theory that draws on tourism, subjectivity, time measurement, set theory, post-colonial rectitude, and the fabrication of history. The propensity to celebrate pure examples of our own history, such as the simulated spectacle of Williamsburg, Virginia, ricochets off the lionizing of the primitive in which undefiled peoples such as the Yanomami escape the tainted failures of modernity. Irony abounds in this thought-provoking work, for The Pure suggests that the elevation of authenticity is simultaneously its demise. To dwell on purity is necessarily to corrupt it and that's the unadulterated truth.-Steve Seid