A few years ago, I spent some days as an ethnographic researcher with an American artist, Pam Longobardi, on the Greek island of Kefalonia, where she had been working to clean up and create with the plastic debris on that Mediterranean shoreline. There was something about the modest size of these countless remnants that really touched me with a sense of poignancy: what were these silent witnesses to the obsessive accumulation of our time trying to tell us? I found a CD lying on some rocks beside the water, and when I brought it home and cleaned it off, it turned out to be playable still. It felt to me like these abandoned objects had somehow found a voice in this artifact, and I tried my hand at making a video called “Seaside Lament” that tries to convey this idea. Such moments may represent no more than small slivers of possibility, but might also give a kind of purchase on things that would otherwise seem to transpire on a scale impossible to grasp.