RACHEL’S BRAIN, a video collage of a solo to music commissioned by 1987’s Los Angeles Festival, explores the human brain and its place in Gaian evolution. Rosenthal derives witty and provocative visual metaphors and quotes from science in order to explore the disproportionately developed fascism of our most celebrated organ. Rosenthal plays several personae, among them Marie Antoinette, the “flower of the Enlightenment”, and a familiar hominid ancestor of ours. The piece ends on an existential note,Rosenthal searches for a non-existent deity whose absence remains obscured behind the clouds.
