Orientation (2026) is a poetry film that uses collage animation to give form to obsessive memory and the uneven textures of trauma. Combining found images and texts, original writing, cyanotypes on muslin, and scanner-based moving image, Cody Tracy builds a fragmented but resonant visual language in which thought spirals, reflection, and self-address become the work’s structure. Tracy, an interdisciplinary media artist, writer, and scholar concerned with labor, mortality, memory, and working-class cultural history, brings those commitments into the piece without reducing it to statement. Instead, Orientation lets fragile materials, disability-informed making, and poetic narration shape a cinema of intimate disorientation, where the speaking cactus becomes a quietly powerful figure for survival and return. Tracy’s own description of the work as a poetic animation built through collage, scanning, and small-scale sound composition helps clarify how its handmade constraints become part of its expressive force.
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Digital America interviewed Cody Tracy in April of 2026.
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Cody Tracy is an interdisciplinary media artist, writer, and scholar whose work examines labor, mortality, memory, and the cultural archive of the working class. Raised in a multi-generational iron-worker and Yugoslavian immigrant family in west-central Illinois, Tracy’s practice emerges from both personal and collective histories of work, labor, and social precarity. Through these varied projects and professional experiences, Tracy’s work continually explores how interdisciplinary, essayistic practices can interrogate cultural memory, working-class life, and the circulation of images, text, and sound, creating an archive that foregrounds both inquiry and aesthetic experimentation.
