Compositing past and future, truth and fiction, “From a Spaceless Within” approaches the construction and dematerialization of the artist while asking where our intentions take root when we attempt to create anything at all.

The narrator of From a Spaceless Within establishes early on that he and the artist known simply as Miles were born two weeks apart, their lives taking similar shape before diverging at the onset of artistic coming-of-age—Miles becomes a widely-known, albeit divisive, figure in the art world; the narrator creates work as a small-time filmmaker. Nonetheless, or perhaps as a result, Miles agrees to have a film made about him to document work on his latest and upcoming installation project, a nod to psychologist Harry Harlow’s primate experiments in the late-1950s. After nine months of production, Miles backs out of the film. What remains is a series of unfinished ideas, half-clear assertions, fragmented interview transcriptions, and a slew of uncertainty about what it might mean to embrace a project forever in the making.  

In tandem with a portrait of the now-absent Miles, From a Spaceless Within utilizes archival materials to piece together the story of psychologist Harry Harlow, whose experiments on rhesus monkeys in the late-1950s were motivated by a desire to prove the existence of love through hard scientific methods. The mutual and at times dueling aspirations of Harlow, Miles, and the filmmaker intertwine as they reconcile with their own respective failures.