My Country Tis of Thee is a work by Anthony Sylvester, built in his signature VHS collage style—layering analog footage shot across the United States, with a signature editing style crafted over the past two decades. The piece pulls from fragmented moments of American life, stitched together through a evolving, patchwork edit language, with subtle interventions of artificial intelligence, acting more like interference than authorship.

The video is less an observation of American society, than an attempt to hold it all together as it comes apart. It’s trying to make sense of systems that feel unstable—socially, environmentally, structurally—while acknowledging that fragmentation is already happening in real time. There’s a sense that the work itself is actively resisting collapse, even as it documents it.

The collage form becomes a kind of meta strategy: a way of assembling broken signals into something that still feels coherent. That structure—constantly repairing itself, constantly rebalancing—becomes symbolic of a deeper idea in the work. It reflects Anthony’s belief that even in moments of breakdown, there is an instinct toward reconstruction, toward continuity.

This is where the work holds its tension between pessimism and optimism. The reality it engages with includes ecological disturbance, climate instability, and cultural systems under strain—forces that are visibly reshaping both the American landscape and society. But within that, the act of assembling, layering, and preserving these fragments becomes its own form of optimism.

The optimism here is not abstract. It’s embedded in the method: in the decision to keep cutting, keep building, keep trying to make a whole out of what’s breaking. In that sense, the work suggests that something in human and civilizational life persists—not as certainty, but as effort.