2022 Program
Light Matter is Co-Programmed by James Hansen & Eric Souther
Program One: Liquid Traits
Friday Nov. 4th, 5:30PM
Liquid Traits of an Image Apparatus
Vera Sebert, Germany, 2019, 7 minutes
US Premiere
On the screen’s digital surface abstract machine codes appear as sensual images, readable by humans. Visualised machine instructions make up their own semantics and are base for human instructions. On a cinema screen these images are detached from their initial meaning.They condense on the picture base and swash into our eyes. Like a random rhizome structure an associative montage of minimalistic user interfaces follows the film’s timeline. Our own body perception and our interpretation formed by media conditions become protagonists in a film without narrative.
Moire / Écume
Maxime Hot, France, 2022, 8 minutes
North American Premiere
Moire refers to the fabric obtained by the mechanical process invented by the Lyon manufacturer Tignat in 1843. This process consists of partially crushing the fabric by calendering by folding the fabric back on itself.
The frame then deviates, and, losing its initial shape, offers new reflective surfaces to the light, alternating undulations and matte and shiny stripes. It also designates by extension the visual effect (moiré) similar to that caused by this textile
(changing shine, wavy and shimmering appearance).
Foam:
1. Whitish foam that forms on the surface of stirred, heated or fermenting liquids.
2. Impurities, slags which float on the surface of molten metals.
How to microwave a cauliflower (in three easy steps)
Patrick Tarrant, Australia, 2021, 2 minutes
World Premiere
You first need to film the cauliflower three times, with a red, green and blue filter in turn. After 30 seconds make sure to pull focus on two of these takes, but not the third (choose your colours to taste). Shooting should be done through a spinning aperture for no more than 90 seconds. Combine in a computer.
Black Palms
Justin Clifford Rhody, USA, 2022, 2 minutes
New York Premiere
A moving image that moves through a still photograph. Created by photocopying details of an enlarged 35mm photograph directly onto clear 35mm film leader.
Color Noises
Mati Pirsztuk, Argentina, 2021, 1 minute
North American Premiere
The glitches are flowing continuously into the digital landscape, without ceasing; like an eternal sea of colour waves into our eyes, while the sound surrounds the images by covering them into the chasm of noise.
Color Noises is the result of experiments with physical analog video devices such as video cassette recorder player and videocameras mixed together, with an classic cathode-ray tube television as an output.
Capitalist Roaders
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2016, 18 minutes
Capitalist Roaders has music by 2 icons of L.A. experimental music: David Rosenboom-- an excerpt from his epic composition In The Beginning (1978-81) and Tom Recchion with 2 tracks off of is 2006 Sweetly Doing Nothing-- Oozings and Ho Ho Ho 66. Capitalist Roaders is the second film completed of my feature length series: Circumstantial Pleasures (2012-19)
LUMINFEROUS AETHER
Stephanie Castonguay, Canada, 2020, 6 minutes
US Premiere
LUMINIFEROUS AETHER is an audiovisual composition which explores the transformation of visible frequencies into audible signals through the phenomenon of transduction. The sound piece is mainly composed of light pulses transmitted from a cathode ray monitor of which the characteristics of sound matter are transformed by modulating parameters of the screen. The visual was generated by means of a modified scanner allowing the continuous capture of reflective objects, as well as the use of video feedback loop effects and light diffraction effects from an 8mm projector.
Tenjinsan Textiles
Michael Lyons & Haruka Mitani, Japan, 2021, 4 minutes
New York Premiere
This is a stop motion animation of antique kimono textiles from the Nishijin district in Kyoto. It was filmed on super 8 in Kyoto by Michael Lyons and Haruka Mitani. The soundtrack was created by Michael Lyons and Palle Dahlstedt using the Octopus analogue audio-visual interface. The synthesizer follows visual input from the film, so that the textile motifs may act as a visual score for the sounds. The film is the outcome of our desire to listen to the kimono patterns.
Thread
Abigail Smith, USA, 2022, 2 minutes
New York Premiere
Threaded film
Ruined Arbor (Mohsen Namjoo)
Kasra Yazdani & Golrokh Hemmati, Iran, 2022, 2 minutes
North American Premiere
Music is based on an old Iranian poem about a carpet weaver girl weaving a carpet under a ruined roof. Images have been photographed from different carpets of Iranian ethnicities.
M*U*S*H
Jodie Mack, USA, 2022, 8 minutes
Vital grief finds interplanetary putrescence.
Of Wood
Owen Klatte, USA, 2022, 7 minutes
Of Wood is a unique experimental stop motion film created by progressively carving images in a large round of wood, enhanced with wooden objects coming out of the wood. It examines the role of wood in daily life through the ages and comments on the impact of consumerism on our lives.
ROTOЯ / Sonic Body
NO1, Austria, 2020, 13 minutes
New York Premiere
ROTOЯ / Sonic Body is the multimedia work by artist collective NO1 (Peter Kutin, Patrik Lechner, Mathias Lenz). At the center of the video is the eponymous sculpture—the rotor, a sonic body as loudspeaker arrangement that revolves around its own axis at different, changing speeds. Resounding from the loudspeakers is a minimalist composition, whose sounds are modulated by the speed of the rotation.
Program Two: Larry Gottheim (Screening & Conversation)
Friday Nov. 4th, 7:30 PM
Light Matter is proud to welcome legendary avant-garde filmmaker Lary Gottheim to the festival for the World Premiere of his new film Entanglement. Following the screening, Gottheim will be in conversation
with Light Matter co-founder and co-programmer James Hansen to discuss his new work, his career,
and to take questions from the audience.
Special thanks to the Dean's Office of NYSCC School of Art & Design at Alfred University, the Divisions of Expanded Media and Art History, and the Institute for Electronic Arts for their support.
Natural Selection
Larry Gottheim, USA, 1984, 35 minutes
Radiating from the Darwinian text-fragments outward through the material is much pictorial and spoken signifying text having to do with issues such as communication, translation, dynamics of perception, art, science, isolation and social interaction etc. In a certain sense a meaning does arise from all of this. At the same time the endless groupings and regroupings of material suggest yet another realm of meaning. Finally it is the experience of our own selection of a pattern among the myriad richness of combining materials, superimposed on my own composed pattern, that opens up the real film. LG
Knot/Not
Larry Gottheim, USA, 2019, 22 minutes
Material from a documentary about conductor Wilhelm Fürtwangler, material from a graffiti stencil work on a brick wall near where I live, a stencil of a girl writing something on the wall, what she wrote crossed out by another act of graffiti. These are the main elements. Also footage looking down at the water of Pearl Harbor with the ruins of battleship Arizona beneath. It had turned red with age. And some footage from Manchester the morning after the terrorists struck. All composed against a sound piece, a multiplication table repeated in four languages. Everything superimposed. It's not just about what it's about, but also memory, negatives that try to get negated. About music and painting. Politics, longing and regret. Superimposition is the primary device. The doubling and tripling suggest many implications.
Entanglement
Larry Gottheim, USA, 2022, 27 minutes
World Premiere
An exhilarating cinematic train ride at the speed of sound through a quantum landscape. Music. The dance of death.
Do you remember?
Program Three: Larry Gottheim (Screening & Lecture)
Saturday Nov. 5th, 1:00 PM
Light Matter is proud to welcome legendary avant-garde filmmaker Lary Gottheim for a retrospective screening of Harmonica and Four Shadows followed by a lecture on Four Shadows delivered by Gottheim.
Special thanks to the Dean's Office of NYSCC School of Art & Design at Alfred University, the Divisions of Expanded Media and Art History, and the Institute for Electronic Arts for their support.
Harmonica
Larry Gottheim, USA, 1971, 11 minutes
With Shelley Berde.
O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm is all thought, and joyance everywhere -
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill'd;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
is Music slumbering on her instrument.
And what if all animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of Each, and Good of all?
- S.T. Coleridge, The Eolian Harp
"This concludes the series of continuous shot films, but now with sound. The sound is produced by the car and the people inside it. The car window is both a screen and a plane that separates the inner world from the outside. Shelley, the performer, generates the primary sound when he breaks through that plane. The film is popular because of the vibrant energy of the performer, the music, and the autumn landscape, but it is also complex. As with the previous films, I myself am passive. The driver and the car and Shelley are the creative forces. He is the first of many avatars, doubles of me, that appear in many of my films and that became one thread of my later attraction to ceremonial possession." - Larry Gottheim
Four Shadows (Elective Affinities, Part III)
Larry Gottheim, USA, 1978, 64 minutes
Like constellations wheeling round, a double chain of four image segments and four sound segments wheel past each other in 16 combinations - a family of Gibbon apes, a landscape measured, a shadowed diagram after Cezanne, a wintry urban scene, a text by Wordsworth, a climactic scene from Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande .... The stately ceremony can generate rich sensuous cinematic pleasure as well as a free-flowing stream of associations. Containment and flowing free - these are some of the issues. The third film in the Elective Affinities cycle.
Exhibition: Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978; Berlin Film Festival.
"Four four-minute image sections and four four-minute sound sections are linked in all combinations of the sound sections with each of the image sections. This established affinities between each of the image sections to the others, and the sound sections to each other. The image sections are: surveyors measuring the land near my house as seen through an old window, a family of Siamang Gibbon apes in the Washington zoo, an industrial site, and a page turned from a book on Cézanne's composition showing a diagram of his painting Mardi Gras, filmed against bright leaves. The sound sections are: a dramatic scene from Debussy's opera 'Pelléas et Mélisande', a passage from William Wordworth's autobiographical poem "The Prelude," sounds from rowing on a lake at night, and the sounds of the apes vocalizing.
Some of these were thought about or created before the idea of the film came about, and some were expressly added. The final material was the Cézanne images This section might present the most difficulty for the viewer, but actually allows for the deepest penetration into the heart of the film. The diagram is an analog of the film as is the zoo cage and an industrial building with it four rows of four windows.
Since each element is repeated four times, there is constant recontextualizing of the material. The viewer can 'play' elements of material from other sections that have affinities with what is on the screen and sound track at a given moment. Everything is deeply reverberant with issues that are connected with my life and work but also can open associations that are unique to each viewer. The theme of "nature" that is present in my earlier work is here, too, but now made more complex. Other issues relate to music, language, painting, the relation of humans to animals and the earth.
The Wordsworth passage is read each time by four different readers for whom English is not the native language. Each is a kind of portrait of the reader. They include Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka, Klaus Wyborny, Heinz Emigholz, Taka Iimura." (Larry Gottheim)
Larry Gottheim Lecture on FOUR SHADOWS
Program Four: Within the Fold
Saturday Nov. 5th, 3:30 PM
The Day Lives Briefly Unscented
Brandon Wilson, USA, 2021, 5 minutes
A rumination on ancestry, transformation and loss. Elemental forces and the universal web of interconnection. Dedicated to the memory of the filmmaker's grandmother Marilyn.
Incantation
Kalpana Subramanian, USA, 2022, 8 minutes
A serendipitous encounter on distant shores
Colliding archives of body and place
Ominous scenes of a homeland's militaristic pride
An incantation to freedom and belonging.
Calm Remains
Chap Edmonson, USA, 2022, 3 minutes
New York Premiere
Calm Remains is an experimental film designed to be viewed on a loop that seeks to evoke the emotion of the black experience in America. With the use of diptychs and sound design, the film explores a duality of consciousness.
Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look
Carlos Velandia, Colombia, 2022, 7 minutes
US Premiere
Faces, bodies and actions are juxtaposed endlessly. Fragmented pieces of the woman come together and form the volume of what has been her image in the history of cinema; one marked by the routinary domination and exploitation of her body. A short film homage to Laura Mulvey and her contributions to feminist film theory.
Archivos Lumínicos y Otras Sensibilidades
Nuria González Pimentel, Mexico, 2022, 7 minutes
US Premiere
Reverberations of fear and desire stemming from the drive to mirror the gaze and assert oneself as an image. My trans body beholds the possibility of collapsing into an inarticulable flux of home movies. This self-portrait summons familiar ghosts dwelling the wound of an image.
Time Crystals
Abinadi Meza, USA, 2021, 6 minutes
Time Crystals is an experimental short film about images, memory, and time, as told by a not-quite-human narrator.
This synthetic narrator is remembering time through images, though it's not clear if the memories are real, if they are fantasies, or something in-between. The narrator describes finding patterns in time, which "she" calls time crystals. We do not know if this enigmatic film is a record, a signal, or a dream.
Eidetic Imagination
Sounak Das, Bangladesh, 2022, 4 minutes
US Premiere
If imagination is a trans-like state for the feeling of existing, wider than words and larger than pictures, is reality an illusion? The short doc-fiction explores the feeling of being lost in time. The memoirs of affection and trauma dwelling to get out from a prison. The prison is comprised of the loss of my father at an early age, my disconnected family, and the longing for my partner. Considering self, memory and time as three different entities, the conversation of these three analogues becomes my truth.
Against Time
Ben Russell, France, 2022, 23 minutes
A structuralist diary, in blue and red.
Un-Tidal
Masha Vaslova, USA, 2022, 10 minutes
New York Theatrical Premiere
An experimental film essay about a found (stolen?) photograph, a hurricane, and film’s inherent ability to animate and re-animate still, dead, and inanimate beings, images, and objects. The film is created using an ink-jet direct-on-film technique where the digital frame is printed directly onto onto recycled 16mm celluloid.
Potemkin Piece
Justin Clifford Rhody, USA, 2022, 2 minutes
New York Premiere
A collaborative deconstruction/destruction of a Battleship Potemkin 35mm trailer created through the mail during lockdown with nearly 100 participants. Each person was sent half-second long strips of the film to manipulate as they saw fit. Once returned, they were spliced together in a new sequence creating a chance-driven score from the optical soundtrack. A messy and exciting experiment in montage and cut up techniques made by a diverse cast including found footage maestro Craig Baldwin and my high school girlfriend.
A Random Walk Through the Latent Space
David Witzling, USA, 2021, 6 minutes
Two artificial intelligences compete to mingle fact with its statistical representation. Thinking machines will eat your future. In the end, all is well in the Disneyverse.
Program Five: Potential Spaces
Saturday Nov. 5th, 5:30 PM
object permanence
Alix Blevins, USA, 2022, 1 minute
New York Premiere
Objects disappear.
The Perfect Room
Leonardo Pirondi, Brazil, 2022, 2 minutes
US Premiere
The rendering of an impeccably constructed computer-generated image displays a disarranged home. Filmed on 16mm and hand-processed, the image is formed through a process that allows imperfections such as hair, dust, and dirt.
Community Room
Amanda Katz, USA, 2018, 4 minutes
On my daily commute, I'm drawn to this underutilized space, tacked-on to a newly constructed condominium. Filmed on the first day of Spring. 210 North 12th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The Black Tower
Mandy Eugeniou, UK, 2019, 17 minutes
US Premiere
The Black Tower is an experimental film using crowd-sourced, aftermath photography of Grenfell Tower, in the wake of the catastrophe that befell Londoners in 2017. As a homage to John Smith’s 1987 masterpiece of the same name, we enter the world of a notional character who is preoccupied with a black tower that seems to follow them around eventually driving them to oblivion. Crucial that all aftermath images for the film were crowdsourced from the general public who had documented the aftermath, here we consider how a networked connectivity can link individual consciousness to cultural memory. This re-enactment creates an aesthetic space to join the conversation between event & representation, myth & reality and the role of viewer-witness in our digital culture. Given how voyeurism underlies an engagement with spectacles of violence, the film explores how “Art After Grenfell” is even possible by putting the traumatic image under scrutiny to perform a critique of seeing. We watched the Tower transform overnight from presence to absence - and then again ad nauseam through the prism of mainstream media. On that day, event and representation experienced a temporal collapse. An architectural and visual anomaly, the ‘monument’ became a politically and historically resonant site of trauma. As the real appears and disappears through the power of images, its monumentality hides in plain sight. The project explores (counter) memory and attempts to inspire an ethical presence with the wider complexities of this unconscionable trauma.
This (award-winning) research project has a dedicated website and is accompanied by a Word Piece.
http://www.theblacktower.co.uk
A Meditation on Nature in the Absence of an Eclipse
Crystal Z Campbell, USA, 2021, 8 minutes
Running like water, an eclipse streams glimpses of irreversible consequence.
Timekeepers of the Anthropocene: Tolchikaualistli
Federico Cuatlacuatl, Mexico, 2022, 9 minutes
New York Premiere
Tolchikaualistli: to exist simultaneously in two places and dimensions of time is an immigrant’s ability to embody a transobder life, navigating the past, present, and future at once. To (be)long is to reclaim territory, in this case it is a transcendence of time and space as a means to reclaim a new dimension of territory or place that must exist in between two worlds, between the past and the future, between two identities, between ones many selves. Smuggling traditions are acts of resiliency, self-preservation, resistance, and self-rematriation in a dimension of transborder indigeneity and one’s many selves: to be an alien; to be the other; to be the threat; to be the dream; to be the backbone; to be the invasion; to be a cultural nomad; to be (in)visible; to be 500 years of historical weight; to be a ‘pinche indio’ ; to be hope...
Ejemplo #35
Lucía Malandro & Daniel Saucedo, Uruguay / Cuba, 2022, 6 minutes
North American Premiere
This unusual documentary pixilation is based on images discovered in Cuban court archives. In the past, the Communist regime’s prying security forces surveilled not only the enemies of the regime, but also the activities of nonconformists, misfits and dissidents.
“The images stored in Cuba’s judicial archives contain the island’s most jealously guarded secret: an alternative history in which the nonconformists, the misfits and the dissidents are also part of it.”
a.o.k.
Christopher Tym, UK, 2022, 14 minutes
North American Premiere
a.o.k is a hybrid video documentary about the experience of making pop videos and pop music. Using only behind the scenes and B-roll footage altered with animations, it is a painting of the emotional experience behind and in front of the camera. It is as much about the content as it is about the making of it.
The project revolves around a series of music videos created to original tracks but the end results are neither seen nor heard; what remains visible, however, are the sensations of the contributors during the production.
It is a journey that cramps with discomfort at the beginning but opens up, softens and releases into something tender and compassionate. The result is relentless and unforgiving but it is an ode to the loving images we create of ourselves.
Puncture
Carleen Maur, USA, 2022, 4 minutes
New York Premiere
Through the limits of language breaking visually and sonically over a burning forest, Puncture seeks to pierce through the affect and potential of its own particular moment in time.
The Endless Journey
Priscyla Bettim & Renato Coelho, Brazil, 2021, 10 minutes
North American Premiere
Atlantic Ocean, Year 1500. During the voyage of the ships commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral, strange events cause the crew to get lost in space and time without ever reaching Brazil. The Endless Journey is a reassemblage of the classic "O descobrimento do Brasil" (1937), directed by Humberto Mauro.
Pet World
Sofia Theodore-Pierce & Grace Mitchell, USA, 2022, 14 minutes
New York Premiere
A parking lot by the airport where people sit in their cars, eat takeout, and watch the planes land. A parking lot outside a mega pet store. A parking lot with a mailbox and a laundromat. A parking lot on the beach. Inspired by Amy Hempel’s short story collection, Reasons to Live, and the work of poet Bernadette Mayer. An ensemble cast riffs on what we might discover about intimacy in parking lots.
Program Six: Tilted Perception
Saturday Nov. 5th, 7:30 PM
WARNING: Many selections in this program feature flicker effects and perceptually challenging images. Those with photosensitivities may want to consider earlier programs.
Black Hole Space Debt, or A Basic Guide to Syncing Sound and Image
Stephen Wardell, USA, 2022, 14 minutes
US Premiere
This is a 16mm film about making a handmade optical soundtrack and syncing it to the image track. It is also a playful experimental narrative about space exploration. As the film progresses, the nature of the soundtrack comes to speak for the way space exploration is part of a larger, systemic repetition of colonialism.
This film is purposefully queer, handmade, and anti-illusionist as a means of deconstructing established narrative film conventions and audience expectations - ultimately working toward a musical, process-based state of play.
Camera Test
Siegfried Fruhauf, Austria, 2022, 4 minutes
North American Premiere
The green leader of the 16mm film is still running, yet the rattling sound is already committed to forward movement. And indeed, it moves forward, but also back again, past hills, fir trees, and apple trees—and at some point, the gaze zooms into the seemingly passing landscape; but will also be forward again.
By stringing together recordings created in the context of a camera test, Siegfried A. Fruhauf constructs a cinematic “journey,” whereby each of the landscape images are separated by several monochrome frames of green leader.
This generates a simultaneously connecting and disturbing stroboscope effect, which generates post-images and allows the landscape to appear continuous despite obvious breaks; at the same time, the interim garish green “flash” offers glaring evidence that here we are dealing with a cinematically constructed journey rather than a “natural” one.
Like the soundtrack, which is based on a staccato-style playback of ocean sounds split onto the stereo channels rather than a linear sound recording, the images are the cinematic synthesis of several camera pans across one and the same landscape, and not the result of a journey from A to B.
Fruhauf works with the fine differences that the runoff patterns of pan and tracking shots leave behind on the retina, and he knows the breaking point at which something is still just barely perceptible: starting with the precise application of four frames per shot (less than that, the human eye would not be capable of recognizing the electrical lines or garden fence) through to rhythmizing the images, so that a “journey” through local stomping grounds becomes a storm of the components scattering in all directions.
Although the whistling of the birds still suggests linearity, Fruhauf increasingly dissolves the succession of images: the landscape falls apart, not only passing by horizontally, but also vertically, swaying back and forth, and in part running diagonally out past the screen.
In times of climate change, a commanding cinematic destruction of an apparently intact (cultural) landscape is an impressive symbolic image of the crisis: towards the end, even a fir tree seems to be shaking its head and countering the viewer with a vehement “no, no, no,” before falling headfirst out of the image as we completely lose our orientation in a stroboscope storm. (Christa Benzer)
Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt
Chyme
Brandon Wilson, USA, 2022, 14 minutes
World Premiere
A convulsing stream of psychic indigestion.
*FLASHING IMAGES*
Cactus Raptus
Maxime Hot, France, 2018, 7 minutes
Raptus (delight in Latin) is a strong disturbance of consciousness provoking a sudden impulse urging the subject to act violently in a reflex way.
The cactus is a spiny plant whose certain species contain psychoactive substances.
Cactus Raptus combines these two elements.
Cactus is used as a plastic and dynamic pattern.
It’s growing up on the screen.
It progressively disturbs the space around us.
It’s entering our bodies up to the brain. The crisis is coming.
We’re about to feel the compulsive energy of raptus.
The following images never happened
Noé Grenier, France, 2022, 7 minutes
North American Premiere
The following images never happened is a found-footage film made from the 35mm trailer of the American action film TWISTER (Jan de Bont, 1996) and based on a phenomenon of collective hallucination.
A strange incident occurred on May 22, 1996 at the Can-View Drive-in in southern Canada. The disaster movie Twister was scheduled to be shown as the weather conditions became threatening. Shortly after, a real twister destroyed the screens. The showing was canceled, but some spectators have built up the memory of having attended the movie, in the middle of a storm.
This film was supported by the Atelier 105 Light Cone, DRAC Hauts-de-France and la Malterie (Lille)
vs
Lydia Nsiah, Austria, 2022, 8 minutes
"vs" (or "virtual spiral") deals with the dynamics between time and body in film. On digital video and non-reliable 16mm-film the processual of time and (film) body is visually transformed by spiraling camera movements. Here, contrary movements, distance and proximity or depth and surface enter into a dialogue with each other. The spiral runs like a thread through the film "vs". For creating the spiraling effect the artist Lydia Nsiah invented a camera tracking machine and shot in-studio, operating the movements of the camera live while recording. On screen we see Found Footage of data centers/ recordings of the physical bodies of our omnipresent data cloud. Artist Hui Ye composed the film’s immersive sound space interacting with the hypnotic and spiraling data body images.
A Vessel, The Ideas Pass Through
Linnea Nugent, USA, 2021, 6 minutes
Secrets of experiencing and the wandering of mind from an initial landing place through haptic view of the lens.
GRID
Alexandre Alagôa, Portugal, 2021, 14 minutes
A post apocalyptic state, still full of angst and sorrow. We follow the frustrated hammer of the future, long after Brecht thought that he had nailed it. Searching always searching, feeling deep yearning from the bowls of what used to be biology. Does he get it in the end?
Program Seven: Fugitive Detectives
Sunday Nov. 6th, 1:00 PM
Breath
Lilian Robl, Germany, 2022, 4 minutes
North American Premiere
A YouTube video, which is supposed to help the viewer against panic attacks and anxiety by focusing on his or her own breathing rhythm, served as the source material, which was graphically altered, filled with words and this way interpreted as a fleeting diagram of breath.
Exhibition
Mary Helena Clark, USA, 2022, 19 minutes
Pivoting between two stories of women and their relationships with objects—a Swedish woman’s marriage to the Berlin Wall, and a suffragette’s hatcheting of Velásquez’s The Toilet of Venus—Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition is a maze-like tour through images and artifacts, a dense cryptography of the forms and objects that hold us in.
Origami
Maxime Corbeil-Perron, Canada, 2 minutes
New York Premiere
Origami plays with perspectives and dimensions. Fractals and luminous geometry are here liquefied by the cathode ray tube of a hacked television set.
a landscape to be invented
Josh Weissbach, USA, 2020, 12 minutes
New York Premiere
Other than the ocean, the rest of the planet was bathed in purple, which was due to the color of the vegetation. The change in the sun's radiation had probably caused the plants to evolve as they adapted to the new light.
Gilgamesh
Lucrecia L. Henrique, Brazil, 2022, 3 minutes
North American Premiere
In a near future, the artificial satellite Gilgamesh search the remains of man-made imagery in search of remembering something that has been forgotten.
Notes from the Periphery
Tulapop Saenjaroen, UK/Thailand, 2021, 14 minutes
Mainly shot in the peripheral areas of the ever-expanding Laem Chabang port in Chon Buri, Thailand, Notes from the Periphery interrogates the notion of territoriality, globalized networks, and ownership through fragmented relations of the affected sites and communities nearby, shipping containers that become a policing tool, and the life cycle of a barnacle.
Fragments untitled #6
DOPLGENGR, Serbia, 2022, 6 minutes
North American Premiere
The two best football teams of Yugoslavia met at the Maksimir Stadium in Zagreb on May 13, 1990. The match was never played.
Fragments untitled #6 vivisects media footage of the event. The film is part of Fragments untitled ongoing serial of works through which Doplgenger researches the politics of media images that participated in creating the historical narratives of Yugoslavia in the period of 1980-2000., especially media images that performed the pretext to the Yugoslav Wars and the breakup of Yugoslavia. Fragments untitled is based on the private archives of citizens who recorded the TV schemes in the 90s. At the same time these are the images that refer to contemporaneity.
Devil's Peak
Simon Liu, Hong Kong / USA, 2022, 30 minutes
Devil’s Peak reflects on recent unprecedented shifts in the socio-cultural fabric of the artist’s homeland of Hong Kong and a nagging anxiety that hangs over daily life in the former British Colony. Highly condensed glimpses of cityscapes and everyday life form a collage of overlapping poetic narratives and coded references. The film cycles through ominous sites of social tension, lush urban spectacle, relics of imperialist legacies, and places of personal significance—such as the artist’s 500-year-old ancestral village—at a rapid, frenetic pace. By interrogating highly subjective experiences in the context of a seemingly insurmountable change in the political and cultural fabric of his native city, Liu creates a site of remembrance for a time and place that may never be as it was.
Program 8: The Plains
Sunday Nov. 6th, 3 PM
The Plains
David Easteal, Australia, 2022, 180 minutes
Every evening a man in his late 50s commutes home at the end of the working day in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. As the seasons pass in gentle rhythm we observe dramatic events of his life as well as mundane quotidian details, and learn more about the man, his inner conflicts and the relationships in his life – with his wife, his mother, deceased sister, and a younger co-worker whom he occasionally drives home. Within the microcosm of the car the film ultimately becomes a meditation on the passage of time, memory, work, and how love and the relationships in our life sustain us.
"The humdrum becomes slowly and cumulatively fascinating across the three hours of Australian David Easteal’s quietly radical feature-length debut The Plains.”
Neil Young, Screen Daily
"… an acute portrait of modern life—one in which otherwise unarticulated beliefs, regrets, and anxieties bring to light a shared humanity too often lost in the commotion of the world.”
-Jordan Cronk, Film Comment
TSI / Harland Snodgrass Gallery Oct. 31 - Nov. 7 &
The Immersive Gallery Nov. 4 - 6
Arc (Wax and Wane)
Karen Donnellan, Ireland, 2017, 4 minutes
Unedited footage of clear molten glass bubbling concentrically in reference to cosmic and terrestrial cycles of expansion and contraction. The two channels feature the same video, with one in reverse.
Baiser (Kiss)
Mark Reynolds, USA, 2020, 1 minute
Love is a squishy, slightly sticky thing.
Cathode Ray Gunpoint
Jen Kutler, USA, 2022, 16 minutes
World Premiere, work will be on view in the Immersive Gallery.
Cathode Ray Gun Point is an audio-visual performance piece in which Kutler relates stories by the light of a single match while wearing a lie detection circuit. The data from the lie detection circuit manipulates the audio and visual environment. Stories exploring links between personal fears, values, truths and conspiracy are told and accompanied by audio generated from the lie detector's signals which return to the air via speakers to manipulate the match's flame in a feedback loop. Video of Kutler's confession is manipulated by a "wobbulator" based on Nam Jun Paik's original Raster Manipulation Unit but with individual channels for red, green and blue. Handmade from a vintage cathode ray tube projector and hand wound coils, the "wobbulator" is controlled by the lie detector's signals. At the same time, notions of memory, honesty and the evolution of belief manipulate the moving image.
Confessions on a Transmission Line
Monica Duncan & Senem Pirler, USA, 2022, 6 minutes
US Premiere
In Confessions on a Transmission Line, we wanted to explore the audiovisual process of feedback as a spiritual practice in relation to Camp and queer potentiality. Using real-time signal processing tools and improvisational strategies, we set up a performance space where our persona interacts with a discarded megaphone. By re-using this object as a tool and instrument to both project and receive transmission frequencies, we are searching for a way to communicate with our queer ancestors and those yet to be born.
corps minéral
Charline Dally & Gabrielle Harnois-Blouin, Canada, 2021, 5 minutes
New York Premiere
Inspired by geology, science fiction, and documentary archives, corps minéral integrates a narrative co-written by Gabrielle HB and Charline Dally (le désert mauve). The film connects the spaces of our lives and of our sensible experiences with geological phenomena of immeasurable temporality. The layers of memory, whether they are contained in the rock or in our cells, are part of a cycle from sedimentation to disintegration. The work invites us to apprehend these processes with attention and empathy in order to consider their slowness as a means to heal even the deepest fractures.
Currency
Crystal Z Campbell, USA, 2019, 3 minutes
Currency is a performance film of refusal: a woman wears bygone forms of currency on the tips of her hair while preserving the greatest currency for herself.
Deep Sophia
Yvette Granata, USA, 2022, 10 minutes
New York Premiere
Deep Sophia is an interactive video installation that explores the intersection of artificial intelligence, 'deep fakes', and emotion capture. Utilizing facial recognition technology, the Sophia Robot is mapped onto the faces of women from historical films as an experimental film essay- rather than a traditional ‘close-up,’ Deep Sophia amplifies the way that machine learning produces a deeply strange form of human-robot expression. The actor is better at facial expression than the robot, while the robot effortlessly wraps itself like a garment around the actor. The human becomes the machinery for the robot’s artificial emotion, just as a snake takes on the shape of its prey as it swallows it, morphing as it digests.
The audience is included in real-time: the viewer’s face is incorporated into the film installation through a webcam and is surrounded by a mash-up of videos of Sophia Robot ‘close-ups’. As the visitor looks from left to right at the screen, they watch their own face further warp the faces on screen.
eth_OS
Victor Galles, Brazil, 2021, 9 minutes
North American Premiere
Feel in your eyes, cathode rays, blood streams and RAM memory, an exciting world of knowledge and possibilities offered by the eth_OS system. What you idealize is within the reach of the machine, even (self) destruction.
How to Clean Your Closet
Wrik Mead, Canada, 2020, 4 minutes
North American Premiere
Bucking the trend, How to Clean Your Closet celebrates the sexy dirtiness of the queer closet. Glitched clips from adult films combined with instructions about closet cleanliness brings delightful irony and sensual pleasure to this hidden space.
Obscene and Uncontained
KT Duffy, USA, 2022, 2 minutes
World Premiere
VR experience for headset and browser.
Duffy conjures entities into existence via code-based processes and digital fabrication. As a Neurodivergent-NonBinary person, the normative modalities of learning and making were not designed for them. To move through these structures, they made their own systems, glitching and patching and breaking the entanglements of binary logic; manifesting into infinite possibility, translating the immeasurable interconnection of transcendent sentience, and examining the impending demise of binary systems.
In addition to their own creative practices, Duffy is a member of a number of many ongoing collaborative endeavors such as Langer Over Dickie Projects, CQDELab, and Mx. Studio.
privacy-GrDN.info
S4RA, Portugal, 2022, 8 minutes
New York Premiere
By placing automation within this simulated i̶d̶l̶e̶ garden it arises the complexity of what being human is in this electronic age. Learning, leisure and work share the same interchangeable framework in this post-truth dynamic where operations are engineered in an ambiguous way to praise & glorify the strenuous path of c̶o̶n̶t̶e̶m̶p̶o̶r̶a̶r̶y̶ labour system.
{ hybrid emulation that deals with coding as the backbone structure of a semiotic < container > / . }
PSYCHIC SYMBIOSIS
VLM, USA, 2022, 3 minutes
New York Premiere
PSYCHIC SYMBIOSIS is a serene, lens-based, dance film created between the artist, a Luna moth, and a pile of dust. The film investigates atomic consciousness through a panpsychic lens. Inspired by ancient mythology, contemporary dance, and post-humanist theory, the film's sources include classical "Myth of Psyche", Yvonne Rainer's 1966 "Hand Movie", and Dr. Donna Harraway's 1988 "Situated Knowledges." In PSYCHIC SYMBIOSIS, all three material protagonists are filmed sculpturally in a decentralized and multi-perspectival gaze that is complete macro with close-ups, diverse camera angles, and rhythmic jump-cuts. Encapsulating these choreographies is a multi-layered elemental soundscape of low humming thunderstorms, playful water droplets, and tinkling temple bells. Collectively, VLM's lush atmospheric sounds and uncanny visual motifs create the dreamscape of PSYCHIC SYMBIOSIS—a soothing and surreal space where consciousness flows intuitively between bodies of gesture, texture, and sound. PSYCHIC SYMBIOSIS was filmed, edited, performed-by, and sound-scored by the artist VLM.
Quotidiano
Rosita Piritore, Italy, 2020, 6 minutes
New York Premiere
Quotidiano tries to give centrality to a background that usually acts as a contour. The sonority, in this sense, is so soft as to allow the listener to annex his own everyday life or thinking. In the composition process, there was almost a reversal: it's as if I had started from the performance (moreover, from my ideal performance) taking care of what I want to emerge from the sound, and on this basis, then the further idea, to elaborate a graphic score. So a sort of stenographic track was born, this is interpretable by every combination of 3 instruments and fixed media (which everyone can make their way: ambiental and clocks recordings, inserting them according to timeline).
Raquel Times Ten
Chris O'Neill, Ireland, 2019, 10 minutes
Raquel Times Ten features 53 seconds of silent footage with actor Raquel Nave (Welcome To New York, Bizarre) which has been duplicated from one VHS recording to another, and that copied to another VHS cassette, and that to another VHS cassette... in total, this sequence is presented ten times and with each duplication the image and the soundtrack quality deteriorate until Raquel's facial features are a wave of analogue distortion.
Reaction Diffusion scan processor
JesterN (Alberto Novello), Italy, 2022, 5 minutes
North American Premiere
Made using the electron beam of a Tektronix 620 analog monitor (green parts) deflected by the sound you hear. The scope picture is superimposed by the same shape colored by laser light. The sound you hear is the signal used to generate the light structure.
Refuse 1 (tape)
Alex Broadwell, USA, 2022, 4 minutes
US Premiere
Moments of VHS and 3/4" tape decay and glitch, collected during archival digitization process, normally discarded for library access copies, but here woven into a noisy and chromatic tarrying with the negative.
A Girl Who Open the Door to Herself
Parnian Donyari, Iran, 2022, 2 minutes
US Premiere
We humans are complex creatures and at some point we may lose ourselves or not accept different parts of our existence and we may not even know how to do this anymore, but in the end, the more we look for ourselves, We can accept all parts of our existence as it is.
The Primitives
Genadzi Buto, Belarus, 2021, 10 minutes
New York Premiere
The complex life of simple figures.
TR333
April Lin, UK, 2021, 10 minutes
New York Premiere
Artist-filmmaker April Lin 林森 presents TR333, a speculative construction of a new species of tree developed in conversation with ecologist Dr. Nalini Nadkarni. Using 3D animation, found footage, and a musical score based on data sonification, TR333 recasts the ecological crisis from a multispecies and affective gaze.
Commissioned by Sheffield DocFest and supported by Wellcome.
Train Song
Yanbin Zhao, USA, 2022, 4 minutes
New York Premiere
Surrounding a hidden monument honoring Chinese immigrant workers next to a railroad track located in Canyon Country, California, Train Song adopts reflective material to distort the image of the railroad, as an approach to conjure the unseen spirits from the seemingly tranquil landscape, calling for remembrance of Chinese American labors through a meditative audio-visual experience.
Trans-Scripted Memory: A Transhumanist Techno-Pop Opera
Christine Drake-Thomas & Alvin Leung, USA, 2022, 10 minutes
Trans-Scripted Memory: A Transhumanist Techno-Pop Opera is a three-channel video installation. Trans-Scripted Memory utilizes open-source Artificial Intelligence programs to generate the lyrical backbone of the work. The piece is in two acts that travel through time from the watery primordial beginnings of cyborgs to a period of modernist Romanticism to a speculative cyborg Ian future. This is musically explored by fusion between idioms of classical operatic and techno-pop music, as well as an interplay between AI-generated and human voices. The symbiotic relationship between AI and human creatives suggest transhumanism’s advocation for humanity to conjoin with technology to reach the next phase of human cognition and evolution.
Venus Rising
Colleen Keough, USA, 2020, 8 minutes
Venus Rising is a single channel video and sound work exploring the dismantling of patriarchal systems and a call back to Earth centered feminine wisdom.
A chant to the moon ritualizing the crumbling effigies of patriarchy, opens the first scene of Venus Rising. A woman is seen summoning new life as she dances in a cloud of microbes. What is hidden becomes visible as her rhythmic and undulating body conjures natural forces. Electromagnetic phenomena cuts through the atmosphere as she performs her ritual. A planetary cosmic and spiritual awakening is taking place. What lies ahead is unknown. The path has been set in motion and now must be followed through.
Venus Rising is a visual and sonic response to this unprecedented moment of global change. It embodies hope for human resilience and a message of returning to earth based wisdom, knowledge, and intelligence as a way to heal and begin anew.
Sound by Colleen Keough, with e.g. walker