
2022 Program
Light Matter is Co-Programmed by James Hansen & Eric Souther
TSI / Harland Snodgrass Gallery Oct. 31 - Nov. 7 &
The Immersive Gallery Nov. 4 - 6
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.
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.
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.
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.
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