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Program 3 - Seals and Dolphins, Piss and Tears
78 minutes

Light Matter is Curated by James Hansen 

Saturday November 8, 12 PM

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I’m Here Live, I’m Not a Human
Flaneuse du Mal, UK, 4 minutes

‘I’m Here Live, I’m Not a Human’ is a video exploring the modes of nonhuman embodiment and its emancipatory potentialities in the context of western anthropocentric humanist discourse. 
 
Inspired by the potency of art appropriation practices by feminist artists from The Pictures Generation, the work appropriates the elements of corporate environment as well as the canonical works of contemporary western male artists, to explore the questions of alterity, alienation and belonging, and invite further inquiry into the nature of contemporary culture and its innate and seemingly benign customs, processes and codes upholding and reproducing the western systems of power.

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The Split
Zorica Colic, USA, 3 minutes

“The Split” is a performative video documenting the action of splitting a phallic vibrator that tackles the psychoanalytical theories of “penis envy.” This theory was developed by Sigmund Freud regarding female psychosexual development, and states that young girls experience anxiety upon realization that they do not have a penis. The video takes a playful twist on this idea, by splitting the phallic object with a reciprocating saw, and opening it up, only to reveal its multiple layers: at first it starts to resemble a vagina, but in the end hides another phallic shape inside. It thus serves as a reminder of the anatomy invested with fantasies, of the anatomy as a radical contingency and of our discomforting and ambiguous corporeality.

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The Man Cave
Sarah Legow, Portugal, 2 minutes

A childhood memory re-enacted through a mixture of publicly sourced photos, staged scenes, and stop motion animation, “The Man Cave” is a brief, bewildering journey inside two young girls’ shared vision of manhood. It’s an irreverent child’s eye view of male sexuality, seen through a proto-feminist lens: the male “safe space” of the “man cave”  invaded by girls, culminating in absurd, exuberant fantasy. 
 
The music in the film, a cover of “You’ve Got Something There” from the 1930s musical “Varsity Show,” is used with the permission of Warner Chappell.  
 
Age rating: 15+.

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Carta Monir BDSM Film Club
Lorelei d’Andriole, USA, 3 minutes
World Premiere

As a queer/trans artist, I am more interested in Action than in Representation. "Carta Monir BDSM Film Club" is an experimental video edited from footage shared with me by artist Carta Monir that I edited using analog synthesis tools during my residency at Signal Culture in November 2024. All effects and audio in this work were generated by means analog synthesis tools, whose input/output methodology I have argued is impertinently queer because of the reactivity of the medium. The work is concerned with queer/kink theory, leather culture, and is part of an ongoing series of conversations and works made between d'Andriole, Monir, and other trans people in Michigan on the role of sex and violence in trans becoming as minoritized victims of transphobia, transmisogyny, and other violence's within the American empire.  
 
 
I want this work to be educational in that it gives viewers permission to explore desire. As my dear friend Jet Trouble, co-host of the Secret Third Thing podcast, asks, “What do you desire most of all without anyone else’s feelings in mind? Without any risk of punishment or shame, do you dare to whisper it?” I believe supporting work like this is critical in a time where the civil rights of queer and trans people are being eroded.

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But…You’re a Dolphin
Sarah Turner, USA, 4  minutes

A Dolphin tells Sarah a secret of the Universe. Inspired by experiments and research of John C. Lilly.

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Colorful Colorado Nails
Monica Panzarino, USA, 7 minutes
New York Premiere

Inspired by Phil Morton's classic 1976 video, “Colorful Colorado”, as well as Panzarino’s first artist's residency at Signal Culture’s new studio space in Loveland, Colorado.  Panzarino processes footage of a drive through Rocky Mountain National Park using Signal Culture's Wobbulator, Jones MVIP Eurorack module (an analog video synthesizer), and Maelstrom software app.  This footage is then chromakeyed onto Panzarino's green screen-colored nails as she works with the tools in Signal Culture's studio.  This video captures the transformative quality of Colorado's natural beauty and stunning landscapes while guiding viewers through a portal from analog to digital image processing.

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Boiling the Piss
Michaela Davidova, Netherlands, 3 minutes

Boiling the piss (2023/2024, 2’ 40’’) is my debut 16mm film made at the coast near Den Haag (NL) with artist Hedwich Rooks. Together, we collected our urine and shared it in one pot. We boiled it down and watched the water evaporate until the dark brown minerals started to accumulate at the bottom. Boiling the piss is a process film considering the values embedded in bodies through a shared metabolic conversion of waste. It follows my artistic investigation into researching urine as a photographic developer and/or possibly a fixer too. 
 
The negative film was developed with the traditional developer D96, while positive was printed with the urine-based developer. The film also contains a chemigram which combines the leftover materials transformed with the urine liquid inviting a viewer into the metabolizing processes. The sound was added in 2024 during the residency at SOLU/Bioart Society, Helsinki, as a site specific reverse recording of their toilet. 
 
The film can be screened as analogue 16 mm (silent or with a digital sound track), or as digital H.264

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When the Time Comes
Wayne Koestenbaum, USA, 4 minutes
World Premiere

A short portrait-film, in digital video and Super 8, starring Ian Lewandowski, with text by Maurice Blanchot, from his novel, "When the TImes Comes," translated by Lydia Davis.

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Half Halt
Sofia Theodore-Pierce, USA, 12 minutes

"pause spewing pause 
to learn the grammatical fact–– 
there is no going forward alone" 
 
In horsemanship a half halt is a pulse on the rein to say, hey I’m still here, holding. It indicates something about to happen. Here, a series of interruptions are held together by those who catch you when you’re falling. Rosie reads. Grace and I ride the elevator. Camera breaks. Record skips. Lovers reunite. We’re all filming each other on horseback.

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Leather Graves
Malic Amalya, USA, 12 minutes
New York Premiere

"Leather Graves" is an experimental 16mm film that explores the permeable boundaries between queer exile and queer utopia. Cruising amongst gravestones engraved with references to queer culture and sexuality, queers defy death by devouring candy-coated blossoms.  
 
The queer epitaphs in "Leather Graves" were created with an in-camera double exposure technique using a Bolex camera and a matte-box.  
 
The cast and crew are all trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and/or femme queer people.

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Hole is the Bubble I Blew
Christopher Tym, Argentina/Netherlands/UK, 7 minutes
North American Premiere

Hole is the Bubble i Blew is a hybrid-documentary combining video, generative animation and composite imagery. It is a choral history of shared intimacy where days and nights loop as an apartment window emerges from a burning tunnel; from this window a small group of people share stories of platonic and erotic love through space and time that separate like oil on the surface of water. "Movements pulse into the void, actions become sentient, consequences wait for the morning that will never be." 
 
This project explores the potentialities of queering time by generating a shared space 'between the frames' in which personal narratives morph together in a plurality of languages, intimacies, and histories. It becomes a deep dream of warping time and matter as the image never stops travelling forward; flat layers in 3D space move towards you like a theatre set and generative animations remain suspended in a never ending tunnel as time displaced figures ripple freely between scenes. Between the frames the viewer is invited to spectrally experience a community in free fall as they fall free together through time.

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Tears for Lost Frequencies
Monica Duncan & Senem Pirler, USA, 17 minutes

"Tears for Lost Frequencies" explores our complex relationship with plastic through the act of improvisation.  Our intention is to highlight plastic as a matter that cannot be separated from the “natural”: a material everywhere and becoming our “nature” and our “uninvited” collaborator.  In "Tears for Lost Frequencies," microplastics found in tears become material witnesses to the experience of one’s grieving moment, such as hearing loss, and a speculative space for plastic healing.

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