Works on installation monitor will run continuously throughout festival.
1. Jasper Von Loon: Langdorp (Belgium)
Langdorp is an experimental film about the director’s hometown, Langdorp. The film observes places situated in this seemingly “ideal”, countryside, village while a voice-over reveals factual information about homicides, suicides. The film aims to bring an experience of “place” to the viewer. An experience which allows the viewer to contemplate about these places and the unfortunate event(s) which they have witnessed throughout the years.
2. Charlie Mars: Pregnant Man (France)
After falling pregnant, a man suffers many kinds of pressure : external and internal. Unless quite the opposite is true…
3. Pierre St.Jacques: The Exploration of Dead Ends (Canada / NY)
There is a process in making my art that is akin to manufacturing clouds, where one must express a certain blurriness of experience, but one can’t be vague about it. It is that exact blurry state, one that seemingly has very little going on perhaps but is full of everything which animates our conciousness. A man can just sit there, sit there and do nothing, and an epic will ensue. Imperceptible tectonic shifts beneath his feet, just under his knowing, the things he used to love he now hates, the things he used to hate he understands, all happening without seemingly any moving part, a slight of hand has brought it into being, and our man just sits there unmoving, part of the continual epic all around him. That simply difficult vision, that depth of experience, with it’s crisp little doors and it’s vast murky expanses has become my current dialog with my work.
The way that “The Exploration of Dead Ends” is conceived is a bit like that journey, a journey where the things clearly happening are as important as the awkward emotions, where the direction seems defined yet the place of arrival isn’t. You walk along and your focus jumps elastically along with you , every second, from thing to thing. You think about your loved ones, then let the ghosts of past memories get the better of you before you return to the room you’ve been standing in this whole time. It’s realism in the same way that ‘Finnegan’s wake’ is realism, or in a certain sense how synthetic cubism is about realism. Above all it’s an’ investigation what goes on inside, how that little human motor works.
4. Aliénor Vallet & Anne-Lisa Maure: Epic of a Disquiet (France)
A silhouette makes her way through the tall grass or the heights of a wall. Where begins the dream, where ends the reality? Is there a single true life among all those available?
This film is an initiatory quest freely inspired by Fernando Pessoa’s work.
5. Jolene Mok & Troels Primdahl: People. Moves. Places. (Hong Kong / Denmark)
This choreographic documentary shows a series of ‘Interrelational Field Recordings’ from Siglufjörður on the Northern coast of Iceland. Through an artless concept of repetitions and bodily gestures an anthropological portrait of the inhabitants in small fishing village gradually emerges. Each of them is articulating their own person, not in the dimension of lingual communication, but simply through the similarities and differences that only the viewer is able to comprehend.
6. Bjørn Erik Haugen: Repeatual (Oslo, Norway)
Repeatual is a video-work consisting of 100 repetitions of a small part of the film “Wicker Man,” where a man is caught and undressed in a brutal and primitive way before a ritual. I have recorded the video-scene 100 times back and fro a VHS video recorder and a DVD recorder. The result is a total corrosion and a regress of the original material. Finally you do not see the what is represented in the video. The thought is that when a ritual is repeated, the cause of the ritual is often lost.
7. Jason Bernagozzi: Simulacrum (Owego, NY)
Simulacrum is a single channel video that documents people using electronic media as soft memory, electronic bodies flickering though simulated experience. Behind a screen, recording the act of being behind a screen, recording.
8. Dominique Palladino: How to Baste a Turkey Roast (NY, USA)
How to Baste a Turkey Roast is a collaborative piece performed by myself and Sarah Johansen. Our collaborative project is called Coynte Prendere and deals with breaking up social convention by playing with the attraction and repulsion of stereotypes specifically dealing with the female body. In this piece, I sit in the same position that Nicki Minaj is posing for her viral Anaconda album cover while Sarah eats an entire sucker. What starts out as an overtly sexual visual, over time reveals the repulsive, awkwardness of the reality behind the photoshopped image.
9. Imogene Newland: Determinazione Per Piacere (ma non troppa) (UK)
‘Determinazione per piacere (ma non troppo)’ [‘Determination for Pleasure (but not too much’)] explores the relationship between the female body and the violin with an emphasis on how body movement might augment sound production. The interchangeability of female body and violin becomes a point of focus through which the determination for the experience of pleasure in playing an instrument is sought. This determination for pleasure is a double-edged sword. On the one hand the player desires technical mastery and thus better emotive communication via their instrument. However, it is precisely this desire and determination to reach a heightened pleasurable state that often prevents it. The symbiosis of body and instrument through physical movement and the subsequent relinquishing of a self-conscious state may thus be framed as the union of desire and actuation.
10. Joshua Pablo Rosenstock: Shrine to the Funky Drummer (USA)
The “Funky Drummer” is a five-second excerpt from a James Brown song that has been used as the foundation of hundreds of other musical compositions and is one of popular music’s most famous samples. This experimental documentary by Joshua Pablo Rosenstock portrays the performance and subsequent sampling of the Funky Drummer as an archetypal cultural moment and a lens through which to examine a multifaceted story of creative appropriation. Rosenstock collected and created artifacts, “holy relics,” and ritual performances that explore the early history of Hip Hop, the fetishistic culture of record-digging, and the creative acts of sampling and remixing.
11. Mila Panic: Original (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
This work deals with body migration, cultural migration, migration of wishes and needs. It contains video installation, number of objects and photographs. My family move to Australia in late 90’s during the post-war migrations. That was one way how to deal with the conflict, to migrate to one of many countries that offered a refuge. When they (my uncle and aunt) settled they sent a videotape and all kind of gifts to my family. Sending the video messages back to families and friends was a common way of communication, for us to see that they doing well. On the tape were their activities and all new stuff that they have. All artworks are examples of ‘migration symptom’ in Bosnia. The material of VHS tapes that I used are just base for post-production work in the form of installation and creation of analytical space of thinking about the cultural transition of those who come and go from this area. Video works showing everyday activity of their life and other, according to them, significant things.
12. Benjamin Rosenthal & James Monroe: Human, Next Phase One (Kansas, USA)
Human, Next: Phase One–a video adaptation of a section of a live collaborative dance/video/animation work conceived of by Choreographer James Moreno and Artist Benjamin Rosenthal–explores the convergences and differences between virtual and physical bodies, offering new perspectives on our 21st- Century Hybrid condition. The systematized condition of both the virtual and physical bodies is further emphasized by the sound score, composed for the piece by Benjamin Rosenthal. Primarily extracted from existing computer “system” sounds, the audio is chopped, stretched, manipulated and reoriented, making the audio an actor, or a body, in its own right Using rhythmic and temporal structures that, at times, collapse in exhaustion, the sound mimics the visceral condition of the dancers as they compete in an arena that tests their boundaries and limits.
13. Jordan Marty: True Faith (Richmond, VA)
The Florida experience abstracted – a tourist’s souvenir in the form of a PAL format VHS tape played back on an NTSC VCR.
14. Valentina Ferrandes: Other Than Our Sea (London / Berlin)
From the relics of an ancient Greek colony in Southern Italy, to modern day shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea, a story of exploration told through fragments of classical literature, flashes of ethnographic films and manipulated excerpts of current newsreels. Referencing the recent tragic circumstances that drowned thousands of migrants departing from Northern Africa to seek asylum in Europe, Other Than Our Sea collapses visual cues as layers of imagery to embroider an enigmatic idea of traveling at sea in times of conflict. A journey that can be a leap into the unknown, a voyage of discovery, or forced migration, death as well as rebirth.
15. William Cromar: Flyspec (PA, USA)
16. Om Bori: 3,267 Footsteps (Hungary)
In this work I deploy an algorithm for stereoscopic street imaging in order to trace my quotidian commute between my home, my school and my grandmother’s place in the city of Budapest. This form of datafied subjectivity is contrasted with an intimate narrative about experiences and memories evoked by the vistas of my daily route.
17. Wrik Mead: Summer 1975 (Canada)
Summer 1975 is part of an installation that first exhibited at PayneShurvell Gallery in London, UK. Artlyst voted it “Our Pick of the latest Emerging Art” and Abigail Addison of Animate Projects Ltd put 1975 on her top ten animations of the year. This animated film is based on one year in the filmmakers fractured life. Hand drawn rotoscoped figures are layered with stills and live video footage to create an open narrative based on events in his life that took place in 1975. He was 13 and this was a pivotal year for him in many ways. He discovered the magic of animation and was hooked. He made his first animated film with his best friend, they locked themselves away for the whole summer to complete it. 1975 was also the year that he had his first sexual experience, with said best friend. It was a time of great excitement, confusion, fear and withdrawal.
18. Kevin Logan: Seamless 9.55 (England)
Seamless’ is a compositional performance mediated through the lens of two video cameras. An unidentified man sits at a table, he sonically manipulates a teapot, smashes it – then reconstructs it using Gaffer tape. Jump cut edited, what starts as aural documentation evolves into an electroacoustic composition. ‘Seamless’ objectifies the faceless entertainer, dislocating the event from its history.
19. Sandra Fruebing: The Individual’s Pursuit (Germany)
The Individual’s Pursuit is the creation of a narrative based on a character whose quest is to inhabit an in-between space as an exploration of what is beyond the obvious. To walk along the edge of water and earth, where both elements meet, is becoming a strong desire. Specially designed apparatus and physical training exercises will be employed in an attempt to fulfill the dream. The story of the Individual’s pursuit challenges common sense and discusses the idea of the in-between space and borders.
This rather odd quest looks at the relationship between the individual belief and society as well as the longing for a creation of a personal space where one is almost attempting to disconnect oneself from reality and therefore add another layer to normality/ reality.
20. Qi You: How Are You (Beijing, China)
21. Alexander Isaenko: Exclusion Zone (Ukraine)
Few years ago Sergey from Krasnodar created a YouTube channel. He documents his different moods with the small camera, shares his online notes, mainly when he is visiting his country cottage area. He likes to work on the land, that’s why he speaks about the country house as of his pleasure. Sergey considers himself a developed personality, both physically, spiritually and intellectually. His constantly naked body convinces us of first. He also finds the acting skills in himself, plays unfunny and vulgar sketches. He knows the tissue of the universe, he is fond of the string theories, and reflects on madness and genius subjects. Sometimes after mowing the grass he clearly sees that he belongs to the scientific community.
22. Pawel Stasiewicz: Radio Play for Display – Sluchowisko do Wyswielania (Poland)
Work about the journey to the market and hearing ghosts
23. Viktor Brim: Unterwasser (Germany)
Underwater reflects on a certain state of being. The setting in which the figures are arranged serves as a medium of visualization. The images tend to fall into a state of disorientation, thereby to foreground figure and body. What are they doing? How do they move? What are they looking at? The perspective of their gaze directs the action from one shot to the next to increase the feeling of disorientation not only locally, but also in the narrative perspective: therewith the focus lies on the figures’ perception, which circles around an atmospheric condition. This procedure follows the impulse to reconstruct the atmosphere of the situation; based on the assumption that perspective works by means of sensible atmospheres. The reduction of the story to the presence of the body, to the figures’ glances is chosen as the gaze may reflect the inner state of a person in a very intuitive way. This state of being often traces back to a feeling, which anon expresses the atmosphere of a place by certain gestures and glances. The passing helicopter, the width of the frozen lake, the sparse falling trees are key elements, which reflect the perception of the characters. The contrast of closeness and distance in the perspective is on the one hand closely related to the feelings of the two figures, which are to be understood in a spatial sense, on the other hand, it reflects the figures’ interwoven perception, which is made up continually in correlation of space, emotion and body.
24. Monteith McCollum: Soundpoint (Vestal, NY)
“Listen”, a short film made as part of a collaboration of works curated by Slamdance Film Festival, examines shortwave radio as a technology that can be utilized not only for communication, but also abstract sound art. Thought of as an obsolete technology in the age of the internet, shortwave is still used around the world by the military, religious organizations, and small pirate news networks. One can also find it in the living rooms and basements of amateur radio enthusiasts. In “Listen,” Ingvar Loco Nordin a Swedish sound artist, writer, and student of the renowned composer Carl Heinz Stockhausen breaks down the sounds of shortwave as a poetic electronic medium. Bringing viewers into a world of forgotten and hidden transmissions, buzzing morse code, the abstract hum of pagers, and the coded transmission of coordinates to airlines flying overhead. It’s a technology that has a linkage to the greater Milky Way. While solar flares can make clear communication on shortwave difficult, for the artist it’s an opportunity to hear an elusive set of tones and crackles.
25. Marie Von Heyl: Utopia (Berlin, Germany)
The video shows the artist examining her small London flat using her own body. Referencing the interior as a trope of art history as well as the modernist utopian ideal of the Modulor, Marie von Heyl discovers symmetries and interconnections between the human body and its artificial environment.
26. Mark Regester & Nonnon: The House on Fire (Missouri / Utah)
The House on Fire (2014, 6 min 55 sec) is a collaboration between Scottish-born, California-raised artist Mark Regester who currently lives and creates in St. Louis, Missouri and Utah-based composer, producer, musician, mad scientist, nonnon (aka Dave Madden). The House on Fire examines the religious rituals of American Pentecostal churches, some of which use deadly snakes, fire and even the drinking of strychnine in their services. These services often send their followers into a frenzy of dancing, fainting and speaking in tongues as the spirit takes them. This video pairs black and white footage of these services with a haunting original soundtrack.
27. Jessica Fenlon: Ungun (Chicago, IL)
Animation built of 5,000+ decayed and degraded images of handguns. Audio sampled from American films whose plots hinge on the gun as much as other human characters.
The object of the gun, ideas about whether, or how, it is regulated – the object shatters our ability to discuss it sanely. I have watched otherwise thoughtful people on many sides of the issue melt down into all-caps shouting in social media. I steal pictures of guns and make something else with them. Yes I’m trafficking in stolen guns when I do this. Yes, it is aesthetic vandalism. Wasn’t the Matrix trilogy founded on that image of stopping bullets with the wave of a hand? What about the old Native American ghost dance, the promise and that we could stop bullets ~
International and US exhibition history detailed at http://www.drawclose.com.
28. Jason Bernagozzi: I Believe it is a Signal (Owego, NY)
“I Believe it is a Signal” is an experimental video that reorganizes archived and contemporary news footage through various glitch processes. The structure of the video is organized as a 5-part vignette, each section is a more intense disturbance of the video code, which eventually tears apart the image into a flowing mass of color over time. In the spirit of Nam June Paik’s early Wobulator work, this piece uses a pixel abstraction process that bleeds the image over the screen, making the pixels appear to rupture. The forced reorganization and eventual glitching bodyscapes suggests that the monumental authority of broadcast and streaming media is in fact a fragile and impermanent signal.
29. Suok won Yoon: Life’s Universal Validity has been Made in the Gap Between Meaning and Meaninglessness (UK / South Korea)
The work is monologue as quite small part of my life. When I am depressed by extreme loneliness for staying in empty space, I can recognize that my another existence have existed in my inner world. Seeing, Thinking, Feeling, listening….these are just factors to reveal my inner world. The moment and the space in the empty room make that I mediate my universal life in loneliness. Although I can feel my existence, I know I can’t see absolute existence. Although I am in solitude, I know I can’t avoid solitude as it is one part of my life. I have been curious the meaning about my life. Also, I have been curiouos the direction of my life. I know the existence that is reflected in my inner world is not absolute. My behavior and words for the monologue demonstrate by the moment that the conflict with inner and exterior world causes. This is my essence. It is me.
30. Jan Swinburne: The Printer Becomes the Printed (Toronto, Canada)
31. Satoshi Tsuchiyama: Float (Brooklyn / Japan)
A path from asleep to awake is like floating and drifting. One’s mind becomes millions of particles in the water swimming and ascending to the surface. At the boundary of what differs sky, land, and sea, the body moves to perceive unity of dream and reality.
32. Aliénor Vallet: Horizon Vert Azur (France)
A three tries to resist the development project of the urban park project « Coulée Verte » in Nice French Riviera.
33. Carla Forte: Staring at the Ceiling (Venezuela,/USA)
The ceiling stares at you and you do not stare back, and you leave it all alone, without sky, staring at its palindrome – which is the floor
34. Jenny Vogel: The Beauty of All Things Falling (NY, USA)
A narrative of glitches and beautiful failures. This video explores the terrifying as well as the creative potential of error.
35. Amelia Johannes: Pattern Gestures (Melbourne, Australia)
Pattern/Gestures is an experimental video that re-edits elements of found family videos, which were originally captured on VHS, to illustrate the idea that tradition can be defined by repetition. This video piece investigates the artist’s mixed South African heritage by visually exploring footage of the family to experiment with perspective, perception, recognition and uncertainty of the video image. The raw VHS footage illustrates recorded memories captured in the late 1980s to early 1990s. This footage has been visually experimented with during the editing process by cropping frames and the collating of repetitive patterns.
36. Duygu Nazli Akova: Hive (Turkey)
Hive takes a look at the unplanned urbanization, which has been paraded under the guise of “urban renewal”, Istanbul has been undergoing for many years. This unplanned urbanization creates mega cities made out of concrete, by destroying the existing historical and cultural legacy. This situation is conveyed through the visualization of Marx’s bee and machine metaphor. This metaphor exemplifies how, due to the heavy workload, the workers become mechanical; how they are not only exposed to the adverse effects of this workload but even pay for it with their lives. They are forced to work at such a speed and yet this speed leads to the creation of both abundance, but also nothingness. At the same time, the metaphor represents the impossibility for the workers to own the very building they help produce. In this sense, Hive, focuses on the workers’ working conditions, contract labor, human rights, and urban renewal.
37. Mikey Peterson: Light Cycle (Chicago, IL)
White light streaks back and forth across black space at different rates, absorbed by the woman’s face and then cycling outward again. Each flash and spark declares its unique presence through assigned sounds, sampled and manipulated from the original source footage. It is as if the light were the only living element in this fluctuating environment that appears blank and stationary. The initial illusion of motion reminds us of fantastical travel through space and time as we try to connect the visual and aural data into meaningful patterns of cause and effect. The “return” to our world makes us question what is more uncanny; the science fiction or the reality.
38. Sarawut Chutiwongpeti: Critical Time (Switzerland)
“ALL AROUND US ARE RACIAL AND TRIBAL, WAR, BORDER, PHENOMENON, TRAGEDY, VICTIM, CONFUSE AND CONFLICT. HOW ARE WE TO INTERPRET THESE — SIGNS OF THE TIMES — IN THEIR PROPER CONTEXT?”
My goal is to investigate the expressive possibilities of conceptual visual language and to develop Collaborative New Art as part of both Contemporary Art/Contemporary Global Structure and the Technological Civilization in which we live today. I am especially interested in finding out how contemporary art can enhance the distribution of information and foster a profound universality in the human nature and cross-cultural artistic and critical collaboration. The meaning of the very possibility to enrich contemporary art may also come into question. In my inquiry, I am guided by the following set of questions: Are sensations-reactions to contemporary art still significant today? In what way and how can contemporary art theory and practice address and help solve today’s global problems? And finally, Can contemporary conceptual art disclose the corrupted social values in mega polices and create a bridge between the present and the future generations?.
39. Matt Whitman: Film Digitalia, No.15 (Brooklyn, NY)
This work is a study of the durative moment of montage between three bodies: the digital, the filmic and the human. It is a moment of confrontation between these three bodily apparatuses. It is about how they are constantly at odds with each other and yet, also in awe of each other – looking and looking and trying to feel the others, become the others and destroy the others. How is it that they can be merged and become something beyond their separateness? How can they, together, become a fourth body?
40. Mighty Kongbot: Random rmx (Italy)
41. Anna Beata Baranska & Michal Baranski: People Don’t Know Who They Are (Poland)
The starting point for the film was a synthesis of film. Start of work consisted several photographs of dots remaining on the old-style TV screen, and the monochrome image noise, which, as shown in detail, however, is not devoid of color. Those photos are animated by music, stationary dot starts to move, vibrate. Monochrome noise becomes colorfull. The mood of anxiety builds the music created by CFREVERSE, and motto (also the title of the film, which we can hear louder during the film), now refer to ourselves – “People do not know, Who They Are”
42. Daniel Wechsler: Asphyxia (Israel)
Over sampling / last breath. 2015 Obscured and strangled by an over sampled, multiple layered channel.
43. Ewa Potocka & Mohammed Nhari: Lost in Abstraction (Poland / Morocco)
“Lost in Abstraction” is a conscious challenge of finite and our mental conceptions of spatiotemporal existence that force us to succumb to the laws of physicality that condition our being and impose its rules like death, boredom, and decay.
44. Mila Panic: We have a Wonderful Life (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
This work deals with body migration, cultural migration, migration of wishes and needs. It contains video installation, number of objects and photographs. My family move to Australia in late 90’s during the post-war migrations. That was one way how to deal with the conflict, to migrate to one of many countries that offered a refuge. When they (my uncle and aunt) settled they sent a videotape and all kind of gifts to my family. Sending the video messages back to families and friends was a common way of communication, for us to see that they doing well. On the tape were their activities and all new stuff that they have. All artworks are examples of ‘migration symptom’ in Bosnia. The material of VHS tapes that I used are just base for post-production work in the form of installation and creation of analytical space of thinking about the cultural transition of those who come and go from this area. Video works showing everyday activity of their life and other, according to them, significant things. In this video dancing is performative act of wonderful life.
45. Mel Edelman: Loneliness By Any Other Name (USA)
“Loneliness by any other Name” focuses on the experiences of loneliness, specifically those of a young woman who was incarcerated as a political prisoner in Iran between the ages of 16 and 19.