Index Art Center presents:
FILMIDEO DAY TWO – Saturday April 25
10th Annual Film and Video Screenings.
Filmideo is a yearly event that celebrates the great diversity and work of independent filmmakers and video artists both nationally and from around the globe.
For an entire month, IAC transforms its gallery space into a screening theater, where artist’s works are projected onto a 10’ x10’ screen and accompanied by a Hi Fidelity sound system.
Saturday, April. 25
FIRST SHOW 2 – 5pm
SECOND SHOW 6 – 10pm
We will also have an installation monitor continuously running throughout the festival. Works featured listed below.
INSTALLATION MONITOR: (Will run continuously throughout event)
1. Xiaowen Zhu: Terminal Island (UK) 10:50
Terminal Island is a visual and psychological journey inside a recycling company in the Port of Los Angeles, where the world of materials ends and restarts. Through nuanced manipulation of documentary footage, the film presents an alternative perception of time and space in a physically specific and yet philosophically ambiguous environment.
2. Hollington & Kyprianou: The Car That Turned (UK) 8:00
The Car That Turned is in a sense a very British road movie – one whose structure is derived from the patterns that emerge from data collected by the UK’s ANPR system, and whose on-screen narrative merges co-ordinates with the inferences drawn by human analysis – a 21st century version of Mass Observation, collecting information to understand, to control and improve, and if that fails, to make do and mend.
3. Mikey Peterson: Slip Away (Chicago, IL) 2:34
Memories diverge from the experiences they intend to mirror. They emerge as an alternate reality we create and revise over time. These visions skew, as our minds focus on fragments of the original experiences – sometimes these visions warp the event to the point where they no longer represent the event but create an alternative version, a dream-like new reality that can influence our present selves. Maybe ourselves and our lives are built upon this process of useful mis-remembering. In these one-shot videos, Slip Away and Unrest, buildings hide behind a natural impressionistic haze. The imagery is familiar, but it’s always at a distance, as movement, light, and sound reinforces its surrealism. What we see is in constant flux, and the same can be said of what we view as Truth and Self.
4. Mikey Peterson: Born Again (Chicago, IL) 4:01
In this single-shot video, a gull appears meshed within its environment. Water, sun, earth and wind work together to transform its appearance and location. Combined, these classical elements create natural, yet surreal, imagery – like a dream or a fractured memory.
Speed is slowed down to emphasize its movement. Sound, taken from the source footage, is manipulated to create a sense of displacement and to emphasize a shift in the event. Scale is altered to show that all change, no matter how small, is substantial. Size is relative, and major shifts within our world are overshadowed by what is larger. By showcasing this transformation, the subtle becomes dramatic.
Nothing stands still in our world. From the gravitational pull on Earth’s tides to living beings pulled from birth to death, we live amongst and within infinite events where everything is in the process of change.
5. Jason Bernagozzi: Simulacrum (Owego, NY) 14:37
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.
6. Mirjamsvideos: Listen (Netherlands / Portugal) 21:00
Concluded in 2013, a sequence of 5 videos, 2 staged microcosm worlds combined with 3 macros playing with micro elements.
“Listen is ruled by a doubtful world. It appears peaceful but is constantly ´disturbed´ by tiny things bursting with life.
The video shows 5 scenes, a play between the macro and micro world, at moments when everything is almost colourless, creating a strangeness and the question whether the atmosphere is sad, scary or beautiful.”
7. Will Jennings: To A Line (UK) 20:00
My father had just moved to an area of mid-Suffolk in eastern England after being diagnosed with a terminal cancer. I relaxed him through meditation and passed on the methods of dowsing using both pendulum and rods. And despite him not knowing what they were, I asked him where he thought the St. Michael line could be found amongst the paths, fields and roads around his house. This video work relates the physical search for this ley line to his understanding and communication of his cancer which has little external evidence to the untrained eye and thus is manifested through personal feelings, emotions and sensations. The piece is a study of internal and external topologies and the desire for something ordered and rational within the chaos of life. The theory of ley lines was initiated in 1921 by Alfred Watkins. After noticing alignments of ancient sites in the landscape he plotted straight lines linking them on his maps before recording them in text and photography. His theory was that these were neolithic routes of communication for trade, though over the following 90 years other ideas and theories were folded into them; including counter-cultural ideas including pagan worship, spiritualist paths, subterranean and dowseable earth-energy streams and UFO navigational routes.
8. Jolene Mok & Troels Primdahl: People. Moves. Places. (Hong Kong / Denmark) 14:56
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.
9. Satoshi Tsuchiyama: Float (Brooklyn / Japan) 5:15
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.
10. Dorianne Wotton: La Nuit (France) 8:42
The Night traffics in familiar genre types: bully, whore, simpleton, old crank, broken soul. And dreams.
11. Montieth McCollum: Listen (Vestal, NY) 10:00
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.
12. Gonzaga Gómez Cortázar: A Ras (Spain) 4:59
A ras (Almost touching) is a commonplace, a common memory, somewhere where we’ve all been and we remember: a warm summer afternoon. Time dilutes, and people and place become a unity of which we are a part. The sun, the ground, the water… they all become visual, auditory and tangible memories that remain within us.
13. Imogene Newland: Determinazione Per Piacere (ma non troppo) (UK) 13:32
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.
14. Valentina Ferrandes: Other Than Our Sea (London / Berlin) 10:20
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. Wrik Mead: Summer 1975 (Canada) 10:00
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.
16. Marie Von Heyl: Utopia (Berlin, Germany) 7:50
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.
EVENING SESSION: 6 to 10pm
1. Jim Tuite & Michael Durek: Times Pieces (NJ, USA) 9:18
The inspiration for Time Pieces comes from various sources. The creation process included envisioning a dream or hallucinatory state based upon a crossing over between consciousness and unconsciousness, the real and the imagined. Elements suggest transition, projection, progressive concatenation. The video culminates with the breaking of the ego and hinting at disintegration. While the first 4 minutes seem plodding, contemplative yet distracted, the finale is loose and energetic as the ego undergoes its transformation.
The music was composed by theUse AKA Michael Durek (theusemusic.bandcamp.com) and video created by Tumei Tejas (Jim Tuite). It was originally performed for an opening of the artist Laura Mylott Manning (mylottmanning.com) in NYC.
2. Rebecca Major: Split Screen Opera (NYC, USA) 6:30
3. Alexander Isaenko: Exclusion Zone (Ukraine) 8:43
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.
4. Davídd d’Addario: Thought (Italy) 2:41
This work is the result of (data) bending of the hexadecimal code of videos, which produces a series of errors known as “glitches”, which reconfigure them according to a different aesthetic and conceptual value.
5. Violet Overn: Facial Projections (New York, USA) 2:39
I tried to hide my face behind celebrities, but unfortunately never fully fit.
6. Alessandra Armenise & Emanuele Correani: Fair Morning (Italy) 3:25
What if even our simple morning routine ceased to appear so normal and reassuring? What if our daily gestures stopped to belong to us and we discovered instead to belong to them? What if one day we could finally hear how our life really sounds like?
7. Mikey Peterson: Light Cycle (Chicago, IL) 3:47
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.
8. Thomas Kuijpers: Waves/ Hijacking the News (Netherlands) 4:35
On January 29th of this year, a 19 year old man hijacked the Dutch news broadcast of the NOS, the biggest news broadcaster of the Netherlands. He got into the studio with a fake gun, demanding airtime to broadcast a message that, according to him, would concern everyone- but it never got to that. The security guard he took hostage on the way in lead him to an empty studio, where cameras were rolling and the microphone was on. Meanwhile, the NOS building was evacuated, and screens went black. For the first time in 60 years the channel did not run the 8 o’clock edition of the news. The word spread fast, and the absence of the news became the new news.
9. Duygu Nazli Akova: Hive (Turkey) 4:00
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.
10. Christian Bøen: Apidae (Norway) 2:41
Apidae and Trombidiformes are experimental short videos consisting of destroyed files of self-composed video art and sound. Different computer software were used in order to destroy the files. The files were exported after several rounds of scrambling, almost resulting in software and computer crash. The videos are edited from a selection of damaged and original video files. The soundtracks are composed by Termodress.
11. Siro: The True King (Spain) 4:47
What is a statesman? What is a politician? What should be the characteristics of a true leader? Should be an administrator who runs certain commands, or something else?
This video reflects on the Platonic idea of how it should be a true statesman. Based on dialogue “Statesman” by Plato.
12. Simon Welch: Domain and Range (UK / France) 6:00
An anecdote about a dead lizard in a French vineyard accidentally run over by the winegrower’s tractor serves as a pretext to explore family history which in turn raises questions concerning the relationship between art and deterministic belief systems and between man and nature, etc. The notion of transformation is explored both in terms of the content of the film and the effect of filming itself.
13. Brian Ratigan – Non Films: The Absent Dreamer (Brooklyn, NY) 3:00
After a cataclysmic incident, the last man on earth is trapped alone and tries to free himself by falling in love with his own mind.
14. Steve Snell & Elizabeth Stehling: A Goldfish Documentary (Nebraska, USA) 7:36
How does one transport goldfish across the country in a safe way–that won’t spill water all over the car and be safe for the well being of the fish? A Goldfish Documentary tells the story of Noodles and Tony P, two small goldfish from the Great Plains of Nebraska and their transformative journey to the small hamlet of Wassaic, New York. Bowl-bound meets highway-bound in this autobiographical true story.
:INTERMISSION:
1. Steve Snell: The Epic Spartanburg (Nebraska, USA) 6:05
The Epic Spartanburg is a series of videos built upon the collective, collaborative creativity and adventures of people from Spartanburg, South Carolina. This project invited the public to bring their ideas of adventure to me. I, in turn, accompanied participants on their journeys into the unknown, making them appear epic and amazing in video in the process.
In this episode Doris rides her bike to exercise class four days a week. In order to get there, she must cross the busy Pine Street, which is full of trucks and all kinds of danger.
2. Monteith McCollum: Soundpoint (Vestal, NY)
The second film in a trilogy on sound.
“SoundPrint” explores the marks left by sonic frequencies. Imagery from optical soundtracks and micro photography of records play against similar signals received by sand, water, and people. Sounds of the ocean and the Midshipman are the backdrop for a rich exploration of the subtleties of transcribed sound.
3. Ela W Walters: Milk (Poland)
It took me 11 years to deal with the material I recorded in Devon, England. The material was sitting in a drawer waiting for the right moment. When I think about this work, I always start thinking about The Milky Way. We tend to consider it as something other, different, detached from us. Whereas, in actual fact, we are a part of it.
4. Christopher Carullo: Niteboy, Daygirl (Los Angeles, California)
5. Adriene Little & Lisa Williams: Spilled Milk on Banjo (Kalamazoo, MI)
6. 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.
7. Matthew Clark Mulligan: 3 – 2 – 1 Separation Perfected! (Colorado, USA)
A dirty joke.
8. Mauricio Sanhueza: My Old Man’s Pistol (Peru)
Throughout the centuries dreams have been to many cultures around the world the images that speak of the future. This particular one is based on the myth of the Doppelganger in which the hero is pursued by his doubles and at the same time they try to take possession of his mind and body.
9. Melvin James: While the Cats Away (NJ, USA)
A woman with plenty to hide has a rendezvous with her secret lover, but is interrupted by a handful of uninvited guests. An official selection of The 2013 Cannes Film Festival Court Metrage.
10. Katina Bitsicas: Hypnagogic Regression (Florida, USA)
Hypnagogic Regression simulates the multiple flashbacks that occur of specific traumas in my past. I recreate specific memories of nights with my assaulter, down to every detail, including the shorts and underwear, and also include footage of us together. I then recreate the night I attempted to flee this earth in a graveyard, and how I laid practically lifeless on the school stairs, with no passer-by stopping to help. This footage is mixed in with found footage of my grandmother’s basement where my older cousin explored in areas he shouldn’t have on an 8 year old girl. This footage is then also mixed in with shots of my mother’s face; the person preventing me from sharing all of this. I refuse to hurt her, and must protect her, because I am that perfect little untarnished girl with a glass case full of Wizard of Oz Madame Alexander dolls.
11. Matthew Clark Mulligan: Abstraction n.7 (Colorado, USA)
An exploration of involuntary memories.
12. Marte Gunnufsen: Ave Maria II (Norway)
Ave Maria II is a cinematic staging of a pole dancer who moves to Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria. I used Jessye Norman’s version for mezzo-soprano and organ.
INSTALLATION MONITOR:
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.