DAY TWO: Saturday, April 23, 2 – 5 PM

Rina Dweck: Karaoke (USA) 1:00
Karaoke was made after completing a 365 self portrait piece, Project Face. Project Face was a yearlong selfie project made between 2011 and 2012. Once complete, I wanted to experiment with different media, and combine my exploration of self and identity with video and music. Karaoke came as a result of that.

Gregory Bennett: Panopticon I (New Zealand) 14:33
Panopticon I’ (2015) is a looped 3D animation which continues my exploration of the utopian and dystopian, and constructs of order and control. Presenting an endlessly rotating point-of-view of a circular panoptic structure, this construction is populated by an ever-expanding taxonomy of animated figures, plants, objects, and architecture trapped in ceaseless loops and cycles in a form of animated stasis. Originally considered a progressive and enlightened solution to societal problems, the Panopticon has come to be read as a central metaphor for modern “disciplinary” societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and normalise, most notably by French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Jem Raid: The last vestiges of hope (UK) 7:18
I thought of dance, my poses are dance related, I am nearer to death than I am to my birth. I used what I see around me for my images and altered and merged them and incorporated my own image into these. Always at the back of my mind as I created the images was the thought that this work ephemeral though it might be could very well survive my own demise. I wanted above all to create something that gave hope with beauty.

Amanda Kline: Closer (OH) 1:48
On one side of the screen a bug writhes on the ground, most likely in the final moments of life. On the other side, a human attempts to mimic the bug’s movements, hoping to erase, if only for a moment, the constructed hierarchy of life that places humans above all else. Closer is an expression of the complex and various relationships that humans have with nature. At once sublime and terrifying, nature exerts a magnetic pull over humans. Yet, food and housing technology physically separates us more each day. We satisfy the desire to get closer to nature through artificial means; images of grand vistas on our computer backgrounds, faux wood grain covering our coffee tables, and taxidermied animals on our walls. Photography and video counters this by making the natural world easily accessible through images.

Irena Pejovic: With Floor – A Moving Sensing Event (NJ) 8:19
Video recording of a moving-sensing event, walking on an uneven surface, wet and dry, soft and rough.

Jennifer Lauren Smith and Andrew Brehm: Triangle Circle Square (NY) 11:20
Triangle Circle Square is a multi channel collaborative video installation conceived by Andrew Brehm and Jennifer Lauren Smith. Three videographic vignettes, each depicting a geometric sculpture or shape inserted by the artists into a natural environment, play on the elements of chance in the attempt to collaborate with nature. Each forced juxtaposition of a man-made form and its corresponding element of air, land, or water also generates an independent instrumentation, so that the triptych of visual elements come together as if in a jam session or song. The soundtrack to the work was developed with Brooklyn-based recording artist Luz Fleming.

Rose Cleary: ayo (UK) 9:24
Within an increasingly online and technologically based society, identities are transcending the “real”, becoming virtual. This mirrors Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity prediction (that technology will alter the human race irreversibly through genetic augmentation). With new technologies taking a growing role in physical relationships (Tinder, Oculus Rift porn functions, etc) I want to examine the idea of the human physically merging with the machine, in a very human way – exploring touch, simulating sensuality. Acknowledging the connotations of this exploration as a video piece, how will a woman’s expression of desire be received?

Jennie Thwing: My Black Hole (NY) 8:12
My Black hole is an animated film about the artist’s creative process in the studio. It references personal history, ideology, social context, family mythologies and dreams. It was created at the Millay Artist Colony in August 2013.

Omri Harmelin: Rothko Ruth Truth (NY) 7:54
Trying to grab a feeling that has no shape yet exists, is a potential for imagination to appropriate and to animate a concept. We are pretty similar in our cores, more or less, that’s why this potential of imagination, can tap into everyone’s subconscious. An example is to ask kids: “Have you ever sat in your room and dreamed, well…not while you were asleep! That you have some kind of special power. Like being invisible or that you can move something only with your thoughts without having to touch anything”. In some level this whole potential meant to fail, yet as a feeling is completely tangible.

Nenad Milcevic: Replanting The Roots (Denmark) 7:13
Replanting the Roots deals with the condition of Uprootedness. One of the explanation is “to displace, as from a home or country; tear away, as from customs or a way of life”. ‘Uprootedness’ can be seen as a universal condition resulting from the destruction of ties with the past and the dissolution of community. ‘Uprootedness’ it is usually known as the product of forced migration. Uprooting is a painful phase in the life cycle, of individual and collectivity, when all the ties with its original soil are lost forever. Uprootedness does not only refer to refugees and immigrants but to anybody who due to the social or economical hardship was forced to cut the connection to its previous being.

Rodrigo Gratacós Brum: Rehearsal (IL) 11:59
Rehearsal (Plagiarism N4) is an experimental video based on Harold Pinter’s “The Dumb Waiter”. A performer is in a studio waiting for random people (selected through craigslist) to read with them a scene and then reenact it by heart.

Don Burton: A Deafening (Massachusetts) 5:53
Emerging from an unknown crevasse and expanding into context, A DEAFENING urges viewers to experience what our frenetic, contemporary world so often covers up – a sense of living presence in the “silent” corners of existence. A DEAFENING was completed with one shot in one-tenth of real time. Directed by Don Burton Voice talent: Leila Valoura and James Nee.

Kara Dunne: Ag dul sios an staighre (RI) 6:55
Dressed in 1950s ballroom attire, I make my way down staircase after staircase. I age as I make my descent. An ongoing work.

JiSun LEE: Roundworld (Paris/Korea) 6:40
The life of video, audio-visual and spatio-temporal, takes place with round, circular or spherical images of mutiple scales : the sleeping planet fed by the sunlight, small soap balls whose shape mixes with lighted bulbs full of memories, waterdrops watering the floor where the faces of people appear and physiognomy exchanges with others, the clockwork, and so on. These images are linked and followed in both linear and circular ways, that is to say with a logic sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious.

Emmy Mikelson: Neuronic Lagoon no.1 (NY) 6:00
The videos are shot using custom constructed aquariums and paintings from my ongoing series titled “Threshold Compositions.” The videos are influenced by the emergent philosophy of Speculative Realism – specifically the non-centrality of the human subject. The videos explore a speculative space in the post-anthropocene, in which life exists at an ambiguous scale and boundaries are tidal and spontaneous. The title is taken from J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World (1962).

Jessica Fenlon: monkeyBoy (IL) 5:37
Data decay animation; opening 30 seconds are silent. All digitally-destroyed looks are intentional, there’s nothing wrong with your computer.  Malaise.  How can you go to the job they say you have to have, when they don’t have one to give you. Something about blame, scapegoats, numbing out, getting lost.

Heejoo Kim: Unwearable functional garments II (OH) 5:05
Unwearable functional garments II: for three princesses is a single channel 3-d animation based on portraying the redesigned and reconstructed garments for three princesses: The Little Mermaid, Snow White, and Cinderella. They are the fairy tale characters who have their own dilemmas. The motion of fabric and design of garments reflect their predicaments and longings. The garments are synthetic and unwearable, but simultaneously they are delivering their fervent perplexity through artificial organic forms and gestures. Each garment is expanding and contracting. They are inhaling and exhaling, and floating and emitting. I specifically conceptualize the sentimental aspects of the stories. The sound track starts with a voice of little child from the classic opening words, “once upon a time…,” and gradually reveals the part of the stories we have hardly paid attention to. I chose excerpts from the sentences and words that manifest the crucial contents of the each fairy tale. In this piece, I re meditated the sorrow and serenity of the stories by manipulating imagination.

Sanja Hurem: The Passage (NY/Berlin) 4:51
The Passage is a journey that explores places and memories that resemble each other and yet are profoundly distinct. Shot in Berlin, Prague and Greece, the piece addresses the experience of the wanderer, the perpetual migrant who passes through stages of comforting familiarity and detached anonymity. Memories become activated and connected throughout places that are strikingly similar but still retain their distinct character. It’s an initiatory passage into a perception of “no home and at home everywhere”. Disorientation and dislocation become focal themes. We are ultimately asked to put together the puzzle pieces of our individual passages.

Drew Walker: Pinka River Party (Detroit) 4:01
In a scene of poetic song lyrics, footage from Walker’s film Masks in the Sun in montaged showing an encounter with a spirit figure named Pinka, who Walker calls “the spirit of Berlin’s Landwehrkanal.” The figure of Pinka is one of the key, mysterious figures among the main group of masked figures Walker calls “The Nound Spirits.” Walker has used the Pinka figure to allude to (among other things) German socialist heroine Rosa Luxembourg, who was murdered and thrown into the canal. Her body was found six months later. [This video is silent.]

Jane Turner: Things as they are, as they are in a dream (UK) 3:12
A short film made locally showing the coexistence of nature and culture. When I made this film I realized that the veil of culture does not conceal anything and that nature and culture exist both dependently and independently at the same time.

Eduardo Herrera: xxxlitanie (Italy) 3:01
xxxlitanie tries to create a kind of media prayer made of images, sounds and dimensions.

Graciela Cassel: Accelerate (NY) 2:48
“Accelerate”, shows the urban landscape while travelling but it is also a meditation about modern cities. In Accelerate, light and speed stream together. Light is the only thing that can achieve the highest speed. Light appears with contrasts and reflections and speed with its variations when increasing and decreasing the acceleration. Along this trip, our lives appear as real but also as a mirage.

Molly Edwards: Eating Salad (FL) 14:52
Curious about the role of the Camgirl on a live porn website, I decide to rattle its system somewhat. Before turning the camera on myself, I made a conscious decision to exercise absence in order to create a sense of endless expectation in my audience. I was highly aware of my telepresence; at once virtual and physical, both private, yet publicly exposed. This tension led me to feel simultaneously victimized and empowered. In feigning my ignorance of being recorded, my spectators grew increasingly agitated. They were being forced to recognize their physical self and depart from their virtual reality because of a “glitch” in the chatroom. The video I recorded sometimes freezes and the audio attached to the visual creates a strange dissonance. I was working within a real-time system yet everything lagged slightly three seconds behind my real-time actions and the viewers in the chatroom were forced into a perpetual anticipation of my performance.

Cole Lu: Super Sad True Love Story: Ex Factor (St. Louis, MO) 15:52
There’s nothing wrong with her except she’s completely fucked up. — Gary Shteyngart, “Super Sad True Love Story” Cole Lu’s SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY is just that: taking its title from Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 sci-fi novel — composed primarily of an email exchange between its protagonist and his Asian love-object — Lu’s exhibition sees the dissolution of a past relationship as the embodiment of his star-crossed dystopic future. Here, we find ourselves already and firmly in a world where relationships are experienced less in person than via exchange: of words and commodities, through Googlechat, IKEA order forms, and text-able brand slogans. Meaning is bought and ordered but rarely received, and one’s sense of self is a scripted and curated projection. The most significant loss of all is undoubtably that of true emotion, as we cry through song lyrics and get lost in the pricey mess of too much stuff. Super-sad, indeed: Lu perceives our insatiable desire for contact as a series of misapprehensions, where feelings are best confirmed through accumulations in inboxes, storage facilities and virtual accounts. — Jessica Baran

Hye Young Kim: Blue Hysteria (NC) 2:35
I question how to define and who decides normality/abnormality in female bodies by creating a series of hysterical actions with Barbie doll as a metaphor of an idealized, regulated and stereotyped female body. In Blue Hysteria, I tried to transform hysterical female bodies from inappropriate and uncontrolled psychological disorder to refusal to be a beautiful object and resistance against body regulation like flapping the wings for entire freedom.