Saturday, April 25, DAY SESSION: 2pm – 5pm
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minds focus on fragments of the original experiences – sometimes these visions warp the event to the point where they no longer represent the event but create an alternative version, a dream-like new reality that can influence our present selves.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.