A textural experience in layers, scars and deterioration that combines hand processed, tinted and toned 16mm imagery. Both sight and sound ooze and emulate those tangible tremors catalyzed by increasing awareness of loss and decay. Footage created at the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm) in Mt. Forest, Ontario, Canada. (Jeremy Moss)
SOON (2014) by Jeanne Liotta; digital video, color, sound, 7 minutes, bay area premiere
Soon it would be too hot. Taking its title from the first line of JG Ballard’s climate-fiction novel The Drowned World (1962) which vividly describes a dystopic future Earth, Soon utilizes original imagery and the most current Greenland and CO2 data visualizations to consider the ongoing state of melting Arctic sea ice due to the warming of air and oceans caused by our carbon emissions. This is a non-narrative media work visualizing the connection between human presence and the finite resources of planet Earth. We are as ephemeral as shadows but carbon emissions are eternal.
Soon was commissioned for a unique science/art collaborative think tank for projection on NOAA’s Science on a Sphere, a 360º global platform for earth science education. Premiered at the Fiske Planetarium, Boulder CO, April 2014. A project of NOAA SOS, and Eco ARts Connections with funding from CIRES, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.” (Jeanne Liotta)
DANCING GLITCH (2013) by Michael Betancourt; digital video, color, sound, 3 minutes
Loie Fuller, the American choreographer and dancer, was an early inspiration for Cubist abstraction with her Serpentine Dance; her performance in Vue Lumière no. 76 (1896) provided the original source material for this visual music work. An extended discussion of the production of this movie can be read in OtherZine no. 25.
L'ENTRE DEUX (2013) by Karl Lemieux; 16mm, b&w, sound, 4 minutes, bay area premiere
The images in L’entre deux are long-exposure experiments that were made while walking around at three different times and cities with a super-16mm camera. It’s inspired by the work of street photographer Michael Ackerman. The soundtrack is from the Swedish avant-garde music composer BJ Nilsen.
SAYRE'S VAPOR (2013) by Karissa Hahn; digital video, b&w, sound, 1 minute, world premiere
“She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.”
CONJECTURES (2013) by Pablo Mazzolo; digital video, b&w, sound, 4 minutes, bay area premiere
Conjectures about the animal that bumps into itself, aims for big things, and gets sick of it all.
AS NEAR AS LIGHT (2014) by Susan DeLeo; digital video, color, sound, 2 minutes, world premiere
As Near as Light is a visual haiku of an ephemeral and potent journey into the realm of the unconscious through hand-manipulated super-8mm film converted to digital. It serves to create a hypnotic state of reverie in the viewer.
SECOND SIGHTED (2014) by Deborah Stratman; digital video, color, sound, 5 minutes, bay area premiere
Obscure signs portend a looming, indecipherable slump. An oracular decoding of the landscape. Made in collaboration with composer Olivia Block, and by invitation of the Chicago Film Archives, utilizing solely films from their collection.
THE GOLDEN HOUR (2014) by Ross Meckfessel; digital video, color, sound, 7 minutes, bay area premiere
The stink of seaweed permeates the streets. I’ve heard there’s growing dissatisfaction among the youth. Do you feel content? How often do you dream? Are you better off alone?
LABORAT (2014) by Guillaume Cailleau; digital video, color, sound, 21 minutes, bay area premiere
A mouse is put to sleep, operated on, scanned in MRI, vivisected. It dies. It is a standard procedure in a lab, a meticulous routine. Single gestures are repeated over and over again. It is impossible to tell them apart, as it is impossible to tell apart, or count, the mice subject to them. A small film crew documents the work of the lab crew. Both crews follow their own protocol, preoccupied by their tools, their repeated actions. A film is constructed which documents scientific experiments, but also experiments with its own complicity in the procedures: it dissects itself and makes its own structure apparent. Between the lines, the distance to the object is lifted. The object becomes the subject, the viewer an accomplice. The images are seductive, the discomfort overwhelming.
JENNY HANIVER (2014) by Stephen Broomer; 16mm, b&w, silent, 16 minutes, world premiere
A photographer steadies a Polaroid camera and composes a shot of the sky, flanked by tree branches. Later, a woman wakes from a nightmare. Jenny Haniver takes its title from a cryptid totem sold for centuries at the docks of Antwerp: a Jenny Haniver or jeune d’anvers (young girl of Antwerp) is a disfigured ray or skate carcass, carved to resemble an angel, a devil, a dragon. A series of ten filmed portraits are subject to all manner of alteration. To mirror its namesake, the film’s plastic properties have been carved, lacerated, bleached, otherwise stressed, reshaped to transform reality into the fantastic and unknowable.