Revolutions per Minute festival, an artist run festival, is dedicated to short-form poetic, personal, cinematic work in experiments, essay film, animation, documentary, video and audiovisual performance.

Schedule

September 27, 2023

7:00 pm : RPM Solo Artist: Vincent Grenier

Vincent Grenier is a native of Quebec City, Canada. He has lived largely in the US, mostly New York City and upstate New York. In spite of this, he was a frequent contributor to the Montreal art scene of the 70’s and 80’s and the San Francisco bay areas where he received an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 70's.
Grenier's experimental films and videos have earned numerous awards and have shown in North America, Europe and China at major museums, showcases and festivals.
Grenier has made over two dozens films and since 1990 as many videos. His work was the subject of retrospectives at Media City film Festival, Windsor, Ontario and Images Film & Video Festival's Canadian Images Spotlight, in Toronto.
One of his video, Tabula Rasa, was screened in the “Best Avant Garde Films & Videos of the Decade” (2000-2010) program at the Lincoln Center, NYC and his recent work Watercolor received the Stellar award for Experimental Works at the Black Maria Film & Video Festival and the First Prize, experimental category, at the Athens Film Festival, Ohio.
For many years one of his video has screened each year at Views from the Avant Garde section of the New York Film Festival.
He has received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2010 and the Stan Brakhage Vision Award in 2019. He lives in Ithaca NY and teaches at nearby Binghamton University.

Tabula Rasa

Re-scanned to FHD /2K format 8-20-2018

Filmed in a South Bronx high-school, Tabula Rasa attempts through sound image juxtapositions, digital manipulation and layering to deal at once with the propensity to mislead and eloquence of the recorded image. The ambiguous qualities of appearances, so assiduously cultivated by institutions, the motivations found in the clues that tells the history of objects, colors, textures, architecture and ultimately, psychological states of mind are but some of the players in this poetic and cultural happening.

Mend

Is it happening in the screening room or on the screen; in a snowstorm or inside; what isn't surrounding and what is? From filming Ann sewing, on a grey winter day.

Time’s Wake

A collection of 'windows' on a personal past, TIME'S WAKE (once removed) is made from home movie and other types of footage I collected through the years when I went back to visit my parents at l'Ile d'Orléans, Québec. Through the use of the double exposure, fragmentation, motion and stillness are linked with memory. -VG.

Tremors

Tall buildings and cars are filmed through the Kinemacolor process, variable color filters and a water lens. Sturdiness jousts with fragility, past with present, alienation with tenderness, abrasiveness with sensuality, red with green. (The Kinemacolor process was used in 19l5 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black and white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized, red and green filters.) -VG.

YOU

No I? Should separate worlds be mixed? Knowing what one wants. The absurd and the hurt. Images for what you did.

Surface Tension

This film was shot in color but using the Kinemacolor process, a process which was used in 1915 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black and white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized red and green filters.

Color Study

“It is interesting to think about Color Study in relation to the purely cinematic-photochemical nature of a work like Kurt Kren’s Asyl with its multiplicity of delicate composite imagery and overlapping seasons that create a feeling of all time being simultaneous. In Asyl, solar light cohabitates with the film - the emulsion receives singes and burns that inscribe the image and are reconstituted in projection as muted radiance. In Color Study, a cat’s eye like chatoyancy of splattered color, the precise mimicry of natural color combined with unnatural color fields, creates and breaks illusion. Color manufactures a kind of implied time lapse where it does not technically exist. A spatial jigsaw, combining the autumnal and the verdant. The invented light and color of the digital process creating an acid wash.” -- Mark McElhatten

Wishbone

The basis of Wishbone is a still life on a tabletop near a window. In addition to a small figurine of a Buddha-like weightlifter, and a nondescript glass prism, the composition is anchored by the titular wishbone. It is situated inside two different drinking glasses, its branches contained as it tapers into a juncture that hovers between both containers. But this still life doesn't remain still for long. Grenier overlays the tabletop with a flowing river, complete with a rower in a tiny kayak.
– Michael Sicinski

Moonrise

A wild montage of everyday sounds that impersonate rain drops, anthropomorphize eyeballs floaters.

COMMUTE

Distinct fields on the same screen, foreground each other, invite comparisons, between different times and spaces, and the constructed and natural processes that inescapably defines us thru textures and emotional spaces. Commute does refer to regular travels between one place and an other, but also to substitutions, and exchanges.

While Revolved

Restored version with soundtrack by Etienne Grenier An elusive film that highlights, in a series of movements, the magnified chemical soup of the emulsion as the camera lens is trained on both a closely foregrounded granular surface and a complex set of sinking, rising and emerging spaces behind it, subtly shaped by the focusing abilities of shadows. Sound introduce other layers and ideas about movement and space bringing new understandings and articulations to this sculpture like cinema.

September 28, 2023

7:00 pm : Illuminations

Rhythm 23 - Hans Richter

"More complex than RHYTHM 21, the film is nonetheless a logical extent of Richter's conviction that film is modern art. Again, the orchestration of basic geometric forms according to precise rhythmical.

Hans Richter was a German abstract painter, filmmaker and avant-gardist. He was a member of the Dada art movement and created one of the early and influential examples of abstract film, Rhythmus 21.

RED HOUSE - Barry Doupé

RED HOUSE is an animation that playfully explores metamorphosis in relation to the stability and structure of housing. Created using the AMIGA computer console and Deluxe Paint IV software, hand drawn sequences delight in the constant reconfiguration of images, characters and forms.

Barry Doupé (b. 1982 Victoria, BC) is a Vancouver based artist primarily working with computer animation. His films use imagery and language derived from the subconscious; developed through writing exercises and automatic drawing. His films have been screened throughout Canada and Internationally including the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor, Michigan), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), Anthology Film Archives (NY, New York), Lyon Contemporary Art Museum (Lyon, France), Pleasure Dome (Toronto, ON), MOCCA (Toronto, ON), Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC), and the Tate Modern (London, UK).

Just Untitled - Alessandra Vorontsova

16mm cameraless handmade film. The soundtrack is the materials used to create this film.

Alessandra Vorontsova is a multidisciplinary artist mainly working in stills, film and installation pieces. Analog and digital methods are often used to pose questions about the way we do things and why. The work seeks to be a source of contemplation of media consumption in current times.

Under the Midnight Sun - Mélissa Faivre

"Under the Midnight Sun" is a dance of light and shadows, textured grayscale expanding across the landscape of an apocalyptic city. The sun is moon and light. It unveils itself by means of visual pulsating dynamics, unstable frequencies and vibrating rhythms; until it disintegrates into particles and pixels, and vanishes into darkness. This visual-musical piece is dark, worrying and calls to sensorial explorations into deeper energies.

Mélissa Faivre, born 1989 in France, is an experimental video artist based in Berlin. Her rhythmic and mesmerizing work seeks to provoke questions on the nature of perception. The images she creates present blended and distorted realities that test the temporal and spatial coordinates foundational to the perceptive experience. Working only in digital format, her practice often pushes the aesthetic boundaries between film and video.

Like a Lighthouse - Richard Tuohy

A blinding beam of light. The piercing sound of ships. Everything - the land, plants, the sky - shouts for attention. Perceptions assail us with their demands to be noticed.

Richard Tuohy is one of the most active experimental film artists currently working on celluloid in Australia. His film IRON-WOOD won first prize (ex aequo) at Abstracta 2009 experimental film festival in Rome. He runs Nanolab in Australia – the specialist small gauge film processing laboratory. He actively encourages other artists to work with cine film through his Artist Film Workshop initiative (see artistfilmworkshop.org). He is also a founding director of the Australian International Experimental Film Festival.

Grain Cloud Atmosphere - Martin Moolhuijsen

Many grains make a cloud. many clouds form an atmosphere.
120 meters of handpainted 35mm film were digitized as single pictures and fed into a self developed editing software that shuffles the individual images according to certain parameters such as painterly technique and color. the film is the result of one hour of improvisation with that software. grain cloud atmosphere explores the perception of time through the eye and through the ear.

martin moolhuijsen is an italian intermedia artist based in berlin. his work is situated at the threshold of sound art, experimental film and experimental poetry and has taken the form of installations, fixed-media pieces, conceptual artworks, poems, signs, films and of any combination of the aforementioned. his work has been presented at akademie der künste, deutschlandfunk kultur, ZKM – zentrum für kunst und medien and CTM vorspiel among others. he is a member of the analog film lab LaborBerlin

Arcalis - Youjin Moon

A cosmic panorama of dazzling silver forms and specks of light unfolds, conjuring a utopian vision. The viewer is led on a quest for paradise in shades of green and fantasies of unknown space.

Youjin Moon is a South Korean artist based in Boston. Moon has shown her work at national and international film festivals and exhibitions, including the deCordova New England Biennial, the 56th Ann Arbor Film Festival, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, and the Biennial of the Moving Image, Buenos Aires. Moon received the Korean EXiS Award at the 12th and 16th Seoul International Experimental Film and Video Festival. Her works have been featured in the Boston Globe and Art New England, among others.

Parts - Michael Lyons

This camera-less silent film examines parts and wholes. Electronic components were photogrammed on 16mm print stock. Displacements in time and space assemble the parts into an abstract dynamic gestalt.

Michael Lyons is a researcher and artist based in Kyoto, Japan.

Water Mining (Eaton Canyon) - Kate Lain

Water Mining (Eaton Canyon) is a nature document(ary) made *with* a stream, rather than about it. Its images come from a combination of cyanotype, a blue-and-white photographic process dating back to the 1840s, and actual plant material adhered to physical film. I hand-coated clear 16mm leader with cyanotype chemicals, then used sunlight to make photogram-style, cameraless exposures of plant matter I had gathered in and around the stream in Eaton Canyon. Cyanotypes are processed using water, and for this film, I used stream water that I had also collected from the canyon. I approached the film as though the stream, what was in it, its surroundings, the film, the chemicals, and I were all extensions of one another.

Kate Lain is a Los Angeles–area multidisciplinary artist working in film, video, clay, and other media. Her experimental film and video work verges on documentary and spans a wide range—from essay film to stopmotion collage to impressionist portraiture. Her works have screened at festivals, microcinemas, museums, and other spaces across North America and Europe.

In the Wind - Yue Hua

“In the wind” is a thought experiment on Found footage attempts to decipher myself and my experience of the physical world around me. By linking my senses through sound and images, I establish my connection to this diverse and ever-changing world. Walking In the wind is also a state that I try to maintain in the post-epidemic era, a state of confronting the world and maintaining myself - "everything happens, dissipates in the wind, and I observe, experience, feel, and keep walking.

Yue Hua is an emerging artist and filmmaker based in Boston, focusing on visual storytelling and intermedia artwork. She loves using celluloid films to explore themes of the female, identity, spiritual and physical world. She holds a BFA from the China Academy of Art and is currently completing an MFA in Film and Media Art at Emerson College.

Potemkin Piece - Justin Clifford Rhody

A collaborative deconstruction/destruction of a Battleship Potemkin 35mm trailer created through the mail during lockdown with nearly 100 participants. Each person was sent half-second long strips of the film to manipulate as they saw fit. Once returned, they were spliced together in a new sequence creating a chance-driven score from the optical soundtrack. A messy and exciting experiment in montage and cut up techniques made by a diverse cast including found footage maestro Craig Baldwin and my high school girlfriend.

Justin Clifford Rhody (b. 1984, Flint Michigan) is a fine art photographer, filmmaker and sound artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

9:00 pm : RECOLLECTIONS

A Companion for Amateur Cinematographers: Vol. I - Federico Di Corato

Set against the backdrop of Italy in the years of the fascist dictatorship, a man of means, yet unknown to history, scrutinises the world through his small cine camera. Guiding him and teaching him is a manual; the buds of ideology are detectable beneath the seemingly impartial tone it uses to describe technique. But in his films, the ineffable signs of resistance still rise to the surface.

Production Companies: Enece Film, Lab 80 Film Made with: Footage from the Augusto Gandini Collection (Archivio Cinescatti – Lab 80 Film) Development supported by: Re-framing Home Movies, Vide?adoc

Born in Andria in 1991, he lives in Milan. He graduated from the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA), where he now teaches film editing. He is one of the founding partners of the Re-framing Home Movies association, which works to safeguard and promote amateur film heritage. He has directed three short films. “The Shack” and “(s)words” both explore the theme of private memory, through the aesthetic of video tape devices; both were presented in competition at the Locarno Film Festival. “A Companion for Amateur Cinematographers: Vol. I” is the result of his research into Fascist-era manuals for amateur cine enthusiasts; it was presented in competition at the Venice Film Festival.

Golden Headacher - Niina Suominen

An experimental animation documentary about women’s hate and aggression and the culturally sanctioned ways to express or suppress these uneasy feelings. The film was created by animating textile and décor waste and beautiful glossy pictures of children that were popular in Scandinavia in the last century. The work brings to the fore the irritation and exhaustion felt by women and the thoughts often left unsaid outside the walls of home, as well as reflecting on the remorse and the shame felt after the bursts of anger.

Niina Suominen graduated from the Arts Academy at Turku in 2004. She also has an education of a blacksmith, animal nurse and a forest worker. She works as a film director and media artist using traditional animation techniques requiring hand-work. Her works have been shown widely at the festivals both in Finland and abroad. She lives and works in Southwest Finland.

Broadcasting from home - Mariano Ramis

Broadcasting from home, was created while reflecting about the perplexity of loss and the human desire to communicate with the afterlife.
The video was manufactured using frame-by-frame analog transfer technique and digital post-production.

Born in San Pedro, Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1979.
Mariano Ramis is an Image and Sound Designer from the Faculty of Architecture and Design of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, preparing thesis on video montage through Artificial Intelligence. As an artist he specializes in frame by frame experimentation on moving image recording, mixed image transfer techniques and music. His work has been exhibited in festivals, museums and salons in Argentina, America and Europe.

The Winter of Eternity - Patrick Müller

What's the meaning of life? How do I find my way? In his existential philosophy work CITADELLE, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry posthumously gives us uncomfortable answers.
A few years ago I visited the citadel on the island of Gozo and immediately remembered Antoine de St. Exupéry's posthumously published existential philosophy work CITADELLE. I had read the text fifteen years ago and, because of its radical nature and mysterious beauty, I never forgot one passage in particular that dealt with the meaning of life. I took my Super 8 camera and filmed my associations. The soundtrack finally succeeded in 2022: Valérie Hendrich spoke the text and four young musicians based in Chemnitz, Germany, composed the music (In 2023 they even won the first prize at "Jugend musiziert" festival in Berlin for their score).

Patrick Müller, born in 1981 in Frankenberg, GDR, has made more than 40 short films, primarily with 8 and 16mm film, seeking to explore poetry within moving images. His experimental works have screened at numerous film festivals around the world and won several awards.

The End of the World - Ali Aschman

How do we relate to the concept of climate catastrophe on a personal level? The filmmaker draws a parallel between various threats of climate change and her own visceral and emotional experience of grieving after an immense and sudden loss, questioning her capacity to care about humanity yet nonetheless showing a glimmer of hope for the future.

Ali Aschman is a London-based artist from South Africa and the United States, making experimental animated short films. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries in the US and screened at festivals worldwide. She has studied at the University of Cape Town, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Royal College of Art. She is the Pathway Leader for Animation & Film at Cambridge School of Visual and Performing Arts.

Postlude - Roger Deutsch

"Would I lie to you? All I do is dream of you."
"Don't"

Roger Deutsch is an American who lives in Hungary. He entered the realm of film 40 years ago as the producer of the punk classic “Blank Generation” featuring Richard Hell and the Voidoids.

Khorosho - Dominic Angerame

In June 1999 dear friends Agnetta Falk and Jack Hirschman were married at Matt Gonzales' place in the Mission. I was there with my 16mm Bolex and filmed part of the ceremony and crowd. After almost 30 years I finally made this footage into a finished film. It features many of our dear friends both living and deceased. In honor of Jack and Aggie's wedding anniversary I finished the film over the weekend.

Dominic Angerame's works search for unfamiliar views of seemingly familiar things: cities, landscapes, faces, and bodies. The filmmaker's desire to make everyday images "strange" at the editing table, to learn to see them fresh and to estrange them from our senses, makes his films seem-in all the different social realities they contain-always distanced as well, as if they led to another world beyond the concrete, beyond time and defined space. In Angerame's films, which pay homage to films from early cinema and the classic avant garde to American underground films of the 1960s and 70s and non-narrative films of the present day, an amazingly comprehensive history of the "visionary" moving image is always present. It may be that precisely his refusal to adopt a signature style has diminished the immediate influence of Angerame's films; however, Angerame's decision to work "universally," not to be swayed by considerations of the art market, and to experiment with very different styles increases the pedagogical worth of his films. It's not surprising to learn that Angerame, born in 1949, teaches at several American schools in addition to having served as the executive director of the American avant garde distribution center Canyon Cinema from 1980 to 2012.

Tarantula - Tomás Orrego

When hungry, the black gloved tarantula crawls out of its crypt to feed. The pale flesh of innocent bodies it takes into dark corners to *********.

Tomás Orrego (Lima 1991) is a filmmaker, designer, visual artist, and musician with studies in architecture. Through digital animation, sound design and video installation, his work embraces the drowsy consciousness of dreams.

White Shoes - Simone Bethancourt

A memory told from the perspective of a little girl meeting her father for the first time, and the gift he gives her before disappearing.

Simone Bethancourt graduated from the Calarts in 2022. White shoes is her thesis project.

September 29, 2023

6:00 pm : DECOMPOSITION

Radiant Forms - Ryan Marino

Luminous forms merging in time.

Ryan Marino is an interdisciplinary artist working with film, sound, and collage. His 16mm films explore the ethereality of time, light, and space. His 16mm films have screened at film festivals and venues including: Anthology Film Archives, New York Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Uplink (Tokyo), Venice Biennale, Fracto Experimental Film Encounter, Spectacle Theater,? and Pacific Film Archive. In addition to creating the soundtracks for his own films, his sound work includes original compositions and commissioned soundtracks for short films and theater productions. By day he works as an audiovisual archivist.

Konstantin - Hogan Seidel

Konstantin is an experimental film shot on high-contrast black and white 16mm film using a single 100ft reel. The film is an in-camera edit with triple exposures, creating a layered and complex visual language. Through this aesthetic, the piece explores themes of queer love and queer ecology. It invites the viewer to enter a unique and poetic world, where the boundaries between the human and natural realms blur and merge. Pushing against human exceptionalism & into a world where there is no ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural.’
Can a walk in the forest, a kiss between lovers, a roll of film, the touch lichen, liberate ourselves from these hierarchies?

Born and raised in the American South, Hogan Seidel is an interdisciplinary artist with a creative presence in Boston and Seattle. Their moving image art has been featured in prestigious festivals, including Alchemy, Analogica, Onion City, and Istanbul Experimental. Their work has been shown at museums and galleries such as the Belvedere Contemporary Art Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Boston Center for the Arts, Cyber Arts New Media Gallery, Fountain Street Gallery, and the Clemente. Hogan has received funding and support for their work from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Collective Futures, and the United States Artists Grant. They are a recent alum of the Studios at MASS MoCA Artist Residency.

Ill Composto - Moviate (Josh Drake, James Hollenbaugh, Jeremy Moss, Caleb Smith)

A collaborative Dadaist/exquisite corpse film on the theme of waste by four members of the Harrisburg-based collective Moviate.
Process: A found, expired 100’ roll of 16mm color negative film was split into four parts and photographed separately by each participant. Then each section was developed in a homemade b&w developer from the participant’s own compostable waste. The negative was then printed to 16mm color print stock on a makeshift DIY contact printer along with found optical sound. Lastly, it was assembled in the Dadaist poetry method by cutting the printed film into pieces, placing them into a large wooden box with holes, randomly pulling strips of film out through the holes one at a time and splicing them together in that order.

Moviate is a filmmaker-run curatorial collective based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Exaggerations - Charles de Agustin

A supernatural road trip in the Scottish village of Foyers, the American hamlet of Grovers Mill, and reading breaks in an Amsterdam film library. We try to pick at belief and clarity. Difficulties between loving your work, working at loving, making a living. Language piles up, crashes down, and maybe becomes something else.

Charles de Agustin is an artist primarily making films, performances, and texts which playfully scavenge in the ruins of critique and complicity. Influenced by essay/diary cinema traditions, de Agustin finds value in making a caricature out of the didactic, working toward better questions about the insidious forms of violence that impact our attempts at leading ethical lives.

electric moonlight & the language within the leaves - Takahiro Suzuki


a modern re-telling of the japanese tale of the bamboo cutter and the moon princess. the moon princess listens to the untold intelligence of the cosmos as observed by the trees to become closer with and eventually return home.

Takahiro Suzuki (he/him/his) is an artist currently residing in Portland, ME (USA). He completed his BA in Studio Art from the University of Virginia concentrating in the media of photography and cinematography, and received his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

de-composition - Laura Kraning

A textural macro collage of a rust belt landscape- scratched, splattered, dripping, cracking, and bursting to the surface. Photographed and meticulously edited over one year in Buffalo, NY, the reverberant tones of the New York Central rail line provide the rhythmic pulse to a rapid cascade of multi-hued material decay and metallic de-composition.

Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates landscape as a repository for memory, cultural mythology, and the technological sublime. Exploring absence and the fluidity of time, she evokes liminal spaces of neither past, nor present, but a landscape of the imagination. Laura’s work has screened widely at international film festivals, such as New York, Rotterdam, London, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Antimatter, Visions du Réel, and Festival du Nouveau Cinema, among others. She is a recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation John H. Johnson Film Award, the Leon Speakers Award and Jury Awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award at the Athens International Film and Video Festival and the Jury Award for Short Film at Rencontres Internationales Sciences et Cinémas.

8:00 pm : Bodies in Motion

Three Approaches - Ethan Osman

Three Approaches is collection of three animated dance performances by Ethan Osman, with sound by Carrie Neumayer. Each piece explores a different process or approach. Ethan uses the human form to explore movement without visual references or dance experience, embodying the 'dancers' to somatically explore the possibilities of movement, one frame at a time. While working on the first approach, Ethan met musician and visual artist, Carrie, who shared love for process oriented artwork and ‘chance’ operation, particularly the collaborations between John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Ethan and Carrie's collaboration began with the mantra, “whatever you make will be perfect.” This climate of safety also formed an intentional practice of allowing the other person to become the ‘chance’ element in each other’s process. For the second approach, Carrie made the music first for Ethan to ‘dance’ to. For the third approach, Carrie and Ethan developed a time code adapted from a text message conversation to compose/choreograph to.

"I make handmade animated films and studies. By intuitively following each film's process without preliminary sketches or editing out mistakes, the films serve as a document of their own process. Ideas, mood, and focus shift each time I enter the studio. These subtleties are evident when each image is sequenced at 12 frames per second, and months of work can be condensed into moments. Similar to AI generated art, my work starts with following a process (algorithm) that often uses prompts, but the work holds all its meaning in being made by hand with life wrapped up in its process." -- Ethan Osman

Virtual Spectres - Sarah Boo

Virtual Spectres combines scrolling social media feeds with incomplete body scans, situating them together in 3D space. Moving patterns emerge when layers of TikTok footage are superpositioned and the silhouettes of their creators briefly occupy the same time and space, being swiped together and then away. The video ruminates on our existence as cyborgs in a state of the in-between and everywhere. How does it feel to have body-consciousness that is stretched between macro spaces and virtual spaces, duplicated between flesh organs and corporately owned data centers across the world?

Sarah is a Toronto-based multimedia artist who spent her formative years immersed in virtual worlds of various shapes and sizes. Her internet and video works aim to make sense of her experiences of memory, space, and time in a techno-capitalist society. Recently, she has spent much of her time thinking about online sound environments and their ability to foster digital intimacy. She is currently in the Digital Futures program at OCAD University.


Busy - Jan Otto Ertesvåg

The reality of beach snails is not that much different from human lives, filled with an intricate interplay of social interaction and solitude, curiosity about the world and its rigid rules, fleetingness of life and the resilience to go on.

Jan Otto Ertesvåg (Norway, 1969) holds an MA in Animation from the Royal College of Art in London (1997). His films have been screened and awarded worldwide. After 12 years of animating and directing in a variety of animation styles in Oslo, he is now based in Aalesund on the northwest coast of Norway where he continues developing and producing his own abstract stories. He now makes both animated and live action films outdoors in the scenery. Over the recent years he has made a trilogy "from the shore", directing awareness towards lifeforms and civilization.

Two Boys and a Dream - Casey Carter

Two young boys on a small farm explore the woods, tell stories about monsters on the moon, and recount their scariest dreams, while their father and mother take care of the garden and chickens, reflecting on their own fears and convictions. Recorded on HD, mini-dv, and super-8 cameras, the imagery slips formats as the film follows a dreamlike structure that morphs from an observational portrait to a psychological family diary - meditating on the tensions between familial intimacy, sentimentality, fear, and vulnerability. The mini-dv and super-8 formats invoke generations of home-movie making, collapsed into a portrait detached in time. A curious intimacy suggests the filmmaker may be part of the family too.

CASEY CARTER is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary designer and researcher whose work engages nonfiction storytelling in film, photography, data visualization, and cartography. His photographs have been published and exhibited in the U.S., Ecuador, and China. He was a 2017-2018 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio Fellow. He holds bachelors degrees in both physics and photography from Middle Tennessee State University and a Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan.

Three Pride Flags - Tom Bessoir

Inspired by the joint Jasper Johns retrospective exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Philadelphia Museum of Art, I created three permutating pride flags.

Tom Bessoir’s experimental films often use mathematics and randomness to explore perception and the structure of cinema.
Tom was born and raised in the Astoria section of Queens in New York City in 1957. From there he commuted by subway to attended The Bronx High School of Science. Tom studied mathematics and electrical engineering at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. While attending the Engineering School, he took advantage of Art School classes, focusing on film theory and studying experimental filmmaking with Robert Breer. In the late 1970s, he started photographing the downtown music scene. His photographs have appeared on dozens of records as well as in films, books, magazines, and newspapers.

The Only Photograph of Emily Dickinson, American Poet - Dennis Tupicoff

As the "slant of light" comes and goes in a Massachusetts studio c1850, Emily summons up an English poet from an earlier age. Her playful vision of love and life ends in the unique photograph of Dickinson that survives today.

Dennis has made many award-winning films as writer, director, producer, and animator: fiction and documentary, animated and live-action, comedy and drama – and often inventive combinations. He has also been a full-time lecturer at the VCA School of Film and Television in Melbourne, and has taught and conducted workshops in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.

Site of Passage - Lucy Kerr

In a mysterious room shrouded in darkness, six young women, through the possibilities of their imaginations, conjure a series of ritual games. By the end of their playful rite, the interwoven bodies, levitating, appear to become one.

Lucy Kerr (b. Houston, Texas 1990) is a filmmaker, artist, choreographer, and educator. Her work is rooted in questions of image-making and performance and how both of these are tied up with ritual and transformation. Kerr received and MFA in Film/Video and Art from California Institute of the Arts in 2020. In 2022, she was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film in Filmmaker Magazine. Her debut feature film, Family Portrait, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2023 and garnered her the Locarno Boccalino d'Oro for Best Director, the feature film grant from Austin Film Society and the AirFrance Prize from FIDLab, and the New Horizons Award from US in Progress at the American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. Her short film, Crashing Waves, is in the permanent collection of Frac Provence-Alpes-Co?te d'Azur in Marseille, France. Kerr’s projects have been presented by International Film Festival Rotterdam, FIDMarseille, San Sebastian International Film Festival, Reykjavik International Film Festival, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, REDCAT, Anthology Film Archives, Francois Ghebaly Gallery, The McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, and others.

Endearing Insanity - Poyen Wang

Employing the genres of horror and erotica, Endearing Insanity navigates the threshold where sensuality and terror meet. Staged within a small apartment kitchen, the seemingly ragged protagonist constrained in various enclosed spaces such as a cabinet, microwave, and sink, performs a monologue waiting for someone to visit. By utilizing the sensual as a tool, the protagonist calls the viewer to enter their intimate realm, gaining agency in a displaced environment. Hovering between the sincere and the absurd, the seductive and the repellant, Endearing Insanity reflects the longing for connection and the desire for visibility.

Poyen Wang is an artist and filmmaker, born and raised in Taiwan and currently based in New York City. Informed by his queer and immigrant experience, his recent work employs the languages of performance art and cinema, and uses 3D computer graphics to create still and moving images, grappling with issues of identity, sexuality and masculinity through a psychological lens.
He has had solo exhibitions at Essex Flowers, New York; Taipei Digital Art Center, Taiwan; 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles; Flux Factory, New York; and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. He teaches full-time at the Hunter College Department of Film and Media Studies.

Bodies #1: Milwaukee Waters - Michelle Trujillo

Bodies 1: Milwaukee Waters is the first installation in a series shot on 16mm film that explores the magic and life of public bodies of water. Images for this film were collected from the Milwaukee River, a community pond and the shoreline of Lake Michigan (Milwaukee Bay area). Throughout the 1800s, the Milwaukee River was used to carry sewage into Lake Michigan. The many tanneries, breweries and other industries lining the water, poured their waste into the river without any water treatment. Much work has gone into cleaning the water in the past decades and into removing dams, and flow barriers to increase fish passage. Much progress has been made and the water is much cleaner and safer than it used to be. However, the Milwaukee River Basin is still considered an area of concern (AOC). The main concern is the contaminants in the riverbed sediment such as PCBs, PAHs and heavy metals. My film focuses on the beauty found and restored within this area. My acknowledgement of this dirty past and work to be done stands in the recurring smoke stacks found within the film.

September 30, 2023

2:00 pm : Traces

Dehumanized - Louis Brückner

"Dehumanized" is an experimental short film, in which the peace of the dead in a military cemetery is disturbed with loud war noises. The camera itself becomes a weapon.
"The truth of war in a nutshell. Without words, but everything is said."
Holger Janke, Pastor

Louis Brückner has been making films since 2013, starting in high school. Afterwards, he completed an apprenticeship as a Technical Design Assistant. During the traininghe developed his obsession with experimental and animated films. Since 2020 he is studying "Film & Sound" at the FH Dortmund.
My vision is to break new ground with passion and experimentation. - Louis Brückner

Here where everything ends - Cláudia CÁRDENAS & JUCE FILHO

Here where everything ends is a poetic and experimental short-film, that travels in between documentary and fiction to approach a culture faced with extinction: the indegeonous peoples of Brazil. It is particularly about the sharing of knowledge of the Bugio village, and made in a collective way in every stage of 16mm footage, botanical revelation and sound caption. It tries to reactivate the memories of the origins of the Laklãnõ/Xokleng people, while observing what is lost with the alienation of their knowledge and culture practiced by colonialism.

Cláudia Cárdenas (Rio de Janeiro, 1961) is an experimental audiovisual artist. Cláudia develops research work in video, film and experimental audio, as well as in the creation of experimental audiovisual works at Duo Strangloscope. She is also the creator and curator of Strangloscope – International Conference on Audio, Video / Film and Experimental Performance, which this year was in its 14th edition. Cláudia and Rafael, as Duo Strangloscope, started to carry out workshops and tutorials in experimental residencies in video both in Brazil and abroad for festivals around the world. They research has currently focused on experimental works with video art, expanded cinema and installation performances of different natures and in different supports.

This World - George Ferrandi

During a visit to the National Aquarium in Baltimore, my 90 year-old mom attempts to repeat after me the lines of Mary Oliver’s “This World,” a poem about the impossibility of writing a poem focusing on something in the world that isn’t special—because as soon as we focus on anything in the natural world, its special-ness becomes evident. My mom’s endearing fumbles in front of starfish and sharks demonstrate—with charming humor and poignancy— another level of truth in the premise of the poem.

George Ferrandi is an American interdisciplinary artist known for her performance, installation and participatory projects that address issues of vulnerability, impermanence, fallibility and spectacle, often through experimental approaches to narrative.

Ashes of Roses - Sasha Waters

This movie is about loving things that are embarrassing and people who are inappropriate. It's an essay film reflection on popular trash; football parties; older men; adolescent desire and the outrageous yet mundane humiliations of being a teenage girl in the 1980s. With sound design by Kevin T. Allen and performance cameos by filmmakers Roger Beebe and Jason Livingston.

As a moving image artist, I am committed to a feminist cinema of opposition that re-imagines personal and social histories in the spirit of engagement with an earlier age of radical-romantic image making. Using anachronistic strategies of cinematic collage, I stitch together original 16mm footage, found/archival films, images, music and text into lyrical, unsentimental (and hopefully sometimes funny) films that mine the tension between the subjective, lived experiences of women / artists / mothers with our interior lives of fantasy and projection, mourning and dread. —Sasha Waters

Bye Bye Now - Louise Bourque

Waving hello to the filming cameraperson, the subjects through this very gesture, are also providing a future viewer with the acknowledgment of a constant good-bye to a fleeting moment.
Yet when the film is projected and the captured gesture is seen, it's as if the subjects are saying hello again from the past.
This film is an homage to the artist's father, the man behind the camera in these personal family archives.

The filmmaker Louise Bourque recently moved back to Montréal after spending 30 years in the United States and elsewhere. Her films have been screened in more than forty-five countries and broadcast on PBS and the Sundance Channel in the US as well as on Télé-Québec in Canada and SBS in Australia. Her work has been presented by major galleries and museums worldwide, including the Musée de la Civilisation and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in Québec city, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC.

Living Lessons in the Museum of Order - Malic Amalya

Living Lessons in the Museum of Order examines the carceral logics of the Orca Encounter at SeaWorld San Diego and the “Doing Time” tour of the former Alcatraz prison in the San Francisco Bay. Juxtaposing original 16mm footage, promotional VHS and 16mm footage, and analog video feedback, Living Lessons in the Museum of Order explores the tensions between public fantasies and exploitative practices, as well as between rhetorical and cultural changes, within the two California entertainment empires.

Malic Amalya (b. 1980. Burlington, VT) is an experimental filmmaker living and working in Boston. Malic is an Assistant Professor of Experimental Media and Film Production at Emerson College. His films have screened widely and are distributed by Canyon Cinema in San Francisco and Collectif Jeune Cinema in Paris.

My beloved, grey-haired - Anastasiia Kirii


When the war started in Ukraine, I moved to Barcelona, got there by 9 trains with my dog Penka. This is the first film I created as a reflection to this experience.

Born and raised in Kyiv, Anastasiia Kirii always loved books and used to play them out in my room, with dialogues and accents.

Tlaloc (Lines Drawn in Water) - Abinadi Meza


Tlaloc (Lines Drawn in Water) is a handmade cameraless 16mm film of materiality and transformation; an enigmatic otherworld where hues of water evolve into prismatic blooms. Tlaloc is the deity of waters, rain, lightning, and growth in the Aztec pantheon. This film explores the membrane of film itself - a moving skin marked by fluid, punctured by light. The protean soundtrack was entirely composed with contact microphones to capture handmade surface markings and gestures. The motion picture was made with direct animation, scratching, hand-painting, and contact-printing techniques.

Abinadi Meza (US/MX) is a Latinx-Indigenous artist who studied creative writing, art and architecture, and whose practice includes experimental film, sound art, and installation. Meza’s films are made with found and original footage, hand-painted film, and original soundtracks.
Meza's award-winning films have been presented at: Anthology Film Archives, New York; Antimatter, Victoria BC; Athens International Film & Video Festival; Atlanta Film Festival; Aurora Picture Show, Houston; Blaffer Art Museum, Houston; Bogotá Experimental Film Festival; Festival de Cine Radical, La Paz; Cosmic Rays, Chapel Hill; Crossroads Festival, San Francisco; Festival ECRÃ, Rio de Janeiro; Esto Es Para Esto, Monterrey; Filmmakers’ Cooperative, New York; Flatpack Festival, Birmingham; Houston Cinema Arts Festival; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival; Kassel Dokfest, Germany; Mientras Tanto Cine, Montevideo; Minneapolis Institute of Art; non-syntax Festival, Taipei; ULTRAcinema, Tepoztlán; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus among other places.

4:00 pm : Chronicles

River - Penny McCann

A hand-processed black and white study of the Ottawa River in winter. Commissioned by the Lightproof Film Collective with sound design by Eric Walker.

Canadian media artist Penny McCann's body of work spans thirty years and encompasses both narrative and experimental films and video. Since 2000, she has been engaged in creating a body of experimental films that journeys through an abstract and poetic terrain marked by half-glimpsed memories and fragments of the past, forming a sustained poetic meditation on landscape, place and time. According to Cecilia Araneda in her essay commissioned by Gallery 101 to accompany her 2020 exhibition, Land Lines (of time and place) in no particular order: “McCann intervenes with our sense of the familiar with her use of hand-crafted analogue filmmaking approaches … purposefully setting it back into a kind of suspension that we immediately associate with the dream state of processing memories.”

Bezuna - Saif Alsaegh

Bezuna explores the complexities of fleeing a war-zone through the analysis of peripheral details. Through interweaving different narratives, the film presents the raw and broken feelings of a child and a cat whose lives will never be the same.

Saif Alsaegh is a United States-based filmmaker from Baghdad. Much of Saif’s work deals with the contrast between the landscape of his youth in Baghdad growing up as part of the Chaldean minority in the nineties and early 2000s, and the U.S. landscape where he currently lives. His films have screened in festivals including Cinéma du Réel, Kurzfilm Hamburg, Kassel Dokfest, and in galleries and museums including the Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and Rochester Contemporary Art Center. He received his MFA in film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Fleshwork - Lydia Cornett

At a butcher shop in Jeromesville, Ohio, four meat processors situate their labor within their own minds and bodies.

Lydia Cornett (she/her/hers) is filmmaker based between Columbus, Ohio and Brooklyn, New York. As a former musician turned filmmaker, she makes work that unites the restraint of observational storytelling with the physicality and connective qualities she associates with music-making. Her work has screened at AFI Fest, BAMCinemaFest, Sheffield Doc Fest, AspenShortsFest, Hamptons International Film Festival, and DOC NYC, where she received a Special Jury Mention for her film Yves & Variation. She was awarded fellowships to the Jacob Burns Film Center’s Creative Culture program and the UnionDocs’ Collaborative Studio, and she has received support from the Tribeca Film Institute, IF/Then Shorts, the Princess Grace Foundation, and the NYC Women's Fund for Media, Music and Theatre. Her work has been distributed and featured by The New Yorker, PBS (POV and Reel South) Nowness, and Vimeo Staff Picks.

Daybook - Alfred Guzzetti

October, 2019 to August, 2021. Fragments of remembered music, poems, glimpses of objects, recorded day by day, as if a chronicle— or elements of imaginary films yet to be made about a time that needs to be remembered but resists comprehension.

Alfred Guzzetti is a filmmaker and Professor of Visual Arts at Harvard University. His work has been shown at the New York and Berlin film festivals and other festivals in London, Rotterdam, Germany, Spain and France, as well as in installation settings in New York, Copenhagen, Houston and Santa Monica. Guzzetti is the author of the book Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Analysis of a Film by Godard (1981) and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Exquisite Corpse Trilogy - Seokyoung Yang

Through three unsuccessful attempts and trials, a filmmaker seeks to reconcile with the death of her father. This film explores the strength of persevering through multiple attempts, even when the outcome is likely to be failure.

Seokyoung Yang (she/they) is a curator, poet, and filmmaker dedicated to artistic experimentation. Born and raised in South Korea, she investigates the correlation between anomaly of language, diasporic bodies, and internal loss through moving images and texts. She received her BFA in film and video program at California Institute of the Arts. She currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Fathers' Land - Francesco Di Gioia

1910s. Poems with alternate rhymes narrate a journey by sea and by rail. These are the verses of Fadil Hasin Ash-Shalmani who witness a historical fact often forgotten: the deportation of numerous civilians during the first years of the Italian occupation in Libya. The short film follows the poet's experiences and memories using only archive footage, thus subverting the original propaganda function of the images.

Francesco Di Gioia (Gorizia, 1993) achieved a BA (Hons) at the Politecnico of Milan in Communication Design, after which he began a course at the Civica Scuola Luchino Visconti in Documentary Cinema. He then studied Video Editing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. He currently works as an archive researcher for several productions.

How to Build a House out of Wreckage and Rags - Bernd Lützeler

Found footage: California in the 1950's and 60's. A young Indian couple enjoys their personal American dream come true in their home somewhere in the suburbs of San Francisco. In great detail they demonstrate their newly achieved wealth in front of their Super-8 camera. Like postcards, they would send these film rolls to their families back in India. Around the same time, an American missionary couple visits the city of Calcutta to shoot a Christian propaganda film. The drastic reality of poverty and famine in the streets of the Indian metropolis fits perfectly into their wicked plan: To promote the believe in Christ by showing the misery that pagan believers are doomed to suffer from.

Artist and filmmaker Bernd Lützeler lives and works between Berlin and Mumbai. His films have been shown at venues and festivals worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, Berlinale International Film Festival, Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Views from the Avant-Garde and many more. Bernd is an active member of the artist-run analogue filmlab LaborBerlin.

8:00 pm : THRESHOLDS

(r)evolution - Vanessa Cardui

(R)EVOLUTION is a 1- minute object animation film that explores the impact of plastic on wildlife. Researchers found that more than 1500 wildlife species worldwide have eaten plastic in the environment. 100 million marine animals die each year from plastic waste. And a recent study found that people eat five grams of micro and nano plastics every week. (R)EVOLUTION visualizes the increasing danger of plastic - it shows the extinction of animal species and how plastic takes over the body.

Vanessa Cardui, born in 1987, is a Berlin based video artist. She studied art and media at university Hildesheim in Germany. Her work is characterized by artistic metamorphoses. She transforms everyday objects into pieces of art by exploring the different techniques of animation to bring the objects to life. She works with meaningful color contrasts and creates an imaginative world that arises from the texture of the material.

2cent / 10coil - Monteith Mccollum

Part science, part history, 2cent / 10coil is an exploration into the physical properties of a U.S. postage stamp and the anomalies it presents when subjected to the beam of an electron microscope. Integrated within, are the philosophical musings and speeches of a man in his last weeks of life on a quest entitled, “The Voyage of Understanding.”

I like to say this subject found me. At the Analytic Diagnostics lab at Binghamton University I received training over many months culminating in access to a Scanning Electron Microscope. I was enamored with the unique possibilities the SEM offered despite its difficulties. I brought in a small stamp collection to give myself border limitations. The 1932 Harding stamp was the first to come to life. Using the SEM is a slow process, after sealing the stamp in the chamber and composing a shot there was only time for approximately 120 consecutive scans per session. This particular stamp reacted in a way the others hadn’t, fibers came to life and the ink danced. None of these images are animated with software. The mysterious movement stems from the scanning process itself and the build up of heat from the electrons rendering the object – monteith mccollum

A throwing forth - Xiao Zhang

A time remnant inhabits a personal space with a secret, private, unspoken word of one's being. Sliding planes of window and time, throwing drifts of the inner and the outer self, the film seeks in the interval of memory for a transitory reunion with my family.

Xiao Zhang is an artist-filmmaker from China living in Los Angeles. She received her BFA at Beijing Film Academy in 2020 and currently holds an MFA in Film/Video at CalArts. Her practice centers on personal poetics which derives from cross-generation memory and diaristic approaches. It continues by employing methods drawn from handcrafted celluloid film and expanded cinema. Her work often offers a complex fluctuation between material reality and subjective experience.

Rheme maining sources

A place-specific film-excavation of Bixiga neiborhood-São Paulo.
Choreography of forces that cross present time.
Filmancy, clairvoyance is the vision of what is taking shape.
Allegory: lobby-color, speculates.
Hollow in the heart of the city, a rock. A bird ‘rappina’ lands.
Novelty: Quilombo, alley, dealers:step. Vai-Vai samba school’s black and white banner. Pictograms from Benjamin’s “The Arcades project”.
Progress: pluging a river while it’s possible.
Commodity: Matarazzo & Metro. The real state of things, real estate: banning organic. Ground- quotation, blue taroes, water tanks, oxum: (cosmo) political reaction. Rheme maining sources: life asking for passage.

film-designer, educator and programmer. His films, video-installations and texts have been exhibited in festivals, galleries and museums such as: SFMoma -Cinemateque (Crossroads 2018)- EUA; Pantalla Global CCCB-Barcelona; Museo San Telmo -San Sebastián-Espanha; EAC (Espacio de Arte Contemporaneo)-Uruguay; Microscope Gallery; Bienal SURb2021-Buenos Aires, 13 Bienal de Artes Mediales (Temblor)- Chile; Berwick Film & Media Fesitival-Reino Unido; Programa de Exposições CCSP-SP-Brazil (solo); Revista ArtContexto- Brazil; 19 Fest CurtasBH-Brazil; 13 CineOP-Brazil; CantorGallery, Massachusetts - USA; VisArts– Frame & Frequency 3– Rockville- USA; CCEG- Centro Cultural España-Guatemala; La Darsena - Argentina; Sala Nordeste -MinC- Brazil; Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS)- Brazil; Dobra Festival Internacional do Cinema Experimental- Cinemateca MAM- Rio de Janeiro, Blitz#27: ? Economia/Ecologia _ Zumzeig Cinema-Barcelona, among many others.

Vision of Paradise - Leonardo Pirondi

The great voyages to the "New World" were seen as expanding the frontiers of the visible and displacing those of the invisible, therefore, maps from that time render the real and imaginary. The film follows a voyage of the Brazilian Military in search of an imaginary island with the same name as their country. The myth from 1483 Brazil, or Hy-Brazil, is known to exist to the west of Ireland and above the Fortunate Islands. Vision of Paradise is an examination of the capacity of the human imagination and computer simulations to construct environments. Amidst the fine threshold of the real, simulated, and imagined, the film analyzes the contemporary ideas of virtual reality and their ambition to expand the frontiers of the physical world into a "New World".

LEONARDO PIRONDI is a Brazilian filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His films explore the infinite abyss between the multiple derived versions of reality through documentary, experimental, and narrative modes. Much of his work uses analog and digital manipulations on celluloid to examine the sociopolitical unfoldings of the intersections between imagination, science, myth, and technology. His films have been exhibited at various film festivals, institutions, and venues internationally, such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Viennale, BFI London, Melbourne, Edinburgh, Guanajuato, True/False, Ambulante, Curtas Vila do Conde, Wexner Center, REDCAT, and others. Some of his work exists in the collection of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, Cinematheque of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, and The Film-Makers' Coop. in New York. He holds a Film/Video degree from CalArts, is a Sundance Ignite Fellow, and is the recipient of the Allan Sekula Social Documentary Fund and the Tim Disney Prize for Excellence in the Storytelling Arts.

Case Study One: The Shrink - Mila Rae Mancuso

A short poetry thesis film surveying transitory object-life and permanence. Concepts arose from games of exquisite corpse & practices of automatic writing —part one of a series of vignettes. Shot on 500T 16mm, hand processed.

Mila Rae Mancuso is a writer and interdisciplinary artist whose creative work is driven by the subconscious. Writing poetry since the age of 14, her work is fueled by self-discovery and contemporary feminist surrealism which explores the complex intersection of fairytales, girlhood, and the macabre. Mancuso’s work often entwines the worlds of literature, art, filmmaking, and experimental processes to create an occupancy of its own kind.

Babbler, Fairy and Thrush - Karel Doing

Part science, part history, 2cent / 10coil is an exploration into the physical properties of a U.S. postage stamp and the anomalies it presents when subjected to the beam of an electron microscope. Integrated within, are the philosophical musings and speeches of a man in his last weeks of life on a quest entitled, “The Voyage of Understanding.”

An unfiltered stream of perception: small objects and grand panoramas appear simultaneously. The certainties of near and far, detail and overview, inside and outside are deliberately thrown into confusion. Aided by ‘in camera’ superimposition and travelling mattes a near abstract experience is created. Sunlight filters through semi-transparent surfaces, while small holes and cracks allow the light to travel unrestrained. The work was conceived and shot within a few hundred yards from my house, focusing on the plants, flowers, trees and ferns that grow around me.The soundtrack is composed with noises and voices from that same area, revealing a further abundance of life.

Karel Doing is an independent artist, filmmaker and researcher whose practice investigates the relationship between culture and nature by means of analogue and organic process, experiment and co-creation.

Everything Comes Full Circle - Lilan Yang

Following Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) filming locations from Houston, Texas to Los Angeles, California, I use a 16mm Bolex camera to capture the vastness of the American West. The footage draws me to reminisce about snippets of my everyday life. I contemplate how we perceive the world through analog optical apparatuses and how memories are multidimensional yet fragile. Our recollections of people and places can be distorted, unrecognizable, and fictitious. These memories would eventually diminish with the passing of time. Everything Comes Full Circle is a personal attempt to remember things that will soon be forgotten.
The original footage was shot in Kodak 16mm film stocks during the summer of 2021 and edited digitally with voiceover. Later the digital moving images were inkjet printed on clear film spliced together with perforations cut out with a laser cutter. Each run of the projection makes the printer ink slowly melt, and the film will eventually fall into decay over the course of time.

Lilan Yang is an artist and experimental filmmaker from Chongqing, China. Her practice explores the myth of cities and landscapes, ways of seeing and unseeing, and sentiments of remembering and forgetting, through lens-based analog media such as 16mm filmmaking and 35mm photography, as well as digital technologies such as machine learning and data visualization. She received a BS in Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MFA in Digital + Media from Rhode Island School of Design.

October 1, 2023

2:00 pm : Unknown Languages

A Thousand Years Ago - Edgar Jorge Baralt

(In an imaginary look back at the present from the year 2049, an exile returns to Los Angeles decades after being displaced by large scale social and environmental collapse. Once back, he recreates his past (our present), and imagines the lives of those who inhabited his apartment during his absence. His sense of displacement leads to a meditation on place, memory, and dreams.

Edgar Jorge Baralt (b. 1988) is a Venezuelan-born filmmaker based in Chicago, whose personal work tackles questions of memory and temporality, incorporating multiple formats in his practice. He obtained an MFA in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts. His work has been programmed at different international venues and festivals, including the Berlinale, LA Filmforum, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Kasseler Dokfest, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, among others. His films attempt to destabilize rigid ways of understanding identity, perception, and landscape.

Damp Moss - Christopher Thompson

Glittering illusions of vectorized providence attempt to emulate an inherited physical realm of diminishing significance.

Christopher Thompson (1990) is a contemporary American artist and filmmaker whose work examines desire, capital, and the seemingly supernatural forces that govern its acceleration. His films and video works have been featured in film festivals and exhibitions worldwide, including San Francisco Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS Film Festival, Prismatic Ground, Mimesis Documentary Film Festival, the 5th Odessa Biennale at the Odessa Museum of Contemporary Art, and “Late capitalism, it's like, almost over” at The Luminary in St. Louis. He holds a B.A. from the University of Southern Indiana and an M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied video art and performance. He is also the director of HATERS, an online moving image journal. Thompson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Dear Monster - Stefano P. Testa

A fragmented collection of letters tells the story of Elio’s passage from adolescence to adulthood. Elio is a restless and disobedient Italian 18-year-old fellow who lives his youth between cheating and betrayals during the swinging 60s.

“Dear Monster” is a collection of authentic documents. However, there are few historical and biographical references to the characters. Voices and handwriting are the only elements useful to draw the senders’ psychological profiles. The texts are read and interpreted by actors; the voices are inserted into sound environments, as if hypothetically present at the time of writing. The film develops visually through a slow overlap of symbolic and evocative images of the inner universe of the young Elio. Through the use of fade effects, the pages of the letters merge with photographs, magazine clippings and some amateur films of the time. The result is a stratification of worn-out textures and faded colours. “Dear Monster” is a backward journey in memories, in search of lost affections.

Stefano P. Testa was born in 1988. He lives and works in Bergamo (Italy) as a camera operator, video editor, colorist and post-production technician. Since 2010 he has been collaborating with Lab 80 film in documentary films production and with Bergamo Film Meeting, in charge of the festival audiovisual communication.

In Littleness - Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu

The film was shot on a regular 8mm camera and is presented in unslit form as 16mm, a screening format commonly referred to as double 8mm. When I first came into contact with this medium, I was deeply attracted by its miniature size. Eight millimeters is a very small space on which to store images. It reminds me of all kinds of things from childhood: ephemeral, wonderful, changeable. Recalling that as a child I spent most of my time with my nanny, I decided to zoom in on daily life, especially trivial household chores. At the same time, the particles and dust of the childhood world are magnified.

Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu (b. 1982, Kaohsiung, Taiwan) is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and writer whose work is grounded in literature and the conceptual avant-garde. Cherlyn’s creative activity often starts from a life event or curiosity concerning an anomaly in language or in the material world. It continues by employing methods drawn from both Eastern and Western practices and philosophies. Her working method at various times involves handcrafted material, mixed media, and experimental interchange between new and old technologies.

istén:'a - KJ Edwards

A poetic retelling of a visit from the artist’s mother, istén:'a looks to dreamspace as a meeting place for us and our late loved ones who we are always tethered to.

KJ Edwards is a Kanien’kehá:ka,mixed-settler filmmaker and media artist. Their family is from Kahnawa:ké and Longueuil, Quebec, Canada; while KJ was born and raised in Treaty 6 Territory, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Holding a BFA in Film Production from the Toronto Metropolitan University, KJ is trained in narrative, documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques, using both analogue and digital hybrid workflows. They are a 2023 MFA graduate from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, located on unceded traditional Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Territory in Vancouver. KJ's thesis work involved eco processing analogue film, reflecting on the unpredictability of the medium as that of a collaborator, and the ways that dreams and memory can offer creative pathways toward content creation.

Language Unknown - Janelle VanderKelen

This film embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans (who are far more sensorially limited). Leaves, mycelium, and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of human might possibly understand.

Janelle VanderKelen is an artist, curator, and educator currently based in Knoxville, TN. Her films and intermedia installations imagine alternative acts of relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological, or otherwise) and make visible the agency of plants through experimental time-based media processes. VanderKelen’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, CO; Anthology Film Archives in New York; and Bow Arts in London, England. Her films have screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, True/False, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, IC DOCS, San Diego Underground Film Festival, and Antimatter [Media Art] Film Festival.

Pump - Charles Cadkin

On the Northwest side of Chicago, large swaths of people have been gathering for decades to fill their containers with water from a magical water pump.

Charles Cadkin is a visual artist concerned with documenting and preserving neglected personal and local histories through topography, landscape and body. He holds a BS in Cinema and Photography from Ithaca College and resides in Chicago, IL.

This Is How I Felt - Josh Weissbach

This Is How I Felt was filmed in a twenty-four period while the filmmaker was wearing a heart monitor to investigate possible arrhythmias.

Josh Weissbach is an experimental filmmaker. He lives in a house with his wife, two daughters, three cats, and six chickens next to a once abandoned village. His films and videos have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, Mono No Aware, Chicago Underground Film Festival, 25 FPS Festival, and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. He has won jury prizes at Videoex, ICDOCS, $100 Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, Berlin Revolution Film Festival, and Haverhill Experimental Film Festival.

With The Tide, with the tide - Anna Kipervaser


I know, you're a seasonal beast
Like the starfish that drift in with the tide
With the tide
So until your blood runs
To meet the next full moon
Your madness fits in nicely with my own
With my own
Your lunacy fits neatly with my own
My very own
- from Sea Song by Robert Wyatt

Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born artist whose practice engages with a range of topics including human and animal bodies, ethnicity, religion, colonialism, and environmental conservation. Her engagement with these topics is informed by a commitment to formal experimentation, DIY and alternative processes, spanning disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in both 16mm film and digital video.

4:00 pm : Drifts and Detours

Date : September 27 - October 29, 2023

Location : Various Venues in Ma.

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