Prismatic Ground 2021

Two Sons and a River of Blood

Amber Bemak Angelo Madsen

​A queer woman is pregnant. The self-made family unit of two dykes and a trans man imagine a kind of erotic magic that will allow for procreation based solely on desire. Together they enact a public sex ritual to symbolize their hopefulness for multiplicity, acknowledging their cyborg bodies as technological interventions. When the queer woman miscarries her child, the three begin to build their own mythic understanding of where bodies live when they are not inside us. They create a story to trace movement of the non-body, from a hole, to a river, to a room. Images of an imaginary white room, an ikea-esque torture chamber of stillness, haunt them. As a parallel emerges between the pregnant body and the trans body, the techno-sex act becomes the key and a pyramid becomes the portal to access this other world of non-bodied existence.

A Machine to Live In

Meredith Zielke Yoni Goldstein

In Brasília, utopian geometry, monumental myth-making, and alien-centered architecture present concrete plans for their country's crumbling foundation.
A Machine to Live In is a feature-length documentary about the imaginative and material processes of building one's utopia. The film documents the history of highly controlled modernist planning in Brazil alongside radical projects in cult and mystical architecture. The film's attention radiates outward from Niemeyer and Costa's capital, Brasília, to the flourishing landscape of UFO cults, pyramids, monuments, and futurist projects. The film unfolds through Clarice Lispector's writings on the inauguration of Brasília and subsequent interviews with Oscar Niemeyer. Her literature describes a fraught ideology embedded into the city's concrete design while imagining ahistorical mythologies that may one day disrupt its order. A Machine to Live In attempts to locate where the desires for myth and reason sublimates in the building of utopian spaces. It collects vignettes and stories from architects and builders as they describe their ideal cities, both real and transcendent.

my favorite software is being here

Alison Nguyen

A body of work centering on a computer-generated woman based on the artist's physicality. The project spans video, installation, sculpture, and interactive online performances.
Andra8 is a simulacral subaltern created by an algorithm and raised by the Internet in isolation in a virtual void. From the apartment where she has been 'placed' Andra8 works as a digital laborer, surviving off the data from her various 'freemium' jobs as a virtual assistant, a data janitor, a life coach, an aspiring influencer, and content creator.
The domestic space from which she is constantly surveilled and monitored looks like the inoffensive love child of the results of a 'Mid-century modern' Pinterest search, a mental health hospital, and a perpetually sunny L.A. Airbnb. In other words: A kind of antiseptic neoliberal purgatory.

The Well-Prepared Citizen’s Solution

Lydia Moyer

An account of life among those preparing for the end of the world. A report from the garden.

Forever

Mitch McGlockin

A life insurance company uses an AI algorithm to determine the risk of a new applicant. The subsequent denial sparks a period of introspection for the individual in question.
Forever was created with the experimental technique of using LiDAR to capture real life moments and environments. The LiDAR unit used to acquire the footage was originally created for self-driving cars. This junction of technology and filmmaking intersects with the subject of the film. AI uses LiDAR to "see" humanity in accurate detail, but has resolution limitations. In both story and style, Forever explores the boundary of advanced technology and the human experience.

Startle Response

Michèle Saint-Michel

Part of the PTSD Suite (2020-2021)
Borrowing a narrative storytelling approach from director Lizzie Borden, the PTSD Suite uses vignettes, allegories, poetry, and sometimes dictionary entries to create a liminal world at the center of many overlapping Venn diagrams. The PTSD Suite is a collection of short experimental films that explores the symptoms and lived experience of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Each film is named after a common symptom of PTSD. Saint-Michel teamed up with a different experimental musician and / or composer for each piece. While each piece sounds unique, all are underpinned by a familiar pattern: the Fibonacci sequence. The films reuse much of the archival footage and analog textures, creating an uncanny experience of uncertain deja-vu. All this in an effort to mimic an experience of PTSD for the viewer.
STARTLE RESPONSE film is part of Saint-Michel's PTSD Suite of experimental short films documenting the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The film had its world premiere (mostly virtually) in Berlin, October 2020.

The House of Science

Lynne Sachs

This defiant feminist mosaic subversively recontextualizes archived materials dating back to the 1950s. Footage taken from a medical laboratory, an educational film on menstruation, and an amateur fantasy film about a mermaid gain whole new meanings. The repurposed shots represent the female body as a kind of freak show of bodily processes, sexuality, and maladaptation. Opposing the distorted imagery of women rooted in our patriarchal world is American poet Gertrude Stein, who seeks to bridge the gap between the "body of the body" and the "body of the mind" and achieve the integrity denied to women by Western society.
"I deconstruct a purely cinematic reality that to me seems disturbing, humorous, and just plain visually provocative. The composition of a single frame displaces the seedbed where I can cultivate my paintings and collages."

Cane Fire

Anthony Banua-Simon

Cane Fire​ examines the past and present of the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi, interweaving four generations of family history, numerous Hollywood productions, and troves of found footage to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the economic and cultural forces that have cast indigenous and working-class residents as "extras" in their own story.
Countless productions have taken place in Kauaʿi since Hollywood's Golden Age, many casting residents as extras and each shaping an exoticized popular imagination of the Hawaiian island. In a far-reaching essay-film, Anthony Banua-Simon recovers histories of sugar plantation–era extraction, exploitation, and suppressed labor movements that cinematic representations have obscured by design. Nimbly composed from the filmmaker's intergenerational family archive, contemporary interviews, Hollywood dramas, and a dizzying range of found footage, Cane Fire is a spirited, urgent counter-narrative. Reflecting on present-day visual culture, economic marginalization, and sovereignty activism on the island, the film above all exudes the power of working class and native Hawaiians telling their own stories of resilience and resistance. Best Feature Documentary Prize, Indie Memphis Film Festival

Occasionally, I Saw Glimpses of Hawai‘i

Christopher Makoto Yogi

A film essay looking at 100 years of Hawai'i in film, explores issues of representation and gender. This filmic deconstruction is a lively, often infuriating examination of Hollywood's portrayal of the islands, highlighting the essential necessity of homegrown filmmaking.

Land in Sight (Terra à Vista)

Lívia Sá

"Land in Sight (Terra à Vista) is an experimental short film shot on Super 8mm film in Brazil, in the states of Bahia, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The film begins with an image of Monte Pascoal, the first spotted land by the Portuguese, moment when the colonization process was initiated and consequently, the extermination of the indigenous people. The film documents everyday moments that juxtapose with scenes of resistance from different indigenous communities during a protest in São Paulo."

Letter from your Far-Off Country

Suneil Sanzgiri

In this film shot on 16mm, Sanzgiri traces lines and lineages of ancestral memory, poetry and his history. A search for solidarity in the sounds and colours of a spontaneous movement in Delhi led by Muslim women, an Iqbal Bano song, images of B.R. Ambedkar – a radical anti-caste Dalit intellectual – all revolving around a letter addressed to a distant relative. Seeking to reclaim the past from erasure, and provide a journey towards a potential future.

Nitrate (2019)

Yousra Benziane

When the fireworks inflame the memory of a war survival.

A Demonstration

Sasha Litvintseva Beny Wagner

"A Demonstration" is a monster film with no monsters. Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of Early Modern European science, the film explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from today's vantage point. Early Modern naturalists were guided by a logic in which scientific truths were discovered through visual analogy. The word 'monster' comes from the latin 'monstrare', meaning to show, to reveal, to demonstrate. "A Demonstration" picks up on these themes in a poetic exploration of the boundaries of sight and the metamorphosis of form.

Drills

Sarah Friedland

Drills is a film about the choreography of preparing for the future. A hybrid documentary and experimental dance film reimagining the form of the Cold War-era, US government-produced social guidance film, Drills asks what futures we are preparing for through the exercises embodying present anxieties.
Friedland's nonfiction dance film filters America's present-day anxieties through the auditory and kinesthetic patterns of preparatory exercises.

Sanctuary

Nate Dorr

Despite New York's status as a sanctuary city, ICE facilities ring and infiltrate the boroughs while its agents continue to make hundreds of arrests every month. We know this, especially when high-profile abuses are reported, but ICE presence here typically goes unseen and unremarked on. Sanctuary highlights this troubling disjunction, and the millions of people threatened by it, through a pointed act of looking at the architectural apparatuses of detention and deportation. As long as ICE persists, there is no true sanctuary.
New York State remains fourth in the country in annual deportation proceedings after Texas, California, and Florida. Across twelve short chapters ranging from the outer rim of Queens to Hackensack, New Jersey, Sanctuary visits detention sites, prisons, offices, and courthouses -- all the locations through which ICE maintains its operations in downstate New York. In each chapter, brief narration condenses extensive research into government reporting, Freedom of Information Act retrievals, and investigative journalism, over manipulated photographs of the buildings themselves. Many of these interventions attempt visually -- through fragmentation, redaction, distortion, or even the blurring by which some of these sites are obscured in street view apps -- to do what is more difficult in actuality: the destruction and removal of ICE itself from the landscape.

The Curve of the Earth

Lorenzo Benitez

Nearly four years after befriending someone on Facebook with the exact same name as him, filmmaker Lorenzo Benitez ventures to South America to meet the friend he had come to know in writing but had yet to meet in-person. In this experimental 'travel video', what began in jest evolves in sincerity as they appraise the surprising significance of their serendipitous friendship.

Switch Center

Ericka Beckman

"When I began preparing the film in Budapest in 2000, I found myself surrounded by the remnants of the Soviet's Modernist Architecture. I was immediately captivated by these buildings – not because they were esthetically appealing – but because they embodied perfectly, not only their purpose, but also the ideology upon which they were built. They were not constructed to last but a few years, but rather to endure through millennia, corresponding to the expected lifespan of the regime. The fact that they still stood – solid, defiant even – while the empire had crumbled into dust, made them all the more appealing to me. I chose an abandoned water purification plant on the outskirts of Budapest as the setting for Switch Center. In conceiving of this film, I was inspired by Leger's early avant-garde picture, 'Ballet Mechanic'. In my film, the structure itself comes to life through the manipulations of the employees who work inside it. I wanted to make a tribute to the kind of futuristic pragmatism expressed by these buildings that are now being razed to allow space for shopping malls and corporate offices." — E.B. 2002

Still Processing

Sophy Romvari

A box of stunning family photos awakens grief and lost memories as they are viewed for the first time on camera. Filmmaker Sophy Romvari documents her first-hand experience as an exploration into cinema as therapy in this nonfiction short.

Pause, Play, Repeat

Ankita Panda

Pause, Play, Repeat is a film that identifies the patterns that exist in the macro and micro systems around us.

Thick Air

Stefano Miraglia

An experimental music ensemble is recording an album. They want a very specific sound: the sound of THICK AIR. The sound engineer struggles to understand and to find that sound. A tale of sleepless nights and loud music. Shot across five cities and countless nights, THICK AIR is a noise-injected collage, composed of diaristic footage, a found narrative (memories of a popular 60s band), original music and field recordings.

Home in the Woods

Brandon Wilson

Baby spiders take their first wobbly steps. Human hands work in the garden. Waterfalls get tangled up in space and time. Home In The Woods is an immersive portrait of a place viewed from different perspectives and scales. A contemplation of the cycles, patterns and relationships that exist in the forest near the filmmaker's home. Filmed over the course of two years in Marion Country, Oregon.

Make Sure the Sea Is Still There

Gloria Chung

My projects often come about from traveling, which was not possible in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, I attempted to travel vicariously through the webcams of the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration, capturing screenshots on my phone and editing them with videos I had recorded during the pandemic and on previous trips to Iceland. I found time and landscapes moving strangely, if at all—seeming to mirror our new reality of sudden isolation, tragedy, and the utter unknown.

The Aquarium

Paweł Wojtasik

Filmed primarily in Alaska, The Aquarium contrasts the openness of the primeval Arctic landscape with the entrapment of captured sea mammals in aquariums. It speaks of the progressive destruction of these animals' habitat, seeing beyond the alluring spectacle.
"This is not a "message movie" transposed to a gallery setting; its formal strategies set it firmly in the realm of art, and ultimately the message, if there is one, is tantalizingly ambivalent. The final image is that of a startlingly bright orange octopus being lifted out of a tank of water by a latex-gloved hand. The octopus immediately wraps its tentacles around the hand, and each time the human tries to remove it, the creature attaches its suckers ever more tightly, refusing to let go or to give up."

A Slight Wrinkle in the Strata

Ryan Clancy

A 1904 geological survey owed the presence of iron-bearing rocks deep under the Mesabi Range to "a slight wrinkle in the strata." The abandoned open-pit mines that once produced a majority of America's iron-ore now alter the northern Minnesota landscape as vast, water-filled craters. Oral histories, landscapes and observations of daily life are layered to create a portrait of a community existing in this post-extraction economy.

Look Then Below

Ben Rivers

Ben Rivers' films study the otherworldly, looking for places and stories outside the daily conventions of reality. Look Then Below was filmed in a Somerset transformed into a coloured, mist-enveloped island in an oily ocean with a cave basking in a subterranean glow. Time seems to stand still there. After Slow Action and Urth, this is the final part of a trilogy developed with American SF author Mark von Schlegell.

A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer)

Lynne Sachs Barbara Hammer

In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C Scape Duneshack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack images, sounds and writing to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Lynne explores Barbara's experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces and times. "While editing the film, the words on the screen came to me in a dream. I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her and the film. My text is a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces at once." — Lynne Sachs Support provided by Wexner Center Film/ Video Studio and Artist Residency Award – Jennifer Lange, Curator. Additional Editing by Paul Hill; with gratitude to Florrie Burke.