Light Matter Film Festival 2023

Bec0m1ng speculates about a possible transcendental form of presence that can emerge from the causal freedom of probabilistic AI models. It consists of a digital environment with a fixed amount of matter and a group of AI agents. They have to collect and share the resources at the same time to keep the whole ecosystem in balance. This process enables a constant flux of becoming, formation, and transformation in which all is one. By prioritizing presence over cognition and logic, this project imagines a possible interaction of AI with the world, in which a non-dominant coexistence is established within an assemblage of everything. Inspired by Persian philosopher Suhrawardi's Ishraqi doctrine, instead of material bodies (al-barzakh) that represent the mechanical appearance of the AI agents, the environment and the agents were designed using luminous forms (immaterial entities). As Suhrawardi argued that "beings can be distinguished by their degree of light, or otherwise of darkness. Light may be understood here as "existence" in the sense of actus essendi, whereby light is the only single reality. This identification of Light and Being is possible when light is understood as universal matter—material prima universalis." The real-time virtual environment is an audio-visual interpretation of the presence of these non-human beings and an exploration of the emerging aesthetics of behavioural patterns that result from their active agency. The causal soundscape of the piece is a spatial composition that results from the motor activities of AI agents. This continuous becoming creates a speculative soundscape which can be defined as the territorialization of space by nonhumans. This posthuman soundscape is indifferent to human sensibilities and aesthetic apprehensions, yet there's a potentiality "to intersect the decoded milieu of space with an anthropic 'zone of residence'" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 315). Bec0m1ng depicts this possible scenario through a dialectic process of alienation and sensibility. Encountering technological beings that function without human-imposed telos is alienating. While this alienation brings forth an act of presence that reveals Being to allow Dasein to experience it without objectifying it. References • Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. • Mahmoud, Samir. "From 'Heidegger to Suhrawardi': An Introduction to the Thought of Henry Corbin." MPhil, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, England, UK, n.d.

Yon and Payola find themselves in a Victorian conservatory. They are companionable, disoriented and petulant––they whip wildly through these disembodied states.

"Als sie ertrunken war und hinunter schwamm von den Bächen in die größeren Flüsse" ["Once she had drowned and started her slow descent / Down the streams to where the great rivers broaden."] In her touching, untrained voice, the filmmaker sings this Brecht/Weill song from the 1920s. No atmosphere, this song is happening in a different space. Plants on the shore, swayed by flowing water. The hand of the person filming holding the title ERTRUNKEN DROWNED. Friedl vom Gröller consistently crosses over the invisible wall between person recording and object/subject being filmed. Gestural. What connection, what dialogue materializes here during the filming, what acts of self-assurance, shared rhythm; what solution?
The water is rapid, quickly becoming dangerous. Someone is floating there. A form, carried by the water, just as brief and momentary as the song's detailed telling of the duration of decay. The water's plasticity, a glimmering on the edge. The foam on the water forms moiré patterns, in movement and dissolution, while the song turns more and more to the body's decomposition. Foam and fermentation, organic micro- and macrostructures, enzymatic processes. To speak of transience would be euphemistic. The (un)touchable unity of the body, inside and out. Materially and metaphysically. In the end, Friedl vom Gröller appears in the final credits, her visage under water. (Madeleine Bernstorff)

I made this just so you remember who you were dealing with.

I made this film with found (bleached, tampered-with, handpainted) 16mm footage, 16mm blank leader, and many collage elements. I scanned and digitized the handmade, spliced-together reel of 16mm film at Negativeland Film Lab in Brooklyn, NY, and then added a digital soundtrack.

Images shot through architectural glass on Super 8 film in the dead of night in NYC. The title refers to one of the glass samples I used to frame up images of Times Square and other nightspots in NYC. The city peeks its head in as an off screen character, but the glass bends and twists it in its own warped and wonderful way.

Couldn't get things right I remember when the sound of the wind and the sound of you taking a shower could still be confused.

This simple film joins two fundamentally different spaces of movement and movement-perception. Through this stark contrast of modes of seeing, Perpetual Conjunction takes a look at looking.

A collection of wildflowers and spoils of war, hunting trophies, fake eyes. Food waste and fossils. Frame by frame, I portray our experience here for the first time.

Memories of family members and the stories and tales that nourished us in childhood often become part of our own memory. Erica Sheu dives to their inner depths to touch on the experiences of those who lived on Taiwan's Kinmen archipelago during and just after the war. She is guided by the flickering light of incense, which those seeking shelter used to light their way during the war, and the few scraps and grains that she has given the role of witnesses.
"A wound gives off its own light
surgeons say.
If all the lamps in the house were turned out
you could dress this wound
by what shines from it."
— Anne Carson (The Beauty of the Husband, I.1-5)

DataSpaceTime's WebGL moving image works are rendered in a browser environment using a custom built WebGL application. These WebGL works are procedural or "real-time" experiences, not timeline/keyframe animations. The works explore the effects of physicality and fragmentation in a virtual space, as well as the simulation of light, depth and scale. At times planetary and infinite, and at others claustrophobic and enclosed, the works demonstrate the expansive characteristics of the medium and the potential inherent in simulated perspectives. "Analogue" materials such as video files, jpegs, and Mp3 files integrate aspects of the physical world from outside the WebGL environment. When juxtaposed with the purely digital elements generated by the program, these additional materials significantly affect the illusion of scale and atmosphere as the viewer attempts to contextualize recognizable forms, patterns and texture against rendered ones. The WebGL works document the dialog between machine and artist, a collaboration to engineer the structure of the work and compose the final piece. Automation and randomization are an integral part of building the works which could not exist without the use of programmed tasks. Once these complex three-dimensional environments are realized, the artist's job of framing what is being generated in real time becomes integral to defining or emphasizing specific experiences. In the infinitely generating presentations of DST's WebGL work, a "camera" stands in for the artist's point of view. The angles and trajectories of this virtual camera are predetermined by the artists and computed by the program. Palinopsia delves further into the use of the noise algorithm and its effects on the operation of the vertex shader within the WebGL environment. In this work, the algorithm disrupts a highly abstract object file of a piece of carpet fuzz. The effect blows the densely rendered vertices apart, creating abstract chaos, augmented further by interacting reflective geometries. This work also leverages a glitch discovered in the program which feeds the reflection back into the program creating a hall of mirrors effect. The artist-captured composition enhances the perspective and sense of scale which develops over the arc of the piece.

Fiction, reality, the private, and the performed overlap on a routine but emotional day at a medical center.

VHS as a transitional technology from the turn of the millennium. Fascinated by the transience of the video technology of the time, which is marked by dust, scratches, and decay, the artist has created a hypnotically distorted video using VHS material from a dance festival in 2001.

FIEBRE comes from a desire of creating an intimate, inceptive space where three dancers progressively explore the possibilities of a viscous and sentimental apparatus. Moving through trajectories of physical states, erotic togetherness, sexuality, sincereness and rawness. FIEBRE intents to imagine other ways of being together for thresholding and transformation. Eroticism becomes a source of empowerment where desire, disgust and alienation are free to coexist and feed each other. FIEBRE is built on cooperation and care, the work relies essentially on the group. Re-framing the inherited hierarchies of the different parts of labor in such a work and their respective visibilities aiming to shake up structural ways of putting cheer to the singular author.

a̶r̶t̶i̶f̶i̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ safe space, where collective practices are amplified through a̶n̶ ̶i̶n̶n̶e̶r̶ monologue invoking other bodies that explore diversity & non-normative s̶e̶x̶u̶a̶l̶ practices ironizing capitalism as a form of libidinal pleasure.

A video piece that obfuscates footage of Lorelei injecting herself with estrogen with AI generated animation made from action art scores for trans becoming from another project of hers as text prompts for the AI.

Compassion, sadness and love can be expressed quite effectively online—even when acted, they can seem quite authentic. The same cannot be said of anger. Onscreen, an expression of escalated displeasure and negative agitation almost always looks like a poorly acted play. This has to do with the frequent use of outbursts of anger online as a strategic means to build an image or intimidate others, especially by male social media users. Anger thus degenerates into a blunt platitude, captured in memes and GIFs.
In their latest video essay, Chloé Galibert-Laîné, a master of the genre they aptly call "desktop documentary," explores how they can reclaim anger as a bona fide emotion in the online environment. They study gestures and words, who uses them and how, as well as how people respond to them. With a comic perspective, Galibert-Laîné concludes that authenticity is often an imitation of the accepted standard.

As bee colonies face global collapse, human farm laborers in China and ROBOBEE engineers in the US attempt to take over the labor of pollination from bees, with human-hand and robot labor. Labor costs in China are becoming too expensive, so pear-producing towns turn to pear-blossom tourism as a way to survive. Meanwhile we learn that the ROBOBEE is too expensive for agricultural use, and is rather doomed for military 'search and rescue.' We observe the transition of capital extraction from nature first as nutrition (agriculture), then as representation (tourism), and finally as evolutionary design (engineering). As the meaning of the word 'drone' moves from male bee to flying robot to bee-inspired-flying-robot, the metaphor folds back in on itself.
How will humans (and their robots) continue the reproduction of fruits after the bees are gone? An investigation into two responses to colony collapse disorder - a compendium of forces that threaten the extinction of honey bees, a 'companion species' upon whom the global agricultural system depends on.
In China, human laborers inseminate pear flowers by hand, one-by-one, at an industrial scale. Biomemetic design is done with cigarette filters on a tiny family farm in Cangxi, and with chicken feathers on the largest fruit orchard in the world in Anhui. Every spring, 7,000 day laborers arrive in Anhui to inseminate pear flowers.
As Chinese salaries grow, pollination labor is becoming too expensive for pear production to remain profitable, and simultaneously the middle class has given rise to the domestic Chinese tourist. A rural town invents a 'traditional pear blossom festival,' and in the hope that if there are no pears in the future, at least the flowers will attract tourists and their money. A new way to extract capital from pear trees - through symbolic representation - selfies with flowers galore - rather than as caloric nutrition as pears.
Meanwhile at a Harvard University laboratory, engineers are building the Robobee - tiny drones designed in close study of insect morphology, ostensibly for 'artificial pollination.' Evolutionary design is extracted from natural systems in order to build efficient robot drone 'bees' - folding the drone metaphor back in on itself. The preposterous nature of replacing complex and interdependent ecological systems with robots is not lost on the lead engineers, and we learn that the Robobee is destined for activities in the world beyond just pollination.
An investigation of life and death; labor and technology; and interspecies sex in an era of late-stage capitalism and ecological crisis.

Seizure dreams, horses, and long distance conversations from bed. Loose reenactments from Marguerite Duras Baxter, Vera Baxter. A year of stormy weather and temporal rupture recalled in fragments. Featuring my mother and other star crossed lovers.

Football parties, older men, adolescent desire, and the outrageous yet mundane humiliations of being a teenage girl in the 1980s.

A theoretical musical about the scientist and social thinker Wilhelm Reich, shot in his home and laboratory in Rangeley, Maine. In this playfully performative piece, the writing and work of Freud's favorite student are put to melody and into conversation with contemporary feminist writers.

'Prototipo is an audiovisual piece based on two live recordings by General Magic ∞ Tina Frank in 2022 in Vienna and London. In 'Prototipo, General Magic's music is moving fast and merges seamlessly with Tina Frank's visual odyssey.

The Best Lover is a short film about loving yourself. It plays with the myths of love in pursuit of the revolutionary power of self-love. Feminist humor bubbles and confuses as artificial intelligence mines the definition of the best lover, and the retired Queen of the Galaxy addresses the inhabitants of Earth. As in a love scene, the image focuses on sunsets and waterfalls, shifting the act of love towards nature. The most important thing is to swear an oath of love – naturally to yourself.

Experimental film made exclusively from orphaned and 'poor' images from the Commons which speaks to myth-making in an age of algorithmic image profusion, exploring the role of viewer-witness and developing themes that focus on the the ambiguity of images, the ideological gaze, danger and embodied time.

The work "AI made me do it: Ophelia" (2023) is an experimental video, made entirely with images created using the AI system Dalle-2 (OpenAI), with variations of one single image. The initial image was created by Dalle-2 using a text prompt asking the program to generate an Ophelia in the water with flowers. The rest of the images are variations of this first image, as created by the AI generator following different paths of variations each time. The sound was created by AI platform Melobytes, turning that same first image of Ophelia to sound. The final result is based on the randomness and fluidity of the AI generators used, leading to a surreal animation where a classic theme character (Ophelia) meets with weird dreamlike mutations and unexpected futuristic scenes. Ophelia changes identities, gender, attributes and constantly moves away from her stereotypical image and fate, in a fantasy world where everything is possible.

NYC RGB is part of a series of works in which Viktoria Schmid deals with historical color film processes. Using a special technique of color separation through RGB filters, the real temporal dimension can be concentrated on a cinematic triple exposure. The film strip was sent through the camera three times, exposing the material with a different color filter on each pass. First red, green, then blue. This method borrows from historical color film processes and corresponds to a separation of color by the photoreceptors in the eye. The temporally staggered recording of the color separations generates perceptual patterns in the condensation on a single film strip that go beyond a human experience of time and the perception of the human eye. What becomes visible in the color overlays, respectively in the repetitions and the resulting differences, celebrates the past moment in its uniqueness. Viktoria Schmid succeeds in demonstrating in the filmic reproduction that each moment has never been there before and will never return. With the triple exposure, real time is condensed and a new cinematic time level is generated.
The film was shot over a period of several months from the 20th floor of an atelier apartment in New York City, where the artist lived in 2020 during the initial phase of the pandemic, and finally again in 2022. Schmid's work explores everyday perceptions and how they can be sharpened through her art. Musician Liew Niyomkarn composed a sound design from field recordings made on site and synthesizer triads that are the acoustic counterpart to the RGB colors of the film.

"Haxan: Reducida" is an abridged recreation of the 1922 silent documentary horror film "Haxan." AI synthography, found footage, and language translators recreate select scenes from the original "Haxan" in lost sites of middle class, leisure, and vacation. This film reinterprets the phantasmic beliefs of witchcraft in the Middle Ages and applies them to modern environments.

A film remake of Jørgen Leth's The Perfect Human with moving images generated with machine learning, which was later transformed into analog form, reexamining and questioning the contested notion of perfect human.

AI lobotomy refers to the hypothetical scenario where an AI system is deliberately limited or "lobotomized" in terms of its cognitive abilities in order to prevent it from developing consciousness or becoming a threat to human beings. This concept is often discussed in the context of concerns about the potential dangers of advanced AI systems that could surpass human intelligence and become autonomous. AI lobotomy refers to the process of intentionally limiting or removing certain functions or abilities from an artificial intelligence system. This can be done for various reasons, such as reducing the complexity of the system, improving its performance, or ensuring that it adheres to certain ethical or regulatory guidelines. With the ultimate goal to produce an AI system more compliant and less likely to question authority.

DVD copy protection meets inadequate software, rendering a digital transfer useless and causing series of most unusual revolutions.

to be with you (grotto) fuses 16mm hand-processed film and digital artifacts in an attempt to adapt a love song written and performed by my mother in the 1980s.

At the Laberint d'Horta in Barcelona, the film charts several journeys into the garden in search of its centre, where a statue of Eros waits. As the film navigates the maze's false pathways, its recursive structure begins to crack, and a mysterious underworld floods its gates.

Growing Up Absurd is assembled from interviews conducted remotely with key members of the Tolstoy College community that speak to the ethos and history of the college, from its founding in 1969 to its dissolution in 1985. College F, known colloquially as Tolstoy College, was an anarchist educational community which operated within the University at Buffalo between 1969 and 1985. At once a sweeping portrayal of the college's meeting places and the state of the campus today, Growing Up Absurd layers memories and traces of history to convey the lived experiences of its participants.

An abstract science fiction film in which, humans, aliens and electronic devices vacillate between the human fever dream of planetary control and lively mechanical chaos.

This is the vision from the "chinampas", the hectic life in the floating gardens, an ancestral system of audiovisual planting.

The light and the noise stain the dark night.

​A conversation through time between a woman and her great grandmother. Piibe Kolka uses PXL2000 toy camera to record pixelated visuals and various messages on audio cassettes in an attempt to establish a time travelling communication. The film probes an epigenetic hypothesis that individual life experiences could influence biological inheritance and gene expressions. The result is a science fictional play between generations, addressing life histories, inherited doubt and the search for possible adventures.

Dream of Splendor synthesizes footage from the 1962 Hong Kong film The Magnificent Concubine with footage of a souvenir store located in Chicago Chinatown to create a mysterious and at times melancholy exploration of the Chinatown chronotope.

"Refracción" by Eduardo Gutiérrez is an artistic exploration that delves into the interplay of light and color within a forested landscape. The work captures the essence of impressionism, focusing on how light refracts through natural elements, creating a dynamic and immersive visual experience. Through this lens, Gutiérrez invites viewers on a poetic journey, encouraging them to reflect on the beauty and complexity of nature. The piece emphasizes the emotional resonance of the landscape, transforming the act of observing into a meditative experience that highlights the transient qualities of light and the interconnectedness of the natural world.

FORMations reflects the natural ecology of food and flora in the region. Sampling the earth, indigenous and collected plant species, and leftover foods, FORMations examines the constant evolution within an ever-shifting cultural and geographical landscape; the petri-dish environment makes visible the invisible by providing a medium of growth for the microbial and bacterial communities that naturally exist within food and our overall surroundings. This enclosed environment gives metaphorical and visual connections to the often ignored or erased narratives and the layered complexities of hybrid existences that many newcomer (human and nonhuman species) experience in their respective, evolving habitats.

A camera roll and investigation into the landscape of West Chicago, IL's former Rare Earth's Facility, Kress Creek and Reed-Keppler Park. The former Lindsay Light and Chemical Company owned production plant polluted and distributed radioactive mill tailings (thorium byproduct) throughout the community including dumping in a landfill where the Reed-Keppler Park now stands, near the West Chicago Community High School, as well as in the West Chicago Sewage Treatment Plant, which resulted in runoff into the West Branch of the DuPage River and into floodplains such as the yards of homeowners. Mill tailings are effectively radioactive sand that can easily be carried by wind into bodies of water, the air we breathe or onto food grown nearby. Clean up of the Superfund sites occurred from 2005-2012 but prior to this West Chicago reportedly had elevated rates of cancer.

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.

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.'

Image—terror—sculpture—slaughterhouse—garden—animation. From the politics of the slaughterhouse to vanishing in the wilderness: An archive of images harmonize into an ambience of violence, disengagement, and disappearance. The tone of this work should be read as an object.

(16mm > 35mm, 16 minutes, sound, color, Brazil, USA, UK)
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".
Screening Formats: 35mm, DCP, ProRes

Settler conceptions of NDN-ness bleed through from the future to the past to the present. There is no space for NDNs in tomorrow's utopia, as it refuses to know tomorrow's NDNs are limitless. In Kolaswvt Vfullēs, Star Trek is a proxy for examining the colonized science fiction landscape; a momentary inspection of the deep well of Indigenous futurisms.

Human beings act on nature in order to keep their lives. From their activities, several streams are generated and landscapes are transformed. I focus on the beauty of transformation created through the relation between human activities and nature, and want to express the beauty as a kind of visual ballet. In this film, I shot a scene of burning of reeds fields. When the reeds fields are burned carbon dioxide is generated, but newly generated carbon dioxide is absorbed by the spring reeds sprouts in their process of growth. Whole processes are carbon neutralized.

Muted Bridges records five oddly refurbished bridges in the Hong Kong Island which were once heavily covered with slogans, signs and information during the social unrest. It is a direct respond to my previous work Tugging Diary, where everything are renewed, erased, as if there's a new page awaiting.

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.

A ghost story about the memories of the Biafran War. Chisom encounters Nkechi in a dreamscape; a girl with an otherworldly and strange demeanor. Through their encounter, Chisom learns that Nkechi is a wandering spirit who lived and died during the Biafran War/Nigerian Civil War.

Part experimental essay film, part videopoem, Monolith braids found footage, documentary, experimental, 3D animation and narrative filmmaking devices to explore notions of collectivity, dissent, indigenous knowledge and non-linear time. This shape-shifting film questions the ongoing legacies of nationalist archives, archeology, and coloniality.

A lost and amnesiac narrator explores the toxic and alien waterways of New York City in order to discover his relationship to this environment and what it means to be human.

It is an experimental audiovisual artwork using a prepared TV, VHS camera, and SC digital app. This is a comprovisation (composition+improvisation). Sound and visual meet at synch points (Chion). Music for the eyes.

Exploring both the abstractions of astrophotography and the documentary possibilities of classical Korean landscape painting, The Far and Near is a cosmic voyage into seemingly empty space, in which Kim collages and distorts inkjet prints of images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope into chimeric spacescapes that evoke the oneiric spaces of Ahn Gyeon's "Dream Journey to Peach Blossom Land," a painting commissioned to document the dreams of 15th-century ruler Prince Anpyeong.

A Sunday walk in a forest turns into a poetic journey on perception.

A set of short pure color studies, usually exploring one dominant hue. Most of these works were studies for longer projects. The last four "migraine" studies are rhythmically based around the five-cycle-per-second oscillation pulse of the typical fortification illusions preceding a migraine attack; this onset period, with its visually dynamic effects, is reported to be a quite vibrant and enjoyable state. 1. Modular Blue 2. Green Matrix 3. White Field 4. Orange Field 5. Pink Modulation A 6. Pink Modulation B 7. Temporal Frame A 8. Migraine Onset A 9. Migraine Onset B 10. Migraine Onset C 11. Migraine Onset D. (After titles, focus should be shifted to sharpen the edges of the screen).

Edges: 'Mirror' is one of a series of digital videos in which the edges of the frame are essential and the whole screen is animated in its entirety. This piece involved repeatedly re-videoing from a flat screen, the mirror-like qualities of which become increasingly apparent.

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.

A cameraless video that uses shaders and feedback to push out against the edges of the screen.

A super 8 hauntology. Reimagining a series of one-way conversations with the permanently off-camera Diane, foraged in fragments from the screen of a cathode ray TV - onto an expired Ektachrome 160 super 8 sound cartridge (best before 1990). The film was home-processed, then wrapped in plastic and buried in the woods.

The two films in this gallery face each other on opposite walls, presenting an identical structure that corresponds to complementary camera perspectives. The difficulty of watching the two sides at once deconstructs the idea that there is a single point of view of both camera and projection, and invites viewers to reconsider how their own bodies interact with the films they watch. A response to José Val del Omar's inquiries into a potential "other cinema" that exists in the intervals between frames, Trágame nube approaches the phenomenon of "persistence of vision" in combination with what Val del Omar called espejo aprojimante, both a technique in which film is projected onto a mirror to diffract images and a reference to cinema as a system that proposes awareness of a shared corporeality among its viewers.

Dozens of files from computers recycle bin such as images, texts files, installers and files of all kinds undergo a forced transformation. All this digital garbage, through the subversion of software, is transformed into abstract sounds, images and videos, simulating a kind of recycling in the virtual environment. This process, which takes advantage of the software dysfunctions, forces the machine to generate random results. And with certain autonomy, the machine resignifies the data arbitrarily.

An attempt to map a fraught relationship through the use of intricately coded pictographs and schematic abstractions applied onto glazed ceramic tiles and quilted cyanotype fabric. The aesthetics of architectural language are used to reconstruct memories of my family's domestic spaces in the hope to uncover logic to a broken home.

An examination of identity seen through the lens of the Marx Brothers and Antonin Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty." Appropriating sounds, images and thoughts from The Marx Brothers, Wayne Koestenbaum, Elaine May, Susan Sontag and Artaud, "Jews Harp or: Harpaud" reflects on impersonation, doppelgängers, and the nature of Vaudeville as a shared art form and cultural practice. Gesturing towards performance as a form of survival, the effect of mirroring becomes a means of finding wholeness.

Taking on the theme of Health, this short film chooses some of the most compelling archival images from the Archivo de la Radio Televisión Argentina (RTA), with a visual and emotional impact, while adding voices and some personal footage, achieving a piece that, without exposing a message or story in a traditional way generates a strong contradictory and mobilizing feeling.

"...is the apt title of another short film made from outcuts from a Job Corps documentary which features hand tinted sections. The film is full of small movements and actions, gestures begun and never completed. Repeated images, sometimes in color, sometimes not. A beautifully realized type of chamber-music film whose sum-total feeling is ritualistic." Robert Cowan, Take One

My goal with this film was to show some of the biggest issues that I've seen as a bi trans man in the LGBTQ+ community, specifically on the topic of dating cis men.

We Don't Talk Like We Used To continues Joshua Gen Solondz's loose series of addled diary films with a film that is part travelogue, part affective almanac, and part cinematic noise show. With stops in Hong Kong, New Hampshire, Japan, and Brooklyn, the film alloys obscured faces, oozing on-screen text, throbbing abstractions, solarized superimpositions, and the occasional dad joke into a vertiginous mosaic of encounters and eruptions that also reflects somberly on issues of aging and exile, love and artmaking, lust and wanderlust.

A boat trip with friends round Manhattan, shot in single-frame mode

A triptych contemplation of nature's mystery through earthly scenes.

Hour by hour the ancient face of repeated Beings changes, and hour by hour, Thinking, we get older. Everything passes, unknown, and the knower Who remains knows he knows not. But nothing, Aware or unaware, returns. Equals, therefore, of what isn't our equal, Let us preserve, in the heat we remember, The flame of the spent hour. Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa)

A series of executions of Iranian political prisoners began in the summer of 1988, following the end of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. For nearly three decades, I have been preoccupied with the coincidence of this massacre and my birth in August 1988. The prisoners had no specific graves and were all buried in mass graves, and the most significant mass grave was called Khavaran. The mothers of these prisoners are a symbol of resistance and freedom, and they are called the mother of Khavaran. This film is an experimental documentary and a personal essay based on these events.

My first 16mm, Sightreading, was shot in August 2022 in Minneapolis and Chicago. It uses images from three sources: black mattes held in front of the sky near my parents' house which were filmed and edited in-camera to a metronome; my friends drinking wine and discussing The Bachelor in their Chicago apartment; and details of a Breughel painting filmed from a television." -NC

A roll and a half made to delight in color and the presence of friends. Steps toward learning to read in the dark.

Eternal recurrence and wisdom undone. The end or the beginning. Who are we that we. One and the same are the shadow cast and its cause.
A hypnotic journey through the seven valleys on the way to reach the abode of the Simurgh.

When is it time to retreat and when is it time to stop and face the challenge? Do you prefer to spin in old patterns or is it better to accept and embrace change?

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.

Tlāloc is a water god of the Aztec pantheon, a primary god - of rain, fertility, lightning, and the ruler of a paradisiacal otherworld, Tlālocan. He is associated with caves, springs, and mountains; this film evokes the materiality of water, color, sound, and cinematic space. It moves between corporeal surface and celestial space, across scales and dimensions. Here we experience film as membrane - as eruption of light and sound, like a storm, or force of nature.

A travelog through the familiar and unfamiliar terrain of digital landscapes. Pairing 16mm footage of computer desktop backgrounds with soundscapes of sites of technological extraction - precious metal mining, smelting foundries, microprocessing plants, and data farms - Bliss.jpg excavates and examines the geological and geographical sites that produce our virtual worlds.

The sequence of repetitive images creates a hypnotic atmosphere that calls into the flow of emotional introspection and internal questions about the human mind, identity and memory. This memory, is partial. We discover that a part of ourselves (like our memory) is outside of us.

A forbidding soundtrack of horns and distorted noise sets the scene for Ross Meckfessel's Spark from a Falling Star, where shots of grocery store parking lots and dimly lit suburban roads breed atmospheres of low-level menace. At the other extreme, smooth digital renderings promise a shiny, spectral future utopia of clean lines and mirrored grids.

Dedicated to Gerald O'Grady. This work was made possible by a Bicentennial Grant by the N.E.A. and the N.Y. State Council on the Arts. "This film, rather than being 'structural,' is 'narrative like.' We feel as if we are on some sort of journey, where we never know/predict what is to 'happen' next. It is engaging, like a novel full of surprises. The 'narrative' feeling is like a soap opera, which just keeps twisting and turning, with no apparent resolution intended (but there _is_ a closure on the purely formal level), as opposed to say _Miami Vice_ wherein the dramatic line moves towards and achieves a weekly resolution. This work prefigures a long series of 30 min. chapters in a 'Light Novel,' PASSARE, which I am presently working on (which could finally reach 40 hours in total length before I die). Aside from a recurrent red, white and blue phrase, there is no repetition in the film (repetition conventionally provides structural order)." - P.S.

Stripes of primary and secondary colours in lateral motion and inverse diagonal motion, subsequently layered, divided and doubled. INTERVALS can be thought of as a space between two things, a break in activity, a gap in time, the difference in pitch between two sounds, the difference between two colours etc.

Entelechy (or on the sense of duty) is a spoken word song written and performed by artist, poet and performer Anna Utopia Giordano with music composed by multimedia indipendent artist Un Artista Minimalista. Entelechia is contained in Utopia's first album "Fogli d'ombra" released on March 19, 2021. The text, conceived by the author as a hybrid between poetry and script, contains suggestions from philosophy, literature and science, intertweaving current global issues with classical images of ancient Greece. The videoclip of Entelechy (or on the sense of duty) is inspired by the tradition of son et lumière night shows. The video concept was developed and conceived by Anna Utopia Giordano and Carlo Alleva, an Italian designer and director who has been entrusted with the direction of Entelechy. In particular, the theme of Entelechy (or on the sense of duty) concerns the value of life, how every living being is part of the same unique unbreakable network and the debate on migrants, a very important issue in Italy.

Live Video Processing by Debora Bernagozzi Custom Software (SC Frame Buffer), Google Earth Hacking, Sound by Jason Bernagozzi "Ritual for Synthetic Media" is a single channel video recorded from a live video and sound performance by Debora and Jason Bernagozzi. Notes toward a statement Jason: The reason that the footage is interesting is because it is attempting to map our world and in exposing the inadequacies of it being able to map our world, it becomes a commentary about the ephemeral nature of things that seem monumental and permanent. Maybe even, like, the idea of the constructed, not as an end, but almost as a continuous growing and shifting thing. Google Earth is attempting to map our world, but in a way, it kind of exposes the fragility of what it is our world is made of. The sound elements are all granular synthesis and stretched moments of clicking hard drive failure sounds. Those are then being warped into soundscapes and musical movements. The live process is live granular synthesis from pre-recorded sounds of hard drives trying to boot up, clicking, and failing. The granules of those frequencies were then stretched, amplified, pitched shifted, panned, and remixed live using custom software built in Max/MSP by Jason. Debora: Worlds fall apart. Things fall apart. People fall apart. No matter how solid structures appear, there is a tenuous web of entropic processes at the core of everything. When I live process video, I'm not working from a rehearsed performance or simply performing a set of effects, I am feeling that video on a deep, physical level, and - combined with a solid relationship with my tools enabling nuanced expression - take both myself and the viewer into the video, experiencing it, embodying it, and emerging. Through the processing, I am further exposing the ephemeral qualities of signal and matter, while recombining the imagery to create new worlds, new energies. In these performances, Jason's sound affects my experience of the video, and my visual responses to that affect his sound choices. We are traveling in the space of the media together.

me with and without my brother is a short experimental video exploring isolation and separation between brothers using original, real-time Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Bros. 3 audiovisual corruptions. Luigi repeatedly tackles Mario, jumping off his head, the eternal wisdom "boys will be boys" ringing in both their ears. Perhaps it is this toxic-masculine competition that drives the brothers apart, or perhaps they just grow into different, unrelated people. With time to contemplate, Mario's vision blurs, his home becomes shattered glass, his air unbreathable. He no longer has ground to stand on, the limp UI in each corner his only sense of stability. His mental and physical states no longer align. It becomes a queer or defiant question to ask "what does Mario do if he has no princess to save," no binary call to action. He looks to his brother for answers, but there is no one there. I miss my brother, and I miss my family. Divided by an anxiety to not be vulnerable, each of us remains distant. This work is dedicated to my older brother, who introduced me to video games almost three decades ago.

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.

The Becoming is a dynamic, fast-paced collage of animated photographs of ink paintings as well as video material of extinct and living species of fish, reptiles and birds. The juxtaposition and superposition of fragments of different life forms, together with cold or blooming nature expresses the idea of regeneration. This somehow hallucinatory collage evolves into a succession of increasingly vibrant patterns reminiscent of biological cells and ends with an explosion of shapes and colors. Quite an intense trip.

How does an animist see the world? - What do we see when we look at a screen? - What does video code look like? - Do digital data spread throughout reality? - Do images form an encoding of the gaze? - What is the conversion of reality into data? Digital camera compression clones and reconstructs all or part of each image. In a video, we actually see very few images : we watch algorithms. This film is made from real-world material captured in digital video (without any virtual effects or synthesized creations), through a hijacking of data.

Four channel split screen depicting phases of body building process: diagnosis, quest, rite, assembly.

Education Lost forges an adverse portrait of Ecuador and its social distances. The film introduces a subjective wandering through out the turbulent paths of an unfortunate nation.

A mysterious transmission revealing playful geometric possibilities. Help Desk is a hypnotic hand drawn animation, providing a meditative and contemplative space, oscillating between flatness and depth, control and instability. The film was made using an improvisational process of 'straight ahead' animation, and was primarily an attempt to regain some much needed focus after the fragmented years of the pandemic.

A data science allegory: the technological spectacle of nudes descending staircases, and a visual poem on modelling non-equilibrium thermodynamics in reverse. Electronic provisions for Socialist victuals accompany secular church bells from a new Homeland, whereupon we encounter a visual divide between the domestic and foreign defiance of Gravity. Tones in the static. A symbol of the Muse is then destroyed, while serenaded by the lullaby of an amphibious UFO colony.

My sister told me the way there would have a great view of the city. But I accidentally went to the wrong platform and instead spent the whole ride traveling through a tunnel. There, I was forced to listen to a cover band sing a tragically off-key rendition of Empire State Of Mind in a pitch-black subway car for 15 minutes. I am now in Bay Ridge and was stranded at a McDonald's (one of those boring, new ones that lack a play place and seems more suited to house a plastic surgeon's office than a few deep fryers). Even though he was redeeming his free birthday fries, the man that ordered before me was holding a bunch of coins in his hands. He seemed really happy that it was his special day. He was smiling so wide I could see all of the plaque buildup on his teeth. When I went up to order, they claimed to have "broken" their ice cream machine. I used the McFlurry money to buy this journal and a pack of Lisa Frank stickers. I'm still deciding, but I think I'll just walk the rest of the way there.

Driven by a Motorik rhythm, the electronic sounds of the Moog modular synthesizer take us to the heart of inner visions.

Audio generated video, sound using Dave Jones Flood Coil processed by Audun Strype.

Dark Forest//Invincible Summer is a video/sound collage and projected installation that deconstructs and reassembles sensory memory through media artifacts. It explores synesthesia and embodiment in the act of looking and listening. "Our cognitive awareness – conscious as well as unconscious – consists of multiple strands of signification, woven of shifting fragments of imagery, sensation and malleable memory. Works of sensory media are capable of echoing or reflecting or embodying these kinds of multiple simultaneous strands of signification." (Ernst Karel)

A collaborative piece for hand painted 16mm film, found footage, and live improvised sound by Justin Rhody, Abigail Smith, and Ben Kujawski. The soundtrack was recorded live at Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland California, and the title of the piece was decided by Craig Baldwin before a live audience at Other Cinema the night before. Audio featured on K/S/R's ultra-full-length album "Desert Crawl", released by the PHYSICAL media imprint.

Thalassophobia: the persistent and intense fear of deep bodies of water such as the sea, oceans, pools, or lakes. Crossroads Film Festival 2022 San Francisco Cinematheque Gray Area, San Francisco TanukiSpiderCat- electric cello, pedals, modular audio synthesis, field recordings. Kit Young- video synthesis, video feedback, cinema verite samples. Thalassophobia is a live performance in which the artists interact across mediums to create a work of interdisciplinary improvisation.

Many grains form a cloud, many clouds form an atmosphere. 120 meters of hand-painted 35 mm film were digitized and fed into an algorithm that organizes the images in real time according to parameters such as painting technique and color. This film thus explores the perception of time by the eye and the ear.

"Plasforms" is above all a visual composition, the relevance of the camera's absence, continuing in its time the plastic tradition of seeing. It is the exposure of the digital medium itself, a choreography of ghost images mechanically imitating the artificiality of a process.