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Stained Night (La Noche Manchada)
Andres Medina<p>The light and the noise stain the dark night.</p>
Playlist
In 2023, Light Matter Film Festival Travelled to a Few Cities, incluidng Buenos Aires and Quito.
Light Matter: Buenos Aires June 10-11, 2023 Los Experimentos presentation at Kino Palais Buenos Aires, Argentina
Light Matter: Ecuador March 17-18, 2023 Cinemateca Nacional of Ecuador Quito, Ecuador
<p>The light and the noise stain the dark night.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Yon and Payola find themselves in a Victorian conservatory. They are companionable, disoriented and petulant––they whip wildly through these disembodied states.</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>A Sunday walk in a forest turns into a poetic journey on perception.</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>A triptych contemplation of nature's mystery through earthly scenes.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The rendering of an impeccably constructed computer-generated image displays a disarranged home. Filmed on 16mm and hand-processed, the image is formed through a process that allows imperfections such as hair, dust, and dirt.</p>
<p>On my daily commute, I'm drawn to this underutilized space, tacked-on to a newly constructed condominium. Filmed on the first day of Spring. 210 North 12th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.</p>
<p>Raptus (delight in Latin) is a strong disturbance of consciousness provoking a sudden impulse urging the subject to act violently in a reflex way.</p>
<p>Unedited footage of clear molten glass bubbling concentrically in reference to cosmic and terrestrial cycles of expansion and contraction. The two channels feature the same video, with one in reverse.</p>
<p>Duffy conjures entities into existence via code-based processes and digital fabrication. As a Neurodivergent-NonBinary person, the normative modalities of learning and making were not designed for them. To move through these structures, they made their own systems, glitching and patching and breaking the entanglements of binary logic; manifesting into infinite possibility, translating the immeasurable interconnection of transcendent sentience, and examining the impending demise of binary systems.</p>
<p>Feel in your eyes, cathode rays, blood streams and RAM memory, an exciting world of knowledge and possibilities offered by the eth_OS system. What you idealize is within the reach of the machine, even (self) destruction.</p>
<p>In Confessions on a Transmission Line, we wanted to explore the audiovisual process of feedback as a spiritual practice in relation to Camp and queer potentiality. Using real-time signal processing tools and improvisational strategies, we set up a performance space where our persona interacts with a discarded megaphone. By re-using this object as a tool and instrument to both project and receive transmission frequencies, we are searching for a way to communicate with our queer ancestors and those yet to be born.</p>
<p>Devil’s Peak reflects on recent unprecedented shifts in the socio-cultural fabric of the artist’s homeland of Hong Kong and a nagging anxiety that hangs over daily life in the former British Colony. Highly condensed glimpses of cityscapes and everyday life form a collage of overlapping poetic narratives and coded references. The film cycles through ominous sites of social tension, lush urban spectacle, relics of imperialist legacies, and places of personal significance—such as the artist’s 500-year-old ancestral village—at a rapid, frenetic pace. By interrogating highly subjective experiences in the context of a seemingly insurmountable change in the political and cultural fabric of his native city, Liu creates a site of remembrance for a time and place that may never be as it was.</p>
<p>That was when I thought I could hear you on petals, on fire, and on the edge of the bridge.</p>
<p>"A serendipitous encounter on distant shores Colliding archives of body and place Ominous scenes of a homeland's militaristic pride An incantation to freedom and belonging."</p>
<p>Moments of VHS and 3/4" tape decay and glitch, collected during archival digitization process, normally discarded for library access copies, but here woven into a noisy and chromatic tarrying with the negative.</p>
<p>When you question the very nature of your physical reality it becomes much easier to see the cracks in the system. Estuary charts the emotional landscape of a time in flux. Inspired by the proliferation of computer generated social media influencers and the growing desire to document and manipulate every square inch of our external and internal landscapes, the film considers the ramifications of a world where all aspects of life are curated and malleable. As time goes on all lines blur into vector dots.</p>
<p>This is a 16mm film about making a handmade optical soundtrack and syncing it to the image track. It is also a playful experimental narrative about space exploration. As the film progresses, the nature of the soundtrack comes to speak for the way space exploration is part of a larger, systemic repetition of colonialism.</p>
<p>The glitches are flowing continuously into the digital landscape, without ceasing; like an eternal sea of colour waves into our eyes, while the sound surrounds the images by covering them into the chasm of noise.</p>
<p>A moving image that moves through a still photograph. Created by photocopying details of an enlarged 35mm photograph directly onto clear 35mm film leader.</p>
<p>An experimental film essay about a found (stolen?) photograph, a hurricane, and film’s inherent ability to animate and re-animate still, dead, and inanimate beings, images, and objects. The film is created using an ink-jet direct-on-film technique where the digital frame is printed directly onto onto recycled 16mm celluloid.</p>
<p>Reverberations of fear and desire stemming from the drive to mirror the gaze and assert oneself as an image. My trans body beholds the possibility of collapsing into an inarticulable flux of home movies. This self-portrait summons familiar ghosts dwelling the wound of an image.</p>
<p>Atlantic Ocean, Year 1500. During the voyage of the ships commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral, strange events cause the crew to get lost in space and time without ever reaching Brazil. The Endless Journey is a reassemblage of the classic "O descobrimento do Brasil" (1937), directed by Humberto Mauro.</p>
<p>A post apocalyptic state, still full of angst and sorrow. We follow the frustrated hammer of the future, long after Brecht thought that he had nailed it. Searching always searching, feeling deep yearning from the bowls of what used to be biology. Does he get it in the end?</p>