Playlist
<p>Two artists, one in Pennsylvania and one in Puerto Rico, each in pandemic lockdown, each disoriented. Objects seem to control them; their bodies are unbalanced, unwieldy, comical. The horizon spins; the ground falls away; and yet a strange wonder reigns.</p>
<p>Day after day, bars of sunset pass the kitchen. Lamps carry on when the sky gets dark. The frame finds its balance. Life in work and work in life.</p>
<p>An account of life among those preparing for the end of the world. A report from the garden. </p>
<p>The horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, is a promised place where these two elements come together. a metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. a place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart.</p>
<p>Wear and Tear is an autobiographical poem and an honest reflection on a very weird year. Filmed with a thrift store Super 8 camera mid-pandemic on a family vacation during a moment of massive uncertainty, the beach serves as a refuge and a temporary escape from reality. Journal entries, email fragments, voicemails and other digital ephemera are stitched together into a somnambulistic narrative about losing touch, self doubt, and the toll of prolonged stress on our brains and bodies.</p>
<p>A portrait of the urban residential development as it slips into oblivion.</p>
<p>As the ringing alarm is consumed by static, fire haze hangs heavy on the California landscape of smashed cars, burning valleys, lost animals, and tented homes.</p>
<p>As we follow The Seeker, who moves between the city and the sanctuary, MASS carves out the intimate communal spaces and intangible signals that characterize the contemporary Black experience.</p>
<p>Light is information, a signal sounder than recollection. If there’s anyone out there to receive the message.<br /> <br /> Alone in a sealed apartment until time loses meaning, the world outside unreal or unreachable, archaic illuminations crawling across the walls, connections fraying. What is happening here? A science fictional essay film, or its inverse. A break-up film about optics, memory, data. Endings and what survives them or fails to.</p> <p>Many thanks due to Maya Edelman, Dave Zackin, Zach Nader, and the Regional Plan Association.</p>
<p>At night in Boston, a bodega cat is the only witness when an alien rock lands among the trees in an empty lot. Crude special effects conjure a viscous white humanoid who is stalked by a figure on a motorcycle. Their encounter ends in ritual fire. A burning effigy and a Senegalese call to prayer combine modes of Afro-Venezuelan spiritual resistance from past and future into an ambiguous present. Terror Has No Shape condenses the experience of colonialism into a series of fragments from first encounter to long haunted aftermath.</p>
<p>A wannabe vampire spouts a hilarious and bizarre monologue as a means to cope with the uncertainty and chaos of the current day.</p>
<p>During their annual migration to Mexico, thousands of Monarch butterflies funnel into Point Pelee National Park in Leamington, Ontario, where they wait for calm weather to allow them to fly across Lake Erie.</p>
<p>A number of distorted 3D characters moving about in a scrap land. A collage of forms and functions, with textures and animations applied incorrectly. This material was obtained from public domain libraries, low budget game asset stores and preset banks. Mythological shapes show up in a haphazard and contextless way, mirroring the image flow of the internet era and the mental processes involved when making meaning of the world.</p>
<p>This associative stream of visuals, culled from the past, reflect on the roles of art, labor, and journalism in contemporary Sri Lanka, facing a dubious future ahead. Memory and ethnographic deconstruction cascade in an obliterated form, forging a dire and prescient assemblage.</p>
<p>We live in a world where looking and being looked at has become a kind of currency, where “likes” have literally become income. How can we locate or make space for the radical Other? In PHARMAKOSIS, a series of confrontations at a museum illustrates this exclusive economy of images and illuminates a complex set of permission structures surrounding who is allowed to look and who is not. An articulation of the Pharmakos – the figure in ancient greek religion who was ritually expelled from the polis in the belief that such sacrifice would bring about purification.</p>
<p>Jealousy is an experimental 3D animation. It features an elemental digital construction of the plantation house meticulously described in the seminal 1957 novel La Jalousie by French writer Robbe-Grillet. No characters are depicted in the animation – just as the novel emphasizes settings and objects over characters/dialogue. The compulsively observed settings and objects reveal the obsessive mindset of the main character, a jealous husband who suspects his wife of having an affair. The soundtrack features sounds described in the novel; nocturnal animal cries, insects whirring, etc. The animation expands on the novel by making settings and objects dynamic; furniture self-constructs, objects move, and lights shift.</p>
<p>A short experimental documentary about the site of a former stop on the Underground Railroad, the erasure of history, and what we owe those who came and struggled before us.</p>
<p>A chilling, phantasmagoric 3-minute experimental short that interrogates the Trump Administration’s reactionary 1776 Project. It combines frantic, repetitive animations—depicting reinforcement, bunkering, and isolation—drawn from home improvement texts, with audio excerpts from the 1776 Commission’s report audiobook. The result is an unflinching exploration of right-wing historical propaganda</p>
<p>Strange things are afoot in Hastings, Nebraska.</p>
<p>Herpetologist Jeffrey Beane traverses the mysterious world of reptiles and amphibians out in the field and among rare collections. In the process of searching for clues, he reflects on the ongoing relationship between humanity and serpents.</p>
<p>Created alone in the desert, imaginary structures are built and destroyed through seeking out the edges of an unknown landscape. We keep finding ourselves at the center of something. Shot on a LomoKino, 35mm to digital</p>
<p>Mainly shot in the peripheral areas of the ever-expanding Laem Chabang port in Chon Buri, Thailand, Notes from the Periphery interrogates the notion of territoriality, globalized networks, and ownership through fragmented relations of the affected sites and communities nearby, shipping containers that become a policing tool, and the life cycle of a barnacle.</p>
<p>The animated body shifts in smear frames through the history of painting, parroting famous depictions of women. She tests the postures by inhabiting them and promptly discarding them, rejecting the fantasy that each represents. The cartoon body is confined by the frame but thrives in constant transition.</p>
<p>A 16 mm cinematic poem shot just after the 2020 COVID‑19 lockdown: a group of friends perform domestic gestures—touching, cooking, spinning a toy top—captured through an eerie red filter. The film explores the fragile balance between tenderness and latent violence in everyday life.</p>
<p>across the held breath distance that we keep in order to forget that we love.</p>
<p>Pretty Is As Pretty Does takes a gander at Southern “lifestyle culture” represented in books like Whiskey in a Teacup by Reese Witherspoon, Pinterest lists of Southern sayings, and Hollywood representations of the South. The film remembers matriarchal traditions, recipes, and expressions long after leaving home. It’s also about being charmed by kids with good manners, still hearing the relentless hum of cicadas even thousands of miles away, and missing the humid air, fireflies, and distant storms. Storms can be deadly, though, and sometimes politeness is an excuse to hide painful truths. Memory is just the road we’re lost on.</p>
<p>You never know when someone is miscarrying; it could be happening right next to you.</p>
<p>An incursion into Medicine, specifically gynecology, exposing problem origins and fraught desires.</p>
<p>A group of tattered paper dolls daydream alternate realities and surreptitiously explore the hidden lives of their strict and secretive caregivers. Hijinks ensues and discoveries are made as the characters live out their childhood fantasies. Created with found paper dolls cut from a 1920s newspaper and found in an attic, the film explores the adult’s attempt to dictate what girls learn, and the children’s talent for discovering forbidden knowledge.</p>
<p>News from another pandemic, the one that “changed everything” before it fell out of the news cycle and collective memory, except for the newly infected, or those who, like myself, managed a new life after death. Based on a text by David Wojnarowicz.</p>
<p>Going through my mini DVs shot over the past decade, I rediscovered a forgotten night sequence of Chantal Akerman and Sonia Wieder-Atherton leaving a brasserie where we had dined together in Montparnasse. Since New York, Paris and Moscow were places the three of us had in common, I intertwined some of my images with hers.</p>
<p>Though the world is full of noise, it was born in deep sea silence.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>A photographer tries to harmoniously combine a small child with symbols of state violence in one photo.</p>
<p>A pulsating cosmic montage; an alternative view of the seminal Earthrise photograph. We are all astronauts whether we like it or not.</p> <p>Seeing Spacecraft Earth is the third in a trilogy of films composed from NASA’s publicly available image and sound archives. At once playful and precise, each film applies a structuralist rigor to reanimate the vast archive that frames public conceptions of the universe.</p> <p>The complete trilogy includes:<br /> Seeing Spacecraft Earth (2021)<br /> Dear Opportunity (2019)<br /> The Known Universe (2016)</p>
<p>Some forms we can only know by their shadow. In homage to the spirits of space test dogs, or any being we use in the name of progress.</p>
<p>The story unfolds on the Eve of Midsummer: on the day when the threshold between worlds is porous, and an idle gesture can tempt fate. Inspired by Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth (1671), this work takes the outward form of a nature film. But observation gives way to illusion and the surface gives way to murky waters strewn with debris of those who have succumbed to its lures. (The Lady of Shalott, Ophelia). They remain trapped; menacing reminders of the dangerous seduction of beauty, and anger of the elusive spirits who resent being examined.</p>
<p>A fictional account of David Koresh’s last words, a cursory analysis of the pantheon of Icelandic sagas, a home movie taking into account 20 years of filming on an old Bolex 16mm camera, a series of reflections on the destructive nature of industrialized societies: a collage film, metaphysical road trip movie in time of pandemic and social uprising. A point-and-shoot epistolary fever dream collage film made in times of multiple crises.</p>
<p><em>in ocula oculorum</em> interrogates the unknown and the internal, in both subject matter and experience. Dealing with the contemporary state of perpetual doom, the film contemplates various stages of life and death from the point of view of our human bodies and perceptual systems. It explores beta movement and phi phenomenon, pushing the limits of intermittence and persistence of vision, playing with our innate desire for continuity and cohesion by forcing image slip.</p>
<p>Experimental short film in which a synthetic narrator describes patterns in time, which “she” calls time crystals. It is not clear if this film comes from an unknown future, is a consciousness loop, or a dream. Over time her narrative shifts and branches as if other films are emerging from the fragmented spaces in between, from our own mental images, memories, and cinematic consciousness. </p>
<p>A neurodivergent-futurist manifesto considering feedback systems as philosophical frameworks, and a system of sense-making where there is no difference between art and science, and invocation.</p>
<p>180 million years ago, through a chance horizontal gene transfer, ferns acquired a much needed light sensor (neochrome) that allowed them to modify and survive in low light environments. </p> <p>We should all be so lucky.</p>
<p>Set in the landscapes of Los Angeles, this hybrid documentary seeks to explore harmful cyclical occurrences that exploit natural resources and bring us closer to extinction. Following the discovery of a mysterious metal structure in the desert, this film documents the encased objects found within the structure. This film is made up of speculative recreations of the study conducted, analysis of the found objects, and surrounding landscapes.</p>
<p>Building on research by Diana Deutsch, Alfred Bregman, Maryanne Amacher and others, The Sick Sense is an ongoing project exploring the limits of the perceptual system. These projects stimulate otoacoustic and flicker phenomena and auditory and visual hallucinations while searching for stimulus patterns that deactivate the brain’s default mode network, switching the brain into the role of ecstatic perceiver.</p>
<p>GOVERNANCE (GVNC) is the collaborative project of Rebecca Uliasz and Quran Karriem. We collectively build electronic compositions, installations, and media driven interventions that take the form of audio-visual performances and multimedia publications.</p>