The Forest is Offended – Stephanie Barber – USA – 2017 – 3 min

This is a short 16mm film poem thinking about the physics of sound, the need sound has to vibrate and bounce off a molecule or atom to return to our ears; it is thinking about this physical property as a metaphor for spirituality or love. This film was shot on expired film from 1970 whose own molecules needed to be called back. To us.

Stephanie Barber is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been focused on an expanded poetics that results in the creation of movies, books, installations and songs. This work sits between essay and story, cinema and literature, science and spirituality. It moves beyond allegiance to media and works hard at defying classification. Barber’s work considers the most basic existential questions of human existence; its morbidity, profundity and banality, with the unexpected tools of play and humor. She approaches these questions rigorously while side stepping the oppressive, class-bound implications of academic form and language. Major museums and festivals in the US and abroad have hosted solo exhibitions of these films and videos and books, essays and poetry have been widely published. The past five years have seen the release of two feature films which focus on an imaginative approach to poetic essay represented in dialog, radio play and song (in DAREDEVILS) and lecture, song and monologue (in In The Jungle.) as well as other projects.

A Film Containing Trees – Jon Behrens – USA – 2018 – 3 min

This is a film that went through several versions before I finally settled on this one. This was one of the very first films I shot on my newly purchased Arriflex S camera. I shot a 100ft load of 250D off the deck of my home in one three minute take, I then back winded the roll to the beginning and shot again this time from a different angle and past my hand in front of the lens and blended the two images together. It was then double print with one exposure upside down. The sound was created from sounds recorded from the same deck a few months prior, and heavily processed. I already have two other new films for this year so I thought I would just give this one away, I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Jon Behrens is a Seattle based filmmaker/composer. His films have been screened at film festivals, colleges and museums throughout the world since the early 1980’s including screenings at Antimatter Film Festival Canada, Seattle International Film Festival, TIE Film Festival Colorado, London Underground Film Festival, Crossroads Film Festival San Francisco, Festival International des Cinemas Differents et Experimentaux in Paris, Alternative Film and Video festival in Novi Beograd Serbia, Sydney Underground Film Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris and many many others. His work ranges from personal film diary’s to abstract hand painted optically printed works. In addition to filmmaking Jon Behrens is also a composer and has created sound designs for most of his own films starting about 10 years ago, as well as non film related compositions. www.jonbehrensfilms.com

Generation – Dan Browne – Canada – 2017 – 2 min

Life cycles of a garden visit.

Dan Browne (b. 1982) is a filmmaker, photographer and multimedia artist whose works explore patterns and nature through dense and kinetic forms. His films and videos have been presented at over one hundred festivals and venues internationally, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Diagonal Film Archive, Centre Georges Pompidou, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Wavelengths at the Toronto International Film Festival and Early Monthly Segments. His multimedia work memento mori (2012) received the Jury Prize for Best Canadian Work at WNDX Festival of Moving Image, First Prize at Athens International Film + Video Festival, and the Deluxe Cinematic Award at Images Festival. Most recently, Poem (2015) was released on Graphical Recording’s Variations, and received the Trinity Square Video Award at Images. Dan’s media practices also encompass live performances in collaboration with musicians, and video installations that have received public commissions in Toronto and Vancouver.

Prist – Eric Ko – USA – 2018 – 5 min

Official music video for Uio Loi’s “Prist”. “Uio Loi is an experimental electronic musician who interweaves computer-generated notation with hand crafted melodies. I wanted to mirror that in the visual work, combining an aesthetic inspired by uncanny, sterile, auto-generated detritus found throughout the web and intimate, personal, textural imagery that can only be captured manually – hand-drawn, hand-painted animation, hand-held super-8 footage, hand-held video recordings.” – EK

Eric Ko is an independent animator, filmmaker, and artist from New York. He is engaged with emotional distillation through textural and visceral atmosphere. He is interested in visual poetry by way of both abstraction and objective imagery.

Uno No Es Tan Débil Como Para Sucumbir Ante Situaciones Así (One is Not as Weak…) – M. Dianela Torres – Mexico – 2017 – 5 min

Light, transformation and rhythmic image. One is not as weak as to give in to such situations is a formal exploration. Ruins rebuilt through moving images and synesthesia.

M. Dianela Torres is a producer, filmmaker and audiovisual researcher from Mexico City, interested in experimental cinema and video. She studied Broadcast & Media with a specialization in Audiovisual Production at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her work has been exhibited and projected in Mexico, South America, USA and Europe. http://cargocollective.com/mdianelatorres

Equal Tense – Ieva Balode – Latvia – 2018 – 8 min

Ieva Balode, born in 1987, in Riga, Latvia is an artist and film curator working with analog image. She graduated from the Latvian Academy of Art. In her artistic practice she is interested in human identity matters, which she explores through the language and philosophy of an image – both still and moving. Drawing inspiration from texts, archival materials and nature, the artist seeks to find the border between human consciousness and transcendence within it. Her interest in analog medium lies within the medium’s relation to nature and human perception. With her works she takes part in international exhibitions and film festivals presenting her work both in installation, as well as cinema and performance situations. As a curator she is a founding member of Baltic Analog Lab – artists collective providing a space and platform for analog film production, research and education. She is also a director of the experimental film festival “Process” happening in Riga since 2017. Akademia Dunkan was a sanctuary for those minorities who could find their shelter under one roof which unites them in a common movement of artistic creativity, freedom and equality.

Not For Medical Use – Camila Moreiras – Spain – 2017 – 4 min

Inscription as document and inscription as documentation. Evidence and testimony. Diagnosis and reaction. The forensic puts in play a retelling of events, a (re)construction of time always already from an historicizing perspective. Its images are the images of remains and remainders, and of questions left unanswered. Broadly speaking, Not For Medical Use gives an experiential account of what it is to be medically imaged. More precisely, it seeks to blur the lines between evidence and testimony; between lived experience and an experience given over to the image proper.

Camila Moreiras (US/Spain) is a visual artist and scholar whose work focuses on the state of the image at a time of saturating surveillance and compulsive documentation. She received her PhD in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, and is currently pursuing her Masters in the Creative Documentary program at the Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Spain, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.

 

Applied Pressure – Kelly Sears – USA – 2018 – 6 min

Sequential images sourced from dozens of massage books are activated to reflect on recent public conversation from this past year surrounding bodies, massage, and assault. Ease the pain from past physical and mental distress. The body remembers. Aches may linger. Lay prone, breathe deeply, release tension, let go of the pain.

Kelly Sears is an experimental animator who recasts and reframes American archetypes and institutions to reimagine our own social and political legacy.  She views animation as a critical practice, cutting out and collaging as a way to intervene and expand context to appropriated source materials.  Through combining animated photographic and film documents with speculative storytelling, each of her films contains recognizable political and social narratives that take fictional twists, becoming uncanny or fantastic as history merges with myth. Her award-winning films have screened at festivals such as Sundance; South by Southwest; American Film Institute; Los Angeles Film Festival; San Francisco International; Off+Camera Film Festival, Poland; Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil, France; and Tricky Women in Austria; and retrospective programs of her short work at Anthology Film Archives in NYC; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Portland Art Museum; and the SF Cinematheque. She teaches advanced filmmaking, animation, experimental documentary, and media archeology at the University of Colorado – Boulder.

The Event – Mo Flannery – Australia – 2017 – 5 min

The Event is an autobiographical account from the position of the Observer. The Observer working in a CCTV traffic control room. This account was a personal narrative voice over from memory of a protest by a woman against an authoritarian system who closed a major freeway in a standoff. This work explores what it is to engage with images in a moral and ethical form and the vicarious complicities of the viewer. There is an engagement with the power structures of the working environment, the resulting emotional labour and the fractured perspectives of representation. The politics of vision and the politics of a postmodern geographical landscape come to the fore. The motivation for the narrative revolved around the act of protest by a single woman that is out of the social order. An event that was performed in a public space. It amplified the fractured mediated forces that are in play in relation to what is performed in the urban environment.

Mo Flannery is a Scottish artist, filmmaker based in Melbourne, Australia. Her film and video works utilise different moving image technologies to create autobiographical and socially engaging narratives. These works have been shown in projection art festivals in and around Melbourne. She is an MFA candidate at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

In a Free Sound Field – Monteith McCollum – USA – 2017 – 11 min

In a home filled with rare art objects from around the world, a disjunctured set of tales unravel about the travels of collector Don Boros. Dislocating fact, from fiction and time from place, the tales are intermixed with the notable text “Sensations of Tone” by 19th century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. This work exists as a single channel and interactive film. The interactive version utilizes the audiences Iphones shaping the film and audience experience in very different way sonically, visually, and conceptually. Sounds are distributed throughout the audience utilizing the acoustic architecture of the theater and visuals are used to bring a different context to the narrative through text and image. In a Free Sound Field is the third in a trilogy of films exploring sound.

Monteith McCollum is an inter-media artist working in film, sound, and sculpture.  His films have screened at Festivals and Museums including The Museum of Modern Art, Hirshhorn, Wexner Center for the Arts and Festivals including SXSW, Slamdance, Hot Docs, San Francisco International Festival.   His films have garnered dozens of festival awards including an IFP Truer than Fiction Spirit Award. His film and sound work have received support from organizations including New York Foundation for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, NEA, Jerome Foundation and Kodak. Recent Audio Visual performances of include the project Hidden Frequencies and Rabbit in the Sand.