Join us on Saturday, September 28, 7:30pm, at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave., Denver) for night 9 of the Unseen Festival 2019!

Reading

Jeffrey Erlacher is a poet and children’s author from Denver, CO. His poetry has appeared in Midwest Review, Brushfire, Talking Writing and elsewhere. He also has a children’s novel, The Little Palace, which is being released by Chipper Press on October 8th. Find out more about his work at jeffreyerlacher.com and Instagram @jeffreyerlacher. Jeffrey’s poetry explores our shared multi-layered realities, from the structures of the molecular and musical, to the grounded specificity of geographic place, body, and identity—while reaching to and through the shifting and expanding universe (or multiverse) we inhabit and are inhabited by. He writes for those he loves and the passions that move him, including music and art, our relationship to one another, travel and time, disability and illness and death—but also possibility and wholeness and this one-time life that unfurls in the present moment. 

Dance

Rachel Halmrast began dancing at eXit SPACE School of Dance in Seattle, WA.  Under the artistic direction of Marlo Ariz and Karen Baskett, she deepened her study of movement and choreography as a member of the pre-professional program. After graduating high school, she spent a year dancing for Seattle-based artists Amy J Lambert (AJnC), Alicia Mullikin, and Marlo Ariz (Marlo Ariz Dance Project). She is pursuing majors in both Dance and Jewish Studies at CU Boulder, and is currently exploring conscious movement as a means of investigating and expressing the human experience.

Kelley Ann Walsh likes to move, wiggle, shake, and jiggle.  She is an Appalachian performing artist and scholar whose work explores identity through interdisciplinary and collaborative play.  Reoccurring themes in her work include feelings of displacement, trauma, dis/ability, feminist ruminations, the military, the fallacy of binaries, and Appalachia. Kelley Ann’s work has been presented across the country.  In 2018, she received the Boulder International Fringe Festival’s ‘Hibner Brown Award: Most Important Historical Message’ for her interdisciplinary collaborative work Where I’m from the Mountains are Red, White, and Yellow.  She has danced with Columbus Moving Company and John Gamble Dance Theater, and performed in works by Lux Boreal, Larry Keigwin, Bill Evans, and Taproot Dance Ensemble. Kelley Ann is a Third-Year Dance MFA Candidate and Graduate Part-Time Instructor at the University of Colorado Boulder.  She is also a Certified Movement Analyst and an Alexander Technique teacher.  She received a BFA in Dance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a BA in Government from the College of William and Mary. Kelley Ann would like to take a moment to remind you that you can make a dance about anything, and everything is political.

Film

Bird Milk – Chris Strickler – Canada – 2018 – 5 min

An anxiety inducing exploration of juicy colors and crunchy textures driven by chaotic electronic music.

Chris Strickler is from West Lafayette, Indiana, US of A. He graduated with a BMA in animation from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada in 2018. He likes creating abstract work exploring materiality and time. He is also an interactive installation artist and amateur VJ. 

Adentro de la Tierra – Katalin Egely – Argentina/Hungary – 2018 – 4 min – NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE!

Three symbolic animals of the Andean cosmology guides us through the three mental states of the three worlds. Visually, as well as in the music, the ancient meets the contemporary on the animated tapestry, in order to create something relevant to the present day.

“I graduated in Animation in 2013 from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Hungary.

Besides short films, credits and animated scenes for movies my focus is primarily on making music videos. 

Music videos are especially inspiring for me because instead of narrative story-telling I can create visual poetry based on associative images.

I also like to work on animated documentary films because with animation it’s possible to express the more subjective parts of a narrative.” – KE

Cow Palace – Julian Gallese – Costa Rica – 2018 – 3 min

Song recorded by Jules in a long train ride across Canada.

Julian Gallese. Animation filmmaker from San José, Costa Rica. His work has been shown in film festivals and galleries around the world. In 2018, Julian completed an artist residency at the Toronto Animated Image Society and he’s currently studying at the Royal College of Art in London.

Template Message – Marin Martinie – France – 2018 – 11 min

What is exactly the fundamental tension between still picture and motion picture? Pictures are somehow information : they converge, get ordered and eventually become unreadable. Let us show you how…

Marin Martinie is a french cartoonist and animation director, graduated from EnsAD Paris. He’s interested in deconstructing classical forms of art in the fields of comics and animation. He lives and works in Paris.

ULTRA – Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand – Canada – 2017 – 2 min

ULTRA is a psychedelic film about the dysfunction between furniture and the female body. Through a series of colorful and animated background, an aesthetic and conceptual change operates between the furniture and the body.

Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand lives and works in Quebec City. She holds an MFA in which she focused on the ethical and aesthetic stance of the frivolous in her practice. During her MFA studies, she was selected to carry out a residency at La Bande Vidéo with assistance from Fonds Fondation-René-Richard of the École d’art of Université Laval. She has taken part in many multidisciplinary events that combine sound, video and performance. Her animation films have been shown at numerous festivals, notably in Canada, Catalonia, France, Germany, Italy and Russia and the US.

In the Sky – Marián Vredík & Jana Hirnerová – Slovakia/Slovenia – 2018 – 2 min

Animated Short named In the Sky was created as an unnatural harmony of free associations during a resident stay at the “Potô? Theater.” Absurdity and oddness blends with magic elements. 

Marián Vredík and Jana Vredík Hirnerová graduated from the Painting College. Recently, however, he has been making animated films as directors, artists and animators. Authors also approach to making video clips or TV series. They also work with other filmmakers on various projects. Their video “Flush It Out” received the 2019 An?a Music Video Award Special Mention. They live and work in Pezinok (Slovakia).

Lost Child Reel – Evan Morgan – USA – 2019 – 9 min

“The Lost Child”, a tune from the Stripling Brothers (1918-1936), passes through the prism of folk and ethnographic processes, digital and physical media, and never arrives.

The first film in the American traditional music cycle “Variations On”.

Evan Morgan is a filmmaker and musician from Houston, TX currently living in Durham, NC. His continued interest in the overlap between avant-garde forms of the moving image and music often informs his work in both fields. His film work has shown at festivals as close as Chapel Hill, NC and as far away as Riga, Latvia. Morgan currently performs with fiddler Courtney Werner in the experimental, old-time duo Magic Tuber Stringband. They have shared bills with artists such as Tom Carter, Isasa, Eight Point Star, the Cherry Blossoms and Powers/Rolin Duo. They’re debut record Wayward Airs for Earthbound Vagrants released at the beginning of August 2019. 

Opium – Ashok Meena – India – 2019 – 5 min

A wanderer amidst a mythical world witnesses a passionate play of emotions. An eccentric mix of fear, love, faith, anger, laughter, happiness and sadness is all brought together through interplay of stories and the make believe world of their fabled characters.

Ashok Meena is an independent cinematographer based out of Mumbai. He is known for his cinematography for Kamal Swaroop’s acclaimed documentary Pushkar Puran. His recent work includes a feature film Versova shot entirely on B/W super16. He is also working on his first feature documentary Kunchok which will be his directorial debut.

Nutrition Fugue – Péter Lichter – Hungary – 2018 – 4 min

“Közért” (translation: “for the public”) was a government owned chain of stores in Hungary, during the communist era (1948-1989). The word Közért is still used in the Hungarian language. Our film was made from the 35 mm celluloid raw footage of its advertisement: the film strips were dug in the soil, rotten with food and cut up in pieces.

Péter Lichter is a Hungarian experimental filmmaker. He studied film history and film theory at the ELTE University, Budapest. Péter makes found footage abstract films, lyrical documentaries and experimental features since 2002. His films were screened at festivals and venues like: Berlinale Critics’ Week; Tribeca Film Festival – New York; Rotterdam IFF; Jihlava IDFF; goEast – Wiesbaden; EXiS – Seoul; CROSSROADS – San Francisco; VideoEX – Zurich; Festival of (In)appropriation – Los Angeles; Antimatter – Victoria, Canada; etc. He is also one of the editors of the Prizma film-periodical, his first book on experimental cinema (A láthatatlan birodalom / The Invisible Impire) was published in 2016, his second and third book were published in 2018.

Mirror Effect – Oliver Smith – USA – 2018 – 3 min

Mirror Effect is an abstract experimental film. It was made in 2018 using a section of circuit bent video. Central to the film is a figure like (head and shoulders) shape that undergoes many transformations. Electronic sounds accompany these changes. Mirror Effect is a non-narrative visual/sound exploration of light and form in the presence of time. 

Oliver Smith is a visual artist living in Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated from the Ringling School of Art and Georgia State University. Using the interplay between sound and moving image to create intense states of being is of special interest. When not making art he can often be found wandering around on a bicycle. 

Oliversmithart.com

An Autonomous Agents Choreo – Toni Mitjanit – Spain – 2016 – 7 min

AAAC (An Autonomous Agents Choreo) is an abstract generative animation video created through code and user interaction in which a flock of autonomous agents governed by physical laws of attraction-repulsion is subjected to the will of a geometric choreography. Throughout the audiovisual piece the flock of autonomous agents is distributed against nature into different geometric patterns which vary the general perception of colour, shape, texture and rhythm.

The soundtrack of AAAC is also a generative audio work created through code and user interaction in which the movement and bustle of the flock of autonomous agents generates its own musical score. The physical features of the agents (velocity, acceleration and position in the space) and the forces generated by the vectorial field which shakes them are some of the parameters used in the audio synthesis. The generative instruments and sinusoidal waves used for the interpretation of the sound space, their frequencies and rhythms change according to the geometrical pattern adopted by the flock of agents.

Toni Mitjanit was born in Manacor (Spain) in 1977. Lives and Works in Spain. Is Bachelor in Computer Science in 2002 by Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB), Ph-Degree in Computer Graphics on Internet in 2002 by FUEIB, Master in Multimedia Production & Creation in 2007 by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Degree in Photography in 2010 by Escola Superior de Disseny de Palma (ESD). Works at the level of media, video art, computational art, generative design and experimental animation regularly since 2010.

He explores innovative audiovisual expressive ways through creative coding using data visualization, human/machine interaction, autonomous agents, physics and randomness. All his audiovisual creations are produced by coding his own software in different programming languages (Processing, Java, C++, SuperCollider, ChucK).

Sonant – Timothy David Orme – USA – 2019 – 3 min

Squares, sound, and speed all voice a space that builds to collapse.

Timothy David Orme is a writer, filmmaker, and animator. His short films have won international awards and shown at film festivals all over the world including Big Muddy, European Media Arts Festival, Ann Arbor, and many others.

KALOPSIA – M. Kardinal – Germany/Ukraine – 2018 – 5 min

KALOPSIA. The delusion of things being more beautiful than they are.

“There is a determination in their movement which is quite different from the expression of ordinary curiosity. It seems as though the movement of some of them transmits itself to the others. But that is not all; they have a goal which is there before they can find words for it. This goal is the blackest spot where most people are gathered.” (Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti, 1960)

KALOPSIA combines different mass movements of the 1914s to the 1990s with contemporary mass psychological contexts, taking into account the philosophical work Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti, in which he investigated the dynamics of crowds and the question of how crowds obey the power of rulers.

“For KALOPSIA I worked with an obsolete video technique. It is based on found footage which I manipulated analogue. For the analogue processing, I used a modified video- processor from the 1990s and altered the images in real-time. After the real-time image processing is done and the found footage is released from its original content and form, I assembled the processed material to new sequences of moving images.” – MK

M. Kardinal is a visual artist currently based in Berlin (DE). Her work has been exhibited and screened in national and international exhibitions and film screenings including 14th Montreal Underground Film Festival (CA, 2019), Revolutions per Minute Film Festival (USA, 2019), Bideodromo International Experimental Film and Video Festival (ES, 2018), Another Experiment by Woman Film Festival (USA, 2018), L’Ososphère (FR, 2017), Wellington Underground Film Festival (NZ, 2016), Festival Alto Vicentino (IT, 2014), SI FEST#OFF (IT, 2013), International Short Film Festival Detmold (DE, 2013), Another Experiment by Woman Film Festival (USA, 2013).

Ccconvolve – Scott Fitzpatrick – Canada – 2017 – 8 min

“Serious is fun; fun is serious.”

An extended motorik edit of Colby Richardson’s one-take super 8mm film, ‘Convolve.’ An interrogation of mazes designed by Greg Bright and printed in his book ‘Fontana Mazes.’ 

Created as part of Jesse Malmed’s ‘Asides & Besides: video artists remixing artists’ videos’ screening series. 

SF is a visual artist (Libra) from Winnipeg whose film and video work has screened at underground festivals and marginalized venues worldwide. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in Film Studies at the University of Manitoba and began conducting lo-fi moving image experiments in 2010. His work has received prizes from the WNDX Festival of Moving Image, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, FLEX Florida Experimental Film and Video Festival, and the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, and in 2018 he was the recipient of the 2018 Winnipeg Film Group Manitoba Film Hothouse Award. In addition to producing his own work, SF presents the work of others currently through the WNDX Festival of Moving Image, and formerly as the co-founder of the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival and Open City Cinema. SF has also curated work for the Gimli Film Festival, Antimatter Media Art, Forthwith Festival, Send + Receive, San Diego Underground Film Festival, MIRE International Film Labs Meeting, and the PRISME Festival. 

The Background World – Mélissa Faivre – France – 2018 – 8 min – NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE!

The Background World is an immersive, organic and pulsating environment. It is composed of vivid digital mandalas bringing us on a psychedelic journey through layers of earthly and submarine landscapes. By distorting biological life and transforming it into an unconscious digital place, this work encourages us to observe and experience the world from an inner perspective.

Mélissa Faivre, born 1989 in France, is an experimental video artist based in Berlin. Her contemplative and mesmerising work seeks to provoke questions on the nature of perception.

By experimenting with editing techniques, she creates images that present blended and distorted realities that seek to test the temporal and spatial co-ordinates foundational to the perceptive experience.

Pattern Cognition – Thorsten Fleisch – Germany – 2019 – 7 min

“When you stare at a screen for long, the screen stares back at you.”

It’s late. You’ve been working on those numbers the whole day. The screen in front of you seems to be vibrating. You close your eyes. The after-image on your retina keeps pulsating in iridescent colors. You call it a day and go home. You lie on your bed, eyes closed, thinking about your work. There is still so much to do. A throbbing of vibrantly colored specks distract you from mentally going through the tasks that need to be done tomorrow. You open your eyes and while staring at your ceiling your vision has been infected by the surge of abstract colors washing over you. You close your eyes again and the torrent of flickering colors of all hues reaches an intensity unknown to you. You don’t think about anything any more. You lie there on your bed, ready to never move again.

Thorsten Fleisch, born 1972 in Koblenz/Germany. First film experiments with his dad’s super 8 camera when still in school. Studied experimental film with Peter Kubelka at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Germany. His films received several awards and are shown at festivals worldwide like: New York Film Festival, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Ottawa International Animation Festival, Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam. He lives and works in Berlin where he is also involved in theatre projects, creating video games and musical excesses with his band Malende.