Join us on Tuesday, September 24, 7:30pm, at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave., Denver) for night 5 of the Unseen Festival 2019!

Reading

Ian D is a Pittsburgh, PA born poet and performer living in Denver, CO. He is an NPS Finalist (2004). He has been a member of the 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010 and 2012 Mercury Cafe National Slam Teams. He was the alternate for the 2002 Merc team. He was a co-coach for the 2005, 2009, and 2011 Merc Teams and head coach in 2015. He has featured and competed at venues across the United States as well as having performed at Denmark’s Roskilde Music Festival in 2002 and the 2009 Connacht Regional Heat of the All-Ireland Slam in Galway. He has also achieved top 5 finishes at the Great Plains Poetry Pile-Up and Treetop Poetry Festival indie competitions. In addition to his slam credits, he has worked with students and writers at Front Range Community College, Red Rocks Community College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Denver South High School, 516arts (ABQ, NM), Oak Park/River Forest High (CHI, IL), as well as Art From Ashes. He has been published in Metrosphere, Poetry Victims, The  Pedestal Magazine, and The Denver Word Affiliate anthology Louder Than Clouds in addition to several Mercury Cafe Slam Team chapbooks. He is the author of two other chapbooks; Hymns For A Dancer (Verbl Warfare) and No Known Style: Poems from the Asylum (90 Proof, out of print) as well as, two CDs Suicide Mechanic and like wet cement (available for purchase). He has two live CDs forthcoming; Hometown Hero and Hymns Spoken Here. He is currently working on a full length poetry manuscript and at becoming a better human being. Oh yeah…and he’s one of the co-founders of the Mercury Cafe Poetry Slam.

Dance

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.

Nu World Contemporary Dance

Film

Go Move Be – Esther Polak & Ivar Van Bekkum – Netherlands – 2018 – 10 min

A city under construction, buildings reduced to a fragile frame, trees folded from paper and cars made of clay. The voices of three generations utter impressions about movements, about distance, memories, a future. Go Move Be hints at a structure that almost becomes solid. 

Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum work together as artist-couple under the name PolakVanBekkum. Their work focuses on landscape and mobility. Rooted in the history of Dutch realistic landscape depiction, they embrace new technologies to express personal experiences of spaces of the contemporary city and countryside. Their projects are often informed by collaborations with participants, be it humans, objects, or even the rays of the sun.

Senses of Time – Wenhua Shi – USA/China – 2018 – 5 min

Senses of Time depicts the lyrical and poetic passage of time. The work reflects on time and focuses on defining subjective and perceptual time with close attention to stillness, decay, disappearance, and ruins.

Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival.

Mayan Time – Alberto Jose Doctorovich – Mexico – 2019 – 7 min

Mayan Time is a documentary about archaeoastronomy phenomena in the Mayan area, images of real astronomical alignments in the Mayan pyramids during equinoxes and solstices, shot with infrared cameras and motion time lapse cinematography. This project was born with the idea to capture archaeological phenomena in the Mayan pyramids, as we know the ancient cultures oriented their buildings to some stars, this is a unique account of real archaeoastronomical phenomena.

Alberto Jose Doctorovich. Birth 25-May-1962-Buenos Aires-Argentina. Cinematographer specialist in time lapse. Participating in many documentary projects. As well as advertising campaigns, and series. An Artistic photography and a great impact images in altered time are his seal.

ANDROKTONES – Emine Yildrim – Turkey – 2018 – 10 min

According to some sources of Ancient Greek and Roman historiography, the “mythical” Amazon Female Warriors originated in Pontus, a location which is today a part of Turkey’s Black Sea Region.

Inspired and compiled from the texts of  “History” by Herodotus, “Iliad” by Homer, “Prometheus Bound” by  Aesychylus ,“Argonautica” by Appollonius Rhodius, “Library of History” by Diodorus of Sicily, “The Fall of Troy” by Quintus of Smyrna, “The Gothic History” by Jordanes, “Geography” by Strabo and “Hippocratic Collection” by BC Pseudo-Hippocrates,  the film ANDROKTONES retells the Amazons Female Warrior myths in the Turkish language, through the contradicting words of a female and male narrator.

Set in a  touristic Amazon theme park built in the Turkish Black Sea city of Samsun,  ANDROKTONES takes a plunge at how the historical legacy of the Amazons is still very much subjective, and how the suffocating patriarchal voice defies time, language or geography.

Emine Yildirim is an award-winning screenwriter and producer. After graduating from METU Business Administration, she pursued a career in film and attended the Bilgi Uni Film Grad School. She has produced films such as Son Ç?k??/Siren’s Call ( Tokyo IFF Main Competition), Kusursuzlar/ The Impeccables (Busan FF, Antalya FF, Ankara FF, Romania International FF), The Monster’s Dinner ( Montpellier FF, Antalya, Ankara FF), Ziazan (Cannes Diversity), Gri Bölge/ Mother Virgin No More (Berlinale FF Generation). She has also written the screenplay of The Impeccables which garnered her a Best Screenplay Award from Ankara FF and the Flying Broom Women’s FF Bilge Olgaç Achievement award. She teaches screenwriting  at Kadir Has University Film Department Graduate Studies. She is an EAVE 2014 graduate.

Luminous Variations in the City Skies – Giuseppe Spina – Italy – 2019 – 5 min

A silent film composed of digital scans and blow-ups of Guido Horn D’Arturo’s photographic plates depicting Bologna’s skies.

Giuseppe Spina is an Italian filmmaker based in Bologna. His films have been screened at numerous international festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, EMAF and Annecy’s IAFF. He is the co-founder of Nomadica, an international network of artists and intellectuals focused on experimental cinema.

A Collection of Attempts in Astral Travel – Ryan Betschart & Rachel Nakawatase  – USA – 2019 – 7 min

In 1990 parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo, an expert in the study of astral projection and an accomplished oboe player, was murdered in his Northridge home. The crime remains unsolved. A fleeting glimpse into a world of vibrant colors and luscious curves. Images glide, swell, and envelop one another to a tempestuous original score of looped and delayed oboe and sonar pings.

Rachel and Ryan are a wife and husband team that as curators created and run the San Diego Underground Film Festival, and both program at Slamdance Film Festival. As film creators their works have played Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Chicago Underground, and have won awards at Slamdance, Indie Memphis, and Arizona Underground. Rachel holds a BFA in Costume Design from UCLA; Ryan holds a BA in Visual Arts from UCSD and an MFA in Film and Video from CalArts. 

A SLOWER SPEED OF LIGHT – Stuart Pound – UK – 2019 – 6 min

Light is interrupted by a strip of old 16mm film seen under a low magnification microscope and is reflected from the surface in rainbow colours. Software simulates the film’s chemical erosion.

Stuart Pound lives in London and has worked in film, digital video, sound and the visual arts since the early 1970’s. Since 1995 he has collaborated with the poet Rosemary Norman. Video work has been screened regularly in London and at international festivals.

Black Hole – Tyler Bohm – USA – 2018 – 5 min

Black Hole is an experimental short film consisting of a looping, dynamic color field that uses footage from the 1979 Disney film The Black Hole as its raw material. Via digital manipulation and coding, selected scenes and audio from the film are looped, compressed and reversed, giving rise to new emergent forms and meanings. The work uses temporal and spatial distortions to create a disorienting landscape of sights and sounds that explores the concept of warped space-time.

Tyler Bohm is a new media artist whose recent work involves the appropriation and alteration of commercial films, often reframing original narratives to explore the impact of contemporary technologies. In recent years, his work has been shown and exhibited at Plexus Projects (Brooklyn), Icebox Project Space (Philadelphia), NURTUREart (Brooklyn), Gallery Madison Park (New York), Proto Gallery (Hoboken) and Terrault Contemporary (Baltimore). He is a graduate of Kenyon College and University of Oxford and lives in Columbus, OH. 

IIOII – Rakel Jonsdottir – Iceland – 2016 – 9 min

A mesmerizing voyage into the realm of the psyche. Touching the borderline between the conscious and subconscious the traveler moves silently in a dark vast vacuum. Her repetitive movements put her in a trance and triggers visions that are left for us to interpret, like memories from a dream. Two bodies taking symbolic forms in a dance, alternating between attraction and repulsion. Like magnetic poles in an electronic sea, choreographed with precision in phase with the abstract visuals and soundscape. 

The films main inspiration comes from a dream, where symbols appeared on the dreamer’s skin. First and foremost, the aim of the film is to create a mesmerizing experience and urge the viewer to cross their rational barriers. Allowing themselves to be immersed in a dreamlike state. References to Franz Mesmer’s ideas about animal magnetism as well as Jung’s notion of the collective consciousness are intentional.

Rakel Jónsdóttir is an Icelandic film maker and visual artist, born in 1980. She has a degree in visual arts from the Icelandic Art Academy with main focus on video installations. She has taken part in various exhibitions and festivals in Iceland and internationally e.g. Sequences Art Festival, Northern Wave Film Festival International Kurzfilmwoche Regensburg, Austrian Filmfestival and Backup festival Weimar. She is currently working on her second short film.

Esmark – Husby-klit Bk. – Robert Seidel – Germany – 2017 – 5 min

The band Esmark is a collaboration between the sound architect Nikolai von Sallwitz (Taprikk Sweezee) and the experimental artist Alsen Rau (Scheich in China, On+Brr). The track “Husby-klit Bk.” is taken from their double album “M?ra I & II”, which was released on Bureau B. The music video by Robert Seidel is based on a live video performance, in which a modular video synthesizer generates mental spaces between floating and overwriting realities. The visual material is based on a convoluted geographical impressions, which are fused by the cinematic soundscape into a continuous stream of dissolving memories.

Robert Seidel’s projections, installations and experimental films have been shown in numerous international festivals, as well as at galleries and museums such as the ZKM Karlsruhe, Art Center Nabi Seoul and MOCA Taipei. He is interested in pushing the boundaries of abstracted beauty through cinematographic approaches, as well as ones drawn from science. By the organic interplay of structural, spatial and temporal concepts he creates an evolving complexity of multifaceted readings. Seidel lives in Berlin/Jena as artist and curator.

Set Theory I-IV – Simon Payne – UK – 2018 – 19 min

Set Theory I–IV explores every corner of flat screen space and corresponding illusions of depth. Part I (2mins) involves dissolving surfaces. Part II (2mins) adds alternating planes, plus 0 and 1 as graphic components. Part III (12mins) takes the screen into depth, evoking architectonic principles of the video frame. Part IV (2mins) adds a final dimension of constantly changing colour fields. In the first instance, Set Theory involved producing different sets of vertical, horizontal, diagonal and curved graphic transitions. These were subsequently combined and sequenced by way of different rules that keep the conflict of planes, forms, tonal values and colour foremost. There are multiple ways in which the basic elements could have been handled, and might be again, in different iterations. 

Simon Payne has been making abstract cinematic works for twenty years. His videos are predominantly orientated around bold graphic forms and highly structured, single-frame sequences that produce unexpected colour combinations, clashing planes and counter-intuitive illusions of movement. Simon’s work has shown in numerous international film festivals and galleries including: Anthology Film Archives, New York; the Edinburgh, London and Rotterdam film festivals; Tate Britain and Tate Modern and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. He has written widely on experimental cinema and is currently editing a posthumous book by A.L. Rees, entitled Fields of View: Film, Art and Spectatorship. Simon is Reader in Film and Media at ARU, Cambridge, UK.