13 (Recorded) Apparitions of Her Ghost – Pere Ginard – Spain – 2018 – 7 min

“What is a ghost? (…) One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.” (James Joyce)
“All ghost story begins with a love story.” (Stacy Horn)

What, and how, is a ghost? Pere Ginard gathers in his daily life a series of comical and lyrical ghostly appearances, and as a researcher of paranormal events, he registers and categorizes them. The super 8 camera as a spectral catalyst and microscope.

Pere Ginard is an illustrator, filmmaker and alchemist. His specialty lies in experiments with perpetual motion and variations on Lumière’s prototype; including phantasmagorical motions with robots and melancholic representations of mourning, triumphs, monsters, prodigies and mystic raptures, as well as at times unfinished observations on things that turn towards the sun and balding blond people with wavy hair. He has presented his films and artwork at a good number of national and international art centers, published several illustrated books and been awarded prizes for photography, illustration and audiovisuals.

Mountains of the Sun – Gloria Chung – USA – 2017 – 10 min

This work is a brief commentary on the cryptic nature and generic prescriptions of eschatological writings. It imagines eschatologies as a video game in a post-apocalyptic setting. Using religious texts and sacred writings on the ‘end times’ as guides, players search for the Mountains of the Sun (paradise, nirvana, afterlife).

Down Escalation – Shunsaku Hayashi – Japan – 2018 – 8 min

Falling down, it feels ecdysone is filling up its body. Delving into the deeper layers of itself, the flesh is melted down in the shell until the form is no longer.

Shunsaku Hayashi is a Japanese artist. He studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths University of London as a trainee under the Japan Cultural Ministry Abroad Research Fellowship for up- and-coming artists from 2012 to 2015. His recent films won the Grand Jury Prize for Animation Short at 22nd Slamdance Film Festival, the Chris Frayne Award for Best Animated Film at 55th ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL, and Golden Horseman for Animated Film at 28th FILMFEST DRESDEN. www.shunsakuweb.com

The Uninvited – Laura Focarazzo – Argentina – 2015 – 4 min

The Uninvited places the viewer in front of an anonymous, elusive face, a distorted representation of some of the ghosts that inhabit our unconscious. An observer / observed in a state halfway between the real and the imagined, between remembering and forgetting, between life and death. This work invites viewers to immerse themselves in an abstract world. My own field recordings have been re-elaborated by the sound artist Darren McClured for the construction of the soundtrack.

Laura Focarazzo is a video artist and independent curator. She lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her works include experimental films and videos as well as curatorial works. Graduated in Graphic Design at the University of Buenos Aires in 1991, Laura Focarazzo also completed film courses and workshops with prestigious filmmakers of the local and international scene during the last years. She is currently completing a Master Degree in visual arts. She has participated in exhibitions and international film festivals around the world: 13th BAFICI – International Independent Film Festival of Buenos Aires-, Fuga Lab Festival in Buenos Aires, Abstracta Cinema -Festival of Rome-, AIVA – International Video Art Festival in Sweden-, FLAVIA – 1st Latin American Festival of Video Art -, Lab Gallery in Sweden, Incubarte – International Independent Art Festival in Spain, Poetry Film Festival 2013 – London, UK, Fonlad Festival 2013 – Coimbra, Portugal and her video work has been selected to participate the Gesamt project, concept by Lars Von Trier for the collective film: Disaster 521, What happened to man? in Copenhagen Art Festival 2012 – Denmark, Time is Love, Sonorities – Belfast, Punto y Raya – Iceland and Moozak – Vienna among other festivals. She is a member of the international audio / visual group: Exquisite, What ?. She is currently working on the audiovisual project “The Alchemists” where as a curator and a video artist she has invited to participate experimental musicians of the local and international scene to perform an audiovisual collective installation based on her own field recordings. Her work has been included at Datta Editions UK, an online art platform that commissions video, sound, poetry and web. “I make experimental videos using the sound as a “script” in the construction of non-narrative pieces. These audiovisual pieces provide poetic and sensory experiences in a dialogue with the unconscious by evoking chaos as a place to live endless possibilities.” “I work in collaboration with local and international sound artists in blending images and sounds to create a microcosm that can trigger poetic experiences which will rely solely on the viewer’s perception in the most original and profound sense of the term.” – LF

The Boneyard, The Birth Manual, A Burial – Julia Madsen – USA – 2018 – 5 min

The Boneyard, The Birth Manual, A Burial is a short video based on Julia Madsen’s book of poetry The Boneyard, The Birth Manual, A Burial: Investigations into the Heartland (forthcoming, Trembling Pillow Press). The video engages with the documentary poetics of place and landscape through the aesthetic lens of the Midwestern Gothic, recording and presenting an unhomely or uncanny and haunted landscape that implicitly questions, complicates, and interrogates ideas and cultural myths of the region.

Julia Madsen is a multimedia poet and educator. She received an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and is a doctoral student in English/Creative Writing at the University of Denver. She is the video editor at Reality Beach, and has shown video poetry and projection mapping installations at Outlet Fine Art Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, No Nation Art Gallery in Chicago, IL, Counterpath Gallery in Denver, CO, and the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory conference in Orlando, FL. Her video work has appeared in VICE’s “The Creators Project,” and her poems and multimedia work have also appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, Drunken Boat, Caketrain, and others. Her first book, The Boneyard, The Birth Manual, A Burial: Investigations into the Heartland, is forthcoming from Trembling Pillow Press in 2018.

Black Hillsmilk – Spitzweg & Braun – USA – 2018 – 9 min

Deep in the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota (better known to some as “the heart of everything that is”), Black Hillsmilk chronicles one night in the life, memory, and futures past of J. Waylon Porcupine, founding member and frontman of the lo-fi wonders The Reddmen.

Spitzweg & Braun is the collaboration between visual artist Timon Meyer (German) and musician J. Waylon Porcupine (Northern Cheyenne) in the defense of the poor image.

El Diezmo – Jean-Jacques Martinod – Ecuador – 2018 – 13 min

In an image void a tongueless voice speaks. Composed entirely of found footage re-manipulated through tape deterioration, a journey into the realms of an ambiguous demon via the portal of the screen.

Jean-Jacques Martinod is a filmmaker and visual artist originally from Guayaquil, Ecuador. His films have screened in a variety of venues including the Museum of The Moving Image and festivals such as FIDMarseille, EDOC (Encuentros del Otro Cine), Festival Dei Popoli, Les Inattendus festival de films (très) indépendants, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, ULTRACinema Festival de Cine Experimental y Found Footage, Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival for Expanded Media, among others, while also in a variety of galleries and DIY venues. His films oscillate between non-fiction traditions utilizing formal experiments in celluloid film, analogue tape, digital media, and archival footage. He resides in Montreal, Canada, where he is a member of both the Global Emergent Media Lab and the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University, where he is currently an MFA candidate.

Rabbit in the Sand – Monteith McCollum – USA – 2018 – 20 min

Constructed from scraps of analog waveforms and agricultural pen & ink illustrations. Rabbit in the Sand uses a dental camera in combination with a 1970’s Hearn video processing system to form a series of hazy, delicate, and ruptured imagery. Loosely inspired by Rorschach’s studies and the ink blot, the film prompts the viewer to form their own impressions.

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.