The Unseen Festival 2018: Ritual and Repetition. Wednesday, September 26, 6pm

T H E  U N S E E N  F E S T I V A L  2018

Ritual and Repetition

Join us on Wednesday, September 26, 6pm, at the Dikeou Collection at 1615 California St., Suite 515, Denver for night 26 of the Unseen Festival. We will screen work by Laurids Sonne, Gabriele Tosi, James Pomeroy, Alexandre Alagôa, Luther Clement, Paul Jacques Yves Guillbert, Eric Souther, and Bernd Lützeler. Preceding the screening will be readings by Tameca L. Coleman and Emily Barton Altman.

Tadpole Tale; A FantasyLaurids Sonne – USA – 2017 – 14 min

Tadpole Tale; A Fantasy, is an exploration into the tonality of nature and different modes or recording and representing “this” nature, here specifically southern chorus frogs. Through different media and creation of narrative, the film intervenes and questions the representation of other species in contemporary anthropomorphic nature film. Tadpole Tale; a fantasy questions perceptions of construction of authenticity and reality through an appropriation of nature, and a re-representation of this nature though visual and sonic feedback loops.

Laurids Andersen Sonne is a Danish interdisciplinary artist. Laurids’ work spans film, video, installation, sculpture, performance and socially engaged art. From 2004 to 2014, Laurids was a member of the four-person art collective Parfyme, focusing on participatory and social based processes; developing new platforms for community, interaction and exploration. Laurids sees art as a tool that can be used for many things: as a catalyst for personal reflection on being or ameliorations on our surroundings, a way to explore, entwine and unfold serious topics. Laurids holds a BA in Social Anthropology from Lund University, Sweden and an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University.

The Girl with Two WatchesGabriele Tosi – Italy – 2018 – 4 min

Amazing puzzle of a young lady inside a mirror game which creates an endless reflection of her image with a contemporaneity of different moment of her action

Gabriele Tosi, born in Busto Arsizio (a town in Northern Italy), is a conceptual artist, director, and plot writer. He is the Dean of the Video Art Department of the Istituto Cinematografico Michelangelo Antonioni, a first-of-its-kind school in the cinematographic arts. He has been author and/or producer of several videos – including music based videos – and organizer of Happening and Live Performance; he has also been involved in the production of music videos following a successful album of a famous Italian rock star. He founded the BA Film Festival, currently at its 16th edition, and created its section dedicated to Video Art. Among the videos and performances he authored, the following are of importance. In March of 2014 he organizes the Spring Performance (‘Performarce di Primavera’): he creates a free standing tensile structure 90 meters long and 20 meters high; next to it, between two ancient chimneys – vestigial towers of an ancient industrial past – he pulls a slackline, 84-meters long and 15-meters high. The Austrian athlete Mich Kemeter goes back and forth four times while a group of 50 students perform below him; choreographies and music were created for the occasion. This event allowed for the creation of a video-art clip (much more than a simple documentary), The Extreme Challenge (‘La Sfida Estrema’) which was presented with success at the following Italian and International festivals. Co-author of the book Conoscere la Video Arte (How to know Video Art), he has recently led master classes at Academia delle Belle Arti di Brera (Milan) and Academia delle Belle Arti di Bologna. In February 2015, he creates a performance presenting some of the topics discussed in the book. The show is a true-and-true happening thanks to the collaboration of four actors, two musicians, projections, and images. On July 25th and 26th, 2015 he set up the performance The Extreme Challenge: Feeding the Planet. In the then-highest point in the city of Milan, the belvedere at the top of the Skyscraper Palazzo Lombardia. He creates a performance where the spectator is actively involved. This performance was part of a program parallel to the World EXPO that was taking place that year in Milan, trying to raise awareness towards the issue of world hunger. More than 150 people actively showed their will to end famine in the world and accepted the challenge: they walked over a narrow path held three meters above the highest floor in Milan, surrounded by glass windows that gave them the impression to be walking over the whole city. After a five-meter walk over a 14-centimeter (about 5.5 inches) wide platform, performers had to drop a rice grain over a scale that symbolized the imbalance in food availability in the world. The event was recorded, the images fused with the Milanese skyline, and shown in real time to the audience and to the participants, who saw themselves walking over the city. This was one of the first uses of the Green screen shot in natural light and shown live in front of a big audience. This performance was the base of another Video Art Clip, presented and appreciated in numerous Academies of the Arts in Italy. In 2016 and 2017, he was involved in the creation of the Mibart project, a Video Art festival for the city of Milan. Furthermore, he was heavily involved in teaching Video Art at Istituto Cinematografico Michelangelo Antonioni.

Konstruktion AriaJames Pomeroy – Canada – 2017 – 4 min

Konstruktion Aria is both a work of visual music and an examination of visual “reading”. Shot in one unedited take and using a pixilation of surfaces technique and a musical variations structure , it creates movement and rhythm out of stasis.

James Pomeroy is a Winnipeg based filmmaker and teacher. He has taught for both the Department of Philosophy and the School of Art at the University of Manitoba. He is a long time member of the Winnipeg Film Group. His works have been screened at festivals / events globally.

VortexAlexandre Alagôa – Portugal – 2017 – 10 min

A corridor of an apartment is transformed into a claustrophobic and vertiginous vortex that swallows and imprisons you in the in nite fall through the mise en abyme: it’s a pure enclosure inside the image world, it’s the Descent into the Maelstrom.

Alexandre Alagoa (1994) is an art student based in Sesimbra, a village south of Lisbon, in Portugal. He graduated in Multimedia Art (Audiovisuals) from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon in 2015; he completed an Audiovisuals Masters at the same college in 2018; and since November 2017 he has been working at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon as a Monitor of the Multimedia course.

_galore – Bernd Lützeler – Germany/India – 2018 – 9 min

The streetscapes of contemporary Indian metros are largely dominated by products. The bazaar expands into all other parts of the city and claims a large percentage of the available public space. The vast majority of the local shops is lacking the facility of a shop window. Instead, their architecture can be described as a garage style, windowless, rectangular box, open to the front. Stepping into such a shop can be like entering a complete new world: Many of them are literally filled with products galore up to the ceiling. The product itself serves as the interior design. Every day hundreds of busses with thousands of shop owners and their family members come from the surrounding villages and small towns into the city. Especially during the rush hours the market gets overrun by an avalanche of customers who seem to enjoy their high-density shopping experience. Shopping galore. Products galore. Profits galore.

Artist and filmmaker Bernd Lützeler lives and works between Berlin and Mumbai. In his works he explores techniques of moving image production and presentation in relation with their form and perception. Loops, found footage and jugaad (diy) technologies are an integral part of his films and expanded cinema works. His travels to Mumbai have a strong impact on his work that often looks into the aesthetics of popular Indian cinema and television within the urban context. His films have been shown at venues and festivals world-wide, including Centre Pompidou, Berlinale International Film Festival, Rotterdam, Ann Arbor, Views from the Avant-Garde and many more. Bernd is an active member of the artist-run analogue filmlab LaborBerlin.

LocusLuther Clement – USA – 2018 – 5 min

Publicly posted footage from body mounted cameras take us on a series of loops through the life cycle at breakneck speed. Beginning with the sea and skies before throwing the viewer into survival mode, the camera itself eventually breaks free of its mooring. “The other is not a simple duplication of me because it never coincides with me because he is over there while I’m here.” – Edmund Husserl. FILM IS CONSTRUCTED ENTIRELY FROM YOUTUBE POSTED GOPRO FOOTAGE AND SOUND

Raised by school teachers in Lawrence, Kansas, Luther Clement is a former internationally competitive fencer who got his start making videos in the music industry. Having graduated from Northwestern University with an MFA in Documentary Media in 2017, his thesis documentary film portrayed the dreams of a Haitian immigrant, screening at l’Alternativa Barcelona and Oberhausen Short Film Festival. His cinematography and sound design work has been exhibited at such venues as Locarno, MOMA, and Visions du Reel.

Interloop Meaning Lies Inter/Views/LovesPaul Jacques Yves Guillbert – Belgium/France – 2018 – 13 min

“It’s a virtual interview with augmented scribbles,
it’s totally “meta”,
it deals with meaning,
tropical house,
slow mix,
Pop
and red carpets.” ¹
“What do you Mean ?” ²
“This is a question that is likely to remain forever unanswered … probably because there was never any question, this question may remain forever suspended, forever interrogative, as remains forever interrogative the why? […] ” ³

¹ Le Chimist in Introduction à Hannah, 2018.
² Justin Bieber in Purpose, 2015.
³ Vladimir Jankélévitch in La Musique et l’Ineffable, 1961.

Paul Jacques Yves Guilbert is born in 1987 in Le Havre (F). He studied at the Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin (HEAR (F)), at Le Fresnoy (Studio National des Arts Contemporains (F)) and was part of the Digital Art Conservation with ZKM. PJYG is now developing texts, videos, installations and performances in Brussels, Belgium. (PJYG is also member and founder of the collective PEZCORP). Paul Jacques Yves Guilbert produces, from autobiographical anecdotes, “authors” elaborating their strategies of existence through essays. PJYG makes these “Autoessays” as fictional “authorizations” to realize its own discourse. PJYG makes these “Superfictional Autoessays” by spatio-temporal collages, intersecting multimedia corpus, generally glued with a digital imaging tube. PJYG manufactures these “Hypermediatic Superfictional Autoessays” as ASHs for a skeptical state.

Ritual and RepetitionEric Souther – China/USA – 2018 – 9 min

Ritual and Repetition was shot in Xiamen at the Nanputuo Temple. The experimental short film examines the ritualistic space of the temple as a site that engages a range of histories and religions (Buddhism and Confucianism), which day after day interacts with crowds of people coming to pray, practice, sightsee, and explore the space.

Eric Souther is a video and new media artist who draws from a multiplicity of disciplines, including anthropology, linguistics, religion and critical theory. These investigations coalesce into works where ritual, materials, and technological assemblages form emergent systems. Work made with these systems arise from the dialog between myself and the codes that constitute our world. He looks for new ways of seeing beyond the seductive qualities of an image to find unseen pathways that help us understand our digital and non-digital existence. His work takes many pathways, which includes single channel video, interactive installation, projection mapping, and audiovisual performance. His work has been featured nationally and internationally at venues such as the  Museum of Art and Design, NYC, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY and the Museum of Art, zhangzhou, China. His work has been screened in The Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens, Greece, Cronosfera Festival, Alessandria, Italy, the Galerija 12 New Media Hub, Belgrade, Serbia, and the Simultan Festival, Timisoara, Romania. In 2016, Eric won the Juried Award for Time-Based at the international art competition ArtPrize. He received his M.F.A. in Electronic Integrated Arts from Alfred University and is currently an Associate Professor of New Media at Indiana University South Bend.

Readers

Tameca L. Coleman is a singer, writer, massage therapist, itinerant nerd and point and shoot tourist in her own town. She is a current grad student at Regis’ new writing MFA program, and has published work in many genres. She has also performed and recorded music with many different bands. She doodles sometimes and likes dancebreaks.

Emily Barton Altman is the author of two chapbooks, “Bathymetry” (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016), and “Alice Hangs Her Map” (forthcoming from dancing girl press, 2018). Recent poems appear in Bodega, The Journal Petra, Dream Pop Press, Ghost Proposal, and elsewhere. She co-hosts and produces the poetry podcast Make (No) Bones and is a recipient of a Poets & Writers Amy Award. She received her MFA from New York University and is currently pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver.