The Unseen Festival 2019: Reality Shift. Saturday, September 21, 7:30pm
Join us on Saturday, September 21, 7:30pm, at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave., Denver) for night 2 of the Unseen Festival 2019!
Reading
Crisosto Apache, originally from Mescalero, New Mexico (US), on the Mescalero Apache Reservation. He is Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné / Navajo. His Diné clans are Salt Clan born for the Towering House Clan. He holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Crisosto is an Assistant Professor of English at the Rocky Mountain College for Art + Design. He is the Associate Poetry Editor for the Offing Magazine. He also continues his advocacy work for the Native American LGBTQ / ‘two spirit’ identity. Crisosto’s debut collection GENESIS (Lost Alphabet) stems from the vestiges of memory and cultural identity of a self-emergence as language, body, and cosmology. Some of the poems in this collection have appeared in Denver Quarterly (Pushcart Nominee), Cream City Review, Plume Anthology, Common Place: The Journal of Early American Life, photographer Christopher Felver’s Tending the Fire. and most recently The Poetry Foundation’s POETRY Magazine June 2018 issue. Crisosto Apache Website: http://crisostoapache.com/ Book order Link: http://amzn.to/2FzG409Lost Alphabet’s website: http://www.lostalphabet.com/genesis/
Dance
A native of Dallas, Texas, Attiyya Fortune began her training at Dallas Black Dance Theatre and was a member of the Allegro Ensemble for four seasons. She is currently a senior BFA candidate in Dance and a Business minor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Attiyya is a member of Nu-World Contemporary Danse Theatre and an apprentice of Interweave Dance Theatre. She has had the privilege to perform several works by many esteemed artists in the Dallas and Denver-Boulder communities.
Film
The Air of the Earth in Your Lungs – Ross Meckfessel – USA – 2018 – 11 min – FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Drones and GoPros survey the land while users roam digital forests, oceans, and lakes. Those clouds look compressed. That tree looks pixelated. A landscape film for the 21st century.
Ross Meckfessel is an artist and filmmaker who works primarily in Super 8 and 16mm film. His films often emphasize materiality and poetic structures while depicting the condition of modern life through apocalyptic obsession, contemporary ennui, and the technological landscape. His work has screened internationally and throughout the United States including in Projections at the New York Film Festival, Wavelengths at Toronto International Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS Film Festival, Internationales Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Antimatter [Media Art], Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, and The Artifact Small Format Film Festival where he was awarded best 16mm film.
Ghost Shelter (Six Sites) – Brit Bunkley – New Zealand – 2017 – 6 min
The video is based on 3D photogrammetry scans of utopian/dystopian monuments and architecture – a variety of post-industrial structures in various states of ruin.
1. Chemiewerk Rüdersdorf, is an abandoned chemical factory in former East Germany.
2. The Teufelsberg NSA Listening Station in Berlin was built on top of a man-made hill constructed from the rubble of WW2 Berlin. The location was chosen in part to bury an unfinished Nazi military college that lies beneath. The European Parliament determined that it was likely part of the ECHELON intelligence gathering network.
3. Immerath is a ghost town in western Germany removed in 2017 by the energy giant RWE for the expansion of their open cast coal mine, Garzweiler. The RWE strip mines of the Rhineland are among the biggest mining operations on Earth.
4. The Martha Project, located in Waihi, New Zealand is an open cast gold mine. In 2016, mining operations ground to a halt due to unusually heavy rainfall, resulting in a major landslide collapsing the north wall of the mine. Climate change has been blamed for the unusual amount of rain in the region.
5.The Domes of Casa Grande, an incomplete, abandoned computer facility in Arizona, rumored to be haunted.
6. The Sleeping Beauty Castle is the centrepiece of the California Disneyland Park. The castle embodies the Disney Corporation’s tagline, “The Happiest Place on Earth”. It is based on the late 19th century Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, Germany.
Brit Bunkley is a New Zealand artist whose art practice includes the proposal and construction of large scale outdoor sculptures, discrete objects, installations as well as the creation of “impossible” moving and still images and architecture designed using computer 3D modelling, video editing and image editing programs. His work explores an oblique sense of paranoid apocalyptic fear tempered with a sense of whimsy and irony.
Dust – Murat Sayginer – Turkey – 2019 – 2 min
A short animated film with dystopian themes.
Murat Sayginer is a self-taught artist who works in the fields of photography and digital art, and is also known as a filmmaker and composer. Born in Prague in 1989, Murat Sayg?ner studied in Paris during his childhood and graduated from Lycee Charles De Gaulle high school in Ankara. He got involved with photography in 2007 and won several international awards. In 2008, his works were selected for ”IPA BEST OF SHOW” exhibition in New York. In 2010 he was awarded Emerging Talent of the Year in the Worldwide Photography Gala Awards. He has written, directed and produced several animated short films since 2013. His films were screened in over 150 film festivals and 6 of them were staff picked on Vimeo. He is currently living and working as a freelancer in Ankara.
Central Square – Daniel Rowe – USA – 2019 – 3 min
Abstract animation inspired by my commute through Central Square in Cambridge, MA. This film explores the sensory experience of moving through public spaces, the curiosity and anxiety that comes from being in the middle of a city. I use loops and cycles to experiment with the timeless quality of space that you return to each day, and how they can start to feel stuck in time.
Daniel Rowe was born and raised in South Portland, Maine. He started making animated films as one of the many self-taught kids of the first Flash boom in the early 00’s. Now Daniel is a Boston-based independent animator working in both traditional and digital techniques. He received his MFA from VCU’s Kinetic Imaging Department in 2013, and his BFA in Animation from MassArt in 2007. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Animation at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Liquid Traits of an Image Apparatus – Vera Sebert – Austria – 2019 – 6 min
Visualised machine instructions make up their own semantics and are base for human instructions. On a cinema screen these images are detached from their initial meaning. They condense on the picture base and swash into our eyes. Like a random rhizome structure an associative montage of minimalistic user interfaces follows the film’s timeline. Our own body perception and our interpretation formed by media conditions become protagonists in a film without narrative.
Vera Sebert, Media Artist. Artistic works in the border areas of visual media, language, film, computer programs: Computer code allows the adaptation of all other media whose properties are imitated, fragmented and reassembled in virtual space. The hybrid exposes the categorical separation between artistic image and text production and creates a space for experiments that explore the mesh of code, image, sound and language in a digital environment. How does the user interface determine our idea of the interrelationship between body, language and machine.
Red-Evoked Agitations – Agustin Telo – Argentina – 2019 – 4 min
The piece was born from the digital intervention of family films founded on the internet. The work consists in reinterpreting and appropriating these images; seeking their connection with the personal photographic memory, as well as manipulating them in search of their deconstruction. I am interested in thinking them as anxious images, as if they were part of a disordered movement, in the same way as the particles of a substance in constant alteration. It proposes to ponder on the perception of the images in memory and its random form to manifest in the unconscious, conceiving them as an amorphous red dough in permanent reorganization and conflict.
Agustin Telo is a graduate of Image and Sound Design, in the Buenos Aires University (UBA), with courses and seminars of photography, cinema and visual arts. His work goes through diverse techniques (motion images proyections, animation and digital video) and different supports and materials (objects, textil, ice or thrush installations). In recent years he has made video installations: El armario (2009), El Lumenario (2012), Dilusión (2017), exhibiting in various museums and galleries of Buenos Aires. In 2018, premiered the experimental short film Topographies of a Distant Noise, participating in various national and international film festivals. Nowadays, he works on his own over experimental video projects by intervening film materials from digital processes.
Ariadne’s Thread – Marta Di Francesco – USA – 2018 – 6 min
Ariadne’s thread is a piece about the tension and blending of opposites.
Ariadne represents pathos and logos, emotion and logic.
In the homonym myth,
Ariadne helps Theseus killing the Minotaur with the aid of a
thread: symbol of life, logic and the fabric of existence.
The labyrinth is an archetype, a metaphor for the journey to the deep centre of true self
and the absence of self.
The tension between the two resolves into a poetic blending of
two beings into one.
In the Metaverse, identity is bodiless and genderless: bodies are
connected, woven together by a common digital, metaphysical thread.
Marta Di Francesco is a London based artist, exploring new aesthetics, merging poetics with code. She investigates digital identity and its fragmentation, exploring and questioning it through digital bleed, time displacement, video processing, and the sculptural quality of time in volumetric aesthetics. Through her practice she is preoccupied with the right to time and time consciousness as a form of resistance, in times of distraction. She merges a conceptual, critical approach with a search for metaphysical correspondences between the self and the metaverse, writing and creating radical visual pieces which inhabit and cross over poetry, dance and code, and working through multidisciplinary collaborations to explore new expressions and conversations.
Mesophase – Espen Tversland – Norway – 2018 – 5 min
Espen Tversland’s expanded painting explores the relationship between humans and nature. In Mesophase other-worldly yet eerily familiar swaying textures and colors engulf the viewer in a completely sensory experience. Inner and outer space break down into an infinite, multi-layered membrane of an organic fiery entity. At times, it may suggest a comforting fuzzy skin, or perhaps the pits of hell or warm-blooded existential angst.
“My work is concerned with our environment and the part that we are playing in its alteration i.e. the Anthropocene. In my art I express my thoughts and emotions about human drive. Mankind’s brilliant discoveries and achievements against the cost and consequences of them through history, culture and an uncertain future. My artwork is made from my imagination, research and memory after making trips to explore landscapes of the north, which is also part of my home.” – ET
Photo credit: Martin Losvik
_ImEdge – Huang Xiaowen – Taiwan – 2019 – 5 min
_ImEdge is an audio-visual work exploring various landforms’ conditions of uncertainty. This work focuses on the outlines of objects and transformations between each still through edge detection technique. Outputs of visuals are similar with engraving works, and full of textures being made of endless pixel and lines.
Huang Xiaowen graduated from China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, majored in oil painting. She is currently completing an MFA degree at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Now, she mainly focuses on audio-visual works and projection mapping.
Symphonic Textures – Oliver Poppert – Australia – 2019 – 3 min
This work explores the feel, appearance and consistency of the urban footprint. The things seen, unseen and the harmony between the two. This work was made through an extensive process of selection of specific imagery and experimentation which ultimately led to the consolidation of concept and practice. By deconstructing compositions into rows and columns and the application of a vertical grayscale gradient, an imagined plane is created where all particles are vibrating strings and each type of vibration corresponds to a different particle.
Emerging video artist, working primarily in digital video and photography. My work focuses on concepts of time and space – abstract representations of spaces and people with particular interest in urban environments and how they are inhabited.
The Left Hand of Darkness – Sara Bonaventura – Italy – 2019 – 5 min
“Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death… like hands joined together”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
This is a drawing exercise, recording in real time my left hand and a white paper,the right hand was not holding a pencil but rather adjusting knobs and patching oscillators, of a Jones Raster Scan, similar to the Rutt Etra Scan Processor, but one of a kind built by Dave Jones for Sara Hornbacher and powered by Signal Culture. It looks easy, but it is not so comfortable, rather a process of prosthetization in which a very familiar part of the body becomes alien, sucked by the uncanny vortex of the machines, in which we believe to see a glimpse of creation, when two index fingers touch each other, but the triangulation ends up with an unsettling unity. in Mandarin: ???? meaning something like It’s hard to clap with only one hand.
The piece is inspired by Ursula’s novel The left hand of darkness.
Soundtrack: Handplant, by EVN from his album Oh Cruel Science, on Enklav label
Sara Bonaventura is an Italian visual artist. As independent videographer she has been collaborating with performers and musicians, directing clips, adv, curating visuals in clubs. Her video works have been screened worldwide; at the Anthology Film Archives, NewFilmmakers NY series, for Other Cinema at San Francisco ATA Gallery, at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Miami New Media festival, the LA Echo Park Film Center and more. She won the Veneto Region Award at the 10th Lago Film Fest in 2014 and a merit for the 2019 Sino per NIIO Illumination Art Prizes, with one of her work displayed in Hong Kong in one of the world’s biggest public screens; she has been selected for several residencies, ie in 2016 by Joan Jonas at Fundacion Botin (Spain). Recently selected for the ISEA 2019, the International Symposium for Electronic Arts, in South Korea. She is currently working on her first documentary, Forest Hymn for Little Girls.
Ritual for Biological Media – Debora & Jason Bernagozzi – USA – 2019 – 20 min – LIVE EXPANDED CINEMA – FILMMAKERS IN PERSON!
Ritual for Biological Media is a video and sound performance by Debora and Jason Bernagozzi that investigates and meditates on the unseen world of biological processes as a metaphor for the transmission of data structures that govern our world.
Jason Bernagozzi is an artist whose work examines and critiques the codes embedded within the psyche of media culture. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at exhibitions such as the European Media Art Festival in Osnabruk, Germany; the Festival Les Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques in Marsaille, France; the Ilman Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea and the Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Jason is also a co-founder of the experimental media art non-profit organization Signal Culture and is currently an Assistant Professor of Electronic Art at Colorado State University.
Debora Bernagozzi is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Signal Culture, an experimental media art nonprofit organization that provides residencies, resources, and exhibition opportunities for artists, researchers, and innovators working in the field. She continues her practice as an internationally exhibited artist working primarily in video and photography. She teaches Photography in the Art & Art History Department and teaches in the LEAP arts entrepreneurship master’s program at CSU.
