Program 3 - "The Best Medium for a Project Is Usually the Wrong One"
77 Minutes
Light Matter is Curated by James Hansen
Saturday Nov. 2nd, 1:45 PM
Infravision
Joris Guibert, France, 2024, 6 minutes
This film explores the "forms of the visible" as anthropologist Philippe Descola puts it. Images educate the eye to see the world. The invention of perspective led to the invention of landscape painting and the contemplation of the distant. The notion of nature emerged as a unified and external object. In contrast, an animist's vision (which considers that non-human things have a spirit and a social life) operates on different scales. A close-up view reveals relationships between things. This film questions perception. The optical tracking shot, whose focus varies incessantly, modulates the viewer's gaze, which catches certain shapes and struggles to grasp others, without ever managing to fix on a whole. The eye's path is deregulated, and the transition from macro to micro breaks the illusionist view and eliminates all perspective. No special effects are applied to the image : the plastic approach stems from the alteration of the video playback codec. The deteriorated video file fails - just like the deregulated eye - to render an illusionistic view. The explosion of color and the organic movements of pixels reveal a new possibility of looking.
Tape-stry
Rennie Taylor, Canada, 2023, 2 minutes
New York Premiere
Rip, cut, paste, repeat. "Tape-stry" is a short animation designed with Japanese washi tape being directly applied to 16mm film leader. Washi tape is a recent invention, created in the mid-2000s, and is known for its variety of colourful decorative designs, ease of use and having a sticky quality that leaves no residue. Inspired by the pattern films of Jodie Mack and Scott Fitzpatrick, this film layers numbers, cartoon cats and geometric shapes, and text. Artist Abby Brock created animated titles and an original flute soundtrack to accompany the film. The audio mirrors the layering and patterns of the washi tape through a stacked, non-melodic woodwind sound, while the fast-paced animation follows the abruptness of the visuals. "Tape-stry" is a playful manipulation of rice paper tape: rip, cut, paste, repeat.
ESP
Laura Kraning, USA, 2024, 3 minutes
A brutalist monument to the Empire State as manifested by a malfunctioning inkjet printer. Chroma and luminance are made audible as architectural and printed lines converge and dissolve into pattern and noise. Photographed in the Capitol City of Albany, New York.
Go Between
Chris Kennedy, Canada, 2024, 6.5 minutes
USA Premiere
Looking down at the Brisbane River--a play of masking and superimpositions.
Trees on Sand
Minhyeong Kil, South Korea, 2024, 6 minutes
North American Premiere
The shape of light that seeps through the trees and the texture of the sand that passes through them.
Cada Gesto
Valentina Alvarado Matos, Spain, 2024, 11 minutes
North American Premiere
The hand becomes the protagonist in a piece that traces, from a macro perspective, a city understood as a tactile scenario based on different artisan women. cada gesto is an audiovisual portrait that thinks on the city of Barcelona from the footprint and inner life of the workshops.
When the Plug is Pulled and the Set is Cold
Alex Broadwell, United States, 2024, 5.5 minutes
World Premiere
Inspired by a Bill Viola essay which relates three different kinds of 'video black' to closing one's eyes, sleeping, and dying, this work thinks those states of darkness through rapidly failing and increasingly unsupported electronic equipment. Briefly remembered fantasy images, soft crackles of chromatic snow, and explosions of violent feedback form a death dream of analog video.
O/S
Max Hattler, Germany, 2024, 5 minutes
New York Premiere
Taking inspiration from 20th-century avant-garde experiments in graphical sound generation, the entire image in O/S functions as an optical soundtrack. Abstract motion becomes sound. What you hear is exactly what you see.
WILLIAMBABE
Tianjiao Wang, United States, 2024, 10.5 minutes
World Premiere
This film is a tribute to the influential artist and mentor, William Pope.L, following his passing on December 23, 2023. The narrative begins with a timelapse of a spathiphyllum plant, named WILLIAMBABE, purchased on the day of his death, symbolizing the quiet persistence of life and memory. The film transitions into a space shaped by two of Pope.L’s works, Cliff (2012) and Better (2013), evoking a haunting yet reflective atmosphere. Central to the film is the use of hand-drawn lettering, meticulously created in a darkroom. This process, a ritual of sorts, involves inscribing Pope.L’s words directly onto unexposed film strips, which are then used in the Bolex camera for shooting. This act of embedding his words within the very medium of the film transforms the project into a vessel for his essence. It’s a deliberate, almost sacred gesture that mirrors the way his presence continues to resonate through his art and teachings. The film invites viewers to reflect on how an artist’s spirit lingers in the spaces and lives they’ve touched, creating a lasting imprint.
It's Called Round Like a Head
Andrew Wood, United States, 2024, 7 minutes
North American Premiere
Playful formalism at the coast. A film about two people shooting the same horizon and the staccato experience by which we piece together knowledge of place. Informed, but jumbled, the empirical, the guidebook, a scrap of interpretation board. A half remembered history class, a transliterated place name.
Braided Sand
Tracy Szatan, United States, 2024, 17 minutes
New York Premiere
What if the rock could be a lens? And if it’s not a question of if, but when? Braided Sand engages the geologic materiality of imaging and communication technologies. There is no lens without sand, which itself is the result of millions of years of geologic activity. Filmed at a sand mine, a glass factory, and a nanotech laboratory, the film moves between observation and abstraction, juxtaposing human and geologic timescales, plunging the viewer into churning industrial environments to lay bare the weighty earthly bases of seemingly invisible and immaterial infrastructures.