Studio 27 Experimental Media Screening
Impure Cinema: Hybrid Works Rupturing Media Boundaries
Friday, October 5, 2007, 9:00 PM
689 Bryant Street (at 5th Street), San Francisco
Admission is free
Studio 27 presents a screening of short films and videos that intermingle different mediums or genres. By synthesizing traditional media and techniques with newer technologies, these filmmakers have created hybrid forms to express new ideas in their work. Some of these pieces draw attention to their own construction by the conventions of genre, while others either question or highlight the distinction between different visual technologies. The filmmaker Federico Campanale will be present.
The Arsenal at Danzig
Timothy Hutchings, 2001, 8 mins., USA
The destroyed palaces and monuments of the city-state of Danzig, captured on travel postcard, are remembered in a visceral way with the insertion of the moving figure of the artist. This flaneur operates as a forced device for focus, and strikes a chilling comment on the result of war and its relationship to desire.
Anticipation
Johanna Vaude, 2007, 12 mins., France
Johanna Vaude’s aesthetic strategy of post-production as method integrates traditional experimental celluloid techniques, such as hand-processing and direct painting on film negative, with computer-based digital manipulations of color, luminosity, and compositing, to a create a visual/aural tone poem on the origins of the universe and of the human.
The Tree With The Lights In It
Jason A. Harrington, 2007, 5 mins., USA
Inspired by the story of a blind girl seeing for the first time, this visual poem combines digitally drawn elements and stop motion film. It expresses a personal experience of what new vision can be without the fetters of preconception.
Authority Head Exorcism
Daniel King, 2006, 3 mins., USA
King presents a degraded montage of fragmentary memories in still imagery, found material, and home footage. This piece reflects on the complexity of life in the American social landscape while exploding the crossroads of the personal and the political.
Inkjet Printed Film Process
Jesse England, 2007, 1 min., USA
This on-going project explores the potential of producing something like Super 8 film using transparency film and an inkjet printer. The result of this painstaking process is a semi-abstract work that uses video imagery as the source material for the film. The project stands as homage to the medium of cinematic film. Its early conceptions started in 2005, which was also the year that Kodachrome 40 was discontinued.
Vide-Uhhh!
Jesse England, 2005, 2 mins., USA
England experiments with video scratching using a VHS VCR, a digital camcorder, magnets, and brute force to produce a work that stands as the new “hand processed” technique, while simultaneously offering up an aesthetic that reflects on the nature of film but is wholly digital.
This video edited by computer
Jesse England, 2005, 1 min., USA
So you’ve shot some touching footage of you bonding with your stuffed cat, and talking into its telephone abdomen. What do you do next? This humorous piece is an account of the moments when personal footage is edited on autopilot by a computer set to music-video mode.
Blobsquatch: In The Expanded Field
Carl Diehl, 2007, 11 mins., USA
Diehl creates a paranoid hyperspace of conspiracy theory tropes surrounding the ever popular mass media phenomena of extra-human sightings. This video takes pleasure in playing with the familiar genre of investigative television journalism, and demonstrates what might happen in the sensationalization of absurd manifestations of the pseudo-scientific.
The End of The Universe as we know it? (Cosmic)
Anders Bojen & Kristoffer Orum, 2007, 8 mins., Denmark
The inflated rhetoric and self-absorbed posturing of doom-and-gloom Armageddon predictions provides the hyperbolic background for this eye-popping visual extravaganza. This film humorously demonstrates how valiant attempts to pictorially represent cosmic catastrophes by using the latest high-tech optical toys must, on a fundamental level, inevitably fail.
Kogel Vogel
Federico Campanale, 2007, 6 mins., The Netherlands
With super high-speed cinematography, reminiscent of adored science education films from our childhood, gun fetishization is here taken to a surrealist extreme. Through visual and aural penetration of multiple planes of plate glass, shattering in spectacular slow motion, a technology of scientific reproduction becomes the unexpected transmission for a poetry of the unseeable.
Mother on Trial: Gathering Voices in the Theater of Attraction
Kristine Diekman, 2006, 12 mins., USA
Three forms of representation (stock footage, a Law & Order television episode, and an MSN chat room conversation) form the background source materials for an investigation into a mother's trial for killing her own children. Superimpositions of digital puppetry, and three-dimensional avatars that stand in place of the viewing public, are used as a distancing strategy that effects an uncanny separation of aural, pictorial, and bodily elements. This approach raises questions concerning the construction of criminal identity in contemporary mass media.
Nebula
Hilary Harp and Suzie Silver, 2006, 10 mins, USA
A synthesis of vibrant colors, glassy surfaces, sparkling facets, and digital mirroring technologies create a spatial enigma that is simultaneously crystalline and liquid, effervescent and rocklike. We are drawn perpetually inward in a cosmic journey that is perpetually transforming, transporting us into a zone of science fiction inspired fantasy.
Running Time: 1 hour, 19 mins.
