VASTLAB EXPERIMENTAL VLX4
2023 TOURING PROGRAM
CHICAGO 4/15 7-9:30 pm

Musical Guest
Toby Kaufmann-Buhler – Sawing Sound

Toby Kaufmann-Buhler (based in Lafayette, Indiana) explores sensory perception, identity, history and memory through work in video, sound and space. This includes work in performance (as Sawing Sound), focused on manipulation of the saw and real-time video.

AbstrArt 22

AbstrArt 22

Luis Carlos Rodríguez

Abstrart is part of an audiovisual artistic research project that tries to transfer expressive and emotional concepts to the screen with moving images and, therefore, intentionally lacks formal, narrative and structural aspects. Any resemblance to reality is pure coincidence or a chance accident in the production process.

America (I wanted to...)

America (I wanted to...)

Matt Mullins

A 21st Century re-imaging of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America.”

Beyond the Fields

Beyond the Fields

Toby Kaufmann-Buhler

Experimental video featuring the poem “Meditation / Die Sinnende” by German poet Gertrud Kolmar (1894-1943) 

FLOAT

FLOAT

Jaden Heller

A penguin drifting through the polluted waters of a flooded Earth must see if he has what it takes to survive the new ways of the world.

futile/gestures

futile/gestures

Yolanda Tianyi-Shao (韶天怡), Aaron Holmes

Two dancers entangled—conversation to conflict to dissolution. / A hand-drawn animated film for which all the frames were drawn simultaneously by 100 people over the course of a 30-minute performance.

giroscopio

giroscopio

John Muse, Brendamaris Rodriguez

 giroscopio is a short experimental film by two artists, one in Pennsylvania and one in Puerto Rico, each in pandemic lockdown, each disoriented. Objects seem to control them; their bodies are unbalanced, unwieldy, comical. The horizon spins; the ground falls away; and yet a strange wonder reigns. 

Origami

Origami

Maxime Corbeil-Perron

Origami plays with perspectives and dimensions. Fractals and luminous geometry are here liquefied by the cathode ray tube of a hacked television set.

perf dance

perf dance

Steven Woloshen

A physical dance with darkness and light – a dark choreography with film.

Photographing New York

Photographing New York

Cesare Bedogne

This short film is based on a poem I wrote remembering the two weeks I spent in New York in 2004, on occasion of my first photo exhibition overseas. I almost forgot this piece of writing, which I had strangely written directly in English in the course of a feverish night, until it resurfaced to my mind almost fifteen years later, while I was travelling in Portugal. 

Self-shot film

Self-shot film

MARAT VALERIEVICH NARIMANOV

The pre-life, life and after-life of a human, featuring problems that we meet and decisions that we take. A surrealist film told in a non-narrative form: in non-concrete images, emotions and associations. A journey, a meditation, a disturbing experience.

space that continues to the mountain

space that continues to the mountain

Qianwen Hu, Jeremiah Paul Neri

Inspired by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poem, the film strings an elastic bond between objects, providing viewers with a non-linguistic poetic visual experience. Swinging through the spectrum of translucency, the work is devoted to find the beauty of movements and variations within stillness.

Spectral Rainbow Frequency

Spectral Rainbow Frequency

Hüseyin Hüseyin Erverdi

Spectral Rainbow Frequency (2021) is about creating an experience akin to a certain type of synesthesia, as if all hues of colors comes, emerging and piercing through darkness accompanying the soundtrack. 

The Seismic Properties of Cloud Computing

The Seismic Properties of Cloud Computing

Maxwell I Oginz

The Seismic Properties of Cloud Computing interrogates contradictory metaphors of infinite accessibility and total security advertised by cloud infrastructure providers. Bringing words by Walter Benjamin and Louise Amoore to life through a combination of video-game imagery, lyrical cinematography, and found footage, the film depicts a world in which the cloud’s seemingly endless architecture is in fact already a boundary drawn by habit, perception, and power. 

Three Pride Flags

Three Pride Flags

Tom Bessoir

Pride and Permutations Inspired by the joint Jasper John retrospective exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Philadelphia Museum of Art, I created three permutating pride flags.

To All Those

To All Those

Josh Weissbach, Ben Balcom

a city symphony in miniature, dedicated to anyone who has gotten lost in thought while stuck on the midwinter train. to all that unfolds in those private reveries.

Triboro

Triboro

Nate Dorr

A trip behind and beneath the street-level skin of the city on the hidden paths of industrial history and once-and-future transit. The Triboro Line is a 24-mile freight rail spanning New York City from the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to Co-Op City in the Bronx. 

WALD

WALD

Christian Groen

Wald, a monk who lives in the distant future, whilst scavenging in the desolate wastelands gains and loses his first friend. Facing the endless cycle of rebirth and destruction.

women

women

Tracy Miller-Robbins

Created more than 60 original portrait drawings which were then processed by an AI machine learning program to create new versions, as it learned from the images. Resulting work evokes temporality and fragmentation of self, while hinting at facial recognition systems.