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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.