Over the past 2 years, Experimental Film and Visuals have been a deep thread in the fabric of VASTLab. With that, we are kicking off a weekend dedicated to Experimental Film with the VASTLab Experimental Festival running Fri Sept 20 + Sat Sept 21 in Burbank, CA.
Sounds both nights by humors
Program includes Experimental Short Fiction, Short Non-Fiction, Short Animation, VR, and Projection Mapping
C-5-11
Edward Ramsay-Morin
Matter and Energy, Mind and Spirit, Science and Magic.
BOOKANIMA – Dance
Shon Kim
an Experimental Animation to give new cinematic life to book. It aims to create ‘Book Cinema’ in the third scope between Book and Cinema. Animation links Book to Cinema.
F A B U L O S A
M Kennedy Volcofsky
scapeland
Immersion:Inversion
Alexandria Searls
“Immersion/Inversion,” a film and audio installation, contains five segments ranging from two to six minutes in length, all of them relating to the underwater views of a river–views looking sideways into the water, and views looking at the outside world from below the surface.
nowhere
carolina marconi
By transporting the viewer back into the womb – a place that everyone has been before but cannot remember – Nowhere explores how place of birth can determine one’s experience of the world.
Last Known Whereabouts
Daniel Watkins
A few years ago I built a mapping app for the iPhone. The app tracked the user’s proximity to the last known whereabouts of missing people in Los Angeles.
Last Known Whereabouts is a three channel video piece comprised of landscapes shot at several of these abduction sites alongside an ambient composition of field recordings taken at the same sites.
Silent Edge
Enzo Cillo
a work that questions about the vision itself.
Temple of Truth
Giuseppe Boccassini
Temple of Truth is an archive that constantly ambulates amid tangles of decaying worlds, ex-perienced as petrified, deprived, residual traces, preserving in the process of taking along and transforming itself, a magmatic state, a specific, ancestral, sometimes whitish non-space.
The Bed and the Street
Mike Hoolboom
A love story set in the global anti-austerity demonstrations. As citizens take back their streets, two women meet and fall in love. What geometry of desire will help overthrow the state? What micro-politics of sharing and communality will provide fuel for demonstrations that will remove and replace the neo-liberal consensus? Cast in a palimpsest of images and sounds, as if there were no way to separate inside and out, the street and the bedroom.
The Paradist- Crusader
Michael Mersereau
Scenes from the Anthropocene
Gregg Biermann
Scenes from the Anthropocene combines material shot at The Bronx Zoo and The Museum of Natural History, with 3D animated material. On the soundtrack, paleontologist Peter Ward warns of the probability that we are experiencing the beginning of a sixth mass extinction. This work is a lament on anthropogenic climate change, its effects on life on Earth and the human urge to oblivion.
Autopoiesis
Lana Caplan
#aerialskiers #SeoulWinterOlympics #divers #LeniRiefenstal #Olympia #OpticalIllusions #SpeculativelyGeneratedOuterSpace #SelfHypnosis #SunRa #SpaceIsThePlace #4ECognition #AssaultByHashtags #MeToo #BlackLivesMatter #StillMarching #GiletJaune #Brexit #IdeasofUtopia #AfroFuturism #AryanRace #HashtagActivism #YouAreASystem #ConstantlyBuffeted #Maintain
Alfaião
André Almeida Rodrigues
In the countryside painted in white by the frost, the birds sing while entrapping the hunter who warms himself in the early sunlight. In the fireplace, the wood crackles in the fire and warms the elderly who are making siesta in company of their cat. We are in the village, where there it is always too hot despite the cold weather and the rain once in a while. This village is Alfaião.
Far Fa Loo
Luis Grane
A hypnotic expedition disentangling present day gurus and followers, self-reflecting the passive role of their enablers.
The Last Step of an Acrobat
cesare bedogne
“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown”.
-T.S.Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Uriel
Harvey Goldman and Jing Wang
The “visual music” collaborations of Jing Wang and Harvey Goldman attempt to produce a synesthesia like experience. The audience is encouraged to “see” the music and “hear” the visuals. The imagery and audio components are constructed without hierarchy, a true melding of sound and image.
Sensors
Kent Tate
Cataylst
Kent Tate
Being natural born pattern seekers, we are forever looking for this or that clue to help explain what otherwise might appear unfathomable. Fundamentally Catalyst represents a type of diary without dates, of memories reconstructed to formulate my story. A story that takes place in time and space, shaped by the earth and sky.
It Matters What
Francisca Duran
Absences and translations motivate this experimental animation in an exploration of the methods and materials of reproduction and inscription.
8401
Francisca Duran
Suit of Lights
Francisca Duran
dontwannabeontheinternet.com
Fabiola Larios
dontwannabeontheinternet.com is about men who have recorded women without their consent and have published it to porno pages as xvideos, it is a digital collage of a search scroll and women walking while being stalked, without being “provocative”, unaware they are being stalked, and at the same time they are being recorded.
mallow chambers
Juana Robles
There are eternal chambers of the unspoken where strange mallows grow.
soil
Alican Durbaş
Conceived through the division of the screen into nine cinematic frames, the film “Soil” narrates the journey of a young man carrying a handful of soil into the grave of a deceased soldier who happens to be burying his own dead body. With the form integrated into narrative, it is possible to watch every phase of his journey synchronically. Wherever he goes the smell of the soil remains the same.
Dada Ship
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
A Dadaist time travel film. A ship on the oceans of time, born out of a dream. Our dreams offer unparalleled luxury travel, after all. A celebration of all things queer and dada. A hand-made split-screen experimental film using the technique of disrupted stereoscopy and collage détournement of found images.
Kiki’s Film
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
A Dadaist time travel film. A ship on the oceans of time, born out of a dream. Our dreams offer unparalleled luxury travel, after all. A celebration of all things queer and dada. A hand-made split-screen experimental film using the technique of disrupted stereoscopy and collage détournement of found images.
Circle Bends
Sara Bonaventura
Official video for Samara Lubelski (http://samaralubelski.com/), Circle Bends, from her solo LP Flickers at the Station out on Drawing Room Records. It was shot in Italy and processed in the US with wobbulator and analog equipment (Hearn Videolab Analog Processing System, Jones four channel analog colorizer, Eurorack & Jones MVIP modules), during a residency at Signal Culture, NY. The model is the Italian photographer Arianna Lerussi (http://www.ariannalerussi.com/)
As If The Color Was Looking At You
Sara Bonaventura
Triptych version of a choreography performed by Annamaria Ajmone, the same sequence had been processed with analog synth during a residency at Signal Culture.
TRUTH
Jenny E. Balisle
Alternative realities bypass the principles of American democracy. The word TRUTH is transformed representing that its definition can take many forms- from supporting facts based on evidence to speaking against hate. The Georgia font is the same used by The New York Times. Citizens must continue to support the freedom of the press over the rejection of logic.
Glitchtown 02: Texting With Ruth
Paul Echeverria
Grandma Ruth was born in Detroit during the early 1900’s. During her lifetime, she witnessed the rise and fall of the Great Motor city. By the time of her death, the Internet was in its infancy and the city was entangled in a perpetual state of glitch. Due to the limited availability of archival media, her rich personal history dissolved with her passing. Glitchtown 02: Texting With Ruth, presents a fictional conversation, between the filmmaker and his grandmother, about the history of Detroit.
PROXIMA NOVA
Victor Acevedo
PROXIMA NOVA (v4) Part pure motion-graphic abstraction, part figurative dance piece; this is the 4th iteration of a work that has 2 sections bridged by an ‘eternal form’, the Rhombic Dodecahedron.
DizzyMess
Vivian Ostrovsky
Dizziness, in the sense that it inspires artists and filmmakers to move beyond their known borders. Or how a state of altered perception, instability, and confusion can be a catalyst for exploring new surroundings. Let go of the ground and attain giddiness or perhaps even foolishness?
fallin
Tomohiko Tsuji
There are two artists of Outsider Art. They have a mental disability. Their drawings which they drew with an urge are, in a measure, transcendental. In order to experience something which is hidden in the deep mind of human beings, high-resolution 4K camera and high-definition lens will fall into their drawings.
Isle of the Dead
Benjamin Nuel
A timeless trip, from an average apartment towards our final destination, guided by Charon, the ferryman of the Underworld.
chairs
Avner Pinchover
A man hurls chairs at a wall for 12 minutes in what seems to be a holy-rage attack. This expressive performance-for-camera fluctuates between satisfaction and futility while simultaneously creating compositions of destructive beauty.
The Names of Trees
Pamela Falkenberg
Images of decay and regeneration photographed using a video camera whose sensor has been modified for infrared photography create a post apocalyptic, strangely beautiful, but disconnected world.
when i was four
Hugo Ljungbäck
When I Was Four reenacts a distant childhood memory of the first night in a new home, and relates it to an adolescent experience, in hope to uncover what truth the memory holds, if any.
Cosmosea I
Marina Mardas
Cosmosea is an experimental video series that is a synesthesia into the depth of waters, our subconscious mind.
My Echo, My Shadow, and Me
Roger Deutsch
faint forgone forgotten
Roger Deutsch
A memoir disguised as a love song. A love song disguised as a memoir.
Film digitalia, this intimate hard drive
Matt Whitman
This film is a textual and archival response to and documentation of perpetual discrepancies – between living and deceased, public and private, physical and virtual – found in processes of contemporary mourning. Shot on 16mm film, the work’s own ontology speaks to the material vulnerabilities, susceptibilities, affective properties of the physical archive, particularly in juxtaposition to contemporary modalities of digital memory.
Love Letters to Ruth
Ruth Patir
Between the years 1937 and 1972 General Moshe Dayan wrote hundreds of love letters to his then wife Ruth.
Letters chronicling the affair from their first infatuation to their very public divorce.
As a Ruth myself I asked my former lovers to take the role of the revered general and read his letters to me.
Field Notes: Tree 1
Kate Lain
A meditation on the meaning of one artifact of modernity.
Bitrate Medley
Houston Guy
Malfunkn, “the world’s first artificial intelligent musician,” performs a live music/augmented-reality experience in realtime 360.
She Collage
Kate Lain
She Collage is part response to the work of California-based collage artist Terry Braunstein, part reflection on the practice of art-making. Like Braunstein’s art, the film is itself a collage—in this case, frame-by-frame hand-manipulated images of Braunstein, paper cutout stop motion animation, archival footage, and an assemblage of sounds.
Huntington Drive
Kate Lain
This work comprises various types of documentation of a single trip along the entire length of Huntington Drive, a 16-mile-long street that passes through nine cities in Los Angeles County: sounds recorded at various points, photographs of sights along its length, sections of pages from a paper map book depicting the route, and scans of trash picked up along the way. the various types of visual documentation were printed onto pieces of paper of uniform height, arranged in geographic order from Los Angeles to Irwindale, and attached together into a long scroll modeled after small box panorama toys from the late 19th century.
Geneviève
Zoe Meyer
Geneviève is a 30-minute film presenting a series of visual poems that reflect on the story of a 19th century French woman who spent her life resisting the confinement of mental health institutions. Geneviève was a patient of Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist who influenced the birth of modern psychoanalysis. According to Charcot’s detailed case studies, she was the perfect example of the medical “succubus,” a woman prone to sexual fits and hysteria. But Geneviève–her life, her personhood–was more than this.