2/9 lineup

on the lobby monitor

Poésie de mains Hodan Youssouf
Come Home Before Food Gets Cold Sharon Liang
Signs of our Times Lisa Birke
The Evolution of the Humble Brown Box Alia Alkaff
Anima # 1 Vasco Diogo
Night Ride from LA Martin Gerigk
the human ceremony Ben Spatz
The subterranean blackness of roots Charles-André Coderre

 

7pm VLX5 Program #3 – Part 1

Kusikozu Aitor Irulegi
I’m sorry I’m late Sharon Mooney
Welcome to the Enclave Sarah Lasley
Monolith Teri Carson

 

7:40pm Amanda VanValkenburg Q&A

8pm Intermission

8:30pm LiveScore H. Anton Riehl scoring

La próxima te acompaño (next time i’ll join you) Camila Dron
bleu passé Tracy Miller-Robbins
Anima # 3 Vasco Diogo
Brackish Vincent DeZutti
Expansion Amanda VanValkenburg

 

~9pm VLX5 Program #3 – Part 2

Poésie de mains Hodan Youssouf
Echoes Susanne Layla Petersen
form Adam E. Stone
Soapaboyo : Soap Film 3 Ihab Mardini
Absolut Caroline Rumley
Waking Field Brian Alexander
Horizons Charlie Marois
The Mirror Neuron (poetry mix) Tommy Becker
a landscape to be invented Josh Weissbach
The Enlightenment Stephanie Barber

 

~10:10pm WRAP

VLX5 – Program #3

Chicago

H. Anton Riehl is a classically trained composer, multi-instrumentalist, and an active performer as a modular synthesist. His work spans film, TV, video games, and commercials. As a composer and arranger, he writes for symphonic orchestras as well as intimate chamber ensembles, and specializes in blending acoustic and electronic voices. Riehl has collaborated with Danger Mouse, Karen O, Mike Patton, Daniele Luppi, Úyanga Bold, and many more. Most recently, Riehl worked on the CBS show Blood and Treasure and the video games Receiver II and Overgrowth.

Amanda VanValkenburg is a visual artist using a combination of traditional and digital techniques to explore contemporary anxiety and digitally mediated interactions between the past and future. She received her BFA in Painting/Drawing /Sculpture at Brigham Young University, studied digital media at Hochschule für Künste Bremen, and received her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Film/Video/New Media/Animation. She currently teaches at Northern Illinois University as an Assistant Professor of Time Arts and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as an instructor in ACE and ECP programs. Her work has been exhibited in the MCA, Elmhurst Museum, Mana Contemporary, Woman Made Gallery, 6018 North Gallery, LeRoy Neiman Center, and screened at the Gene Siskel Theater, Nightingale Cinema, Links Hall, Filmfront, and the Chicago Digital Media Festival. She has completed residencies through High Concept Labs, Oxbow, and Ragdale.

La próxima te acompaño (next time i’ll join you) Camila Dron Blue Print animation. English: “Next time i’ll join you” is the result of the combination of various animation techniques and supports, both physical and digital. The process begins by converting computerized images of a person’s interior into blueprints. This work seeks to play and expand the notion of the representations that technology offers us about the interior of our own body. Spanish: “La próxima te acompaño” es el resultado de la combinación de diversas técnicas de animación y soportes, tanto físicos como digitales. A partir de la conversión de imágenes computarizadas del interior de una persona en cianotipias esta obra busca jugar y expandir la noción de las representaciones que la tecnología nos brinda sobre el interior de nuestro propio cuerpo.
Camila Dron (Argentina, 1999). Es Lic. en Artes Audiovisuales y programadora dentro del festival Festifreak. Actualmente indaga en procesos alternativos de fotografía y animación utilizando como materia prima la cianotipia. Su reciente obra,”La próxima te acompaño”(2023: Mientras Tanto Cine/ Festival Internacional de Artes Experimentales; Odds & Ends Film Festival; Cineminuto Córdoba; Cine Caos; Suspaustas Laikas; 60 Second Intl. Film Festival; Turku Animated Film Festival; Denver Underground Film Festival; LINOLEUM Festival; Black Canvas y EXPS/SLC) busca jugar y expandir la noción de las representaciones que la tecnología nos brinda sobre el interior de nuestro propio cuerpo.
form Adam E. Stone A poem film about physical and spiritual transmutation, crafted with archival footage, family photos, and found photos. Directed, written, edited, and produced by Adam E. Stone. Voices: Corey DeMoss and Shanta Parasuraman. Audio mixing and editing by Jon Clarkson. Total run time, including credits: 2 minutes, 45 seconds. Various formats, all with open or closed captions, are available upon request. Select “CC” button on Vimeo player for English-language closed captions/subtitles. Text of poem (also available as a PDF on this Filmfreeway page): Part I: and I see you one body, one mind in a sunlit room your brush your pen youthful eye that gazes outward aging eye that gazes in “each thought,” you said, “is just a moment” “each moment,” you said, “is just a thought” on the trail of a glimpse of something more Friday evening living … living Monday morning gone … but not really as you are gone, but not really Part II: and I see you one body, two minds on a sunlit plain your life your pen eyes now closed breath now slow you told me they would take things soon you would become unrecognizable … recognizable unrecognizable … recognizable Friday evening Monday … mourn gone, but not really as you are gone, but not really you told me you would change again: in a dream you smiled, then ran away the unseen world, so much more fun Part III: and I see you two bodies, One Mind a sunless branch and a sunlit tree a veil that lifts the world your pen One, and yet … yourself: aging eye that gazes outward youthful eye that gazes in and I see you … and I seek you, and I reach you … and I lose you two at once, at once two, I pray to one, I pray to both different … and the Same and I see you … and I see you Copyright 2024 by Adam E. Stone
Adam E. Stone’s latest feature film is the poetic essay film “Atmospheric Marginalia” (2022). His films have been featured at dozens of prominent, well-curated festivals worldwide, and have won numerous awards. Short poem and essay films include “form” (2024), “as the night” (2023), “Tyranny of the Unafflicted” (2023), “If Any” (2021), “Awake” (2021), “Specks and Flashes” (2020), “Elegy for Unfinished Lives” (2020), “an entombing(dis)entombing” (2020), “Declarations” (2019), and “Gods Die Too” (2018). Previous short dance films include “Do Not Forget the Lost” (2019), “Summer Friend: A Ballet Film” (2016), “Resting Places: A Ballet Film” (2015), and “Janet: A Silent Ballet Film” (2014). He also is the writer, producer, and co-director of the feature-length fictional essay film “Abstractly You Loved Me” (2013), and is one of the co-producers of, and conducted many of the interviews for, the feature-length documentary “Black Hawk Down: The Untold Story” (DVD 2019). In 2012, Stone wrote and produced the spoken-word ballet “A Life Unhappening,” which is about the impact of one woman’s Alzheimer’s disease on three generations of her family. In 2010, he wrote, directed, and produced the DVD novel “Cache Girl Saves the World: A Novel in Visions.” He is also the author of three conventional print novels: “Xamon Song” (2006), “Kingston Fugue” (2007), and “The New Harmonies” (2009).
The Evolution of the Humble Brown Box Alia Alkaff Against the world’s perceptions and society’s projections, a little brown box undergoes a metamorphosis to discover the meaning of its gender identity.
Alia Alkaff (she/they) is a storyteller, specialising in film and theatre. For film, their art horror short film, ‘Mended’ (2022) has been showcased in Fantasporto International Film Festival 2023 and Kota Kinabalu International Film Festival 2022. Their other work has also been showcased in the Tag! Queer Shorts Festival 2022 and Women Voices Now Film Festival 2021. Previously, Alia was a storywriter for one of Singapore’s longest running English dramas, ‘Tanglin’. Her recent theatre work includes ‘Nur’ (2022) as a co-writer and co-director, and ‘parthenogenesis’ as a performer, an experimental docu-theatre piece on asexuality, a part of The Substation’s Septfest 2020 & 2021. Alia hopes to continue creating accessible work that explores identity and culture through different lenses.
bleu passé Tracy Miller-Robbins
“bleu passé” translates to, faded blue. The work is a nod to painting and to memories of people. I repeatedly return to the figurative- a gesture, a glance, a hint of narrative. These works start as studio sessions, rapidly drawing sketches of portraits from memory, taking these further into paintings, and then using an AI program to see what it learns in the process of creating my work. I see hints of my tendencies, of my shorthand, the marks, and the process of the program learning fascinates me, as the gradual evolution of the image creates an animated transition if played in sequence. I approach working with the computer, with software, and with AI in particular, as a collaboration.
Soapaboyo : Soap Film 3 Ihab Mardini
Ihab graduated in 2014 after being awarded the Outstanding Student of College of Imaging Arts at RIT, and he was chosen as the delegate of all RIT grad students. His teaching career took-off in 2014 as an adjunct Professor in the School of Film and Animation (SOFA), he was hired later as a visiting professor at the 3D Digital Design program (3DDD), where he later was offered the position of an Assistant Professor, a position he currently holds. He is now also an affiliate Professor of the Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity (MAGIC). In addition to teaching academically, for several years Ihab has taught 3D modeling and animation to kids at the RIT Tiger-Camps. He has also been volunteering to teach animation to kids at the Joseph Avenue Arts and Culture Alliance. Throughout his career at RIT Ihab worked on several personal and commissioned films, which reaped him numerous film recognitions including a permanent display of Iroquois Creation Story at Ganondagan’s Seneca Art & Culture Center and two Best Animation awards, in addition to a permanent display of Soap Film at the Exploratorium Museum of Science. As a Professor, Ihab was nominated for Teaching with Technology in 2022, the Eisenhart Nomination – RIT Outstanding Teaching Award in 2018, and a Nomination for Outstanding Teaching Award for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty in 2015.
Anima # 3 Vasco Diogo Anima # 3 is an experimental animation focused on a fast presentation of hand-drawn faces that transmit diversity, inclusion and human emotions: a divided self with many faces trying to survive in a violent stereophonic world.
Vasco Diogo was born in Lisbon in 1970. He has a degree in Sociology by Universidade Nova de Lisboa, a master degree in social sciences by Universidade de Lisboa and a PhD in Communication Sciences by Universidade Nova de Lisboa, with the thesis: “Video: specificity, hybridity and experimentation”(scholarship by FCT, 2008). From 2008 to 2020 he was a professor at University of Beira Interior teaching mainly cinema directing, new cinemas and experimental cinema. After being co-founder of Projecto Teatral, works, since 1998 in performance, video art and experimental cinema around themes such as self-presentation, truth and manipulation. In experimental cinema he has won several international awards (more than 70), specially with the film: “anexperimentalviralvlog – the movie remix # !”. He has shown his works in several exhibitions and festivals in Portugal, Spain, Italy, USA, Canada, India, Germany, France, Cyprus, Poland, etc.
Absolut Caroline Rumley As Covid dims and the war in Ukraine does not, there remains just one absolute.
Caroline Rumley is an American filmmaker who collages solo-shot film, found and archival footage, text, and sound to illuminate a personal or public experience. Her work looks at power structures and control, and the resulting loss or lack, and moments of clarity. Her films have screened internationally at varied venues – from Melbourne’s Biennial of Video Art to Amsterdam’s IDFA to Berlin’s Zebra Poetry Film Fest to Sundance.
Brackish Vincent DeZutti “Brackish” is a short essay film that examines issues of memory and image-making through various camera sources, editing, voice over, and expressionistic sound design. The footage was shot during Vincent’s time in residence at Tofte Lake Center in near the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota.
Vincent DeZutti is a lens-based artist living and working in Minneapolis. He is interested in the relationship between humans and images – how and why we make them, consume them, and how that affects our relationship to nature, other people, and our own memories. He has exhibited work in various galleries in the Twin Cities metro, the greater Midwest region, and beyond, as well as screened moving image work at both U.S. and international film festivals.
Waking Field Brian Alexander Waking Field is an optically based experimental film shot in realtime without computer generated effects or post processing. The only physical subject is light and water. I have developed open lens systems which operates in complete darkness in a 20’ x 30’ room. The actual lenses have no body and are a combination of glass and melting ice which degrade over time such that no two takes are exactly the same nor are they repeatable. The art of the process has become in creating the conditions which manifest the effect since it is largely uncontrollable, it is a practice of allowing and openness. The audio is created primarily in realtime with as few post tweaks as possible. It is hoped that this sense of the immersive, rooted in physical reality can serve to ground us and help reset media stereotypes. At a conceptual level, “Waking Field” represents an ongoing exploration in observation, meditation, and artistic research. Why do we stare and slowly decompress at the sight of light on water, a distant flock of birds or an empty bag hovering in an alley ? There is an apparent gray area of experience where cadence, familiarity and abstraction are in balance and serve to connect us in an elemental and unified manner. Ive sought to expand on these moments of “betweenness” and shift them towards the primary.
Brian Alexander is a transdisciplinary Artist who’s works are specifically focused on the unseen, unheard, and under served life forms among us. His practice involves the development of one off tools, processes, and programs in order to realize the space beyond our collective limitations in perceptual bandwidth. Believing the adage “a fish cannot tell you about water”, Alexander’s works point towards the gaps between human intent and understanding by bridging the Earth’s deeper signatures and reconnecting us all in a grounded and immersive experience. His 34 year professional career spans public and commercial Art endeavors including Sculpture, Installations, Sound and Performance, as well as product and technical process development. He currently holds 28 patents with permanent works in MOMA NY, Cooper Hewitt, and Smithsonian. In 2011 He established Trace Bloom as a blanket field of exploration and artistic research for all forms of media in an immersive, and fully inclusive approach. Distilled as definition, Trace Bloom is; to loosely outline perceived phenomena, to develop the tools and conditions for emergent expression, and to allow that expression to grow unencumbered to a point of perceived resolution or shared understanding.
Kusikozu Aitor Irulegi
An intense journey between lines, nature, animals, life and death.
Horizons Charlie Marois Filmed frame by frame, the landscape is deconstructed in a way that makes us lose our sense of reality and continuity. The horizon line becomes our only reference point to create a new motif that is both irrational and contemplative.
Charlie lives in Montreal. He graduated from Concordia in film production in 2012. Since then, he has been creating moving images through a formal and sensitive approach. His films have been screened in various festivals in Montreal and abroad.
I’m sorry I’m late Sharon Mooney Psychological deteriorations caused by invisible labor and stress slowly build. What’s left as her internal and external struggles to find solid ground? Moments taken from the The Avengers that hint at disruption, mental dissolution, and violence slowly disintegrate to be replaced with another – another thought/another memory/another question. An ethereal soundscape with re-edited sound clips from Honey West gives voice to the tension of navigating the unnamed character’s internal and external self.
Sharon A. Mooney is a filmmaker who works in experimental, narrative and documentary portraiture, all focused on investigating desire and the human condition. Mooney’s short videos and installations have screened internationally in festivals and galleries. She is a professor at a film school in Los Angeles where she teaches filmmaking, post production, and punk rock cinema.
Poésie de mains Hodan Youssouf 1) HANDS: The music is signed in Langue des signes québécoise (LSQ), because words and visual sounds are expressed through the hands in the lives of Deaf people and signers. Hands act as a “jack-of-all-trades”. All too often, society imposes spoken language and auditory sounds on Deaf people, which for them are not “touchy-feely”. Take a good look at their hands! They’re essential. 2) Mains de langue: True, pure Quebec sign language *Do not use “sign language”. 3) Sea of hands: The sea of hands visually translates the musical flow of hands.
Born in Somalia, Hodan Youssouf is Deaf from birth. In 1989, with her siblings, Youssouf immigrated to Canada. Today, she works as an anti-oppression consultant in the arts community. Passionate about theater and acting, she has participated in various theater activities, including an ASL adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in Toronto. She has also collaborated on numerous occasions with Cinéall, an organization that works on innovative and creative communication solutions between the Deaf and hearing worlds, notably on short films including “Un homme fou s’aspire” and “Souviens-toi… un dortoir”. A committed poet and actress, she has taken part in a multitude of projects over the years, in both hearing and Deaf circles, in Quebec and abroad.
Come Home Before Food Gets Cold Sharon Liang Come Home Before Food Gets Cold is an animated short film documenting the development of the Liang Liang family’s traditions and their strong bond through times of change. The Liang Liang family is a team of five individuals-Garlic Papa, Chili Mama, Natto Boy, Croissant Girl, and Cereal Grannie- who learn they are not complete without one another. They separate at times but will reunite as always. They are forever one. One body, one heart.
Sharon Liang is a multimedia artist based in Chicago and Taipei. She recently graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA degree in the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department.
The Mirror Neuron (poetry mix) Tommy Becker The Mirror Neuron (poetry mix) is an art rock film divided into three vignettes that investigate complexities of interconnection beneath an awakening of the sun. Mirror neurons activate when we observe the actions of others. They allow us to empathize through feeling, not thinking. Their discovery confirms our evolutionary path to see others as similar to ourselves. The Mirror Neuron celebrates our biology through a series of musically driven gestures intended to activate our neural networks. VIDEO, MUSIC & TEXT: written, recorded, edited & performed by Tommy Becker
Tommy Becker attended the San Francisco Art Institute as an undergraduate before receiving his MFA in Film/Video/Performance from California College of Arts where he was awarded, “The All College Honor Award”. A poet trapped in a camcorder, Becker continues to feed his video, music and poems into his never-ending saga, “TAPE NUMBER ONE”. Often Becker’s single channel works are translated to live cinema performance. He has been an artist in residency at Headlands Center for The Arts and the Wexner Center for the Arts. His work has been shared at Bay Area Now 4 at the Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, Freewaves’ 10th Biennial Film, Video & New Media Art Festival, Los Angeles; White Columns, New York; Ann Arbor FF; Chicago Underground FF; Currents New Media FF; Perth International FF and Black Maria FF. Since 2004, he’s worked as an arts educator in the Bay Area.
Welcome to the Enclave Sarah Lasley Two sisters fight to save their digital utopia from demise. “Welcome to the Enclave” is an experimental animation framed as an absurdist crowdfunding video. The Enclave is a virtual neighborhood for ‘like-minded women’ created by Moni Calivione during the Covid pandemic. At the moment, she’s under attack from Reddit trolls who are changing her road signs to potty humor and splattering her walls with sexually explicit imagery. Together with her sister Blair, she desperately looks for a way to save her patch of e-serenity by raising money online. The film is a delirious exploration of technological “progress” that paints the metaverse as one large opportunity for chaos. A compendium of design flaws, errors, glitches, and oddities unravel the delusion at the heart of The Enclave’s pursuit for a white, suburban ideal and expose the baggage we bring to online spaces if we don’t fix our very real IRL problems.
Sarah Lasley is an award-winning filmmaker from Louisville, Kentucky and an Assistant Professor of Film at Cal Poly Humboldt. She has screened internationally at festivals, museums, galleries, and universities such as the Cairo Video Festival, 25 FPS Film Festival, Katonah Museum of Art, and National Chiao Tung University. She holds an MFA from Yale School of Art and a BFA from University of Louisville and was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2004.
The Enlightenment Stephanie Barber THE ENLIGHTENMENT, s. barber 16mm, 2023 Listing dangerously into poetry, philosophy and sound art, Barber’s new film (distributed by Video Data Bank) finds Yon and Payola in a Victorian conservatory. They are companionable, disoriented and petulant––they whip wildly through these disembodied states. Payola reads an excerpt of their experimental essay on the age of enlightenment. Payola’s research, and presentation of this research, is a purposeful affront to empirical data, the scientific method and other enlightenment ideals, while reveling in the desire for the revolution and intellectual expansion those thinkers championed. The concepts are undermined by the form and register of their delivery OR the concepts are strengthened by the poetry through which they are presented. The soundtrack for The Enlightenment was originally commissioned by the Diffusion Festival for multi-channel sound work, curated by M.C. Schmidt for High Zero.
Stephanie Barber is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been focused on an expanded poetics resulting in the creation of films, books, installations and songs. This work sits between cinema and literature, science and spirituality, philosophy and comedy and manifests as a corpus that moves beyond allegiance to media and works hard at defying classification.
Monolith Teri Carson Part essay film, part videopoem, Monolith braids found footage, documentary, experimental, 3D animation and narrative filmmaking devices to explore notions of collectivity, dissent, indigenous knowledge and time as a series of folds, splits, ruptures, loops, clusters, drifts, ascents, descents, vortexes, pulses, rhythms, linkages, aberrations, burials, and unearthings. This shape-shifting film addresses ongoing legacies of nationalist archives, archeology, and coloniality.
Teresita Carson (b. Mexico) is an artist and educator working across disciplines, including moving image, new media, sound, sculpture, photography, printmedia, fiber, and installation. Taking an irreverent feminist approach to world and counter-archive building, she explores the abstract intersection between the historical, the speculative, indigenous cosmogonies, and magical peripheries. Through weaving and its Indigenous histories, she activates the genre of science-fiction as a feminist strategy to mine for aspirational modalities and clues towards a decolonial path. Her experimental films have been shown at film festivals and curated film exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego. Recent venues presenting Carson’s work include Mana Contemporary, Sullivan Galleries, Moving Image at ACRE, Spudnik Press Collective, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA Museum), Ugly Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400 and the Cleve Carney Museum of Art. She is director of the project space INTERSECT, which exhibits and supports artists making time-based work. She holds a Bachelors in Fine Arts from the School of the Art institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago under the advisership of Deborah Stratman. She resides in Chicago, Illinois in the land of the Three Fires Confederacy, Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe Nations.
Echoes Susanne Layla Petersen Video including traffic, streets, child on swing, woods, landscapes, olive tree, hashtags, sound, light and glass
Susanne Layla Petersen is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Frederiksberg, Denmark. Exhibitions and screenings worldwide.
Anima # 1 Vasco Diogo This experimental and abstract animation reflects upon the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, following the structure of an hip-hop song and mixing plenty of digital hand-painted techniques. The style alternates between continuity and frame collision.
Vasco Diogo was born in Lisbon in 1970. He has a degree in Sociology by Universidade Nova de Lisboa, a master degree in social sciences by Universidade de Lisboa and a PhD in Communication Sciences by Universidade Nova de Lisboa, with the thesis: “Video: specificity, hybridity and experimentation”(scholarship by FCT, 2008). From 2008 to 2020 he was a professor at University of Beira Interior teaching mainly cinema directing, new cinemas and experimental cinema. After being co-founder of Projecto Teatral, works, since 1998 in performance, video art and experimental cinema around themes such as self-presentation, truth and manipulation. In experimental cinema he has won several international awards (more than 70), specially with the film: “anexperimentalviralvlog – the movie remix # !”. He has shown his works in several exhibitions and festivals in Portugal, Spain, Italy, USA, Canada, India, Germany, France, Cyprus, Poland, etc.
Night Ride from LA Martin Gerigk ‘Night Ride from LA’ is based on a real car ride at night from downtown LA to the desert near Palm Springs a few years ago. The footage was taken from the car by continually shooting single long exposure photos to document the ride of about two hours without any break. This technique condensed the whole trip to a flickering twirl of time-stretched movements and night light graffiti causing a kind of psychedelic trance. A love letter to the energy and vibe of the Californian way of life.
Martin Gerigk (*1972) is a composer of contemporary music. His repertoire includes compositions for orchestra and chamber music, as well as several solo concertos. His compositions are performed nationally and internationally including in Korea, Japan, USA, England, Finland, Austria and Switzerland. In this context he works together with renowned international soloists and ensembles. In addition to his compositional work he is known for his remarkable audiovisual art and experimental films which focus on inherent synesthetic connections of sound and visual perceptions. Besides creating interwoven aural and visual landscapes of music, nature sounds and video sequences one important aspect of his art is the illustration of the hidden poetry of nature phenomena and sciences. His experimental films won several international prizes and were screened at noted festivals like Asolo Film Festival, International Digital Arts Festival Videoformes, Girona Film Festival, Salento International Film Festival, Columbus International Film & Animation Festival, USA Film Festival, New Jersey Film Festival, Sidney International Film Festival, Fargo Film Festival, Sherman Oaks Film Festival, Canberra Short Film Festival, Film and Video Poetry Symposium Los Angeles, Syracuse Film Festival or ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival.
the human ceremony Ben Spatz This video critically reframes a recording made in 2017, at one of the many Polish synagogues that were destroyed during the european Holocaust. Here my colleagues and I came upon a strange altar comprising historical archives, jewish ritual objects, kitschy sculptures, and amateur paintings. The recording has been recolored, temporally distorted, and overlaid by a page from Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals — a book that reimagines overlapping Black and Native histories and futures in north america. The resulting video is structured as an extended form of talmud, putting jewish diasporic songwork in conversation with King’s visionary writing. Responding to King’s idea of ceremony, it calls for a radical decolonization of jewishness in apprenticeship to Black and Indigenous studies.
Ben Spatz (they/them) is a nonbinary scholar-practitioner with an innovative research practice at the intersections of artistic research and critical theories of embodiment and identity. They are Reader in Media and Performance at the University of Huddersfield, founding editor of the videographic Journal of Embodied Research, and a leader in the development of new audiovisual research methods.
Signs of our Times Lisa Birke A seemingly endless parade of empty platitudes and paradoxical life affirmations trouble entitlement and question who determines and owns the American Dream. Original footage serve as visuals for a slightly redacted found audio track from a 1960 film in the public domain called “Your Name Here”, produced by The Calvin Company as a spoof on the industrial film.
Lisa Birke is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is a result of the collision of video, performance art, and installation. She is interested in the stories that we re-cite and re-brand and how these inform our conception of the world and the tragi-comic perception of ourselves. Recently, Birke has been exploring immersive multi-media approaches using special effects, AR, and 360 video. Her award-winning video work has seen more than100 screenings and installations at film festivals, media centers and in galleries and museums internationally, including Vancouver International Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, Florida Film Festival, International Short Film Week Regensburg, TIME is Love, The New Museum of Networked Art and Remai Modern. Birke is Assistant Professor of Digital and Extended Media in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Saskatchewan.
The subterranean blackness of roots Charles-André Coderre Shot in Quebec (Canada), the film seeks to show the sensory experience of the invisible life of stones, plants, and the nature that surrounds us.
Charles-André Coderre lives and works in Montreal. He makes films and works on 16mm live projections for several film and music performance. His films are distributed by Light Cone (Paris), CFMDC (Toronto) and Vidéographe (Montréal). Since 2017, he co-organizes, with Michael Bardier (Heavy Trip), the OK LÀ! music & expanded cinema series in Verdun (Canada).
a landscape to be invented Josh Weissbach Other than the ocean, the rest of the planet was bathed in purple, which was due to the color of the vegetation. The change in the sun’s radiation had probably caused the plants to evolve as they adapted to the new light.
Josh Weissbach is an experimental filmmaker. He lives in a house next to an abandoned village with his wife, two daughters, and three cats. His films and videos have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, 25 FPS Festival, and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. He has won jury prizes at Videoex, ICDOCS, $100 Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, and Haverhill Experimental Film Festival.

 

 

 

 

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this Friday and Sat – VLX6 Programs 1&2

this Friday and Sat – VLX6 Programs 1&2

We're excited to kick off VLX6 this weekend! Check out Artist Q&A for and reserve your spot to join us Friday and Saturday!  Tickets are free with suggested donation of $10. Since its inception, VLX has served as a crucial platform for experimental artists,...

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VLX5 Artist Q&A with Telemach Wiesinger

VLX5 Artist Q&A with Telemach Wiesinger

VLX5 Artist Q&A with Telemach Wiesinger Telemach Wiesinger`s multiple award winning film works are presented in solo programs or performances on numerous festivals and locations. (selection, status: June 2022) Web: www.telemach-wiesinger.de Come see TURBULENCE...

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VLX 5 is kicking off Dec 9th in North Hollywood with Program #1 include two LiveScore sets from Threadbare Aristocrats & Pablo’s Perez. Programs 2-4 are will take place Jan-April 2024. Program 2 Los Angeles - Jan 20 Program 3 Chicago Feb 9 Program 4 New York...

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VLX5 schedule coming mid Nov….

This year, we're expanding our horizons beyond Los Angeles to include special events in both Chicago and New York. Our unwavering commitment to boundary-pushing art—ranging from avant-garde films to groundbreaking sound and immersive performances—has always fostered...

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VLX4 2023 TOURING SHOW

VLX4 2023 TOURING SHOW

VASTLAB EXPERIMENTAL VLX42023 TOURING PROGRAMCHICAGO 4/15 7-9:30 pm Musical GuestToby Kaufmann-Buhler - Sawing SoundToby Kaufmann-Buhler (based in Lafayette, Indiana) explores sensory perception, identity, history and memory through work in video, sound and space....

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