Take a joyride through comfortable suburbia—a landscape molded by seductive television and corporate America (and keep in mind: disaster is another logo for your consumption...). This is the age of the "culture jammed" consumer preened with Friends hair, Survivor courage, and CNN awareness. A generation emptying their wallets for the most important corporate product of all: lifestyle. The psychological road trip across a slightly battered America travels at One Mile per Minute.
This fictional memoir gives voice to the woman who haunted Andre Breton's 1927 Surrealist novel Nadja. Speaking from the sanitarium as World War II approaches, she recounts their nine-day love affair in the streets of Paris. Nadja is imaged following the game of exquisite corpse, with staged and framed gestures, excerpts from Surrealist films and archival newsreels as well as fragments from the walks of the filmmaker as flaneur.
Revelers at a masquerade ball enter an UnderWorld of guilt, vice, pain, chaos and redemption.
-- Mike Kuchar
These are the western lands of the mind. The western tracks in the land. The western landscapes of our time. The wasted times of our lives. Our communal Selfie. So is the rest of the Capitalocene civilization.
Employing the 'case studies' of Helen Keller, Genie the 'wild child' and Angel at My Table author Janet Frame, Goss's extraordinary video contemplates the struggle to be heard, to break free from the prison of the incommunicable self. '[A] tour of the house and grounds of language,' constructed with beguiling visual spaces and surfaces, startling edits, and insinuatingly layered sound design. —New York Video Festival (2000)
Playing off the notion of “interactivity”, Utopia poses itself as a video game plugged into the social consciousness of contemporary California. The viewer/player seemingly makes choices from the menu offering utopian or dystopian realities; however, the score is always the same: the winner loses, and vice-versa. Features Rachel Rosenthal as the host of a macabre interactive game that pushes the boundaries of performance and interactive media.
The close collaboration between internationally celebrated artist-filmmakers Ben Rivers (Two Years at Sea) and Ben Russell (Let Each One Go Where He May) has yielded an intriguing ethno-trance aesthetic that finds its stunning summa in their much anticipated co-directed feature A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. An immersive, at times mesmerizing experience, Spell follows a nameless protagonist — played with Bressonian restraint by musician Robert A.A.
Adapted from psychologist A.R. Luria’s research in the Islamic outskirts of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, How to Fix the World brings to life Luria's conversations with Central Asian farmers learning how to read and write under the unfamiliar principles of Socialism.
Colorful digital animations based on Max Penson's photographs of collective farmers play against a backdrop of landscape images shot in Uzbekistan in 2004.
Taste the delicious colors of "SWEET NOTHINGS" and observe the dice of desire being tossed on a gambler’s bed like yesterday’s candy. See tomorrow’s chocolate bunny melt into a brown puddle and feel a sticky, rainbow colored lolly-pop thats stuck to six feet of skin that secrets pent up passions... It’s all here for you to eat and is guaranteed to fatten your eyes!!
The sonic fabric of 2nd Person, [originally] a multi-channel video installation, is formed through an array of women’s voices orchestrated as parallel tracks in a musical composition. The speakers, all women I have intimately known at different points in my life -- my child, my mother, my best friends, students, mentors -- talk with me about aging, growing up, death, motherhood, love and loss.
"Conspiracy Of Lies speaks of the alienation of minorities, of consumer culture, urban isolation and the fine balance between mental order and chaos. The video begins with a voice (my own) recounting the story of the discovery of a series of diary entries and lists written by an anonymous author. When I found the texts, I assumed the author to be a white, gay man, like myself. Through the use of twelve narrators of different race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation, I attempted to destabilize my own subjectivity and challenge my pre-existing assumptions regarding difference.
This is the state of mind in the post-Covid quarantine. This is the state of the body into the pandemic vortex. This is our post-Covid eyes. Part of the Hauntology and Post-Covid series.
This feature-length video follows several inflicted characters and recounts the ways in which they find resolve. A series of entropic scenarios held together by an attraction to failure and its spectacle describe the characters' malfunction - their inability to fulfill personal desire. Compelled by the consequences and rewards of their attempts they question their own trajectory. Using elements of melodrama, performative monologue and traditional narrative structure Ponytail presents a unique society of characters that destroy the distinction between memory and invention.
A kind of warped Folktale, the video follows two women through a bizarre, broken landscape of collapsing signs and imploding meanings, on a pilgrimage to the Winter Gardens, Blackpool, to cure their green baby. In this fantastic, primitive-future world, the difference between technology and magic has become incomprehensible. Our characters become entangled in a cargo-cult of Margaret Thatcher, and buy a Maggie doll which spouts quotations to guide them when they pull its string.
The temperature in your eyes will rise when you contract ‘FEVER DREAMS’ and experience the haunted mayhem contained therein.
This title comprises The Stone Boy (2011), Nonsensical (2014), and Coffee, Tea, and Wizardry (2015) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
A young man recovering from emotional wounds, defiantly re-enters the outside world that welcomes his return with all its abundant miracles.
In i am wise enough to die things go (2023), Syms explores the idea of psychosis through an unnamed protagonist reciting a monologue. Responding to the work of iconic animator Chuck Jones, Syms transfers the form and narrative structure of an animated short into live-action. Working with the inherent challenges and restrictions brought about by this sort of translation, she delves into both the breaking up of images and the breakdown of the psyche.
"Mama mama mama...," a woman calls out again and again, over and over. Is it her child that she mimics, or is she calling for her own mother? A desperate video performance in the first person.
Pandora is one who communicates to the human world the powers of the night. These are glimpses of her visions.
Shot in Naples, Vienna, and New York, Some Chance Operations explores the notion of an archival form, in this instance film, as an unstable memory receptacle that can vanish. History and how it is made is meditated upon as one of many chance operations. The filmmaker Elvira Notari, who had a film production company in Naples from 1906 to 1930, plays a significant role as an impetus for Some Chance Operations. Despite the fact that she was a prolific filmmaker, producing over sixty feature films, only three remain intact.
Playing off the notion of “interactivity”, Utopia poses itself as a video game plugged into the social consciousness of contemporary California. The viewer/player seemingly makes choices from the menu offering utopian or dystopian realities; however, the score is always the same: the winner loses, and vice-versa. Features Rachel Rosenthal as the host of a macabre interactive game that pushes the boundaries of performance and interactive media.
What happens when memory collapses into an unknown landscape? Upside-down train tracks merge and blur the distinction between reality and imagination.
The video hovers tentatively between therapy, documentary, poetics and mystic traipsery and ends, like all good things, in surrender to song. There is a challenge presented (the challenge to engage earnestly with the piece as it requests) to fall into the breathing and pacing presented, and the challenge to view the video as a discrete piece of art at the same time. The piece relies heavily on the text, the disembodied Virgil through which the words become musical, instructive and (due to the absence of image) visual.
Polycephaly in D is a densely collaged exploration of the existential drift, collective trauma, and psychological free-fall of the contemporary moment. Leaping, falling, and meeting your new self in an earthquake; we lose one head so as to grow another.
The dog in dreamland? Or at least one of us is…
–– Ken Kobland
