http://sightunseenbaltimore.com Sight Unseen Sat, 20 Apr 2013 19:04:32 +0000 http://sightunseenbaltimore.com en http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/5-10-Expanded-Cinema-Videopolis http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/following/sightunseenbaltimore.com/5-10-Expanded-Cinema-Videopolis Sat, 20 Apr 2013 19:04:32 +0000 Sight Unseen 5399659 <img src="http://payload154.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5399659/notendo3.jpg" width="670" height="502" width_o="1280" height_o="960" src_o="http://payload154.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5399659/notendo3_o.jpg" data-mid="29141444" caption="Jeff Donaldson" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload154.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5399659/Picture 1.png" width="670" height="411" width_o="1261" height_o="775" src_o="http://payload154.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5399659/Picture 1_o.png" data-mid="29063123" caption="Thomas Dexter's xAction/Film" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload154.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5399659/Picture 3.png" width="630" height="415" width_o="630" height_o="415" src_o="http://payload154.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5399659/Picture 3_o.png" data-mid="29063172" caption="Greg St. Pierre" border="0" align="left"/> Friday, May 10th, 9:00pm Videopolis The Metro Gallery 1700 N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21201 FREE! Sight Unseen has teamed up with The Metro Gallery to present an evening of expanded cinema as part of the 2013 Videopolis festival featuring performances by Thomas Dexter, Jeff Donaldson, and Greg St. Pierre. These three artists reconfigure analogue technologies to create their improvised live performances, often subverting the original functions of their chosen media. Through tearing apart technology, destroying film stock, and re-purposing hardware, these artists defy the conventional modes of how to use their equipment. This practice results in the creation of unique, aesthetically contemporary visuals, allowing the artists to refute the notion that their technologies are becoming obsolete while offering a vision for the media’s future. BIOS & PERFORMANCE NOTES THOMAS DEXTER Thomas Dexter is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. In work spanning film performance, single channel video, sound, and installation, Dexter explores compositional systems which upend normative configurations of image and sound, signal and noise, illusion and material. Through drawing attention to unfamiliar overlaps, folds and breaks in sensory experience, Dexter's work attempts to explore the perceptual structures that frame the commonplace. Dexter's solo and collaborative projects have been featured at Microscope Gallery, Experimental Intermedia, PS1, Roulette, The New York Museum of Art and Design, Sight and Sound Festival, Issue Project Room, the Mononoaware Festival, The Lesley Heller Workspace, Festival of Ideas for the New City, The Invisible Dog, Splatterpool, and ESP TV. SQUARE/GETS/THE/CIRCLE An expanded cinema performance involving light-to-sound synthesis, a prepared projection surface, and the destruction of the film. Performance at Microscope Gallery 2012 from Thomas Dexter on Vimeo. JEFF DONALDSON a.k.a. noteNdo Jeff Donaldson is an audio/visual artist who has been working with feedback systems since the late 1980s. At the beginning of the new millennium, Donaldson began applying the concept of feedback to video game systems, transforming them into generative audio/visual instruments. Since publishing his video work online, Donaldson has exhibited internationally as well as helped to pioneer the fields of video bending and glitch aesthetics. He is currently based in New York. INFINITE REGRESS Infinite Regress - A real-time audio/visual improvisation generated with a Panasonic video mixer. For Infinite Regress, the video output signal is split into two signals: one signal is sent to an audio processing device and the other is sent back into the video input of the Panasonic creating a feedback loop. Audio and video are therefore perceived as an abstract continuum which is guided live. What one sees is what one hears and what one hears is what one sees. ❐ from Jeff Donaldson on Vimeo. GREG ST. PIERRE Greg St. Pierre is a video artist and live visual performance artist based out of Baltimore, MD. He works with custom systems of his own design, analogue video equipment, and analogue video synthesis modules to create immersive environments, interactive installations, and video performances in collaboration with the scores of many artists. Greg has collaborated with many different musical acts including Dan Deacon and Animal Collective and has performed with them in many different venues and festivals internationally. GSP’s performance at Videopolis will involve his newest analogue video synthesizer and a composed experimental score. Graffiti Weave from Greg St. Pierre on Vimeo. ABOUT VIDEOPOLIS In an effort to promote explorations into the tangible boundaries of the moving image the Metro Gallery presents Videopolis, a video installation exhibition with limited selected performances. Held across the street from the Charles Theater during the Maryland Film Festival, Videopolis features work that doesn’t make more traditional festival formats. Videopolis hopes to juxtapose various forms of film and video, along with other mediums that comment upon or investigate the moving image, together in a relaxed environment for the enjoyment of artists, festival-goers and random passers-by. With people on all sides of the lens exploring how different disciplines may work together, the results are expected to be innovative and entertaining. This year May 9th – 11th, 2013, the Videopolis video installation exhibition will open with performances in the evenings, and run through the rest of the month of May. Friday, May 10th, 9:00pm Videopolis The Metro Gallery 1700 N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21201 FREE! Sight Unseen has teamed up with The Metro Gallery to present... http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/Contemporary-Shorts-the-BMA http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/following/sightunseenbaltimore.com/Contemporary-Shorts-the-BMA Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:20:50 +0000 Sight Unseen 5286184 <img src="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/the-hunch-that-caused-thewinning-streak-and-fought-the-doldrums-stephanie-barber.jpg" width="670" height="446" width_o="720" height_o="480" src_o="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/the-hunch-that-caused-thewinning-streak-and-fought-the-doldrums-stephanie-barber_o.jpg" data-mid="28434697" caption=" The Hunch That Caused the Winning Streak and Fought the Doldrums Mightily by Stephanie Barber" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/MarkBrown.png" width="670" height="375" width_o="1679" height_o="942" src_o="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/MarkBrown_o.png" data-mid="28434783" caption=" Growing/Innit by Mark Brown" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/gatten.JPG" width="670" height="450" width_o="780" height_o="524" src_o="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/gatten_o.JPG" data-mid="28434798" caption=" How to Conduct a Love Affair by David Gatten" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/Jordan_SolarII5.jpg" width="650" height="472" width_o="650" height_o="472" src_o="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/Jordan_SolarII5_o.jpg" data-mid="28714550" caption=" Solar Sight II by Lawrence Jordan" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/laida2.jpeg" width="670" height="485" width_o="2048" height_o="1485" src_o="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/laida2_o.jpeg" data-mid="28434857" caption=" A Lax Riddle Unit by Laida Lertxundi" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/pfeiffer.jpeg" width="670" height="400" width_o="2048" height_o="1224" src_o="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/pfeiffer_o.jpeg" data-mid="28434892" caption=" Dark Windows by Miranda Pfieffer" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/reeve.jpg" width="670" height="474" width_o="1280" height_o="907" src_o="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/reeve_o.jpg" data-mid="28434901" caption=" Landfill 16 by Jennifer Reeves" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/yasinsky.jpeg" width="670" height="502" width_o="1772" height_o="1329" src_o="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/yasinsky_o.jpeg" data-mid="28434906" caption=" Audition by Karen Yasinsky" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/eyecandy.jpg" width="670" height="446" width_o="2048" height_o="1365" src_o="http://payload149.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5286184/eyecandy_o.jpg" data-mid="28434920" caption=" Eyecandy by Tasman Richardson" border="0" align="left"/> Saturday, April 20th, 2-4pm The Baltimore Museum of Art 10 Art Museum Drive. Baltimore, MD 21218 FREE ADMISSION! Sight Unseen presents a group program of short films and videos chosen in response to the newly reopened Contemporary Art wing at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Featuring both local and international artists, the screening will be followed by a gallery talk relating pieces from the contemporary collection to the works shown. FILMS & VIDEOS: The Hunch that Caused the Winning Streak and Fought the Doldrums Mightily by Stephanie Barber, 2010, DV, color, sound, 2m* “The interior was delusional like any visual psyche. The couches and plants, rugs and paintings were all in cahoots and up in arms over the cahootery. The explorers were under-qualified and cowardly. These interiors—the photos hung on the walls, the furniture and rugs, houseplants and televisions—are collaged from photos of various domestic items from Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian homes brought together to suggest one continuous home. I'm interested in the tension between the visible and the invisible cultural markers represented here. The British parade matted into the televisions, the Japanese musician and Ethiopian music exaggerate this collision.” -- Stephanie Barber Bio: http://www.stephaniebarber.com/ Journey to a Star by Tom Borax, 2012, DV, color, sound, 6m* Borax’s piece uses an old edited sequence from Busby Berkely’s “Gang’s All Here” finale w/sound rework. All sounds were made on a modular synthesizer. “Respect to Busby on a visionary piece of art. Pop gone surreal, eventually off into yogic bliss, landing in purgatory with singing human head taxidermy.” - Tom Borax Bio: Tom Borax is a Baltimore-based multi-media artist and multi-instrumental musician. His work deals with dissonant combinations of spectra, and clangorous mergers of sensory data. After 15 years of activity in musical improvisation, his current work, musical and otherwise, incorporates the ideas of language and gesture as things which are evocative and logical in one half, and animalistic and intuitive in the other. He helped found the High Zero Festival of Experimental Music and has performed and shown his work throughout North America and Europe. Growing/Innit by Mark Brown, 2008, digital video, color, sound, 7m* What happens when you slow down the fastest man in the world? Using a corrupted video stream of Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt's record shattering 2008 Summer Olympics victory, the video explores the relationship between speed, distance, media viewing technology, software malfunctions, and data corruption. The original footage was shot in a stadium in China, streamed to an North American television network where it was captured and uploaded to a Swedish file sharing website and then downloaded again in Baltimore where it was manipulated, slowed down, and synched to an alternate soundtrack provided by the Brooklyn-based band Growing. This video toured with the 2008 Wham City Round Robin Tour and was featured on Rhizome.org and the Village Voice blog. Bio: http://www.markcharlesbrown.com/ How to Conduct a Love Affair by David Gatten, 2007, 16mm, b/w, silent, 8m “This is an extremely lovely film… The film begins with a text composed of plaintive instructions to a would-be lover; we soon discover, rather surprisingly, that the text is taken from an early conduct book. Throughout the film, Gatten alters the text through deletions and additions, eventually generating what appears to be direct statements in his own voice, patterned after and/or taking off from the conduct book's tone. What one finds here is a rather heartbreaking tension -- our innermost feelings are, in the end, not that different from those of other people and, as such, subject to schematic treatment. Of course, an actual love affair exceeds these strictures, but not entirely, perhaps the way a river laps against its banks. Against these conceptual matters, Gatten provides exquisite images, the dominant one being of a heavy, wrinkled piece of canvas, hanging like a curtain but appearing to be flat against the wall. Gatten lights and frames the material to highlight shadow and texture, and the result is rather like a Warhol film-portrait of a Richard Tuttle painting. In counterpoint to this image, we see dusty, antiquarian close-ups of window panes, encrusted bottlenecks, and eventually superimpositions, ghostings, and painterly, near-monochrome intrusions of color. Some of these brief passages call those of Nathaniel Dorsky to mind, but Gatten's approach is more synthetic and willing to transform the image for mood and effect. In the end, the overall impression of Love Affair is one of constant surprise, a framework in which there is not only continually renewed promise in that which we know well, but the likelihood of something utterly unexpected just in the offing. Not bad guidelines for courtship if you ask me.” – Michael Sicinski, Senses of Cinema Bio: http://davidgattenfilm.com/ Solar Sight II by Lawrence Jordan, 2012, 16mm, color, sound, 10m "Many of the approaches to the cut-out material are the same as in part I, however II is a much different film. It is more meditative. It has a somewhat slower pace. I tried to let the cut-outs float more gracefully. Again, John Davis' music forms an integral part of the meditation. I have used that word 'meditation' because that is how some very astute friends of mine described it to me on first viewing. The approach is partly planned, partly improvised under the camera. There has been little or no editing outside the camera for many years in my animation. All effects are done in camera." - LJ "What is it about? Wrong question. It's about you watching, and falling into the dream." --Michael Atkinson--'Lawrence Jordan's Road to Utopia', Fandor Jury's Choice $100 Film Festival 2013 Juror's Award Ann Arbor Film Festival 2013 Bio: http://lawrencecjordan.com/ Can't Remember, Can't Forget by William Knipscher, 2012, DV, color, silent, 3m* "This video piece consists of small moments captured with a cell phone camera over the course of a year. The individual videos are not meant to document the happenings of a year but rather the moments in between, bookends of bigger memories. Deliberately degraded through repeated projections and recordings, the video has faded much as those specific memories fade a little each time they are recalled." - WK Bio: http://www.williamknipscher.com/ A Lax Riddle Unit by Laida Lertxundi, 2011, 16mm, color, sound, 6m “Laida Lertxundi’s A Lax Riddle Unit (2011) also shows a series of gentle transformations. Each of the film’s turns reveals a surprise: a woman suddenly appearing in bed, and, from behind an album cover, her shy smile. With the film’s elements of Los Angeles landscape, houseplants, and James Carr’s plaintive “Love Attack,” continually rearranged like the letters of the title, which is an anagram for Lertxundi’s own name, there is the sense of kaleidoscopic rotation, breathtaking views made with the slightest of movements: changing light, cuts, and slowly revolving camera pans.” – Genevieve Yue, reverseshot.com Bio: http://www.laidaletxundi.com/ Andy at Work by Jonas Mekas, 2006, 16mm-to-DV, color, sound, 5m Andy Warhol at the Village Gate, June 7, 1966. Andy videotaping John Kennedy Jr. and Anthony Radziwill at Andy's estate, 1971, in Montauk, Long Island. Andy at work in his studio, 1976, Union Square, New York. Lee Radziwill, Peter Beard, Gerard Malanga, Peter Orlovsky, Ed Sanders, and Ronna Page are also pictured. Bio: http://jonasmekasfilms.com/ lions and tigers and bears by Rebecca Meyers, 2006, 16mm, color, sound, 12m A bustling metropolis towering skyscrapers and urban architecture reveal traces of the wild. Remnants of an untamed world are reincorporated into the built environment as stone lions guard homes and museums, jaguars lend power and speed to business, and decorative Halloween owls try to navigate the city skies. Meanwhile, squirrels traverse jungles of power lines, geese hold court in parks, and cats, dogs, and fish look out at the wilderness in watchful silence. Bio: Rebecca Meyers (b. 1976, New York City) is a filmmaker and programmer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her films have screened internationally at festivals and in curated exhibitions such as Media City, Windsor, ON, Canada, and Detroit, MI; Images Festival, Toronto, Canada; New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde, New York, NY; Festival Les Inattendus, Lyon, France; the London International Film Festival, London, England; “Bringing to Light” at the San Francisco Cinematheque, San Francisco, CA; and “White Shadows: Stories and Polar Visions” at the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy. For three years she served as Co-Programmer of Chicago’s Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival and has curated film programs for the Chicago Underground Film Festival, the Massachusetts College of Art Film Society, Brooklyn’s Light Industry and the Harvard Film Archive, where she acted as Archive Coordinator. She is currently Director of Film Programs at ArtsEmerson at Emerson College and Associate Director of Studio7Arts in Cambridge. Rebecca holds an MFA from the University of Iowa in Film/Video Production. Dark Windows by Miranda Pfeiffer, 2011, HD, b/w, sound, 5m* “Drawn on tracing paper in ink and graphite, Black Windows is a hand crafted portrait of a city with few occupants. Based on the city of Baltimore, the film begins with a small roach roaming between cracked, abandoned architecture. While insects and rodents pass freely from interior to exterior, a young couple stares from their window into the shadows of their neighborhood. The perspective spirals outward, where above, a police-helicopter watches over the city.” – Miranda Pfeiffer Bio: http://www.mirandapfeiffer.com/ The Biscuit Song by Luther Price, 2008, 16mm, color, sound, 5m The “Biscotts/Biscuits” series is made up entirely of reassembled footage from 13 aged, identical prints of a documentary from the 1960s or 1970s about a nursing home for poor African Americans in the rural South. Price has obsessively reworked the prints, which he found in a dumpster, into a series of nine films that empathetically work through repetitions of the original documentary, resulting in a devastatingly emotional and confrontational experience. Bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Price Landfill 16 by Jennifer Reeves, 2011, 16mm, color, sound, 9m “Exhumed film from my very own landfill in Elkhart, Indiana constitute the canvas of my hand-painted LANDFILL 16. After finishing my double-projection WHEN IT WAS BLUE I was horrified by the bulk of outtakes that would normally go to a landfill. So I temporarily buried then painted the film to transform it. Within this colorful, pulsating, abstract “moving painting” I attempt to express my dread of man-made waste that endangers land and wildlife. This “recycling” is a meditation on the demise of the beautiful 16mm medium and nature’s losing battle to decompose relics of our abandoned technologies. For the soundtrack, I combined recognizable sounds, from bulldozers to nature audio, with more abstracted textural and rhythmic sounds I created using audio from consumer-goods-creating factories, old 16mm equipment, the cries of a dying bird stuck in my wall, and other oddities.” – Jennifer Reeves Bio: http://www.jenniferreevesfilm.com/ Eyecandy by Tasman Richardson, 2005, digital video, color, sound, 4m Breakcore edits of Village of the Damned, Night Gallery, Halloween 3, Devil's Rain, Omega Man, and the Rockwell video "Somebody's Watchin' Me." Richardson says, “If you don't see the correlation, you must be blind.” Commissioned for the FAMEFAME event “Flight 666” at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in 2005. Bio: http://www.tasmanrichardson.com/ Audition by Karen Yasinsky, 2012, HD, color/b&w, sound, 4m* “The starting point for Audition was the movement of the woman across the stage in the red light. I rotoscoped the scene and each frame is hand drawn pixels. Once I realized that the sound attached to the actual scene was the impetus for the remembered image, the rest of the video revealed itself.” – Karen Yasinsky Bio: http://www.karenyasinsky.com/ Films with *s next to them indicate Baltimore-based artists. Upcoming Programming: May 10th - Sight Unseen @ Videopolis Saturday, April 20th, 2-4pm The Baltimore Museum of Art 10 Art Museum Drive. Baltimore, MD 21218 FREE ADMISSION! Sight Unseen presents a group program of short... http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/Ben-Russell-s-TRYPPS-1-7 http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/following/sightunseenbaltimore.com/Ben-Russell-s-TRYPPS-1-7 Fri, 22 Feb 2013 12:51:52 +0000 Sight Unseen 5041575 <img src="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/001487_400_300.jpg" width="400" height="300" width_o="400" height_o="300" src_o="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/001487_400_300_o.jpg" data-mid="27421122" caption=" Black and White Trypps Number One" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/001488_400_300.jpg" width="400" height="300" width_o="400" height_o="300" src_o="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/001488_400_300_o.jpg" data-mid="27421366" caption=" Black and White Trypps Number Two" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/trypps3.jpg" width="670" height="446" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/trypps3_o.jpg" data-mid="27020469" caption=" Black and White Trypps Number 3" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/001490_400_300.jpg" width="400" height="300" width_o="400" height_o="300" src_o="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/001490_400_300_o.jpg" data-mid="27421405" caption=" Black and White Trypps #4" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/ben-russell-trypps5-still.png" width="638" height="478" width_o="638" height_o="478" src_o="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/ben-russell-trypps5-still_o.png" data-mid="27421563" caption=" Trypps #5 (Dubai)" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/trypps6.jpg" width="500" height="323" width_o="500" height_o="323" src_o="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/trypps6_o.jpg" data-mid="27020483" caption=" Trypps #6 (Malobi) " border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/trypps7.jpg" width="670" height="376" width_o="1500" height_o="844" src_o="http://payload137.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/5041575/trypps7_o.jpg" data-mid="27020472" caption=" Trypps #7 (Badlands)" border="0" align="left"/> Sunday, March 24th Doors @ 7:30pm, films @ 8pm The Windup Space 12 W. North Ave. Baltimore, MD 21201 $5 General Admission *All films shown in 16mm except Trypps #7 (Badlands). Using a fabricated Old English word as its guiding principle, this ongoing series of (mostly) 16mm films is conceptually organized around the possible meanings that its title elicits – physical voyages, psychedelic journeys, and a phenomenological experience of the world. Begun in 2005 in a somewhat vain attempt to hold cinema up as a mirror to the live and fully embodied reception of the crazy noise music scene in Providence, Rhode Island, the TRYPPS films quickly expanded their formal and critical language to include the various poles of action painting, avant-garde cinema, portraiture, stand-up comedy, global capitalism, and trance-dance a lá Jean Rouch. While the form of these works varies radically from one to the next, when taken as a whole they can be seen to enunciate a broader project of “psychedelic ethnography” – a practice whose aim is a knowledge of the Self/self, a movement towards understanding in which the trip is both the means and the end. – Ben Russell Black and White Trypps Number One (2005), 6:30 min, 16mm “A night sky fills with light shimmers and flecks, surface markings, heavenly bodies. It’s an ocean, a well, a screen, a mirror, a portal. Blackness/void cluttered by growing ephemera. Dark reaches of outer and inner space gradually sifts through shards of granite and diamonds. The mind races as the material becomes greater and more frenetic, reaching a nearly audibly grinding pitch of excitement, flurry, and instantaneous infinity that ebbs at first and then maintains. Flashes of color emerge or are imagined. Chaotic flickering of dancing peasant girls and violently twisting astronaut helmets. Layers of sea slime over undulating life forms. Bonfires and celebration. Explosions, construction. Holocausts. Primordial ooze, modern civilization. Ages and seconds. Floating heads circle kaleidoscopic bursts of shiny beads. Everything everywhere twists, forces through, transforms into, overlaps everything else. Seashells, snow, jewels, static, planets, mitochondria, trash, leaves. Rings, flowers, stars, hair, ghosts, comets, cartoons, demons. Icebubblesinstrumentscatsmarblestwigsfirefliwsspinwheelsinsectscraters.Buzzing.Reeling…..flfkkkkk##################################################################################################### #Overkill. Birth/ Death. Moment by moment, symmetrical—organized like geometry, like Muslim rugs, like math.” – JT Rogstad, The International Exposition (TIE) Black and White Trypps Number Two (2006), 9 min, 16mm “Ben Russell continues his initial impulse for the series, the exploration of “naturally-derived psychedelia”, with this cadenced phantasmagoria of negative imagery and negative space. The tendrils of sharp white trees become osseous arteries against the black void of the sky. The spiraling spine of a massive tree collides against a spanning pan of a branch twined into two through a mirroring effect. Representation morphs into abstraction as the film becomes a study in density and fearful symmetry in the forest of sight. By film’s end, the arboreal is left far behind as the film strip becomes an engulfing, vertiginous maw.” -Chris Stults, Viennale 2009 Black and White Trypps Number Three (2007), 12 min, 16mm “Trypps Number Three transports the documented transcendence of Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres Fous from the Hauka movement to a Lightning Bolt concert where overlapping bodies, swaying to noise rock, are framed in light beamed from the stage – we return to the models of Caravaggio or Garrel – bodies effectively transformed into islands of individual gestures and expressions via a spotlight and lingering camera, before the film cryptically bends upon itself: henceforth the image (through slow-motion effect) and sound (through Joseph Grimm’s spacey drones) conspire to directly invoke the spectator into the raptures.” – Mubarak Ali, Supposed Aura Black and White Trypps Number Four (2008), 11 min, 16mm “Jesus Christ, look at the white people, rushing back. White people don’t care, Jack…” – Richard Pryor Using a 35mm strip of motion picture slug featuring the recently deceased American comedian Richard Pryor, this extended Rorschach assault on the eyes moves out of a flickering chaos created by incompatible film gauges into a punchline involving historically incompatible racial stereotypes. – BR Trypps #5 (Dubai) (2008), 3 min, 16mm “A radically restricted camera was similarly fixed on half of a neon sign in Ben Russell’s Trypps #5 (Dubai) (2008), which displayed the letters “APP” and only half of a “Y” in an erratic, discontinuous pulse. If the mention of Dubai conjures a cosmopolitan skyline, Russell renounces the possibility of seeing even a single street. As Mark McElhatten writes in the program notes, “Happiness is always, incomplete,” and here, in a critique that Debord may have particularly appreciated, it’s a brightly colored sign for a shop that promises everything but sells nothing.” – Genevie Yu, Reverse Shot Trypps #6 (Malobi) (2009), 12 min, 16mm From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It’s Halloween at the Equator, Andrei Tarkovsky for the jungle set. – BR Trypps #7 (Badlands) (2010), 10 min, Super 16mm “Trypps #7 (Badlands) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman’s LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell’s unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence.” – Michael Green, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Running time: 76m BIO Ben Russell is a media artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the moving image. He has had solo screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, threewalls, and the Museum of Modern Art. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2010 FIPRESCI award recipient, Ben began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, was co-director of the artist-run space Ben Russell in Chicago, Illinois, and performs in a double-drum trio called Beast. He currently resides in Paris, France. Upcoming Programming: 4/20 - A group screening/gallery talk in reaction to the newly renovated Contemporary Wing @ The Baltimore Museum of Art Sunday, March 24th Doors @ 7:30pm, films @ 8pm The Windup Space 12 W. North Ave. Baltimore, MD 21201 $5 General Admission *All films shown in 16mm except Trypps... http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/Bruce-McClure-s-The-Walls-are-Glitter-Gates-of-Elfinbone http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/following/sightunseenbaltimore.com/Bruce-McClure-s-The-Walls-are-Glitter-Gates-of-Elfinbone Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:06:08 +0000 Sight Unseen 4882709 <img src="http://payload129.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4882709/CrossSmaller.JPG" width="670" height="502" width_o="700" height_o="525" src_o="http://payload129.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4882709/CrossSmaller_o.JPG" data-mid="26102778" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload129.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4882709/Horizontalsmaller.JPG" width="670" height="502" width_o="700" height_o="525" src_o="http://payload129.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4882709/Horizontalsmaller_o.JPG" data-mid="26102974" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload129.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4882709/VerticalSmaller.JPG" width="670" height="502" width_o="700" height_o="525" src_o="http://payload129.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4882709/VerticalSmaller_o.JPG" data-mid="26102978" border="0" align="left"/> The Walls are Glitter Gates of Elfinbone A projection performance by Bruce McClure Friday, 2/22 Performance @ 9pm $5 Metro Gallery 1700 N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21201 "Spotlights working wall cloths and marches coursing while straining at the leash. Two pieces shifting scenes on wall flats fly and spill playing rake and bridges. Haying after queue and no body is present here which was not there before. Searchers for tabernacles and the celluloid art! Fair men and foul suggestion. There is a lot of licit pleasure bangslanging your way. Punctual form with ungainly musicianlessness so painted in sculpting selfsound like a waft to the wingweary circling and listening as hard as they could. Then you were there to explain to us the meaning of rate, gate going and chance drifting through the system suggesting authentication. A pace of two thinks at a time. I fear lest we have lost ours respecting the wildly parts. Lights out now (bouf!) tight and sleep on it." - Bruce McClure Bruce McClure’s projection performances recognize the 16mm film projector as a chimerical beauty consisting of a mechanical monster and mental fabrication. Leaning into the arc of an audience the projector is rescued from a scrap heap of technological obscurity and enters a formal suite of reception. Threaded with loops, film becomes the server, a material substrate, a sprocketed analogue attending to the projector’s engagement with the neural images that hang between the gaps of the synod. His projection performances transfix film in the headlights, flatten it and leave it behind as road kill. McClure abandons the camera on the other side of the picture plane valorizing the latent hush of a theater of cooperation darkened with expectancy creating a vantage point for aimless observation and drift of internal gyroscopes. BIO: Bruce McClure was licensed to practice Architecture in 1992 and has worked in small architectural offices for 23 years. In the early 1990’s he used stroboscopic light as his entree into cinematic posturing. He eventually adopted the film projector as a tool to organize light and sound into “projector performances.” He has been invited to show his work at many festivals, colleges and museums. Upcoming Programming: March 24th: Ben Russell's Trypps series @ The WindUp Space April 20th: A group screening in dialogue with the BMA's reopened contemporary wing @ The Baltimore Museum of Art The Walls are Glitter Gates of Elfinbone A projection performance by Bruce McClure Friday, 2/22 Performance @ 9pm $5 Metro Gallery 1700 N. Charles St. Baltimore,... http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/Ten-Ways-of-Doing-Time http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/following/sightunseenbaltimore.com/Ten-Ways-of-Doing-Time Wed, 12 Dec 2012 14:12:01 +0000 Sight Unseen 4573868 <img src="http://payload113.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4573868/SS_10.14.12_ten-ways-of-doing-time.jpg" width="520" height="291" width_o="520" height_o="291" src_o="http://payload113.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4573868/SS_10.14.12_ten-ways-of-doing-time_o.jpg" data-mid="24312159" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload113.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4573868/tenguard.jpg" width="504" height="338" width_o="504" height_o="338" src_o="http://payload113.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4573868/tenguard_o.jpg" data-mid="24312162" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload113.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4573868/tenscience.jpg" width="504" height="336" width_o="504" height_o="336" src_o="http://payload113.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4573868/tenscience_o.jpg" data-mid="24312164" border="0" align="left"/> Wednesday, 1/30 Doors @ 6:30pm, Film @7pm MICA Graduate Studio Center Auditorium 131 W. North Ave Room 115A Baltimore, MD 21201 FREE Both artists will be in attendance for a Q&A following the film. Co-sponsored by MICA's Undergraduate Department of Video & Film Arts and the Graduate Department of Photographic & Electronic Media In James Fotopoulos and Laura Parnes’ “Ten Ways of Doing Time” (2012), prison drama and science fiction motifs are fused to create an experimental narrative where scientists research on prisoners attempting to create psychotic warriors for the army. This sprawling chapter based project, both irreverent and outrageous, begins with a formally based structure and then explodes into controlled states of anarchy. It stars Jim Fletcher of the New York City Players and winner of the 2012 Obie for sustained excellence in theater as well as Stephanie Vella. Original soundtrack by Marcia Bassett. Music by Skullflower, Zaimph and hototogisu. Central to the experiment is a box resembling a cell for solitary confinement. To quote the film’s central scientist: “The box becomes a place of focused consciousness. A portal into our communal negative energy. Together we can create the perfect warrior. One without boundaries that catapults our democratic society forward without being encumbered by its principals.” As the experiment spins out of control the prisoner becomes a portal embodying numerous criminal personalities. Prison life unfolds through a series of vignettes where the prisoners are forced to submit to the rules of life in captivity. Often these rules are immediately contradicted. Central characters such as the prisoner, guard, female scientist and witness are performed by actors playing multiple roles. This device is used in both Fotopoulos and Parnes’ past work and is employed to emphasize the iconic nature of the characters while exploring issues of gender and authorship. The highly stylized dialog shifts back and forth from prison genre influenced slang to that of a psychotic romance novel. Deploying visual and verbal quotations ranging from The Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), Titicut Follies (1967), Rousseau, Ghostbusters (1984) and soft-core porn - Ten Ways of Doing Time presents a highly charged world of psychosexual drama and sublimated violence. Total Running Time: 1h53m TRAILER: Ten Ways of Doing Time Trailer from Laura Parnes on Vimeo. Bios: JAMES FOTOPOULOS The film and video work of James Fotopoulos (b.1976) has been shown internationally at many festivals and sites including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Sundance Film Festival, the Walker Art Center, and the Andy Warhol Museum, among many others. In 1998 Fotopoulos founded Fantasma, Inc. for the production of his second feature film Migrating Forms (1999). In 2002 he had a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives and was exhibited in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In 2005 he received a Creative Capital Grant for his in-progress interdisciplinary epic on the life of Richard Nixon, published the first of many books of drawings The Lime Book, and completed an installation for the 2005 Contour Biennial for Video Art. In 2006 with Grove Press founder Barney Rosset he created an experimental video biography on Rosset and an adaptation of an unpublished screenplay by Eugène Ionesco, of which the latter premiered at the New York Museum of Modern Art. In 2008 he directed two videos based on screenplays by artist Raymond Pettibon, the first of which is premiering in 2012 along with recent videos Chimera, Thick Comb and Alice in Wonderland at Anthology in tandem with his first solo exhibition of drawings at the Microscope Gallery. His recent collaboration with artist Laura Parnes Ten Ways of Doing Time premiered at MoMA PS1. His newest feature film Dignity is a science fiction narrative starring the Zellner Brothers and soundtrack by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. For more information, visit: http://jamesfotopoulos.com/ LAURA PARNES Laura Parnes has screened and exhibited her work widely in the US and internationally, including Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece., LOOP Festival, Barcelona, Spain; Light Industry, Brooklyn, NY; Kusthalle Winterhur, Switzerland; Overgaden- Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; iMOCA, Indianapolis, IN; Cinematexas, Austin, TX; Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania; Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Whitney Museum of American Art (1997 Whitney Biennial), NY; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand; PSI Contemporary Art Center MoMA, NY; Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, FL; and Brooklyn Museum, NY. Her solo exhibitions include; LA Art, LA, CA; Alma Enterprises, London; Locust Projects, Miami; Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, LA; Participant Inc, NY; and Deitch Projects, NY. She has had solo screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; MoMA PS1, LIC; The Kitchen, NYC;CATE 10 Year Anniversary, Presented by the School of Art Institute of Chicago and Video Data Bank, Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago Ill; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, CA; and Vtape, Toronto. She was presented by Participant Inc. in a two-person exhibition at No Soul for Sale at X Initiative, NYC, NY. For more information, please visit: http://www.lauraparnes.com Upcoming Programming: February 22: Bruce McClure performance @ Metro Gallery March: Ben Russell's Trypps series April: A group screening at the Baltimore Museum of Art responding to the newly reopened contemporary art wing Wednesday, 1/30 Doors @ 6:30pm, Film @7pm MICA Graduate Studio Center Auditorium 131 W. North Ave Room 115A Baltimore, MD 21201 FREE Both artists will be in... http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/Richard-Garet-s-PERCEPTUAL http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/following/sightunseenbaltimore.com/Richard-Garet-s-PERCEPTUAL Thu, 15 Nov 2012 23:38:07 +0000 Sight Unseen 4342368 <img src="http://payload102.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4342368/Richard_Garet_Perceptual9BIG.jpg" width="670" height="446" width_o="720" height_o="480" src_o="http://payload102.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4342368/Richard_Garet_Perceptual9BIG_o.jpg" data-mid="22955293" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload102.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4342368/DSC_0730.JPG" width="432" height="288" width_o="432" height_o="288" src_o="http://payload102.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4342368/DSC_0730_o.JPG" data-mid="22956037" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload102.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4342368/Picture 1.png" width="558" height="245" width_o="558" height_o="245" src_o="http://payload102.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4342368/Picture 1_o.png" data-mid="22956179" border="0" align="left"/> Sunday, December 9th Doors @8:30pm Performance @9pm $5-10 sliding scale 5th Dimension H & H Building 405 W. Franklin St. Baltimore, MD 21201 Sight Unseen is pleased to present Perceptual, a new live cinema work by Richard Garet with the artist in attendance. Perceptual is an audiovisual performance piece that proposes immersive reception to moving image and sound and examines the processes of luminosity, color, movement, and light phenomena. The sound will be carefully constructed and utilized to effect, intervene, disrupt, and modify further the visual parameters of the projected images. The techniques employed to make the imagery incorporate real-time computer processing and visual-constructs established from the permutations and the brilliancy generated by the media itself and by systematically breaking apart and over-layering algorithmically the outcome in order to create the viewing experience. Garet's sonic construction for this project will hover from material explorations, recordings of studio experiments, and digital processing while also articulating subtle sonic movements that modulate and fluctuate over time. Richard Garet interweaves various media including moving image, sound, multimedia performance, and photography. In work ranging from modified environments to site specific installations to audiovisual screening works, Garet constructs intimate spaces and immersive situations that draw attention to the processes of perception and cognition, and which activate sensorial, physical, psychological phenomena that reflect on the nature and experience of time. Garet's pieces, whether conceptual in origin or stemming from his investigation of complex systems and algorithmic translations, are informed by the background noise established by mass media culture and the collective arena that surrounds him. Garet’s reductive process seeks to invert the normative function of this background noise, drawing it up from subliminal status to an active presence. He finds further inspiration from material interactions that incorporate problems of context, technology, defunctionalization, commodity, and environment. For more on Richard Garet please visit: http://richardgaret.com/ Invite your friends: http://www.facebook.com/#!/events/130201933799390/ Sunday, December 9th Doors @8:30pm Performance @9pm $5-10 sliding scale 5th Dimension H & H Building 405 W. Franklin St. Baltimore, MD 21201 Sight Unseen is... http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/Tom-Jarmusch-s-Sometimes-City http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/following/sightunseenbaltimore.com/Tom-Jarmusch-s-Sometimes-City Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:25:26 +0000 Sight Unseen 4287360 <img src="http://payload99.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4287360/Sometimes City.png" width="670" height="373" width_o="762" height_o="425" src_o="http://payload99.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4287360/Sometimes City_o.png" data-mid="22625223" caption=" Sometimes City" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload99.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4287360/Sometimes_City_1.jpg" width="360" height="265" width_o="360" height_o="265" src_o="http://payload99.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4287360/Sometimes_City_1_o.jpg" data-mid="22625226" caption=" Sometimes City" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload99.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4287360/Alfredo_1.jpg" width="640" height="480" width_o="640" height_o="480" src_o="http://payload99.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4287360/Alfredo_1_o.jpg" data-mid="22625235" caption=" Alfredo" border="0" align="left"/> Thursday, 11/15 Doors @ 7:30pm Film @ 8:00pm $10 General Admission $5 Creative Alliance Members/Students w/ ID Pre-sale tickets available online here. The Creative Alliance 3134 Eastern Ave. Baltimore, MD 21224 Sometimes City is Tom Jarmusch’s moving portrait of Cleveland, a city which like many of its post-industrial counterparts is currently attempting to reconstruct a semblance of community while simultaneously confronting its own survival. Jarmusch offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of Clevelanders and depicts the conflicted landscape with an extremely candid eye. Once called Baltimore’s sister city, the parallels between Cleveland and Charm City are unsettling. Jarmusch traces the atmosphere of aftermath through local commentaries on race, economy, and even a transvestite prostitute reading beat poetry in her bedroom. Anthology Film Archives calls it "a lo-fi, minimalist version of The Wire." Also screening prior to Sometimes City is Alfredo, Tom Jarmusch's gritty black and white tribute to conceptual artist Alfredo Martinez. This stunning, silent short film features the artist installing a shooting gallery and playing video games during his 1999-2000 project, QUIET. The film amounts to an arresting scenario captured by visions of violence and voyeurism. Bill Raden of LA Weekly finds that “the film’s grainy, high-contrast montage of Martinez loading, shooting, stripping, and reassembling a frightening assortment of exotic, high-powered rifles and automatic pistols is implicitly mirrored by Jarmusch putting his own 16mm equipment through its paces. Images are over cranked, under cranked and then optically printed as freeze frames. By its climax, the film pointedly suggests a direct parallel between the violence and obsession of Martinez’ onscreen fetishism and the invasive, voyeuristic assault of the cinema camera.” Tom Jarmusch will be in attendance for a Q&A after the films to discuss his own work and his role on more mainstream productions such as serving as production designer for Coffee and Cigarettes and Stranger Than Paradise or his short-lived acting career in Living in Oblivion. Save the Date: December 9: Richard Garet @ the 5th Dimension in the H & H Building January 30: Laura Parnes & James Fotopolous Thursday, 11/15 Doors @ 7:30pm Film @ 8:00pm $10 General Admission $5 Creative Alliance Members/Students w/ ID Pre-sale tickets available online here. The... http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/Projexorcism-Spaceglue-Continuum http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/following/sightunseenbaltimore.com/Projexorcism-Spaceglue-Continuum Sun, 16 Sep 2012 13:44:51 +0000 Sight Unseen 4091287 <img src="http://payload89.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4091287/Projexorcism.jpg" width="670" height="462" width_o="1067" height_o="737" src_o="http://payload89.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4091287/Projexorcism_o.jpg" data-mid="21932372" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload89.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4091287/Projexorcism-1.jpeg" width="648" height="364" width_o="648" height_o="364" src_o="http://payload89.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4091287/Projexorcism-1_o.jpeg" data-mid="21932381" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload89.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4091287/projexorcism_shreveport.jpg" width="639" height="960" width_o="639" height_o="960" src_o="http://payload89.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4091287/projexorcism_shreveport_o.jpg" data-mid="21915610" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload89.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4091287/YES.jpg" width="600" height="338" width_o="600" height_o="338" src_o="http://payload89.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4091287/YES_o.jpg" data-mid="21456987" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload89.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4091287/projexorcism_lens.jpg" width="670" height="446" width_o="2048" height_o="1365" src_o="http://payload89.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4091287/projexorcism_lens_o.jpg" data-mid="21915614" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload89.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4091287/projexorcism_shreveport2.jpg" width="500" height="373" width_o="500" height_o="373" src_o="http://payload89.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/4091287/projexorcism_shreveport2_o.jpg" data-mid="21916510" border="0" align="left"/> Check out documentation of the full performance on youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgnAWUemE2w Saturday, 10/13 Doors @ 8:30pm Films @9:00pm $5 Pent House Gallery Copy Cat B501 1511 Guilford Ave. Baltimore, MD 21202 "Experimental hyperactive expanded cinema." "Pushing the boundaries of weirdness." PROJEXORCISM: SPACEGLUE CONTINUUM A live cinema performance inspired by “duct tape and its history of utility in space and on screen.” The eight films used in this performance are not spliced - they are manipulated with independent lighting controllers, disrupting the linear flow of plot and dialogue as other films are blended in and out in a dizzying stroboscopic maelstrom of light and optical sound - real time editing a new narrative out of old found films. Pivoting from bicycle chains, further motion is imparted to the motion pictures autonomously by the spasmodic on-off cycling of the 16mm projector motors, and sent into sweeping stroboscopic arcs by projectionist Ed Cooper. The projections pass through strategically placed silver CD-Rs, which act as image splitters, splinterers & multipliers to further fill space with moving light. A camcorder captures a portion of the action, which is scrambled digitally and re-projected through two butterflied video projectors, adding peripheral overload to the performance, and optical audio is woven into an absurd new storyline, utilizing lighting controllers as VJ/DJ mixers. Jacob Lunow and Rick Gallagher are the duct tape of Projexorcism, extracting dizzying sounds from a heavily effected & treated guitar, circuit bent Speak & Spell, found internet sound & other lo-fi noise makers, which provide absurdest bedrock for the 16mm dialogue. 16mm source films: Why Explore Space? – 1962 Halley – A Comet Returns – 1985 Infinite Horizons: Space Beyond Apollo – 1979 Mars Minus Myth – 1977 Universe - 1976 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (redux) - 1977 Biology in Space Science - 1967 The Universe: Beyond the Solar System - 1978 About Projexorcism Spawned in 1999, Projexorcism was begun when Ed Cooper acquired two Bell & Howell 2592 auto-shred projectors and 200 educational films. By 2003 Projexorcism had defined a unique flavor of experimental hyperactive expanded cinema; parts real time 16mm film editor, culture mash-up, and hyper-condensed kaleidoscopic film festival. Projexorcism uses an octuple 16mm projector array suspended from two lighting poles - the projectors are synchronized with a two 4-channel sound-actuated variable speed lighting controllers, the projected images split, inverted and bent using silver reflective CD-R's and Fresnel lenses. A Film-to-Video Regurgitation Array rests atop yet another lighting pole, adding real-time video capture, manipulation & digital projection. The film is manipulated using various techniques to create new contradictory action sequences and dialogue. Films are chosen to reflect relevant, irreverent or nonsensical themes – black history, presidents, Gila monsters. Film often breaks or passes through the projection gate in a manner inconsistent with film preservation. The kinetic swinging and shaking of the film trees will warp reels and melt film - CDs fall to the ground - the shriek of optical sound feedback as dust clogs the sound bulb - the randomly choreographed accidents of brilliance & stupidity – a space armada of keyboards scoring a photonic overture. Projexorcism is joined by a rotating cast of musicians which have included Jacob Lunow, Tom Devlin, Faze Exile, Richard Jeffries, Chad Davis, Ben Teeter, Steve Burnette, Joe Sample and Rick Gallagher. Projexorcism has projected in collaboration with US Christmas, Acid Mothers Temple, Rommanis Motte, The Steve Mackay Ensemble, Feralcatscan, Temple of Bon Matin, Khate, Hellblinki, Weedeater, Sikhara & many others. Save the dates: November 15th - Sometimes City by Tom Jarmusch @ The Creative Alliance December 9th - Richard Garet @ The 5th Dimension Check out documentation of the full performance on youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgnAWUemE2w Saturday, 10/13 Doors @ 8:30pm Films @9:00pm $5 Pent... http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/reWork http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/following/sightunseenbaltimore.com/reWork Sun, 26 Aug 2012 13:38:48 +0000 Sight Unseen 3974821 <img src="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/607417225210BYTES.png" width="670" height="503" width_o="838" height_o="630" src_o="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/607417225210BYTES_o.png" data-mid="21013820" caption=" 607,417,225,210 BYTES by Gillures Southern" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/michaelrobinson.jpg" width="637" height="434" width_o="637" height_o="434" src_o="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/michaelrobinson_o.jpg" data-mid="20783082" caption=" The General Returns From One Place to Another by Michael Robinson" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/viewing_the_distant_13.jpg" width="670" height="446" width_o="720" height_o="480" src_o="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/viewing_the_distant_13_o.jpg" data-mid="21073964" caption=" Viewing The Distant (In Translation) by David Baker" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/narenwilks.jpg" width="670" height="554" width_o="673" height_o="557" src_o="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/narenwilks_o.jpg" data-mid="20783086" caption=" House by Naren Wilks" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/maryhelenaclark.jpg" width="670" height="446" width_o="720" height_o="480" src_o="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/maryhelenaclark_o.jpg" data-mid="20783081" caption=" And the Sunflowers by Mary Helena Clark" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/SHU_VersionMulti.jpg" width="670" height="502" width_o="2048" height_o="1535" src_o="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/SHU_VersionMulti_o.jpg" data-mid="21074045" caption=" SHU by Phillipp Lachenmann" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/STILL RAINING STILL DREAMING - RAGE.jpeg" width="670" height="376" width_o="1600" height_o="900" src_o="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/STILL RAINING STILL DREAMING - RAGE_o.jpeg" data-mid="21124474" caption=" Still Raining, Still Dreaming by Phil Solomon" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/justinkelly2.png" width="670" height="389" width_o="723" height_o="420" src_o="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/justinkelly2_o.png" data-mid="20783078" caption=" Untitled Nascar Trailer by Justin Kelly" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/brandenrush5.png" width="670" height="370" width_o="871" height_o="481" src_o="http://payload83.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3974821/brandenrush5_o.png" data-mid="21237393" caption=" Entropy by Branden Rush" border="0" align="left"/> Friday 9/14 @ The Metro Gallery 1700 N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21201 Doors @ 8pm Films @ 9pm $5 Artists presented in this screening are offering a new restructuring of the pixel. They are rehashing and reworking to establish their own inverted dialect through the language of video. FEATURING: 607,417,225,210 BYTES, Gillures Southern 2012, digital video, b/w & color, sound, 4m ‘An extremely abridged, chronological overview of the past one hundred years of moving image entertainment, gradated by age, speeding into the present.’ – Gillures Southern AND THE GENERAL RETURNS FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER, Michael Robinson 2006,16mm to digital video, color, sound,10m Shaping a concurrently indulgent and skeptical experience of the beautiful, the film draws an uneasy balance between the romantic and the horrid. A Frank O'Hara monologue (from a play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces surfacing. Although originally shot on 16mm, the post-production manipulations employed by Robinson create a dialogue and tension of form that adds to the overall discourse on the medium of video art. Viewing the Distant (In Translation), David Baker 2012, digital video, color, sound, 8.5m ‘Winter ice melting on a windowpane at my back door in upstate New York, with thoughts of Chapter 47 from the Tao Te Ching “Surveying What is Far-Off (Viewing the Distant),” Emersonian organicism with Chinese affinities, motility, a patterned energy made materially visible.’ – David Baker House, Naren Wilks 2007, digital video, color, sound, 3.5m “By employing a technique of layering to digital photographs of houses and sound recordings of doorbells, this video attempts to construct and then deconstruct a singular vision of Victorian terrace style houses in Bristol.” – Naren Wilks And the Sun Flowers, Mary Helena Clark 2008, VHS to digital video, color, silent, 9m Due to technical difficulties at our retrospective screening of Clark’s work, we were unable to show this hypnotic, tranquil gem from her oeuvre. And the Sun Flowers accomplishes a rare feat of cinema; it occludes its production methods to the point that the optical illusion becomes magic. “Henry James had his figure in the carpet, Da Vinci found faces on the wall. Within this Baltimore wallpaper: a floral forest of hidden depth and concealment, the hues and fragrance of another era.” -Mark McElhatten SHU (Blue Hour Lullaby), Phillipp Lachenmann 2002/2008, HDV/HDCam/16mm, color, sound, 12.5m A remote prison (the California Correctional Institution (CCI)) in the Mojave Desert during the blue hour. The CCI is one of four prisons in California providing the infamous SHU: „Security Housing Unit“. SHU/Solitary Confinement is the most severe penalty in US American criminal law after the death penalty and has been classified by some as torture. SHU (Blue Hour Lullaby) was partly inspired by the famous Walt Disney Movie Logo of Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Further, its reference encompasses an eclectic line-up of classic film topics such as science fiction, but also the road movie motif, Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Pollock’s Drip Paintings, Van Gogh’s Arles series, and the tradition of the German Romantic landscape painting. LISDEXAMFETAMINE, Hans Hands 2012, digital video, color, sound, 3m ‘Lisdexamfetamine dimesylate (L-lysine-D-amphetamine) is a psychostimulant prodrug of the phenethylamine and amphetamine chemical classes; its molecular structure consists of dextroamphetamine coupled with the essential amino acid L-lysine.’ – Hans Hands The Shama Bird in 1889 from Jhana and the Rats of James Olds, Stephanie Barber 2011, digital video, color, sound, 2.5m Made in collaboration with Jenny Graf Sheppard as part of Barber’s performance/installation JHANA AND THE RATS OF JAMES OLDS. The piece is a confounding review of a museum's collection, it's stories and value. Between June 25th- August 7th 2011 Stephanie Barber moved her studio into the Baltimore Museum of Art where she created a new video each day in a central gallery open to visitors. The goal of this project was to create a series of short, poetic videos in the playful and serious footprints of Oulipo games and daily meditations; creating one new video each day. The exhibit was both a constantly changing installation as well as a collaborative performance in which museum visitors were present as spectator and often-creative partners. AT THE SHORE from Jhana and the Rats of James Olds, Stephanie Barber 2011, digital video, color, sound, 2m “A micro-fiction. ‘Story’ is stripped to the tiniest suggestion as the image is reduced to cartoon with only the merest hint of 'reality' suggesting possible riches.”—Stephanie Barber Still Raining, Still Dreaming, Phil Solomon 2009, digital video, color, sound, 12m The final part of the IN MEMORIAM trilogy, STILL RAINING, STILL DREAMING adapts the soundtrack of Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon for a vision of shop windows and empty spaces in a rain drenched purgatory in the lower Manhattan of GTA IV. – Phil Solomon Like Rain it sounded till it curved Like Rain it sounded till it curved And then I new 'twas Wind -- It walked as wet as any Wave But swept as dry as sand -- When it had pushed itself away To some remotest Plain A coming as of Hosts was heard It filled the Wells, it pleased the Pools It warbled in the Road -- It pulled the spigot from the Hills And let the Floods abroad -- It loosened acres, lifted seas The sites of Centres stirred Then like Elijah rode away Upon a Wheel of Cloud. - Emily Dickinson Still Raining, Still Dreaming Rainy day, rain all day Ain't no use in gettin' uptight Just let it groove its own way Let it drain your worries away yeah Lay back and groove on a rainy day hey Lay back and dream on a rainy day Lay back and groove on a rainy day Lay back Oh yeah ! - Jimi Hendrix Untitled Nascar Trailer, Justin Kelly 2011, digital video, color, sound, 3m A meditation on the church of NASCAR. Kelly holds a magnifying glass to the fleeting carnage and bizarre patriotism of one of the most popular sports in the USA. Through an incessant series of slow motion clips, we see beauty in brutalism as Kelly breathes life into destruction and fanaticism. Freud’s concept of the Uncanny is an appropriate descriptor for the way this film makes you feel: familiar, yet foreign, simultaneously strange and familiar. Entropy, Branden Rush 2012, Digital Video, color, sound, 7.5m Entropy is a video-graphic exploration through the found footage of science fiction media. This piece references and utilizes temporal, special, and spatial effects with regard to contemporary physics, film art, and photographic history through auditory, hallucinatory, and visual transitions of montage. It explores the literal control and dissemination of information as light captured by a lens, compressed and transmitted, and reappeared onscreen for consumption while audiences experience the passage of real time in a nostalgic film-time remix. Entropy aims to re-present this media, urging the audience to define for themselves what it means to exist in their own relative space-time. With Sean Bnjmn & Justin Kelly in attendance. TRT: 80m Also save the dates: 10/13 - Projexorcism at Pent House Gallery 11/15 - Sometimes City at The Creative Alliance Friday 9/14 @ The Metro Gallery 1700 N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21201 Doors @ 8pm Films @ 9pm $5 Artists presented in this screening are offering a new... http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/SCENE-MISSING http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/following/sightunseenbaltimore.com/SCENE-MISSING Sat, 04 Aug 2012 12:32:57 +0000 Sight Unseen 3864094 <img src="http://payload78.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3864094/Make Them Jump Wkpt 02.jpg" width="640" height="480" width_o="640" height_o="480" src_o="http://payload78.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3864094/Make Them Jump Wkpt 02_o.jpg" data-mid="20149873" caption=" Make Them Jump by Kelly Spivey" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload78.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3864094/Amalya_Gossamer_4.jpg" width="604" height="403" width_o="604" height_o="403" src_o="http://payload78.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3864094/Amalya_Gossamer_4_o.jpg" data-mid="20149925" caption=" Gossamer Walls by Malic Amalya and Peter Miller" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload78.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3864094/86756342_640.jpg" width="640" height="480" width_o="640" height_o="480" src_o="http://payload78.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3864094/86756342_640_o.jpg" data-mid="20150063" caption=" Keep the Home Fires Burning by Ryan O'Toole" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload78.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3864094/outer_space.jpg" width="526" height="248" width_o="526" height_o="248" src_o="http://payload78.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3864094/outer_space_o.jpg" data-mid="20150134" caption=" Outer Space by Peter Tscherkassky" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload78.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3864094/exquisite.jpg" width="340" height="255" width_o="340" height_o="255" src_o="http://payload78.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3864094/exquisite_o.jpg" data-mid="20150330" caption=" The Exquisite Hour by Phil Solomon" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload78.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3864094/leitrim40.jpeg" width="670" height="533" width_o="720" height_o="573" src_o="http://payload78.cargocollective.com/1/7/255060/3864094/leitrim40_o.jpeg" data-mid="20174050" caption=" Are We There Yet? by Moira Tierney" border="0" align="left"/> Saturday 8/25 In the backyard of Current Space (http://www.currentspace.com/) 421 N. Howard Street. Baltimore, MD Doors @7pm Films @8:30pm Chairs will be provided, but feel free to bring your own seating or blankets! $7 general admission $5 for Maryland Film Festival Friends of the Festival or if you carry a flier coupon from the door of the Bill Callahan Apocalypse film screening from the previous night - also at Current Space - and hosted by the Maryland Film Fest! Click here to see the details of that screening on facebook! All films featured on 16mm! SCENE MISSING exposes the enduring tradition in experimental cinema of repurposing found and original film footage. The medium is masterfully recycled by means of chemical and optical manipulations. Frame by frame, the filmmakers’ devotion to celluloid involves an intensely personal quality and handcrafted integrity. Emotional resonance projects through the envisioning of ephemeral worlds, excavation of collective memory and disruption of narrative artifice. The beauty of what is long gone or recently passed is resurrected through unique film spaces that overwhelm the senses. Films: Are We There Yet? By Moira Tierney 2010, S8mm-to-16mm, color, sound, music by Macdara Smith & the Bahh Band, 10m ‘The optic printer broke down, repeatedly. It stuttered, it jumped, it stuck; I rewound, started again, reloaded … In the end I kept it all in – the jumps and the flares as well as the conventionally well-behaved footage; for me it represents the apparent paradox of the border and the struggle one faces when attempting to describe something that slippery – landscape? political imposition? colonial hangover? to be avoided in polite conversation? fact of fiction? comedy, tragedy or farce? to which the only answer I could find is another question: are we there yet?’ – Moira Tierney Poor Jim By Kenny Curwood 2012, 16mm, b/w & color, sound, 9m Poor Jim started as one 100 foot roll of hi-con (shot for a music video). Through optical printing, the footage morphs from the original b&w negative, to positive (b&w), to synthetic color (via multiple passes through filters), finally decomposing into abstract mandalas created by exposing each frame up to 9 times. Interspersed throughout is hand-drawn animation. Optical sound was added with a 70-year-old Auricon camera. - Kenny Curwood Make them Jump By Kelly Spivey 2009, 16mm, color, sound, 11m ‘Excerpted from an optically printed from found footage of animals with children, with subliminal messages … an experimental film that uses snippets from discarded educational films including a bullfrog-jumping contest, a story of a child in a Harlem project who finds an abandoned duck, and a girl whose best friend is a cow. Inspired by the Rachel Carson quote: “It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility,” the film digs frame-by-re-photographed-frame for the underlying, yet now tenuous beauty in nature and our awkward, yet increasingly poignant relationship with animals.’ – Kelly Spivey Gossamer Walls By Malic Amalya and Peter Miller 2007, 16mm, b/w, sound, 5m Image by Malic Amalya, Sound by Peter Miller 'Through the process of contact printing, hand processing, and low-fi optical printing, Gossamer Walls remembers, mis-remembers, and reinterprets a previous generation’s super 8 home movies.' - Malic Amalya Inside Velvet K By Luther Price 2006, 16mm, color, sound, 10m ‘Apocalyptic post card ...........’ – Luther Price Her Fragrant Emulsion By Lewis Klahr 1987, 16mm, color, sound, 11m 'Her Fragrant Emlusion is an obsessional homage to the 60′s B-film actress Mimsy Farmer.' – Lewis Klahr. Outer Space By Peter Tscherkassky 1999, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10m ‘A woman, terrorized by an invisible and aggressive force, is also exposed to the audience’s gaze, a prisoner in two senses. Outer Space agitates this construction, which is prototypical for gender hierarchies and classic cinema’s viewing regime, and allows the protagonist to turn them upside down. (…) Flickering images, everything crashes, explodes; perforations and the soundtrack are engaged in a violent struggle. (…) The story ends in the woman’s resistant gaze.’ – Isabella Reichert Keep the Home Fires Burning By Ryan O’Toole 2008, 16mm, b/w & color, sound, 8m ‘A short autobiographical 16mm film about duty and loss, seen in the home movies of a military family. Focusing on fathers and sons, the filmmaker mixes the voices and imagery of three generations, accompanied by the filmmaker’s original score, to illuminate the effects of war on veterans and their children.’ – Ryan O’Toole The Exquisite Hour By Phil Solomon 1994, 16mm, color, sound, 14m ‘Partly a lullaby for the dying, partly a lament of the death of cinema … [it] is dedicated to the memory of my grandparents, Albert Solomon, who was a projectionist for Fox, and Rose Solomon, who took tickets at Lowe’s Paradise in the Bronx. Based on the song by Reynaldo Hahn and poem by Paul Verlaine.’ – Phil Solomon TRT: 88m Saturday 8/25 In the backyard of Current Space (http://www.currentspace.com/) 421 N. Howard Street. Baltimore, MD Doors @7pm Films @8:30pm Chairs will be...