Visiting Film & Video Artists & Speakers Series
- Location: Lecture Hall 6 (unless otherwise noted)
- Time: 7 pm (unless otherwise noted)
All events are free and open to the public. Sponsored by Cinema Department & Harpur College Dean's Speakers Series.
Fall 2024
Thursday September 19: Alee Peoples
Thursday October 24: Saif Alsaegh
Tuesday October 29: Madison Brookshire
Thursday September 19: Alee Peoples
THEM ORACLES (2012, 7.5 min, 16mm)
Them Oracles is a skeptic investigation of what an oracle can be and what it would sound like.
Human desire and blind faith allow, and maybe even will, these mystic soothsayers
to exist.
NON-STOP BEAUTIFUL LADIES (2015, 9 min, 16mm)
Non-Stop Beautiful Ladies is a Los Angeles street film starring empty signs, radio from passing cars and human
sign spinners, some with a pulse and some without.
SPOTLIGHT ON A BRICK WALL (2016, 8 min, 16mm. Made in collaboration with Mike Stoltz.)
A performance film that navigates expectations of both the audience and the makers.
A series of false starts. Dub treatment on the laugh track.
CROWNING GLORY (2008, 5 min, Super-8mm-to-digital)
Crowning Glory highlights parallel feelings of pride and ownership versus skepticism and rebellion.
A collection of American symbols that adorn the head, this film resuscitates them
with psychic-punk aesthetics.
DECOY (2017, 10.5 min, 16mm)
Decoy sees bridges and walls as binary opposites and relates them to impostors in this
world. Humans strive for accuracy. You don't always get what you wish for.
STANDING FORWARD FULL (2020, 5.5 min, 16mm)
A helter skelter is an amusement ride with a spiral slide built around a tower. Like
this film, an exorcism attempt of an unrequited desire, itĘĽs either moving too fast
or at a complete standstill. Disorienting but exciting.
HEY SWEET PEA (2023, 11 min, 16mm)
Parental aging and an existential wave collide together in funny ways. Hey Sweet Pea
borrows scenes from the 1984 children’s sci-fi movie The Neverending Story to process
our collective grief.
Alee Peoples maintains a varied artistic practice that involves screen-printing, sewing, sculpture
and film. Currently living in Los Angeles, she has taught youth classes at Echo Park
Film Center and shown her sculpture and film work at GAIT, 4th Wall and elephant.
Peoples has shown her films at numerous festivals including Edinburgh, Images (Toronto)
and New York Film Festival, and at museums and spaces including SFMoMA, Brooklyn Museum
of Art, The Pompidou Center, Dirt Palace (Providence) and The Nightingale (Chicago).
She is inspired by pedestrian histories, pop song lyrics and invested in the hand-
made.
Thursday October 24: Saif Alsaegh
Alazeef (video, 2016, 21 min)
Through collage, Alazeef shows the dreams and the fears of a typical Iraqi soldier, a week before the 1991
Desert Storm, compared to the huge war machine. Through poetic narration, Alazeef
humanizes the "enemy" and separates the people and soldiers on both sides from political
agendas. The control of the mise-en-scene gives the film a radiant surreal feeling.
Bezuna (video, 2023, 7.5 min)
Bezuna explores the complexities of fleeing a war-zone through the analysis of peripheral
details. Through interweaving different narratives, the film presents the raw and
broken feelings of a child and a cat whose lives will never be the same.
Somewhere Nowhere (video, 2023, 1.5 min)
An immigrant strolls in American suburbia.
1991 (video, 2018, 12 min)
Through poetic juxtaposition of the virtual landscape of the phone, the calm landscape
of the cabin, and the chaotic landscape of memory, 1991 paints a cruel image of the
horror of war and separation.
Bitter with a Shy Taste of Sweetness (video, 2019, 9 min)
Bitter with a Shy Taste of Sweetness contrasts the fragmented past of the filmmaker growing up in Baghdad with his surreal
California present. Through poetic writing and jarring visuals, the film creates a
calm and cruel sense of memory and landscape.
The Motherfucker's Birthday (video, 2024, 7 min)
Through dancing, the Motherfucker's Birthday shows the evil of the dictator and the
horror people endure under powerful political leaders. The film presents dancing,
a universal and uniquely human activity often representing joy, with eerie footage
of Saddam and his sons’ torture tools while they dance. Bush also dances with a smirk
across the screen while announcing a war that would destabilize a whole region. Contrasting
the dancing of these powerful men, who seem disturbingly unconcerned with the lives
they impact, with the dancing of the people of Iraq amplifies the fear, control, and
horror the general public lives under. Everything becomes a gesture of dance: the
torture, the hesitant political humor, and the war. Everyone becomes a dancer, the
dictator and the oppressed performing a distorted version of this human act. Saddam
dances, Bush dances, so what's left for the Iraqi people except to join in.
Saif Alsaegh is a United States-based filmmaker from Baghdad. Much of Saif’s work deals with the
contrast between the landscape of his youth in Baghdad growing up as part of the indigenous
Chaldean minority in the nineties and early 2000s, and the U.S. landscape where he
currently lives. His films have screened in festivals and venues including Cinéma
du RĂ©el, Kurzfilm Hamburg, Kassel Dokfest, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Madison
Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Gene Siskel Film Center. Alsaegh’s films are distributed
by Video Data Bank. Alsaegh has received several fellowships and residencies including
at Flaherty Film Seminar and the Ucross Foundation. He has an MFA in film from the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Alsaegh is lecturer of film production at California
State University, Fullerton.
Tuesday October 29: Madison Brookshire
Double or Nothing Expanded (with LCollective, 2024, Performance for two 16mm projectors, sine tone, and orchestra,
duration variable)
Offset 16mm projectors create an un-moving image: a field of light with a bright,
inset rectangle. Sine tone, instruments, and voices play long tones that harmonize
with and amplify the sound of the projectors or else are dissonant, making vibrations
we feel as much as hear. Nothing happens.
No. 1 (2022, One 16mm film on six reels, overlapping projection, color, sound, about 12
min)
Semi-symmetrical 16mm films fail to negate one another, creating a work of non-cinema.
No. 11 (2024, One 16mm film on two reels, overlapping projection, color, sound, about 22
min)
Overlapping films continuously align and then alternate colors in an offset pattern,
creating an array of surprising and affecting phenomena in the process. Color by Fotokem;
Colorist: Doug Ledin
Madison Brookshire lives in Los Angeles, where he makes films, paintings, and performances. His work
invites viewers to become aware of perceptual processes and the sensuous experience
of time. Finding sympathies between experimental film, music, and art, he investigates
hybrid forms, often inhabiting the areas at the edges of disciplines, where they begin
to touch and vibrate one another. He frequently works with musicians and composers,
such as Ezra Buchla, LCollective, Laura Steenberge, Mark So, and Tashi Wada. His awards
include being named a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, an ARC grant from the Center
for Cultural Innovation, a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, and being
an Artist in Residence at the Echo Park Film Center and the Hammer Museum.
LCollective is a group of musicians and artists based in Brooklyn, Newark and Buenos Aires. We come from different backgrounds and share a commitment to programming and performing music that we love in open, inclusive and collaborative settings. We value art that creates spaces for intimate and introspective experiences and brings people together to explore new ways of participation and organization. LCollective organizes events in New York, New Jersey and beyond. Recent projects include regular participation in the monthly Piano+ concert series in Brooklyn, performances at DogStar Orchestra 15 in Los Angeles and Klangraum 2019 in DĂĽsseldorf, a retrospective of experimental music and film by LA-based artist Madison Brookshire in New York and Pittsburgh, and concerts and recordings with Germaine Sijstermans and Gabriela Areal in the Netherlands.
Teodora Stepančić is a composer, pianist and curator, founder of Piano+ and Shared Space concert series in Brooklyn, and core member of Netherlands based ensemble Modelo 62.
Douglas Farrand is a composer and musician living in Newark NJ. He works at the University of Orange, a free school and popular education center in Orange NJ, as a cultural and place-based community organizer. He plays the trumpet, cassette tapes, and assorted detritus.
Assaf Gidron is a composer, musician and sound designer. Originally from Tel Aviv, Assaf lived in the UK and the Netherlands before moving to Brooklyn where he writes and performs music, works in film sound, runs the Big Family Audio Co. studio and uploads images to the @moreshapes Instagram page.
Katie Porter plays clarinet, bass clarinet, sings, writes songs and curates performances. She exists mainly in the experimental realm, but can sometimes be found elsewhere.
Contact: Melissa (Missy) Miller - Secretary
Email: mjmiller@binghamton.edu
Phone: 607-777- 4998
Past Visiting Artists/Speaker Series Events
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Spring 2024
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Rajee Samarasinghe
Lotus-Eyed Girl (2023, 6:00), The Eyes of Summer (2020, 15:00), Show Me Other Places (2021, 11:00), Your Touch Makes Others Invisible (2024, 15:00 Excerpt)Rajee Samarasinghe was born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He later left for the United States where he is now based. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Much of his work examines sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of deconstructing ethnographic practices and the colonial gaze in contemporary media. His practice was born out of a desire to understand the circumstances around his childhood and often navigates the terrain of memory, migration, and impermanence.
Samarasinghe is currently working on his debut feature film, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, which explores post-civil war Sri Lanka—the project has received support from the Sundance Institute's Documentary Film Program, Berlinale Talents' Doc Station, Field of Vision, and True/False Film Festival’s PRISM program. He was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020 and was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2023. He's had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA - Modern Mondays), the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and the Los Angeles Filmforum (2220 Arts) among others.
Samarasinghe’s films have been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films by MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinĂ©ma, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance, SFFILM Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival, BlackStar, CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, Media City, Prismatic Ground etc. He’s received the TĂos Award for Best International Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, and an Honorable Mention Award at the Thomas Edison Film Festival among others.March 14, 2024
Chris Harris
still/here (60 min, 2000)Christopher Harris makes films and video installations that read African American
historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. His work
employs manually and photo-chemically altered appropriated moving images, staged
re-enactments of archival artifacts and interrogations of documentary conventions. His current project is a series of optically printed 16mm experimental films in conversation with canonical works of African American literature.
Harris has shown his work at prestigious film festivals and art venues, including his soloscreenings/exhibitions at the Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival in Brazil,the Images Festival in Toronto, Encontro de Cinema Negro in Rio de Janeiro, Arsenal-Institute in Berlin, the Essay Film Festival in London, the True/False Film Fest in MO,the Brakhage Center Symposium in CO, and the Gene Siskel Film Center in IL, and theWexner Center for the Arts in OH. He is the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts
recipient, the 2020-2021 Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellow, and the featured artist at
the 2018 Flaherty Seminar. He is one of the seventy-one visionary artists and
collectives who participates in Whitney Biennial 2024.March 26, 2024
Sheri Willis
Acetylene (16mm, 3min), Anodyne (16mm, 3min), What does light remember? (Installation documentation, 3min), Assembly I & II (installation documentation, 3min), SEAM (digital file, 4min), Camera Obscura (digital file, 5min)Sheri Wills an artist who works with film, video, and sound to make single-channel videos, installations, sound works, and live video performances. She explores the material, psychological, and philosophical potentials of cinema to reveal small moments that often go unseen and pull forward the emotional content of abstract imagery.
She has had one-person shows at venues including the Director’s Lounge in Berlin, the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in NYC, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her films have been screened internationally, such as at the Museum of Modern Art in NY, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Cinémas Différents in Paris, the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, the London Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, Fisura in Mexico City, the Abattoirs Museum in Toulouse, France, and Microscope Gallery in NYC. Her films are distributed by Light Cone in Paris.
Her collaborations include live video projects with music composed by Jan Jirásek, Charles Norman Mason, Bright Sheng, and Ofer Ben-Amots and video performances with music ensembles, including the NYC choral group, Khorikos, the Providence String Quartet, Luna Nova New Music Ensemble, and Ensemble QAT in Montreal, at venues including Roulette in Brooklyn, the Firehouse Space in Brooklyn, and the Czech Center in NYC.
She has participated recently at residencies including the Narva Art Residency in Estonia, At Home Gallery in Slovakia, and the Studios at MASS MoCA.
Sheri Wills is an American Council on Education Fellow and a Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, where in 2019 she was honored with the Frazier Award for Teaching Excellence.
Sheri Wills is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.April 4, 2024
Luther Price Slides, presented by Tara NelsonLuther Price’s stunning work with slides is documented in New Utopia and Light Fracture by Luther Price, a 2023 VSW Press publication featuring copious images derived from the depths of Price’s 35mm collages as well as intimate email correspondence from Price to VSW editor Tate Shaw 2017–18 and an essay by Ed Halter of Light Industry, Brooklyn. In celebration of this publication, Tara Nelson, VSW Curator and Managing Editor for the VSW Press, is presenting two sets of Price’s double-projected slides—New Utopia and Light Fracture (both 2017), which Luther Price donated to the VSW archives in 2017. Tara will speak on the publication, the slides, and on Price.
Tara Nelson is a filmmaker, curator, programmer and lecturer working with film and digital media. At Visual Studies Workshop, Tara oversees the cataloging, preservation and interpretation of the VSW collections. She is the lead programmer for the VSW Salon, and the Managing Editor of VSW Press. Recent publications from VSW Press's Film Art Book (FAB) imprint include: Bouquets 11-20: Notebooks by Rose Lowder (2018); Measuring Time by Ephraim Asili (2020); Feral Domestic by Dani and Sheilah ReStack (2022).
Luther Price (January 26, 1962 – June 13, 2020) was a prolific artist whose work explored the deepest, darkest corners of the human experience. Working in film, performance, sculpture, photography and mixed media, his haunting images were often composed from found elements, thickly layered with ink, paint, glue, tape and bodily fluids. Price's films are sculptural compositions in which images of eviscerated bodies, raw meat, hardcore gay porn, and laughing clowns occupy the same psychic space as quiet scenes of street corners, blue skies and empty clotheslines. Born in Marlborough, Massachusetts, Price attended the Massachusetts College of Art in the early 1980's, where he studied sculpture and performance before turning to Super 8 film after being shot in Nicaragua in 1985. With the support of Super 8 filmmaker Saul Levine, his teacher at MassArt, Price pushed the boundaries of the "home movie" medium, stepping into each role of the fractured family to conjure complicated apparitions on the scratched surface of the film. His practice evolved to include found footage and "handmade film" techniques, incorporating ink, dirt, spit, splices and the process of decay into the production. Price's work with 16mm found footage is some of the most sophisticated in the tradition, with more than 80 original titles created in the course of his career. In the last decade of his life, Price created breathtaking collages on 35mm slides, combining the techniques he had mastered in his film works to culminate in single frame compositions.
Luther Price came to Visual Studies Workshop as a visiting artist in 2017 to give a week-long workshop on handmade film. Though the workshop ended tumultuously, Price maintained a sporadic and sometimes fraught correspondence with VSW Press Editor Tate Shaw. Though a book project was begun, it was temporarily tabled, and Price died in 2020 at the age of 58. The project was continued posthumously as intended by the artist and VSW Press. New Utopia and Light Fracture by Luther Price includes images derived from the depths of Price's 35mm collages, representing some of the most accomplished work of the artist's career. The sparse text in the book comes solely from Price's messages to Shaw over a two year period. VSW Press offers an enhanced eBook companion to this publication, which provides access to view both series of 35mm slides digitally. -
Fall 2023
November 9, 2023
Joshua Gen Solondz
AGAINST LANDSCAPE (2013, 4 min), it's not a prison if you never try the door (2013, 7 min), LUNA E SANTUR (2016, 10 min), (tourism studies) (2019, 7 min), NE CORRIDOR (2022, 6.5 min), WE DON'T TALK LIKE WE USED TO (2023, 36 min)Joshua Gen Solondz is an artist working in moving image, sound, and performance. He’s screened in a variety of festivals including Images, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Onion City, Black Maria, Portland International, Milwaukee Underground, CAAMFest, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Chicago Underground, Locarno, Mar del Plata, FIC Valdivia, Viennale, and New York Film Festival. He's also shown at venues such as REDCAT, Light Industry, UnionDocs, Harvard Film Archive, MoMA, DINCA, NYU, Red Room, ATA, AGX, and Black Hole Cinematheque. Solondz has received awards from Athens International Film+Video Festival, Spectral Film Festival, Black Maria, New Orleans Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Ann Arbor Film Festival as well as commissions for shows at Heliopolis, ACRE TV, WNDX, and microscope gallery. They have an ongoing collaboration with Jim Supanick as the electronic slime duo known as SynthHumpers. Solondz had a 2019 MacDowell Colony Fellowship and was a 2023 UCROSS Fellow. Josh studied at Bard College and received their MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. They live in Brooklyn, NY with his partner and occasional collaborator Emma Brenner-Malin.
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Spring 2023
February 23, 2023
Ralph Hocking: In Conversation with Peer Bode and Kathy High
The Experiment (8:30 min., 1970), Fishing (10 min., 1971), Sitting by the Window (4:30 min., 1977), Scrambled Legs (4 min., 1977), Walk/Run (6:30 min., 1981), Mixtape Series (14 min., 1985)RALPH HOCKING has been a leader in the field of electronic media art since the 1960s, founding one of the first campus-based media access programs in the country at °®¶ą´«Ă˝ University, where he served as Professor of Video and Computer Art and Chair of the Cinema Department until his retirement in 1998. In 1972, Hocking established the independent nonprofit Experimental Television Center, with a residency and research program for artists, equipment access and training programs for the community, and regional and national exhibition programs. He has served as consultant, advisor and panelist with such organizations as the New York State Council on the Arts, the University Wide Arts Committee, the Society for Photographic Education, the Massachusetts Arts Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and many museums and galleries. His personal creative work has been exhibited widely worldwide. He has received support for his work from the NEA’s Visual Arts Fellowship Program and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Video Artist, PEER BODE, in a career spanning over four decades, has created an extensive body of work that investigates electronic media events, active perception systems and culture. A graduate of °®¶ą´«Ă˝â€™s Cinema Department, Bode studied with Larry Gottheim, Nicholas Ray, Ken Jacobs and Peter Kubelka, and later with Woody and Steina Vasulka, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad and Hollis Frampton at SUNY Buffalo’s Media Study Program. Bode worked at the Experimental TelevisionCenter (ETC), which his lifelong mentor and friend Ralph Hocking established in °®¶ą´«Ă˝ in 1969. At the ETC, Bode made his seminal early works while assisting and collaborating with the video artist and engineer David Jones, whose “Jones Frame Buffer” became a signature processor within Bode’s oeuvre. His work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the Whitney Biennial, the European Media Art Festival (Germany), Impakt Film and Video Art Festival (the Netherlands), Viper Festival (Switzerland), among many others. A key figure of the Owego and Alfred schools of video arts, Bode headed the Video Arts Program at the School of Art and Design, NYSCC at Alfred University, where he co-founded the Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA). Bode is Professor of Art, Emeritus at Alfred University, Alfred, NY.
KATHY HIGH is a graduate of the master’s program at SUNY Buffalo’s Center for Media Studies, where her mentors were the pioneering film/video artists Steina Vasulka and Tony Conrad. Her co-edited book The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued, with Sherry Miller Hocking of the Experimental Television Center, and Mona Jimenez of the Moving Image Preservation Program at New York University, was published 2014 by Intellect Books (UK), a subsidiary of Chicago University Press. The book presents stories of the development of early video tools and systems designed and built by artists and technologists during the late 1960s and 70s, and how that history of collaborations among inventors, designers and artists has affected contemporary tool-makers. Today, High is an interdisciplinary artist who collaborates with scientists, technologists and activists. She is Professor of Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, NY, and is director of the BioArt and Technology Laboratory in RPI’s Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies where she is also an affiliate faculty member. She is committed to queer / feminist approaches to reshaping media technologies, learning-by-doing and collaborative action. Among many honors, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
March 16, 2023
Cecelia ConditI’ve Been Afraid (video, color, 6:30 min., 2020), Possibly in Michigan (video, color, 11:45 min., 1983), Suburbs of Eden (video, color, 15:41 min., 1996), All About a Girl (video, color, 5:27 min., 2004), Beneath the Skin (video, color, 11:31 min., 1981), We Were Hardly More Than Children (video, color, 9:05 min., 2019), AI and I (video, color, 7 min., 2021), PLUS: a new project in progress (excerpt, 3 min.)
Since 1981, CECELIA CONDIT’s videos have created heroines whose lives swing between beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty, youth and fragility. Her work puts a subversive spin on the traditional mythology of women in film and the psychology of sexuality and violence. Exploring the dark side of female subjectivity, her “feminist fairy tales” focus on friendships, age, and the natural world. She has shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces, and is represented incollections including the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Centre Georges Pompidou Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France. She has received numerous film festival awards, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mary L. Nohl Foundation. She’s a professor emerita in the Department of Film, Video, Animation & New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she was the director of the graduate program in film for 30 years.
MARCH 28, 2023
Larry Gottheim
Natural Selection (16mm, color, sound, 35 min., 1983), Knot/not (video, color, sound, 22 min., 2019), Entanglement (video, color, sound, 27 min., 2022)LARRY GOTTHEIM is a key figure in the history and development of American avant-garde cinema through the 1970s and 1980s. From his late-1960s series of sublime films to the dense sound/image constructs of the mid-1970s and after, his cinema is the cinema of presence, of observation, and of deep conscious engagement. While addressing genres of landscape, diary and assemblage filmmaking, Gottheim's work properly stands alone in its intensive investigations of the paradoxes between direct, sensual experience in collision with complex structures of repetition, anticipation and memory. Gottheim founded the Department of Cinema at °®¶ą´«Ă˝ and taught there until 1998. In the 1990's Gottheim has also served for a brief time as director of the Filmmaker's Co-op in New York. Gottheim's films are in the collections of museums and archives throughout the world, and a program of his restored early films premiered at the 2005 New York Film Festival.
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Fall 2022
September 20, 2022
Ken Jacobs
From Introduction to Orson Welles’s Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight (digital video, 4:30 min. 2022), Things to Come (digital video, 35 min., 2019), Capitalism: Child Labor (digital video, 14 min., 2006), Perfect Film (16mm, 22 min., 1985)Distinguished Professor Emeritus, KEN JACOBS, was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1933. He studied painting with one of the prime creators of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann, in the mid-fifties. It was then that he also began filmmaking (Star Spangled to Death). His personal star rose, to just about knee high, with the sixties’ advent of Underground Film. In 1967, with the involvement of his wife Florence and many others aspiring to a democratic – rather than demagogic – cinema, he created The Millennium Film Workshop in New York City. A non-profit filmmaker’s co-operative open to all, it made available film equipment, workspace, screenings and classes at little or no cost. Later he found himself teaching large classes of painfully docile students at St. John’s University in Jamaica, Queens.
In 1969, after a week’s guest seminar at Harpur College (now, °®¶ą´«Ă˝), students petitioned the Administration to hire Ken Jacobs. Despite his lack of a high school diploma, the Administration – during that special period of anguish and possibility – decided that, as a teacher, he was “a natural.” Together with Larry Gottheim he organized the SUNY system’s first Department of Cinema, teaching thoughtful consideration of every kind of film but specializing in avant-garde cinema appreciation and production. (Department graduates are world-recognized as having an exceptional presence in this field.) His own early studies under Hofmann would increasingly figure in his film work, making for an Abstract Expressionist cinema, clearly evident in his avant-garde classic Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969) and increasingly so in his subsequent devising of the unique Nervous System series of live film-projection performances.
The Museum of The Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, hosted a full retrospective of his work in 1989, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) held a partial retrospective in 1996, as did the American House in Paris in 1994 and the Arsenal Theater in Berlin in 1986 (during his 6-month stay as guest-recipient of Berlin’s DAAD award). He has also performed in Japan, at the Louvre in Paris, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, etc. Honors include the Maya Deren Award of the American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Award and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant. A 1999 interview with Ken Jacobs can be seen online as part of UC Berkeley’s series Conversations with History.September 22, 2022
Ken Jacobs: In Conversation with Vincent GrenierKEN JACOBS (See biography above)
VINCENT GRENIER is a native of Quebec City, Canada. He has lived lrgely in the US, mostly New York City and upstate New York. In spite of this, he was a frequent contributor to the Montreal art scene of the ’70s and ’80s and the San Francisco bay areas where he received an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early ’70s. Grenier's experimental films have been shown in the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan and China at showcases such as the Cineprobe at MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, the Collective for Living Cinema, Cinéma Parallèle in Montréal, Centre George Pompidou in Paris and MoCA Shanghai, among many others. His films and videos have earned him nine production grants from the Canada Council for the Arts between 1974 and 1992, and in New York State, from CAPS (1979), NYFA (1995), ETC (1992 & 1994) and NYSCA (2007). He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010) and the Stan Brakhage Vision Award (2019).
He has made over two dozen films and, since the mid 90's, nearly as many videos. Many of his videos have been shown regularly at key experimental film festivals such as Views from the Avant-Garde of the New York Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Onion City Film Festival in Chicago and Media City Film Festival in Windsor, Ontario. Grenier's films and videos have been the subjects of retrospectives, more recently at the Denver Film Festival, the Cinémathèque québécoise, REDCAT, LA Film Forum, CalArts, Media City Film Festival and Images Festival's Canadian Images Spotlight. Seven of his films & videos were included in the Whitney Museum’s American Century 1970-2000 film programs.
His video Watercolor (2013) received first prizes in the experimental category at Black Maria Film Festival and Athens Film Festival. Les Chaises (2008) won a Jury’s Choice Award at Black Maria Film Festival and an Honorable Mention at Media City Film Festival. Tabula Rasa (2004) was screened in the program “Best Avant Garde Films & Videos of the Decade” at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater and won a second prize at Media City Film Festival. Here (2002) was awarded Gold for Best Experimental Film at the New York Expo of Short Film and Video. Color Study (2000) earned a second prize at the Black Maria Film Festival. Feet (1994) won a second prize at the Black Maria Festival and was shown in the WNET series Reel NY. His film Out in the Garden (1991) received the Best Documentary Award at Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Best Experimental Documentary Award at the Atlanta Film/Video Festival. It was also shown on WNET and at London Film Festival. Interieur Interiors (1978) was a second prize winner at the San Francisco Art Institute Film Festival, and World in Focus (1976) was a second prize winner at Ann Arbor Film Festival. Grenier’s films are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto and many other institutions in Canada and the US.
October 6, 2022
Lori Felker
Look Down & Find It (made with Julian Day, 13 min., 2021), Memoria Data (12 min., 2018), I Can’t (5 min., 2020), Not You (10:41 min., 2020), Discontinuity (15:33 min., 2016), Spontaneous (13:53 min., 2020)LORI FELKER is a filmmaker, teacher, programmer, and performer. Her films celebrate the ineloquent, oppositional, frustrating, chaotic qualities of human interaction. She has made work in a variety of forms including, experimental film, video installation, music video, documentary, and fiction. Her short films and one feature documentary have screened internationally at festivals including Rotterdam, Slamdance, Ann Arbor Film Festival, BAMcinemaFest, EXiS in Korea, Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal and Kinodot in Russia. She loves every facet of filmmaking and has worked as a cinematographer, editor, and/or actor for various artists and directors and has programmed for the likes of the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Slamdance, and Roots & Culture Gallery in Chicago. She is a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant, a Wexner Center Residency, a Brico Forward Fund and a Fulbright (Berlin, 2000). As of 2022, she is an Assistant Professor at DePaul University in Chicago.
October 25, 2022
Emmanuel Lefrant
All Over (16mm, color, sound, 7 min., 2001), Underground (16mm, color, sound, 8 min., 2001), Saraban (16mm, color, sound, 6 min., 2002), Still Frames (16mm, color, silent, 3 min., 2002), Overall (16mm, color, sound, 5 min., 2006), Blitz (16mm, color, sound, 6 min., 2006), Parties visible et invisible d'un ensemble sous tension (16mm, color, sound, 7 min., 2009), Le pays dévasté (35mm on digital file, color, sound, 11:30 min., 2015), I Don't Think I Can See an Island (35mm on digital file, color, sound, 4:10 min., 2016), Per una selva oscura (35mm on digital file, color, sound, 8:25 min., 2022)EMMANUEL LEFRANT lives and works in Paris, where he makes films, all self-produced and exclusively on celluloid. His films deal with the idea of representing and revealing an invisible world (the secret forms of emulsion), a nature one does not see. With Nicolas Berthelot, Alexis Constantin and Stéphane Courcy, he cofounded the collective Nominoë in 2000. Nominoë’s live projection performances have been presented in venues worldwide including the Pompidou Centre, the Serralvès Foundation in Porto, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, among others.
November 22, 2022
In Memoriam Jim Jennings
Bye Bye Bob (16mm, b&w, sound, 11 min., 1990), Made in Chinatown (16mm, color, silent, 6 min., 2006), Wall Street (16mm, b&w, silent, 6 min., 1980), Elements (16mm, b&w, silent, 7 min., 2002), Silvercup (16mm, b&w, silent, 12 min., 1998), Fashion Avenue (16mm, b&w, silent, 7 min., 2007), Refraction (16mm, color, silent, 3 min., 1972)JIM JENNINGS (1951-2022) was an American experimental filmmaker and photographer. His films have been screened at some dozen solo shows in the United States and Europe, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the San Francisco Cinematheque to the Oberhausen Film Festival in Germany, International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Netherlands and the Viennale in Austria. His work has also been included in group shows at the Whitney Museum, the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant-Garde.” Jennings’s work has been shown at major venues since 1973, beginning at the Collective for Living Cinema. His black-and-white, silver gelatin photographic prints have been exhibited in gallery shows in New York City and are included in major art collections.
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Spring 2022
March 29, 2022
Luis MacĂas
The Eyes Empty and the Pupils Burning of Rage and Desire (2 x 16mm projectors, silent, 25 min.), The Kiss (35mm, sound, 9 min.), Spectral Landscape (3 x 35mm slide projectors, silent, 25 min.)Luis MacĂas (Barcelona, Spain) is a film artist interested in the materiality of celluloid and the appropriation and reinvention of recycled found materials through live performance using projectors. MacĂas studied at Centro de Estudios Cinematográficos de Cataluña (CECC) and graduated in Art History from Murcia University, Spain. His films and performances have been presented at various museums and film festivals, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam and Light Cone in Paris. MacĂas is co-founder of Crater Lab, an independent artist film lab in Barcelona.
April 5, 2022
Kim Kielhofner
Cahiers 1-4 (video, 9:38 min., 2010), Rehearsal (video, 2:37 min., 2012), Louis (Over Nebraska) (video, 6:34 min., 2015), Anna (video, 5:17 min., 2017), THIRD READING (video, 10:58 min., 2017), Endgame (video, 1:30 min., 2011), The Shepherd (video, 6:08 min., 2018), The Coldest Day of the Year (video, 8:36 min., 2020), Today I Did Nothing (video, 8:21 min., 2022)Kim Kielhofner works in video, drawing, and collage. She is interested in how we understand narratives - personal and historic - and how we place ourselves into them. Her process is based on interests in layered narrative, cinema, and literature through which she has developed an archive of images and ideas. Her work has been presented in solo shows at Dazibao (Montréal, CA), LUX (London, UK), VOX (Montréal, CA), Sporobole (Sherbrooke, CA) and k48 (Vienna, AT). Her work has also been shown widely in group exhibitions and screenings including Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, WRO Biennale, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, and Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Buenos Aires. She has been an artist in residence at KulturKontakt (Vienna, AT), Aberystwyth Arts Centre (UK), The Red Mansion Foundation (Beijing, CN), and International Studio and Curatorial Program (Brooklyn, US).
April 14, 2022
Ephraim Asili
The Inheritance
(35mm, 100 min., 2021)After nearly a decade exploring different facets of the African diaspora – and his own place within it – Ephraim Asili makes his feature-length debut with The Inheritance, an astonishing ensemble work set almost entirely within a West Philadelphia house where a community of young, Black artists and activists form a collective. A scripted drama of characters attempting to work towards political consensus – based partly on Asili’s own experiences in a Black liberationist group – weaves with a documentary recollection of the Philadelphia liberation group MOVE, the victim of a notorious police bombing in 1985. Ceaselessly finding commonalities between politics, humor and philosophy, with Black authors and radicals at its edges, The Inheritance is a remarkable film about the world as we know it. – Grasshopper Film
Ephraim Asili is a filmmaker, DJ, and Traveler whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; San Francisco International Film Festival; Milano Film Festival; International Film Festival Rotterdam; MoMA PS1; LAMOCA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. As a DJ, Asili can be heard on his radio program In the Cut on WGXC, or live at his monthly dance party Botanica. Asili currently resides in Hudson, NY, and is a professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College.
- Fall 2021
- Spring 2021
- Fall 2020
Tuesday November 10, 2020
PEER BODE: A RETROSPECTIVEIn a career spanning over 4 decades, video artist Peer Bode has created an extensive body of work that investigates electronic media events, active perception systems and culture. A graduate of °®¶ą´«Ă˝â€™s Cinema Department, Bode studied with Ken Jacobs, Larry Gottheim, Nicholas Ray and Peter Kubelka, and later with Woody and Steina Vasulka, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad and Hollis Frampton at SUNY Buffalo’s Media Study Program. Bode worked at the Experimental Television Center (ETC), which his lifelong mentor and friend Ralph Hocking established in °®¶ą´«Ă˝ in 1970. At the ETC, Bode made his seminal early works while assisting and collaborating with the video artist and engineer David Jones, whose “Jones Frame Buffer” became a signature processor within Bode’s oeuvre. His work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the Whitney Biennial, the European Media Art Festival (Germany), Impakt Film and Video Art Festival (the Netherlands), Viper Festival (Switzerland), among many others. A key figure of the Owego and Alfred schools of video arts, Bode headed the Video Arts Program at the School of Art and Design, NYSCC at Alfred University, where he co-founded the Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA).
PROGRAM:
Part 1
Blue (4:50 min., 1975) / 100 Sec. Lumination (1:40 min., 1976) / Movements for Video, Dance and Music (11:44 min., 1976) / Camel With Window Memory (4:22 min., 1983) / Uber Organ (6 min., 2003) / Songs for Beijing (5:30 min., 2003)Part 2
Wonderful Body Electric, Music, Writing, Data (4 min., 2013) / Harbin Infinite Write (15 min., 2016) / Turn You Change Direction (6:41 min., 2017) / Apparatus Part Two (6:06 min., 2020) / Apparatus Part One (7:40 min., 2020)TRT 74 min.
- Fall 2019
Wednesday September 25, 2019
Orgone Energy Accumulator by Kenneth White
Lecture Hall B89
Screening: WR: Mysteries of the Organism (Dušan Makavejev, 1971, 85 min)Cinema Prof. Kenneth White presents the Orgone Energy Accumulator, a mysterious device invented by the radical Freudo-Marxist Wilhelm Reich. Reich first designed the Accumulator in 1940, envisioning it as a kind of fallout shelter against rising fascism. Following Reich’s blueprints, Prof. White and the artists Peggy Ahwesh, Keith Sanborn, and Soyoung Yoon, built a new Accumulator. Prof. White will speak about the Accumulator’s purpose, history, and legacy. Followed by a screening of WR: Mysteries of the Organism, the acclaimed film on the life and work of Reich by Dušan Makavejev (1932–2019).
Tuesday October 15, 2019
Phil Solomon
Screening: The Passage of the Bride (16mm, 6:00 min.,1980) | The Snowman (16mm, 8:00 min., 1995) | Nocturne (16mm, 10:00 min., 1980) | Psalm II: “Walking Distance” (16mm, 23:00 min., 1999) | Remains to be Seen (Super-8 to 16mm, 17:00 min., 1989/94)
TRT: 64 min.A celebration of artist, filmmaker, University of Colorado Boulder Professor and former BU Cinema Department student. “Phil Solomon was among the great avant-garde filmmakers of this era. Solomon’s films and videos create an interior universe that has rarely, if ever, been surpassed in any medium for its intimacy, evocation of personal sensibility, expressive dream-like sounds and images, and for its sublime—and terrifying—sense of ambiguity between the recognizable world and its dissolution. Perhaps the last significant innovator of special effects on celluloid, Solomon magically transforms pre-existing images and sounds into dense landscapes.” (Steve Anker)
Thursday October 24, 2019
Hey-Yeun Jang
Screening: on/off (film, 2:30 min) | Flickering (video, 7 min.) | 4-frame movie (film, 2:30 min) | (k)now (t)here (film, 8:50 min) | orchard, 5 (film, 7:30 min) | picture day: flip side (video, 17min) | ';' (film in progress, 10min)
TRT: 59 min.Hey-Yeun, Jang is a Korea-born, New York-based installation and film artist. She often uses sequences of 16mm film still images to examine fleeting moments and meaning of swallowed words: explore in-between. Her installations have been exhibited in museum internationally and her films have screened at prestigious venues and numerous festival in the US, Europe and Korea. She received awards from New York State Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Tuesday October 29, 2019
Carolee Schneemann
Introduced by Kenneth White
A celebration of the artist, writer, and filmmaker Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019), with a special screening of celebrated Schneemann’s films Fuses (1964–67) and Kitch’s Last Meal (1973–76).
Friday November 8, 2019
Marielle Nitoslawska
Screening: Breaking the Frame (100 min., 2012)Marielle Nitoslawska’s Breaking the Frame is a feature–length profile of the radical New York artist Carolee Schneemann. A pioneer of performance art and avant-garde cinema, Schneemann has been breaking the frames of the art world for five decades by challenging the taboos leveled against the female body. Breaking the Frame is a kinetic, hyper-cinematic intervention, a critical meditation on the intimate correlations animating art and life.
“A work about a formidable artist that is itself an important work of art.” – Mark McElhatten, Views from the Avant-Garde, New York Film Festival.Note: Another screening will be on Sunday November 10, 2019.
Thursday November 14, 2019
Ariana Gerstein
Screening: Close the Lid, Gently (4:56 min.) | Performance for Perfection 1200 (13:36 min.) | Images of Flying and Falling (24:14 min.) | upCycles (7:03 min.) | In Glass Houses (8:22 min.) | Skin in the Game (5:02 min.) | Traces of Elikem (6:59 min.)
TRT: 68 min.
Using complex hand-wrought editing methods and extensive optical printing Gerstein’s work dazzles in its visual complexity and rhythmic timing. Gerstein’s recent work innovatively integrates desktop image scanners into her analog filmmaking process, capturing minute personal gestures in a sort of slow-motion real-time animation process, creating a visuality both intimate and abstract. – Steve Polta, SF Cinematheque
Her films have been screened and awarded prizes at festivals worldwide and awarded grants by New York Council for the Arts, N Y Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship.
Tuesday November 19, 2019
Malena Szlam
Screening: Chronogram of Inexistent Time (35mm to digital, 6:00 min., 2008) | Rhythm Trail (Super 8mm, 10:00 min., 2010 – 2011) | Anagrams of Light (Super 8mm, 3:00 min., 2011) | Beneath Your Skin of Deep Hollow (Super 8mm to 16mm, 3:40 min., 2010) | Lunar Almanac (16mm, 4:00 min., 2013) | MorfologĂa de un sueño (16mm, 5:30 min., 2015) | ALTIPLANO (35mm, 15:30 min., 2018)
TRT: 48 min.
“Malena Szlam’s films are meticulously assembled using a menagerie of techniques to physically alter the film elements resulting in dreamlike, collaged, flickering images leaving viewers with a sense of wonderment, displacement and an expanded sense of time. Szlam’s careful construction of her works serves to ground and guide viewers on a serene journey through these brief and powerful cinematic experiences.” (Los Angeles Film Forum). Chilean filmmaker Malena Szlam is a member of Montréal’s Double Negative Collective. - Spring 2019
Vincent Grenier
Jodie Mack
Alexandra Cuesta - Fall 2018
Stephanie Black
Helga Fanderl
Rose Lowder - Spring 2018
Canyon Cinema 50 by David Dinnell
Roger Beebe
Laura Kraning - Fall 2017
Larry Gottheim
Katherin McInnis
John Porter
(John Knecht) - Spring 2017
Ernie Gehr
Leiws Klahr
John Knecht - Fall 2016
Peter Hutton (in memorial)
Henry Hills
Jesse McLean
Gustav Deutsch & Hanna Schimek - Spring 2016
Shambhavi Kaul
Erin Espelie
Ken Jacobs - Fall 2015
Tess Takahashi
Daichi Saito
Maile Colbert
Scott McDonald - Spring 2015
Mary Helena Clark
Robert Beaver
Fern Silva - Fall 2014
Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder
Stephanie Barber
Richard Tuohy - Spring 2014
Susan Ray
Wenhua Shi
Joshua Bonnetta - Fall 2013
Scott Stark
Jim Cohen
Madison Brookshire
Tomonari Nishikawa
Jennifer Lauren Smith - Spring 2013
Ute Aurand
Laida Lertxundi
Monteith McCollum
Chris Sullivan - Fall 2012
Ben Rivers
Jonathan Walley
Peter Rose - Spring 2012
Emily Kunstler
Ken Jacobs
Jennifer Montgomery - Fall 2011
Nathaniel Dorsky
Vincent Grenier
Dani Leventhal
Ben Russell - Spring 2011
Melika Bass
Deborah Stratman
Robert Todd - Fall 2010
Jacqueline Goss
Chris Kennedy
Mark Street - Spring 2010
Tony Conrad
Nicky Hamlyn
Todd McGowan
Naomi Uman - Fall 2009
Joseph Branden
Abraham Ravett
Hitoshi Toyoda - Spring 2009
Ken Jacobs
Michael Robinson - Fall 2008
Matt McCormick
Shana Moulton
Ghen Zando-Dennis - Spring2008
Saul Levine
Jeanne Liotta
Leonard Retel Helmrich - Fall2007
Martha Colburn
Phil Hoffman
Leslie Thornton - Spring2007
Larry Gottheim
Ernie Gehr
Phil Hoffman - Fall2006
Bill Brown
Cathy Crane
Zoë Beloff - Spring2006
- Fall2005
- Spring2005
Ken Jacobs
Bruce McClure
Michael Gitlin
Black Maria Film Festival
Martin Arnold - Fall2004
Abigail Child
Nina Fonoroff
Phil Solomon
Ariana Gerstein - Spring2004
Joe Gibbons
Mark Lapore
Leighton Pierce
Vincent Grenier - Fall2003
Su Friedrich
Bradley Eros
Peter Hutton - Spring2003
Black Maria Film & Video Festival
Janie Geiser
Michele Smith
Greg Biermann - Fall2002
Peggy Awesh
Ken Jacobs
David Gatten
Holly Fisher - Spring2002
Black Maria Film & Video Festival
Lynne Sachs
Jennifer Reeves
Miranda July
Ken Jacobs - Fall2001
Konrad Steiner
Lewis Klahr
Luis Recoder - Spring2001
Chris Sullivan
Robert Beavers
Martin Arnold
Barbara Meter
Guy Sherwin
Ariana Gerstein - Fall2000
Ximena Cuevas
Stephanie Barber
Julie Murray
Ariana Gerstein
Gerald Marks - Spring2000
Black Maria Film Festival
Craig Baldwin
Bill Morrison
Vincent Grenier
Robert Attanasio
David Gatten - Fall1999
Henry Hill
Fred Worden
Jim Jennings - Spring1999
Dave Ryan
Bruce McClure
Alex Mendizabal