aDifferent Program 2 | Decanted Cyphers
3:00 PM | Saturday, July 20th 2024 | Woodland Pattern
720 E Locust St | Milwaukee, WI, 53212
The Amber Gates, Laura Iancu, 4 min 00 sec
Synopsis |
The Troite are protective totems placed at crossroads, water sprouts and in places of remembrance. They are the pillars of heaven and the mystical gateways of the Amber Mountains of Romania.
Artist Bio |
Iancu is a visual artist working primarily in experimental video forms and immersive 3D animation & gaming, with an expanded practice of installation and photography. Originally from Romania, she has been teaching, and making images in the US for more a decade. Currently Laura is an assistant professor of film production at Virginia Tech, School of Performing Arts.
Thematically she works around issues of ecology, ethnography, civic resistance under oppressive regimes of power and forms of humor as subversion mechanisms for prescriptive discourses and representations. Her work originates from puzzling together all the hints of the world, the gestural intertextuality, the perceptive and surface qualities of objects, geographical mappings, aspects of sound art, poetry, magic realism, pop/internet culture, gardening, and the mutations of emerging moving image technologies, including the rise in Generative AI technologies.
ABURIDASHI Assortment: Video Letters written in invisible ink. / 映像書簡あぶり出し·あそーと。, Nonoho Suzuki, 9 min 24 sec
Synopsis |
This work is an experimental documentary animation by the traditional Japanese technique of "ABURIDASHI". And it's consists of three parts: Beginning, Middle, and End. "Beginning" is a personal video made to celebrate my friend Hiratake-san. "Middle" is about Hiratake-san's anger at the government responses to the Great East Japan earthquake. "End" is about the fear of war in which get involved individuals. This work depicts how my perspective changes from an individual to a nation over a period of 10 years.
[Director’s statement]
I am empty. I am nothing.
The only thing that floats in the void is the frustration of being alive.
I see the videos I made in the past.
Now, my daughters are a high school student and a junior high school student.
However, in the video, it stops they are as an elementary school student and kindergarten student.
What am I?
At that time, I didn't know that there is a war going on in the future.
At that time, I didn't know that my mind become sick and empty in the future.
In order to move forward now, the only thing I can do is to broil each papers one by one.
Artist Bio |
Nonoho Suzuki was born in Tokyo 1980. Graduated the 26th class of Image Forum Institute of the Moving Image. He is the second son of Shirouyasu Suzuki who is a poet and a filmmaker and the husband of Yuri Muraoka who is a filmmaker and a poet. His works are Take the wind (2008), I, and LA TAKE and Wii ”Gypsum” (2009) and so on. Take the wind (2008) won the Excellence Awards at the Tokyo Video Festival 2009. A father of two daughters.
Billy Billy, Billy Palumbo, 6 min 15 sec
Synopsis |
The myth of Billy the Kid echoes into and out of unknown oblivion.
Artist Bio |
Billy Palumbo is an experimental filmmaker, programmer, and educator in Oklahoma City.
APPENDAGES, Weston Lyon, 6 min 39 sec
Synopsis |
1937 marked the release of the first fully-animated feature film. Appendages is a study of the moment preceding this milestone, where rigid departments of film labor separated women from men. The production of cell animation in the early days of the American studio system is really a story of gender lines and both an invitation for women to partake in the filmmaking process and a prevention of them advancing professionally beyond entry-level departments. Appendages brings together this site of animation labor and the action of a Starfish character (pulled from The Walt Disney Studio’s 1937 short film, Hawaiian Holiday) reproducing photo-mechanically at an uncontrollable rate. The screen is eventually swarmed; the Starfish paralyzed in full gallop, perverted from the natural world but desperate to realign itself against the celerity of entertainment’s working hours.
Artist Bio |
Weston Lyon is a filmmaker and photographer living in Los Angeles. His recent work deals with the history of animation, its popular styles and business models of production. His work has been in exhibition and screened at spaces like the Torrance Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Deslave, Human Resources, as well as film festivals in the US and abroad. He has produced and directed films including 40HANDS (2023), APPENDAGES (2023), CLEARWATER PROGRESS (2021), BIG WATER (2019), and THE NIGHT TAPES (2018). He received his MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 2017 and now teaches part-time in the Visual Arts and Media Studies department of Pasadena City College.
The Stream XIII, Hiroya Sakurai, 5 min 21 sec
Synopsis |
In my "The Stream series", I have expressed the transformation of landscapes as a result of the interactions between humans and nature.
In "The Stream XIII", the 13th in the series, I focused on how the landscape is transformed when the wind as a weather phenomenon streams through the fields and reed fields cultivated by humans.
For sound effects, I used the sound of a wind chime. A wind chime consists of a bell made of iron with a weight suspended by a string inside. When the wind blows, the weight rings inside by wind pressure.
I used the wind chime to perceive the invisible presence of wind as sound. And also we can perceive the invisible presence of wind as visualized wind ripples in the fields.
I expressed the invisible scenery through sound and images.
Artist Bio |
Hiroya Sakurai
Born in Yokohama, Japan.
Graduated from University of Tsukuba.
Sakurai’s work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and J.Paul Getty Trust. Sakurai was awarded at “35th Asolo Art Film Festival (2016)", Italy, "39th Tokyo Video Festival", "18th FILE 2017 ", São Paulo (2017) and "56th Ann Arbor Film Festival" (2018).
Exhibitions include "4th Sydney Biennale (1982),"62nd Melbourne International Film Festival"(2013),"58th San Francisco International Film Festival" (2015) and "24th Rhode Island International Film Festival"(2020)
Not so Kool’haas, Lisa Marie Schmitt, 9 min 34 sec
Synopsis |
In April 1959, the Soviet satellite Sputnik ll entered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned up over the Caribbean Ocean. By that moment, the dead body of the street dog Laika had already orbited the Earth 2570 times. Since then, tons of rockets, spacecraft, and measuring instruments have been launched into space without any plan for what to do with them at the end of their lives. Not so Kool’haas interweaves the problem of space junk with ideas of contemporary urban planning, its etymological counterpart Junk Space, a term coined by Architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas during the early 2000s. Thereby, the film poses the question what attitude is so unifying behind modern architecture and the conquest of space.
Artist Bio |
Lisa Marie Schmitt, (*1991 in Trier, Germany) studied Fine Arts at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar in Saarbrücken. After graduating in 2017 she attended a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts Paris funded by Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral. She was awarded several scholarships, such as the GLOBAL Stipendium by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe (2021) and a work stipend by the Stiftung Kunstfonds (2023). Her works have been recently presented at Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, Roam projects, Brücke-Museum Berlin, Galerie Bernau and Galeria Posibilă in Bucharest. Lisa Marie Schmitt lives and works between Berlin, Germany and Romania.
Midsummer, Masha Vlasova, 2 min 37 sec
Synopsis |
Midsummer is a cyanotype, sun-printed film. The film was conceived during Juhannus, the celebration of the longest day of the year in Finland, when the sun doesn’t set for 24 hours. The light of the sun is both material and collaborator in creating this film-poem.
Artist Bio |
Masha Vlasova is an award-winning experimental and non-fiction filmmaker. She studied art at the Cooper Union (BFA, 2012), Yale University (MFA, 2016), and is a recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship in Filmmaking (2012-2013). Vlasova has exhibited and screened her films at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Smack Mellon, Anthology Archives, Abrons Arts Center, the Border Project Gallery in New York City, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, among others. Her recent film “Un-Tidal” received two awards for “Original Concept” and “Best Celluloid Film” at Experimental Film Festival of East Anglia, UK. She teaches film production and experimental film at Oxford College of Emory University and lives in Atlanta, GA. She’s a MacDowell Fellow.
Reporting from the Ghost Cities of the Metaverse: Decentraland, SubNet, 5 min 22 sec
Synopsis |
Reporting from the Ghost Cities of the Metaverse explores empty and ineffective metaverse platforms using video, social media relational aesthetics, and live streaming performance/discussions. These artistic forms serve to critique techno-feudalist fantasies by examining the siloing of creative possibility in real time using glitch processing and dialectical argumentation in text and sound.
Artist Bio |
Created in fall of 2021, Sub Net is an anonymous new media art project that explores the mirror stage of online identity formation and challenges the promises, politics and power dynamics of technology & capitalism. They are a dream who thought it was a person. Their body of work intersects and tangles topics ranging from the amplification of the absurd within the metaverse; performative nostalgia baiting; and social media engagement as a site for relational aesthetics. Their work resolves as video artworks, live streaming performances, abject game art and interactive WebGL experiences.
The Ant Colony, Natasha Cantwell, 2 min 22 sec