Pictured above: Dirtscraper by Peter Burr
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Admission: $10 General/$5 Cinematheque Members and Headlands Center for the Arts Members
Advance tickets available here
This program is co-presented with Headlands Center for the Arts

A mix of intricate patterns that vibrate, flicker, and hypnotize. Viewing Burr’s work feels like entering into a dark, digital cave. —Alex Ginsberg, Electric Objects

I make infinite dungeons. —Peter Burr

Working extensively with computer animation and the tools of the video game industry, the digital works of Peter Burr present infinitely sprawling landscapes and environments which vacillate between abstraction and figuration and describe dystopian narratives of endless questing. Recent work explores the video game trope of the endlessly mutating, self-constructing labyrinth. Visiting from Brooklyn as an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, Burr appears in person to expound on his process and radical synthetic aesthetic and to present a retrospective of works 2012–2017, including a work-in-progress preview of his latest immersive environmental video Dirtscraper.

Burr’s art conjures the future—projection screens picturing high density structures that resemble malls populated by people who move in slow motion; text by video game designer Porpentine that describes opinionless cultures; undulating black and white patterns designed to mesmerize the viewer. Unlike movies, though, which tend to center around heroes and villains, there’s no morality attached to this environment. It’s not good, or bad. It just is. (Paddy Johnson, Art F City)

FILMS TO SCREEN:
Alone with the Moon (2012): Burr creates a slow, liminal illusion in black-and-white, switching perspectives and matrices and crescendoing in time with Christopher Doulgeris’s portentously pulsating soundtrack.

Special Effect (2014): Channeling Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), this film’s fractured and spiraling narrative is traversed through a hypnotizing blend of live action and various digital animation styles.

Green | Red (2014): Burr conjures a shape-shifting world where the sidewalks are endless, the radio is playing electric, and the night sky is broken open by a cataclysm of shuddering stars.

The Mess (2016): This film follows the perspective of a solitary woman who descends into an abandoned subterranean ‘arcology.’ She is tasked with cleaning up the mess that has spawned from this feral structure, becoming lost in the process.

Pattern Language (2017): Architect Christopher Alexander’s design theories are applied towards a generative video game labyrinth, resulting in this rhythmic animation made of rippling, skipping, and strobing arrays of light infused with programmatic digital pixelation.

NEMATODES from Peter Burr on Vimeo.

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