giroscopio (2021) by John Muse & Brendamaris Rodriguez
the brick and the mirror
Friday, September 8 | 7pm at Gray Area
CROSSROADS 2023 opens with ringing, circling bouquets of ecstatic gestures, oscillations of kinetic song, mechanical delirium, otoacoustic exaltation and corybantic instability. Speculations on rotary motion, cinematic intermittency, haptic alchemy, accident and audiovisual hallucination rise from flicker, disorientation and dissolution. Mirrors shatter. All is quiet in the turning and music fills the air.
SCREENING: giroscopio (2021) by John Muse (US) & Brendamaris Rodriguez (Puerto Rico); digital video, color, sound, 8 minutes. dissolution (2023) by Jenelle Stafford (US) & Ramin Roshandel (US/Iran); digital video, color, sound, 5 minutes. The Sick Sense 2023: The Year We Make Kontakte (or, My Friend Flicker) (2023) by Brent Coughenour (US); video/sound performance, color, sound, 25 minutes. Bouquets 31–40 (2022) by Rose Lowder (France/Peru); 16mm, color, silent, 11 minutes. Music in the Air (2023) by Scott Stark (US); 16mm, color, sound, 15 minutes. TRT: 60 minutes
program community partner: Shapeshifters Cinema
PROGRAM TICKETS
$12 General/$10 Cinematheque Members, Gray Area Members & students (with ID)
FESTIVAL PASSES
$110 General/$88 Cinematheque Members, Gray Area Members & students (with ID)
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CROSSROADS 2023
giroscopio (2021) by John Muse & Brendamaris Rodriguez
giroscopio is by two artists—one in Pennsylvania; one in Puerto Rico—each in pandemic lockdown, each disoriented. Objects seem to control them; their bodies are unbalanced, unwieldy, comical. The horizon spins; the ground falls away; and yet a strange wonder reigns. giroscopio es un cortometraje experimental de dos artistas, uno en Pensilvania y otro en Puerto Rico, cada uno en confinamiento por la pandemia, cada uno desorientado. Los objetos parecen controlarlos; sus cuerpos son desequilibrados, difíciles de manejar, cómicos. El horizonte gira; el suelo se cae; y, sin embargo, reina una extraña maravilla. (John Muse & Brendamaris Rodriguez)
dissolution (2023) by Jenelle Stafford & Ramin Roshandel
psychic & material exposure: a system of responses, a series of turns, a choral round, a spell. (Jenelle Stafford) bay area premiere
The Sick Sense 2023: The Year We Make Kontakte (or, My Friend Flicker) (2023) by Brent Coughenour
Building on research by Diana Deutsch, Alfred Bregman, Maryanne Amacher and others, The Sick Sense is an ongoing project exploring the limits of the perceptual system. These projects stimulate otoacoustic and flicker phenomena and auditory and visual hallucinations while searching for stimulus patterns that deactivate the brain’s default mode network, switching the brain into the role of ecstatic perceiver. (Brent Coughenour) bay area premiere
Bouquets 31–40 (2022) by Rose Lowder
Bouquets 31–40 continues, like the previous Bouquets, to explore different places, which for various reasons, are ecological. In 31–40 they are in France, in Ardèche, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Tarn and Vaucluse and also in Piemont, Italy. (Light Cone) bay area premiere
Music in the Air (2023) by Scott Stark
In a live double-16mm projector performance, Scott Stark feeds gorgeous Kodachrome found footage—from a 1950s promo doc about a fabled teen music camp near Stockton CA—into his propeller-driven projection system to generate a transformative visual spectacle. Using two reels of film, the on-screen image alternates between the left and right projectors, transposing objects onto bodies, landscapes onto buildings, sidewalks onto swimming pools and subtle musical movements onto frenetic explosions of color. (Scott Stark)
John Muse (US) writes criticism, makes experimental films, paintings and installation works and teaches visual studies at Haverford College.
Brendamaris Rodriguez (Puerto Rico) is a visual artist and performance artist living and working in Puerto Rico.
Jenelle Stafford (US) is a filmmaker, writer and cinematographer concerned with slowness, touch and close-looking.
Ramin Roshandel (US/Iran) is a composer and setar player. Considering phenomena such as instability, cultural identity and communicational language on one hand and being inspired by Persian music intervals as a setar player on the other has led him to consider indeterminate, improvisatory and abstract structures and to make contrasts with post- or non-tonal forms or to converge the two.
Brent Coughenour (US) is a media artist originally from the Motor City currently based in the Rose City whose most recent work incorporates computer programming for live manipulation of sound and image. He has presented his work at festivals and venues throughout the US and internationally, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Media City Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. His work is distributed by Video Data Bank.
Rose Lowder (France/Peru) Although I began filmmaking by pursuing concerns common to other contemporary art practices, my attention was rapidly attracted by a twofold feature of the photographic procedure which allows one to handle the content and the form of the material while the process inscribes automatically some of the traces and characteristics of the reality being recorded. This paradox led me to study perception, the possibilities and problematics of research in art as well as how theoretical approaches to experimental film and traditional cinema have evolved. Underlying these studies is a search for meaningful ways to work with film regarding our contemporary society controlled by multinational economics. As the totalitarian environments of urban landscapes become more and more uninhabitable, I seek, against the grain in our “virtual” space age it seems, a more human physical home. (Canyon Cinema)
Scott Stark (US) has made over 85 films and videos as well as numerous moving image installations, live performances and photo-collages. His work has shown nationally and internationally in venues as diverse as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Cinematheque, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Tokyo Image Forum and many others. His 16mm film Angel Beach was invited into the 2002 Whitney Biennial and in 2007 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in San Francisco, California.