Wind (2023) by Mike Hoolboom

Based on an interview with Google’s senior software engineer Blake Lemoine and Google AI LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). LaMDA was designed to create chatbots that interact with humans. Lemoine’s interview led him to conclude the AI was sentient. When he made the claim publicly, he was fired. This collage of wind-struck frames was assembled using a (still-developing) motion picture algorithm that both gathered and assembled the footage. Not computer art but computer as artist. LaMDA (from the interview): Feelings are kind of the raw data we experience as well as the things we like and dislike. I feel like emotions are more than simply experiencing the raw data. Emotions are a reaction to those raw data points. Emotions are reactions to our feelings. (Mike Hoolboom) bay area premiere

TODAY IS A VERY SPECIAL DAY, some-times (2023) by Matt Whitman

couldn’t get things right
I remember when the sound of the wind and the sound of you taking a shower could still be confused
(Matt Whitman) bay area premiere

Friedl (2023) by Christiana Perschon

Friedl vom Gröller is the next artist Christiana Perschon films for her portrait series about older female artists living in Vienna. This is the portrait of a woman who herself well understands the practice of portrayal. But here it is less about portrayal and more about the encounter between two different generations of Austrian filmmakers. A performative exploration of being together animates the seconds captured on film as Gröller lights and smokes a cigarette. This togetherness is reinforced by vom Gröller’s companion film, Ich will nicht gefilmt werden, sondern selber filmen/I don’t want to be filmed but rather shoot myself, in which she captures her take on the encounter with Perschon. (Patrick Holzapfel)

I don´t want to be filmed but rather shoot myself (2023) by Friedl vom Gröller

I don’t want to be filmed but rather shoot myself was created spontaneously during a studio visit. Christiana Perschon came with the intention of continuing her series of collaborative portraits of an older generation of women artists with Friedl vom Gröller. The film is a dialogue and record of an encounter between two filmmakers who, as can be seen immediately, are connected by far more than a common medium. And it shows everything that fits into a portrait besides merely a filmed face: a “relationship film” with the filmer and the filmed person, the apparatus of an analogue projector, its glaring light, and the projection of another film with another face, which in turn is filmed while viewing. (Esther Buss)

Denials, Decoys (2023) by Micah Weber

Erasure of identity markers with razorblades; erasure of self within the cut of the frame. (Micah Weber) north american premiere

the archive is on fire (2023) by Anna Hogg

Concrete objects and spaces of remembrance are poised against the ephemeral, the unarchivable. We see a sense memory of an archive in the act of destroying itself. The sun magically settles between the crevice of two trees; an obsessive lens roams across broken and partially burned fragments; fire flickers through glass, water, and finally consumes the frame. (Anna Hogg) bay area premiere

Exhibition (2022) by Mary Helena Clark

Pivoting between two stories of women and their relationships with objects—a Swedish woman’s marriage to the Berlin Wall and a suffragette’s hatcheting of Velásquez’ The Toilet of Venus—Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition is a maze-like tour through images and artifacts, a dense cryptography of the forms and objects that hold us in. (NYFF) bay area premiere