Experimental

Jean-Michel Rolland | France

Run time: 5:46 min.

Synopsis: “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” Francis Bacon. Around a low tree with twisted branches, a man seeks to rest. He doubles up. One lifts its paw and clings to a branch, the other sits on an uncomfortable curve, like a monkey trying to make its nest. There are three now, then four to explore the possibilities for action offered by the plant. This tree was waiting for him. The character stretches, hangs, and lengthens. He becomes one with the tree and settles there, promising to visit it without hurting it. Of course, the tree is instrumentalized by becoming a chair or a bed, but no one cuts off its branches or assembles them to make them useful.

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Juyi Mao | US

Run time: 1:00 min.

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Jeffrey Boggess & Dalton Carney | US

Run time: 4:07 min.

Synopsis: A collaborative piece between composer Dalton Carney and visual artist Jeffrey Boggess, ‘Anemoia’ is a neologism describing nostalgia for a time and place one has never known. The visuals and the music were composed simultaneously, allowing them to respond to one another and take an organic form. Boggess uses Carney’s haunting tones to play with time, then space, then both at once. The end result is an abstract anomaly.

Bio: Jeffrey Boggess is a commercial videographer and filmmaker based in Morgantown, WV. Dalton Carney is a senior composition student currently studying at Marshall University. The two young men have been friends for over a decade, encouraging each other creatively and supporting the other’s pursuits at every opportunity. Boggess has held crew positions on several feature productions and served as the WVU Film Club President for three years. Carney has heard his work played on SCI festivals such as Westfork. His favorite Beatle is Ringo Starr.

Kymberly McDaniel | US

Runtime: 7:03 min

Synopsis: As I seek to connect with my partner about their queer and feminist research in bioarchaeology, a conversation emerges about what is left behind after death

Janelle VanderKelen | US

Runtime: 6:00 min.

Synopsis: In "A Valley Without Trees," the lowly onion that burrows into the soil and spends most of its life underground is cast as an interpreter or potential sensory prosthetic that offers a different way of understanding (and perhaps communicating with) the land, planet, and cosmos in which it grows.

Bio: Janelle VanderKelen is an artist, curator, and educator currently based in Milwaukee, WI. Her films and intermedia installations imagine alternative acts of relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological, or otherwise) and make visible the agency of plants through experimental time-based media processes.

VanderKelen’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, CO; Anthology Film Archives in New York; and Bow Arts in London, England. Her films have screened at Athens International Film + Video Festival, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, IC DOCS, San Diego Underground Film Festival, and Antimatter [Media Art] Film Festival.

Katherine Balsley & Irina Escalante-Chernova | US

Runtime: 3:27 min.

Synopsis: Ad meliora, or "towards better things" combines hundreds of separate images that create a deep meditation on being, creativity, and nature; a mandala of forms that becomes highly symbolic of life, death, yesterday, now, and the next moment. Flowers, plants, and textures were photographed in places such as nature conservatories, cultivated gardens, vacant properties, and parking lots. The familiar landscape appears molten, luminous, and renewed. Ad meliora is suggestive of adaptation, resilience, and transformation.

Mark Delpopolo | US

Runtime: 11:24 min.

Synopsis: American Weird takes the viewer on a journey through modern folklore in West Virginia in relation to cryptids, including such figures as the Flatwoods Monster, a being named Indrid Cold, and the Mothman. The film focuses on the writings of John Keel and his interviews with eyewitnesses. John Keel, our protagonist, was a paranormal researcher who came to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, after reading an article in the newspaper about sightings of an “owl-like creature” roaming the forest. He reasoned that this would be a great opportunity to get more information on paranormal mysteries, a subject he was passionate about. When he gets there, he hears and experiences things he would have never dreamt possible.
American Weird focuses on a series of paranormal events and how they are seen in the context of the period before the Silver Bridge Collapse in 1967. The film explores the folklore surrounding the Flatwoods Monster, the unnerving encounters with “Men in Black”, and the most famous cryptid in American popular culture next to Bigfoot, the Mothman. The story begins with John Keel traveling to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, from New York. He is heading to town to interview some locals who say they had encounters with the Mothman, a name that originated in the press. For almost the entirety of 1967, there is an escalating tension in Point Pleasant that climaxes with the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge on December 15, 1967. American Weird brings to light a new perspective on the sightings themselves, the mindset of the people involved, and how these events affected a sleepy West Virginia community. The community's fears may have also been influenced by the Cold War and how something strange and hostile could be watching them from afar.

Rachel Wagner | US

Runtime: 1:11 min.

Synopsis: Sea anemones are tugged around an enclosure, locked in a strange dance. Distorted details allude to our planet, fractured by human impact

Bio: Rew (‘roo’) is a new media artist who has exhibited art videos and VR animations at experimental film festivals in the United States and internationally. Her video works use abstraction, distortion, and ethereal textures to inspire awe and curiosity in the viewer. Rew is known for synesthetic pairings of visuals with sound. In addition to making her own music, she is a VJ, doing live video mixing for a wide array of musical acts. She works as a freelance video producer, animator, and teacher.

Music: Galen Tipton also releases music under the name “recovery girl.” She has been recognized by the likes of Iggy Pop, David Byrne, Rebecca Black, Adult Swim, Anthony Fantano, 100 Gecs, and Dorian Electra, and has released numerous projects on Orange Milk Records, Deskpop, and Unseelie. Most recently, her song “tadpoles lullaby” went viral on TikTok. In all her work—whether pop, club, or sound collage—tipton’s focus is finding the connective tissue between the challenging and the accessible, always with a strong sense of play.

Jeffrey Moser | US

Runtime: 4:45 min.

Synopsis: An experimental film that examines the visual architecture of the moving image, in specific cases. The uniform linear motion of the Berlin public transport system is expanded through the persistence and offsetting of the previous frames. The landscape expands like a curtain as time becomes space. The sound source is duplicated, offset, and mixed into a sonic landscape, creating harmonies and progressions from tuned delay and keyframe programming.

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Jacob Dodd & Steven J. York | US

Runtime: 12:33 min.

Synopsis: "Beyond the Shadows" is a short hand-processed 16mm shadow puppet film. It explores a series of Appalachian family stories Inspired by the dreams of West Virginia Native and director Steven J. York and his father William York. The film depicts mountain mysticism, traditional Appalachian folk magic, and dreams of life out at the old homeplace.

Bio: Steven J. York is a producing director, performer and storyteller originally from West Virginia now residing in New York.

Jacob A. Dodd is an independent filmmaker, author, and educator who creates celluloid motion picture films. He specializes in memoir documentary and fiction filmmaking.

Not that long ago Appalachia, steeped in mystery, magic and lore, was home to a type of lifestyle and practice that many modern folks today can hardly believe ever existed. As late as 1969, the same year man first walked on the moon, deep in the hills and hollers of West Virginia you'd think time had stood still. Grannies made medicines and remedies from herbs they gathered in the woods and grandpas interpreted dreams, and worked "by the signs" in much the same way they did 150 years before. They engaged in elaborate and sometimes bizarre rituals from their scattered homesteads and hand hewn cabins across the misty topped mountains. In a very real sense, they WERE the mountain. It provided their food, their medicine, their livelihood and their home.

It wasn't until Billy left home for college that he discovered just how strange and uncommon his family's traditional mountain way of life was. A short while later, back at home, his family was forced off their land, the ancestral property seized via eminent domain and Grandpa Bill died, Granny Thena said "from a broken heart" ... it was then that Billy, my father, began having haunting dreams. In them Grandpa Bill told Billy he had left something for him, out on the mountain, buried in the ground...

Inspired by first-person accounts, this multi-disciplinary collaboration utilizes one of the oldest forms of storytelling in the world: shadow puppetry, along with traditional 16mm capture in extreme low light conditions, experimental film chemistry and developing techniques and modern digital editing, matched with an original score by a native West Virginian folk musician to produce a short like no other. From concept to paper cut-out, to celluloid, to debut screening in just five days. Take a journey, and see if you can peer: Beyond the Shadows.

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Holly Mollohan | US

Runtime: 4:44 min.

Synopsis: Music video for the band, Dunkard and Wheeling, for their song "Bridges". It's just one more drunken all-nighter. Rick and the boys drink at their favorite bar until they get into some shenanigans.

Johann Calderón | Argentina

Runtime: 4:00 min.

Synopsis: Burn" is a 4 minutes minimalistic video art piece about the decline of cultures.
The hands represent rhythm & repetition as well as - in a figurative sense - helplessness, anger, and protest. In the center, you see video footage of Persepolis from pre-Covid19 times.
"Burn" is inspired by the story of Alexander the Great, when he had the city of Persepolis and parts of the palace city set on fire.
This event is merely a proxy for all rulers, statesmen, and especially their servants throughout history, who left nothing but ashes behind them. The burning is to be understood symbolically and serves as a reflection of our times and the burning down of truthfulness, values, traditions, and an attack on the human spirit.

Bio: Johann Calderón is a german painter / media designer / video artist.
He studied Visual Communication at the HS Peter Behrens School of Arts in Düsseldorf Germany with the main focus on Fine Arts, Video, Photography & Graphic Design. He lives and works in Córdoba, Argentina

Tracy Miller-Robbins | US

Runtime: 2:22 min.

Synopsis: Influenced by chalk pastels, color field paintings, and Norman McClaren, this short film was created with a singular circle motif. Sound created using Wolfram Alpha Tones.

Bio: Originally a painter, Tracy Miller-Robbins is a visual artist and experimental animator who creates works that merge analog and digital methods. Miller-Robbins spent 25 years as a Professor of Animation at an art college in Ohio, was an Artist in Residence with the Ohio Arts Council, and has conducted community workshops and collaborative projects in science classrooms, with a continual focus on exploring new methods and approaches to animating. Her short films and installations have been presented at festivals and galleries in the US and internationally including Animafest Zagreb, Melbourne International Animation Festival, and Digital Graffiti.

Katerie Gladdys | US

Runtime: 9:08 min.

Synopsis: Continuous Compost is a non-narrative video that documents and aestheticizes the cycle of transforming “waste” into rich fertile soil. The first section of the video shows chickens feeding and excreting food scraps collected from local restaurants at Grow Hub, a non-for-profit plant nursery supporting the lives of adults living with disabilities. Next, steaming decomposing mulch and manure piles at daybreak depict large-scale composting at Siembra Farms, an organic CSA farm. And finally, the third section illustrates composting on a personal scale in my backyard.

Bio: Katerie Gladdys is a transdisciplinarity artist who thinks about place, marginalized landscapes, sustainability, mapping, consumption, and agriculture, creating installations, interactive, sculpture, video, and relational performances. Recent partners in collaboration include Field and Fork Campus Food Program, Working Food, School of Forest Resources and Conservation, University of Florida Office of Sustainability and Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, and Alachua County Public libraries. Her work can be found at http://layoftheland.net.

Neil Ira Needleman | US

Runtime: 3:50 min.

Synopsis: This is a true story. All these decades later, I still have a hard time believing that this actually happened in 1997.

Ann Everton | US

Runtime: 10:49 min.

Synopsis: "Nightgarden" is a visual lullaby, composed of a Darsombra (Ann Everton and Brian Daniloski) soundtrack. Like all good fairy tales, there is a wonder, a dream-like quality, and a sense of mystery--complete with a fatalistic reminder of the price we all pay for the human hood. Directed and edited by Ann Everton, starring Maura Roth-Gormley, Charlie Wieprecht, and Ann Everton (and Bon). Music by Darsombra.

Jason Bernagozzi | US

Runtime: 4:49 min.

Synopsis: "Diachrony" is an experimental video that examines the framing of historical records as a fragmentation between signifier and sign. Shot in the Sanpete Valley in Utah, footage of monuments, words chiseled in stone are pixel shifted through locally rendered expressions of what the west represents. The entangling of data and image tells a story told by the land and those who claim it, bearing witness to the truth behind cultures born on the backs of terrible tragedy.

Bio: Jason Bernagozzi is an artist whose work examines and critiques the codes embedded within the psyche of media culture. His work uses the real-time features of video and electronic media as a way to engage with interdisciplinary concepts as a dialogical system of emerging languages. Bernagozzi’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as the European Media Art Festival; the Festival Les Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques; the Ilman Museum of Art and the Currents New Media Festival.

Scott Turri | US

Runtime: 5:10 min.

Synopsis: Circle back capsule. No return. Move faster round the outside. Model racetrack on the ping pong table. Basement. Round and round you go. Square dance. You circle back. Head pressed against the window of the greyhound bus looking at the telephone wires. Undulate. The pool stripped-down night swim. You were a deer on all fours galloping up Flagstaff Hill. Riding on the front of the skateboard. Twins. Slipped on the stars and slid down the space chute. One two three. One two three four. One two. One.

Bio: Hailing from suburban Philadelphia, where he spent his formative years, Turri now calls Pittsburgh home and has become enmeshed in its regional art community. He has had a broad range of artistic experiences: as a self-taught drummer playing in punk rock, to an improvising percussionist in a performance art band, writing for New Art Examiner, BOMB, and Afterimage magazines, to currently concentrating primarily on painting and experimental animation. He is represented by James Gallery. Along with these pursuits, Turri is also an educator and holds a full-time lecturer position in the Studio Arts Department at the University of Pittsburgh.

Pako Quijada | Germany

Runtime: 10:00 min.

Synopsis: Where does one find solace in the presence of an imminent event that will change their life forever? The wanderer in this film walks through natural passages in what seems an aimless and fruitless search. This eventually leads to a reunion with his 3 sisters, with whom the destiny of facing family trauma presents itself too overwhelming. The film references the director’s own experience of growing up in a matriarchy and acts as an allegorical retelling of the traumatic experience of losing their mother.

Bio: Pako Quijada is a multidisciplinary artist whose work oscillates between photography, executed either in a series of coherent subjects or as solitary statements, as well as narrative and experimental video pieces. They studied Photography and Filmmaking in San Sebastián, Spain.
In 2014, they co-founded FUSSOFF, a collective working with music and visuals for other recording artists.
In 2018, they also co-founded an artist-curator-run collective named Other grounds.
Their photographs and video installations have been presented in various exhibitions and festivals across Europe and Central America. Pako Quijada is currently living and working in Berlin, Germany.

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Chris Roberts | US

Runtime: 3:33 min.

Synopsis: An experimental short film based around nature throughout a full year.

Ignacio Tamarit & Tomás Maglione | Argentina

Runtime: 2:44 min.

Synopsis: A handheld camera tries to empathize with urban objects that have inherited animated potential. These elements, disconnected from each other, are related through camera movement and montage, which slides through the city looking for its definitive form.

Bio: Ignacio Tamarit (1991, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a filmmaker, teacher and archivist who received his diploma in film preservation and audiovisual restoration from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) in 2019. He studied at the Centro de Investigación Cinematográfica and at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires. He has given film workshops at Big Sur Galería de Arte Contemporáneo, C3 Centro Cultural de la Ciencia, L'Etna (France), Les Météorites (France) and Lumiton Museo del Cine Usina Audiovisual, where he also works as an archivist and curator.

Tomás Maglione (1985, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a visual artist who was part of the Artists Program at UTDT (2009) under the leadership of Jorge Macchi. He made several individual and collective exhibitions, in Argentina and abroad. He went to various residences, such as Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine (2018). He is currently studying Fine Arts in Stadelschule, Frankfurt, under the guidance of Hassan Khan.

Jonathan Johnson | Thailand

Runtime: 8:30 min.

Synopsis: Two young sisters navigate a forest world using their imagination, outdoor survival skills, and friendship. Their adventures double as play and training for an unknown ecological future.

Matias Borgström | Brazil

Runtime: 15:00 min.

Synopsis: By creating a universe composed of real and modifiable environments, the author seeks to reconcile, through a poetical and experimental approach, his routine of confinement with the life in his garden, previously invisible to him. Thus, "jardim" represents the meeting of two different dimensions that cohabit in the same space.

Bio: Born in Argentina, Matias co-founded Salga Filmes, a Brazilian production company specializing in documentaries. From 2019-20, he worked at Grifa Filmes, a major documentary production company with 3 Emmy Awards nominations and 2 Oscar-shortlisted co-productions. Matias is currently directing and producing his first two feature documentary films: "Ouvidor" (Brazil) and "Dark Winter" (Antarctica, Malvinas/Falkland Islands, Brazil, Argentina).

In 2021 he co-created the Citronela Doc documentary festival. Its first edition exhibited 20 contemporary and independent Brazilian feature documentary films.

Pierre Ajavon | France

Runtime: 3:02 min.

Synopsis: The future offers us a face-to-face between humanity and algorithms, the things that make us human beings like questioning, imagination, intuition, or ethics in the face of zeros and ones.
Algorithms must be made useful by human interpretation before the universe becomes the ultimate computer...

In "Humarithms", through our digital daily life, reminiscences, emotions, and images arise from the past and blend into our vision of the future to the sound of an electronic composition on the Moog modular synthesizer.

Bio: Born in Paris on 1 May 1966 // lives & works in Paris - France
- Sound engineer (accredited training center Steinberg)
- Composer & Musician (member of SACEM and SACD)
- Master in Sociology
- Thesis: The psychedelic movement and its influence on contemporary culture - Paris X-Nanterre
- License // Ethnomusicology and Sociology - Paris X-Nanterre
- Bi-Deug // Sociology - Psychology - Paris X-Nanterre

Nate King | US

Runtime: 4:50 min.

Synopsis: “I’m sorry Mamma, I’m A Cowboy” is a compilation of animations created in response to my return to Appalachia as an out queer individual. The work takes its name from the country song, “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys”, and the act of coming out to my mother as gay. Visuals include iconography from cowboy culture and imagery that is associated with masculine heteronormativity, but, through the process of animating myself into the work, my presence queers the narrative, juxtaposing ideas of the American cowboy with queer existence. Metronormativity promotes the idea that queerness and the urban are inseparable, thus invalidating the ruralized queer and placing queerness and rurality at odds. By animating queerness in a rural space, the act of existence is an act of assertion. The work questions notions of masculinity, authenticity, and fantasy.

Emily T Kim | US

Runtime: 3:57 min.

Synopsis: Invisible in the Darkness utilizes digital microscopic technology to capture the complex forms and organic systems which exist deep within our earth: its soil, loam, and dirt. While capturing these visual movements that exist beyond the naked eye’s capabilities, I find a deep sense of exploration and juxtaposition between the light and dark. In the wake of COVID-19, this work explores the deep, tunneling darkness and yet, the sense of light, brightness, and ultimately, hope.

Bio: Emily Kim is a Professor of Graphic Design in the Department of Art at Sam Houston State University in Texas. She is a digital media artist and experimental designer, who explores art, science, and technology. During the past years, Kim has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Her works were exhibited in the Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH, Graphic Design USA, SMart Multimedia Art Festival, Florida International, Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences, 108 contemporaries, West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival, Farmington Museum, and Alexandria Museum of Art in the USA. Furthermore, Kim’s works were included intentionally in the 10th Seoul International New Media Festival in Seoul and GwangJu International Exhibition at Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, LED Media Façade in Selangor, Malaysia, Techfest 2013, Annual International Science and Technological Festival in Bombay, India, 9th International Conference Computer Graphics in Hsinchu, Taiwan, 3rd International Festival of Nano Art in Iasi, Romania intentionally.

Kimberly Burleigh | US

Runtime: 7:18 min.

Synopsis: Jealousy is an experimental 3D animation. It features an elemental digital construction of the plantation house meticulously described in the seminal 1957 novel La Jalousie by French writer Robbe-Grillet. No characters are depicted in the animation – just as the novel emphasizes settings and objects over characters/dialogue. The compulsively observed settings and objects reveal the obsessive mindset of the main character, a jealous husband who suspects his wife of having an affair. The soundtrack features sound described in the novel; nocturnal animal cries, insects whirring, etc. The animation expands on the novel by making settings and objects dynamic; furniture self-constructs, objects move, and lights shift.

Bio: honored with numerous grants and fellowships from such institutions as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, Kimberly Burleigh has shown her work in over 150 exhibitions and film festivals. She works with a variety of mediums, including; painting, drawing, collage, and computer imaging/animation.

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Ellen Mueller | US

Runtime: 12:45 min.

Synopsis: In this series of 10 short video works I'm considering the Mississippi river as a site of both leisure and commerce. Visually, the work combines the imagery of the river, barge tie-offs, shoreline, bridges, and other site-specific details, combined with footage of people working to embody ideas of leisure at this specific location. Performers were given a general overview of these ideas and concepts and asked to improvise movements or stillness on their own. I use juxtaposition, repetition, glitches, and shifts in opacity to complicate these landscapes and human forms, drawing attention to the way this particular landscape has been inextricably bound up in capitalist forms and modes.

Bio: Ellen Mueller (she/her) has exhibited nationally and internationally as an interdisciplinary artist exploring issues related to the environment, hyperactive news media, and corporate management systems. She creates experiences that engage with social and political issues through a variety of media.

Jonathan Moore | US

Runtime: 3:17 min.

Synopsis: A short documentary/experimental film that gives a lyrical account of what it's like to be hearing-impaired

Bio: Jonathan Moore is an independent filmmaker, writer, and professor. He works in both documentary and scripted genres and is the producer of the popular indie feature sports documentary "Coaches' Wives." He is married to long-time film/TV editor Karen Moore. They live in Los Angeles with their son.

Camilo Barria | US

Runtime: 3:22 min.

Synopsis: Look at The Clouds, a hybrid between film essay and a music video made with found footage of family trips, public domain movies, science, and nuclear defense reels found on the internet, explores nostalgia as created memories.

Bio: Camilo B. Royer (b.1973 Camilo Barria Royer) is an Immigrant American filmmaker, producer, and writer of Latino origins from Los Angeles, California. He majored in Sociology in 2000 and rediscovered his passion for photography in 2018. Soon, it led to shooting on 16mm with amateur cameras and expired film stock to self-teach the nits and grits of the filmmaking craft. Those experiments opened the door to be accepted into the prestigious UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television to attend its Professional Producing Program, from which he graduated in 2019.
At the same time, he experimented with found footage and old archives from the internet, creating understated stories for instrumental music to explore juxtaposition and meaning within the moving image. He is currently completing his Film Direction and Story Development candidacy at the UCLA Extension Entertainment Studies department.

Holly Mollohan | US

Runtime: 4:22 min.

Synopsis: Music video for the song "Never Coming Back" By Ransom Weaver Featuring Rick Grayson. A sad, reflective song, sung around a campfire.

Maxime Corbeil-Perron | Canada

Runtime: 1:31 min.

Synopsis: Origami plays with perspectives and dimensions. Fractals and luminous geometry are here liquefied by the cathode ray tube of a hacked television set.

Bio: Maxime Corbeil-Perron is a Tio’tia:ke/Montreal-based composer, director, and audiovisual performer whose work has been highlighted by numerous international competitions, media, and festivals. His artistic practice unfolds in a multiplicity of media: audiovisual performance, experimental cinema, electroacoustic composition, improvisation, sound art, and installation. His current works present an approach related to media archaeology, in which he seeks to establish relationships between obsolete media and contemporary technologies, in search of new aesthetic possibilities.

Dean Winkler & Donald S Butler | US

Runtime: 4:07 min.

Synopsis: "Our America" is a short-form, non-narrative meditation on American 20th-century industrial promises gone awry. The film explores the dreams of World War II America through imagery based on 1943 teacher aid posters called Our America which was distributed to schools throughout the U.S. From the vantage point of nearly a century later, the film examines how the innocent, celebratory intent of American ingenuity has led us on a path of unintended consequences. "Our America" follows "140 Characters" (2017), a short non-narrative film about the unfulfilled promises of internet technology.

Bio: Dean Winkler is an NYC-based film/television engineer and video artist. Career highlights include Senior Engineer Production and Post Production, Doha Film Institute, supervising the production, post-production, and display of nine boundary-pushing immersive films for the new National Museum of Qatar; Executive Producer / CTO of Crossroads Films and Co-Founder/ President of Post Perfect.

Donald S. Butler is a painter, computer animator and video artist. His career spans stage, screen and print. An early pioneer in the use of computer animation, he began his “Aloi” studies of robot animations in 1986. He has worked as a digital animator and digital compositor across the world including at Post Perfect in New York City and Industrial Light and Magic in California, where he contributed to major television and motion picture productions. He co-directed “140 Characters.” Don currently resides in Queensland, Australia.

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Vasilios Papaioannu | US

Runtime: 5:00 min.

Synopsis: "Parenthesis", a short impressionistic poem, liberates the inserted thought from its master. The film's mirrored beginning and ending render the inserted material, not as an explanation or afterthought but rather as the dominant point where the natural and civilized worlds claim their separate space before colliding, as the continual breathing of the sea becomes increasingly intense and urgent. Whatever may be going on in the outside world is kept at bay by the visual parentheses.

Bio: Vasilios Papaioannu is a filmmaker, photographer, and mixed media artist currently based in Washington, DC. In his, work Papaioannu explores the fleeting dreamscapes of reality using noise, movement, and disturbance. He hybridizes different modes of filmmaking, unifying variegated media, primarily 16mm film, digital video, and archival footage. His works have been shown in various venues around the world, such as Crossroads at SFMOMA, Anthology Film Archives, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Cork International Film Festival, Festifreak, Analogica, Cámara Lúcida, Engauge Film Festival, EXiS, L’ Alternativa, Antimatter [media art], Montreal Underground Film Festival, Revelation Perth Film Festival, and Sharjah Film Platform. Papaioannu holds an MA in Communication, Text Semiotics, and Cinema from the University of Siena in Italy and an MFA in Film and Cinematography from Syracuse University in New York. Papaioannu is currently an Assistant Professor at the Cathy Hughes School of Communications, Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Howard University.

Website

Breellen Fleming | US

Runtime: 2:49 min.

Synopsis: An exploration of experiencing the Divine while existing in a religious culture that rejects queer identities. Shining through the complex layers of one's self-image, queer and religious identities may be reflected in surprising ways.

Gabby Sumney | US

Runtime: 1:06 min.

Synopsis: A letter to a six-year-old artist who wants to make the world more beautiful with her art.

Bio: Gabby Sumney (Any Pronouns) is an experimental media artist who makes films, videos, prints, and expanded cinema works that explore issues of race, migration, sexual orientation, gender identity, and ability status. Gabby is also an Assistant Professor of Film Production at the Pennsylvania State University and the creator of This Week in Experimental, a weekly newsletter focused on providing resources to experimental artists seeking creative, intellectual, and exhibition opportunities.

David Smith | US

Runtime: 5:10 min.

Synopsis: A love letter to Huntington (and a minor examination of the complications of using a reference to a canceled filmmaker to make it

Florine Mougel | Austria

Runtime: 6:04 min.

Synopsis: A surrealist drift that questions the notion of inhabiting. "The house is our corner of the world." (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space).

Bio: Florine Mougel is a French media artist. She obtained a BA degree in Audiovisual and Cinema studies at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris and in Fine Art at the School of Art and Design of Marseille. She created her graduation film "Parcourir" at the University of Art and Design of Linz, Austria

Wiktoria Kuczewska | Poland

Runtime: 3:25 min.

Synopsis: This movie was directed during isolation. Pandemic had been hindering teamwork, but together, despite many miles separating us, we created a visualization of our experiences and thoughts. Each team member brought a unique piece of themselves into the project. We let our imagination run wild, and as a result, an experimental movie was created. It shows a wide range of emotions we feel and our different points of view on certain topics – it`s our self-portrait.

Simon Le Boggit | UK

Runtime: 5:05 min.

Synopsis: String Theory is an algorithmically generated abstract animation, spontaneously grown from a carefully balanced mixture of chaos, repetition, and mutation. Its accompanying music has similarly been algorithmically generated from the same data set. Visuals and music mesmerizingly entangle in ways that can sometimes make chance events seem to be alive and intentional.

Michael Fleming | US

Runtime: 12:06 min.

Synopsis: What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? It means to know that one is food for worms. We emerge from nothing, we have a name, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression, and with all this yet to die. Man is out of nature and hopelessly in it: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. ....Tik-Tak.

Martin Del Carpio | US

Runtime: 9:23 min.

Synopsis: "To honor the memory of his father who passed away in 2019, Martin Del Carpio opts for the medium of film once again, and delivers his most lyrical work to date. At once deeply personal, carefully veiled in a delicate fabric of pure emotions, and absolutely immersive in its dreamlike, mysterious beauty, ‘The Dark Forest’ transmutes its author’s innermost life into an admirable piece of introspective cinema. Opening with Dante Alighieri’s quote which inspired the title, it takes the viewer on a short, yet transcendent journey through the bushes of symbols and trees of thoughts, in the company of a lovely (and cunning?) forest spirit embodied by Carly Erin O’Neil whose poise and grace translate as otherworldly. The enchanting imagery that we see on our way is the result of another tight-knit collaboration between writer/director Del Carpio and DoP/editor William Murray, whereby the dense atmosphere of meditative seclusion is complemented by Dan Shaked’s ruminative voice-over and M. Nomized’s haunting score which occasionally gives off some strong ‘classic Hollywood’ vibes..." - Reviewed by Nikola Gocic

Bio:
Born in Venezuela but raised in New York, where he currently lives, Martin Del Carpio is an artist marked by experimentation, the search for new concepts, sounds, and visuals, by a fascination with visuals, and the journey that art takes us on.

Jeremy Newman | US

Runtime: 8:00 min.

Synopsis: This experimental film immerses viewers in a nature dream. Viewers watch plant and animal life in an ecosystem that appears natural but doesn't physically exist. Some of these elements, juxtaposed via editing, are miles apart in actuality. The editing also imparts a visual rhythm that echoes breathing. The visuals are familiar, yet strange. They are arrived at by various editing techniques. Ultimately, the experience is aesthetic and made visceral by digital manipulations. The surreal visuals highlight the beauty and wonder of nature, but they're haunting. A glove floating in water is a key image, literally pollution and symbolic of drowning. In this film, there is life, and these living things are already ghosts.

Crystal Beiersdorfer | US

Runtime: 2:00 min.

Synopsis: The Elegance of Sugar is a 2-minute two-channel digital video that addresses the corporal and auditorial release of daily life. The piece is intended to be shown in a dark room with two opposing monitors and speaker setups; additionally, a bench is placed in the center of the space for viewers to sit and witness/hear the full symphony

Website

Donnie McDonnell | US

Runtime: 8:48 min.

Synopsis: A story about a veteran being pushed to the limits as he deals with the memories of the horrors of war. Desperation has him on the edge as he is amidst one of the toughest battles of his life.

Jan Adamove | Slovakia

Runtime: 4:00 min.

Synopsis: A few mostly skeptical images and sounds that, in addition to doubts, also include a micro-hopeful look into the future. (The video was completed a few weeks before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.)

Bio: Jan Adamove (1971)
Visual artist, film theorist, and pedagogue. Since 2004 he has worked as an assistant professor at the Department of Intermedia and Digital Media (Faculty of Fine Arts, Academy of Arts in Banska Bystrica / Slovakia). He devotes himself to experimental video films in which he focuses on topics such as memory, power, movement, and time. Part of the production is focused on live performances through audiovisual performance.

Lydia Moyer | US

Runtime: 4:45 min.

Synopsis: An account of life among those preparing for the end of the world. A report from the garden.

Bio: Lydia Moyer is a visual artist and media maker who lives and works in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She is a professor of art at the University of Virginia.

Adam Badlotto | US

Runtime: 1:05 min.

Synopsis: Change can be sudden, sweeping, and at times, disconcerting. But just like how nature changes with the seasons, change is necessary and beautiful. Pieces of fallen flower petals were meticulously arranged by color and vibrancy and then glued to 16mm clear leader. Each frame was photographed using a stills camera equipped with a macro lens. The flower petals also composed part of the optical soundtrack when fed through a projector. The result is a crescendo of color, texture, and sound culminating together.

Eduardo Gutiérrez Carrera | Peru

Runtime: 8:02 min.

Synopsis: A review of the physicality of the memory stored in a piece of family furniture.
In modern times it’s said that it’s the human being who gives value to things, but however, objects exist which do not depend on human will, rather they tell us who we are and provide the memory of a future.

Josh Weissbach | US

Runtime: 6:25 min.

Synopsis: A city symphony in miniature, dedicated to anyone who has gotten lost in thought while stuck on the midwinter train. to all that unfolds in those private reveries.

Ruxandra Mitache | Romania

Runtime: 2:16 min.

Synopsis: my palm
just waiting to melt
a winter flake.

Bio: Ruxandra Mitache (Romania, 1979), a visual artist, who studied Fine Arts at the Bucharest University of Arts, and currently lives and works in Switzerland. Working mainly with abstract painting, and exploring transitive themes through video art and installation.

Nate Dorr | US

Runtime: 6:52 min.

Synopsis: A trip behind and beneath the street-level skin of the city on the hidden paths of industrial history and once-and-future transit, pieced together from over 8000 carefully aligned still photographs.

The Triboro Line is a 24-mile freight rail spanning new York City from the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to Co-Op City in the Bronx. Once largely a passenger line, then serving only reduced intermittent industrial use for decades, the rails have again become the focus of efforts to restore crosstown commuter service to the lower eleven miles of track. Spanning seasons, hours, and changing weather in gliding tracking shots, Triboro collapses time and space just as new transit options, inscribed into the ever-changing urban landscape, bring distant parts of the boroughs closer together.

Bio: Nate Dorr is a filmmaker and photographer based in Brooklyn, seeking out the unseen, forgotten, and hidden parts of the late Anthropocene.

Magdalena Bermudez | US

Runtime: 7:46 min.

Synopsis: A history of sister portraiture is reanimated by nascent datasets, as portraits dodge derogatory categories by paradoxically inhabiting one and multiple bodies.

Bio: Magdalena Bermudez is an artist working in film, video, text, and textile. She received a BA from Hampshire College and is a current Cinematic Arts MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has screened at festivals such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, and the Black Maria Film Festival. Her current research examines synthetic media, plant galls, and histories of fingerprinting.

Guillaume Vallée | Canada

Runtime: 2:04 min.

Synopsis: Created on an optical printer from a hand-painted 16mm film, this moving image object embodies a state of mind about benevolence.

Bio: Experimental filmmaker, video artist, and independent curator, Guillaume Vallée graduated from Concordia University with a Major in Film Animation and MFA in Studio Arts - Film Production option. He works mainly on Super8, 16mm, and VHS.

Elian Mikkola | Finland

Runtime: 12:36 min.

Synopsis: Tracing back a lost identity hidden in the forests of this abandoned war zone.
Standing on a sandy beach, looking in the direction where the old lighthouse once stood, reminding the people of this village where home is, every 15 seconds. How does trauma get carried on from one generation to another, and is there a way to stop the cycle? The filmmaker tries to understand how to heal from the past pressures by searching for their grandmother's childhood home. Taking the journey with their parents, they find themselves in a village located in the old Karelia, now a part of Russia.

Bio: Elian Mikkola has been making films and moving image art since 2016. Their work has been showcased in several film festivals in Canada and internationally. Their debut film SAARI (2016) was selected to TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival student program in 2017. Mikkola received the Creative Vision Award as a part of the AE Film Festival in 2016. Their latest film Magdaleena premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2020.

Personal Website

Dermot Daly | United Kingdom

Runtime: 3:32 min.

Synopsis: The ebb and flow of existence encapsulated in the sights and sounds of the sea, triggers a memory and initiates a resolution.

Bio: Dermot Daly was born in the middle of England. His short films with chocolate bears have been screened at festivals across the world, winning awards and acclaim along the way. His other film work has seen him work with national and international production companies. He also works as a theatre director and award-winning actor.

Maureen Zent | US

Runtime: 4:42 min.

Synopsis: Order gives way to chaos. Chaos generates ferment. Ferment spurs fecundity.

Whisper, Rustle is a product of the Covid-19 pandemic, born of long walks in the forest spent memorizing poems by W.B. Yeats. Emergency measures disrupted regular patterns of human behavior and fear upended all normal interactions. The disequilibrium unsettled everyone but also brought a new understanding of the fragility of our sense of order.

Whisper, Rustle depicts this cycle with animation of natural and stylized elements drawn primarily from Yeats’s poems and prose. Stop motion animated objects include sand, pebbles, flower petals, oak bark, leaves, gravel, sponges, seeds, eggshells, and a rotting log.

Bio: Maureen Zent is a writer and animator in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Her animated shorts include Tango Sparks, Yank Tug Yank, Oulipo’s Cave, and Bostle Sleench. Her stories explore the way our conflicting desires create great challenges. Her animation has been screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, London International Animation Festival, Thomas Edison (Black Maria) Film Festival, Stop Motion Mexico, and many more.

Sara Bezovšek | Slovenia

Runtime: 13:39 min.

Synopsis: A screen recording of the webpage www.s-n-d.si. In this project, Sara Bezovšek was drawn to various apocalyptic scenarios that could lead to the end of the world as we know it. She collaged visual material, found online in the form of short videos, memes, photographs, gifs, emoticons and various external links, with her own works, thereby creating a complex and visually saturated narrative that follows typical Hollywood film premises, and takes the viewer from an idyllic situation to scenes of natural catastrophes, global pandemics, alien invasions, nuclear explosions, meteorite collisions and other terrifying situations.

Bio: Sara Bezovšek is a visual artist, active in the fields of new media, experimental film and graphic design. Her artistic practice is characterized by the exploration, collection and storage of mostly pop-cultural visual references from various online platforms, films and TV series. Using thus creating new narratives through appropriation. In doing so, she is interested in what people view and share on social networks, how visual material travels the internet, how it changes and how it affects users. By using digital images familiar to the global internet user, she wishes to depict how internet phenomena and cliche and iconic pop-cultural references influence our perception. The dense amount of short clips from known series and films, animated GIFs, internet memes, videos and other images from online platforms creates a feeling of layeredness, as the viewer can read a number of parallel associations, linked to recognising individual material, in addition to the basic story.

Website

Eddie Lohmeyer | US

Runtime: 11:22 min.

Synopsis: zen_glitch is an experimental found footage film that explores Buddhist concepts of Saṃsāra as an aimless wandering through the on-going cycle of life, death, and rebirth that characterizes material existence. Drawing from visual sources such as glitched videogames, vintage educational films and documentaries, corrupted art historical jpegs, and microscopic video of plants, the film’s structure mirrors Saṃsāra through technically mediated states of consciousness. Just as one moves through mundane life filled with suffering, zen_glitch guides the viewer through an unveiling wormhole that when played in loop, reflects a cycle of despair and eventual transcendence through states of nirvana. These cyclical abstractions of suffering and liberation from worldly desire in zen_glitch draw a relation among glitch aesthetics and modes of being in Buddhist thought characterized by ever-changing, mutable assemblages of people, material objects, nature, and technology. The film was created by the artist within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and in response to feelings of hopelessness, loneliness, and isolation. Its production represents a meditative release from worldly suffering particularly through repetitive modes of video editing (continual zooms among layers of video) which serve as a visual mantra in and of themselves.

Bio: Eddie Lohmeyer is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Florida. His research explores aesthetic and technical developments within histories of digital media, with an emphasis on video games and their relationship to the avant-garde. His book Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Modding is now available through Bloomsbury Press. Using deconstructive approaches such as glitch, physical modifications to hardware, and assemblage, his installations, sculpture, and video have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, most recently at 1308 Gallery at the University of Wisconsin, Ground Level Platform (Chicago, IL), the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg, Russia, 2021 Milan Machinima Festival, and Arts Warehouse (Delray Beach, FL). Drawing from pop culture debris, occult mysticism, Zen Buddhism, and art history, Lohmeyer’s art explores the intersections among human perception, digital technologies, and modes of spiritual abstraction. Through experimental film, video installation, sculpture, and interactive methods, his media interventions aim to reconsider our habitual encounters with digital technologies through uncanny and often transcendent interfaces and screens. The playfully ironic encounters with these strange media forms unveil normal attitudes and perceptions toward digital technologies that have become a mundane co-extension of our bodies, while questioning knowledge frameworks in contemporary networked culture through which we perceive and sense the world.

Personal Website

Tom Bessoir | US

Runtime: 1:41min.

Synopsis: A film for 2020, a year to remember.

2020 different colors create a flicker film.

Bio: Tom was born and raised in the Astoria section of Queens in New York City in 1957. From there he commuted by subway to attend The Bronx High School of Science. Tom studied mathematics and electrical engineering at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. While attending the Engineering School, he took advantage of Art School classes, focusing on film theory and studying experimental filmmaking with Robert Breer. In the late 1970s, he started photographing the downtown music scene. His photographs have appeared on dozens of records as well as in films, books, magazines, and newspapers.

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