Dream in Bursts: Film, Video and Multimedia Short Works
Twisted Pair (Albany, NY): Stolen Dreams
Twisted Pair are a duo of VJs -- emerging artists of improvisational video. In this work, video clips are freely culled from the media environment around us and reused in today's version of found art. The pieces of footage are carefully selected and trimmed, but from there, they are arranged on a whim using real-time video sequencing, in a way that ends up being more like playing a musical instrument than editing.
Leona Christie (Albany, NY): Ataraxy
Ataraxy, meaning "the state of being tranquilized," uses the traditional aesthetic of cel animation to depict the hallucinatory journey of a doll-like protagonist. The piece was created with a mix of hand-made drawings and digital software. NYC-based Christina Wheeler contributed the electronic music score.
David Lachman (North Adams, MA): Internal Contemplation of the Body
David Lachman (North Adams, MA): Flower To Flower
David Lachman is adjunct professor in the art department at Williams College.
Samantha DiRosa (Pullman, WA): Containing Lightness
In this video sequence, a woman seamlessly sucks bubbles into her mouth through a bubble wand, but never exhales. Each light vessel is absorbed into her body in an attempt to physically take in that which has no corporeal mass.
Andrew Bucksbarg (Bloomington, IN): Snow {Bank}
The kind of audio and imagery that Snow {Bank} seeks to evoke is the transition from waking to sleeping. This kind of visual motion has been used in many films to express travel from waking to sleeping or into altered states of consciousness, such as 2001, A Space Odyssey, The Wizard of Oz, or Hitchcock's Vertigo. The audio track simulates the kind of vague sense one gets of hearing someone talking, mixed with the sleepy dreamlike sounds. Beware of the hallucinatory, mesmerizing and hypnotic!
Richard Lainhart (New City, NY): Dreamwood
Dreamwood: a wordless poem of a single line. I composed and performed the music (for electric guitar with computer processing) first, and created the imagery to fit the music. The image is flowering dogwood branches, keyed, slowed down and processed in After Effects to create illusory motion and color
Dylan Cromwell (Oakland, CA): Float
Dylan Cromwell was born in Anchorage, Alaska, grew up in Seattle, WA and now lives and works in Oakland, CA. He has worked with almost every medium, beginning with glassblowing and eventually moving to film and video. He turned 20 in the beginning of December.
Laurent Pernot (Lille, France): Life’s Attraction
Night falls on a narrow street. A child starts to run whilst snowflakes luminous and corpuscular float slowly. A young boy begins to run more and more quickly as the snow continues to fall. Celebrating life's cycle in a sparkling run through the show, Life's Attraction explores time as an infinite journey.
Dennis Miller (Wellesley, MA): Faktura
Faktura (2003) is a work that explores a series of virtual environments, focusing on the infinite variety of forms and textures one might find. Morphing, evolving abstract objects appear against a backdrop of evocative music that sets the tone and effect of each scene. The piece develops over a 9-minute time frame, yet presents a timeless, shifting and (perhaps?) disorienting experience to the viewer. The Russian term "faktura" has a variety of meanings, including one published in the 1923 Constructivist manifesto: manner of construction. Other definitions include surface quality and texture.
Jennifer Beth Guerin (Tucson, AZ): Bed Ballet
Bed Ballet is a collaborative video exploring notions of the everyday (beds and bodies). Through a lens of enchantment, it evokes a feeling of connection and play, while simultaneously suggesting birth, death, intimacy, loss and grief. Ultimately, the Bed Ballet offers a stage for women to relate, to be seen, hopefully hinting at ways that other women can create environments in which to celebrate themselves and others.
Richard Lainhart (New City, NY): A Haiku Setting
A Haiku Setting: from a poem by Joso, a disciple of Basho. Music and animation by Richard Lainhart, type design by Caroline Meyers. In this short film, I set the text of the poem itself in motion to reveal and illustrate the nature of each line.
Bret Battey (Leicester, United Kingdom): Autarkeia Aggretatum
I produced the visuals for Autarkeia Aggregatum through the massed animation of individual points. When seeking a title for the piece, I turned to the Monadology – the philosopher Leibniz’s theory of fundamental particles of reality (monads). I appropriated the two words from that work: autarkeia (Greek) for self-sufficiency, and aggregatum (Latin) meaning joined, aggregated. The terms together appropriately suggest an aggregation of the activities of autonomous entities. More subtly, a resonance with Classicism draws me to the words. The resonance is one of an inner fullness of being expressed outwardly in elegant, self-sufficient restraint.
I recorded the Sikh hymn heard near the end of the work in New Delhi in 2001, from a site near Gurudwara Bangla Sahib.
Jacqueline Forzelius (Bergen, Norway): Insomniarscolepsy
A state in-between dreaming and waking, where you’re puzzling bits together after your own sense and mind; following a feeling more than a linear happening of the past.
Lydia Moyer (Montevallo, AL): South Dakota
I am interested in video’s reference, in the photographic sense, to the world and how I can employ technology to tweak that reference. I use digital processing to combine or manipulate footage, creating environments or scenarios that only exist within the electronic space of the video. I am particularly interested in the emotive possibilities of weather and natural phenomena.