Lightning, 2011

4:47 min.

Lightning is a single channel video composed of digital photographs and synthesized sound. The content sequence is from John Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China. Playing the film from a DVD and monitor, I paused certain moments to shoot a still. I really liked the noisy hot color the camera captured from the screen and the interlace lines from the screen scanning. Again I reshot the photos on a different monitor screen and colorized the image with a proc amp. The sound was created from doepfer analog modules.

I was drawn to this particular figure producing electricity due to the energy he pours out of his body and the rigid mystic poses he performs. Movies like Big Trouble In Little China feature far-out characters with superimposed abilities and traits, yet they are fantasies that only extend to the viewer as visual imagination. Lightning is meant to add power to the figure by adding enhanced colorization, intense flicker, and blaring sound. The power of the electric deity extends beyond cinema picturesque, sucking the audience into a trance and creating a new focus on the scene without narrative.

Michael Chernoff is a multimedia artist whose work spans the fields of painting, drawing, video, sound, and photography. He is a graduate of Alfred University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and has exhibited work in upstate New York. He currently lives in Albany, NY.

Wounds, 2012

2:38 min.

A dream excursion into one man’s corporeal underworld. Regenerative forces go about their business of fusing, stitching, and binding, to a soundtrack of industry and nature.

Wounds is a short, independently produced film imagining the hidden processes of healing through surreal textural imagery, using stop motion animation and reconstructed HD footage.

Born UK 1975. Artist-filmmaker currently living in Hackney, London.

Combining film and animation as agents to develop and fuse a menagerie of art forms into idiosyncratic works, Mr. Fox enjoys exploring his imagination and the world around him, making associations between these levels of consciousness.

Curious crafted properties, often in a state of flux, on paths of exploration with the aim of uncovering uncharted alchemical states.

Fredericks & Mae 2012 Collection, 2012

1:40 min.

Finds a Face, 2011

2:10 min.

We Are the Champions (No Time), 2011

1:54 min.

The Baddest Chixxx, 2010

4:27 min.

Katie Hickman was born in Youngstown, OH, and studied at the School of Visual Arts. She currently works as an artist in Brooklyn, NYC.

Spam (The Proposition), 2011

1:44 min.

This video piece subverts the contemporary phenomena of spamming by using material from these e-mails to construct a script for a sci-fi fictional character, who recounts details which are an amalgamation of different spam letters. Talking as if from the future to its past the character becomes an unsettling figure and the bearer of bad news. Spam e-mails become an interesting literary source material for this video as they try to ultimately con you through the empathy one might feel upon reading the mail.

Born in 1982 in Ireland, Stephanie (Sticky) Hough graduated with a first class hons degree in Fine Art in 2005 from the Crawford College of Art & Design in Cork city. Hough went on to complete an MA in 'Art in the Digital World' from the National College of Art & Design, Dublin, Ireland. In 2009 she co-founded Basement Project Space, an independent artist-led initiative in Cork city, and held the position of Chairperson from July 2009 to January 2011. While at BPS Hough has curated and managed a variety of events including the very successful EYE-KEA project International Video Art Event. Her individual practice has had a long interest in popular culture and she uses a broad variety of approaches and methodologies in her work. Hough has exhibited her work in a variety of locations throughout the world.

TV Dinner for Plants, 2011

3:01 min.

The first restaurant for plants opened in California for several months in 2011. Situated in the gardens of the Crocker Art Museum, the Photosynthetic Restaurant provided botanical patrons, including bushes and shrubs, with healthful and appetizing meals freshly prepared by filtering and mixing the full spectrum of sunlight, following recipes that adapt traditional culinary principles to plant physiology. Though the Photosynthetic Restaurant was short-lived, gourmet sunlight need not be exclusive in the future. Executive chef Jonathon Keats has now packaged his signature recipes for easy consumption anywhere, by videotaping select wavelengths of natural sunlight and editing them into a quick and convenient TV dinner. Playing his three-minute video on a monitor near indoor flora, anyone can treat their houseplants to delectable mixtures of bright colors including orange and violet and yellow.

Acclaimed as "a poet of ideas" by the New Yorker, Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher and artist based in the United States and Italy. Recently he opened a photosynthetic restaurant for plants at the Crocker Art Museum. He has also exhibited extraterrestrial abstract art at the Judah L Magnes Museum, launched a stay-at-home Local Air & Space Administration at California State University, presented the nation's first ouija voting booth at the Berkeley Art Museum, and attempted to genetically engineer God in collaboration with scientists at the University of California. His projects have been documented by PBS, NPR, and the BBC World Service, garnering favorable attention in periodicals ranging from The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle, to Nature and New Scientist, to Flash Art and ArtInfo. Additionally, Keats serves as the art critic for San Francisco Magazine and as a columnist for Wired Magazine. He's the author of two novels and an American Library Association award-winning collection of stories published by Random House, as well as a book about the co-evolution of language and science, "Virtual Words", published by Oxford University Press last October. Since graduating summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1994, he has been a visiting artist at California and Montana State Universities, and a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the recipient of Yaddo and MacDowell fellowships. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.

The Titan, 2011

4:45 min.

The Titan is a stop-motion adaptation of the Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus. The “performers” in the piece are brought to life through a series of photographic images of mouths and eyes, which are housed within a number of different “screens” included in the stage set. To illuminate the photographs each screen is back-lit with LEDs. As I shot each frame in the animation, I changed the photographs, directly on the set, to correspond to the spoken words in the audio.

In the stage set of The Titan the central figure, spatially restricted and physiologically fragmented, represents the physical and psychological condition of the Prometheus. The six additional “screens” flanking the central figure are emotive extensions of Prometheus, employed to underscore specific passages of the dialogue and reference the use of the Mask and the Chorus as a dramatic device in Greek Drama.

In the Aeschylean version of the myth, Prometheus is not only being punished for giving the secret of fire to man, he is also punished for teaching humanity about the Arts and Sciences. Prometheus endowed these virtues upon humanity in an effort to undermine Zeus’s intent of destroying the human race. The text of The Titan is made up of segments of conversations where Prometheus recounts the events leading to his punishment, however the dialogue of all other characters has been removed, allowing Prometheus to “speak” directly to the audience.

More than 2,000 years after Prometheus Bound was written, there are still many individuals and populations struggling against the constraints of oppressive governments and regimes. History has shown us, however, that reason, intelligence, and creative devices can be a power much greater than the mightiest of social and political forces, even the great power of Zeus.

Edward Ramsay-Morin received an MFA from Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York and a BFA from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. He has been working in digital and electronic formats since the late 90's, including animation, interactive multimedia, physical computing, rapid prototyping, sound, and video.

A common thread in his work is an interest in the relationships between the structure of language, perception, and the methods in which cultures share and access information. His work in animation and video is informed by the imagery of scientific texts and educational media that he has been exposed to through public television, museums, his classroom experiences, and his parents, both of whom are paleontologists. His recent endeavors in multimedia include an interest in the formal and metaphoric layers of human-computer interfaces. From these contexts, he is interested in exploring the intersections between intellectual, physiological, and metaphysical experiences.

From 2008 to 2011 he was an Assistant Professor of New Media and Animation at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Animation at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.

Where the Boys Are, 2010

3:24 min.

Ben Neufeld was born and raised in New York. He repairs the city's voting machines for a living and enjoys searching for new or hidden meanings in found films and videos as well as creating his own.

Burning Matches, 2012

2:30 min.

Five arms are struggling to silence three telephones, an alarm clock, and a timer without success. This rejection of communication and more generally of what connects us to time is a pretext for a new experimentation where you "hear what you see" and vice versa. These simple gestures, intended to break an unwanted process, are repeated in a quasi-schizophrenic way. The result is a choreographic and musical fight that will end with some effort.

Acommunication, 2011

5:29 min.

Audiovisual experiment about the light and sound generated by a burning match. Based on accumulation, this video is a declaration of love to the fire element.

Longtime musician and painter Jean-Michel Rolland focuses on video art to make his two favorite media meet: sound and image. At the origin of each of his creations, musicality plays a role as important as image and each one influences the other transmedially. The result is a series of experimental videos where sound and image are so inseparable that one without the other would lose its meaning.

He particularly appreciates using short sequences (samples) and repeating them along his experimentations, wishing to transfigure the commonplace into coherent work. The sequences are treated as mere utensils, found objects used to create visual and musical compositions.

The Golden Age, 2011

5:41 min.

The Golden Age is a karaoke video, combining the lyrics and instrumental rendition of Phil Collins' Take A Look At Me Now with the nuclear attack sequence of the film The Day After, with each shot shown in reverse. In an increasingly complex era of ecological degradation and political unrest, The Golden Age mourns the loss of easily quantifiable threats to our existence.

SR Shearer is a San Francisco-based artist and musician. His recent work addresses the current social role of our doomed future.

Fredericks & Mae 2012 Collection, 2012

1:40 min.

Lights: Fire Night, 2009

4:10 min.

Music video for Brooklyn-based band Lights. Directed by Lauryn Siegel. Cinematography by Ava Berkofsky. AD'd and edited by Courtney Powell. Produced by Larin Sullivan. 2nd Camera by Ruthie Doyle. Set design by Beth Flatlee and Abby Walton. VFX by Jay Liquori. Projections by everyone on set.

Born in Manhattan and raised in San Francisco, Lauryn Siegel has been involved in the production, conception and distribution of media across platforms for over a decade. She began her auspicious career while an undergraduate disc jockey at Wesleyan University’s free-form radio station. Her involvement in recorded and live music served as an entré into the world of visual media and she soon went on to work in a variety of positions within the entertainment, music and film world in creative and supervisory roles. She attended New York University’s School of Journalism to hone her skills as a producer and director of non-fiction content and also had the chance to take classes at the renowned Tisch School of the Arts. Here she developed a strong interest in narrative structures and creative communication and went on to work as a writer, producer and director of short-form content at Logo, a division of Viacom Inc. While at Logo she worked on a variety of campaigns and spots that garnered both industry awards and critical accolades. She recently left this position to pursue her own work as a director of promotional and short-form content. Siegel has long been a believer in the strong power of collaborative thinking and prides herself on maintaining strong connections within her industry and creative community. Siegel continues to DJ recreationally and direct music videos in her free time. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

That Perfect High, 2010

7:09 min.

Based on the lesser known poem by Shel Silverstein, That Perfect High delves into one individual's epic existentialist quest for the ultimate rush.

Brittany Stanley is a video artist living and working in Jersey City. She received her BFA at Carnegie Mellon University where she completed a dual degree in Electronic and Time-based Fine Art and International Relations. Her work deals primarily with the effect of banal civilized society on the primal psyche of contemporary human beings.