VDB at the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival

The Video Data Bank is pleased to be participating in and in partnership with the Ann Arbor Film Festival for its 60th edition.

Highlighting two special programs at the festival:

AAFF x Video Data Bank: Medium Meet Medium
March 26th, 2022, 9PM EDT
Michigan Theater
Tickets Available Here
 
Programmed by our Distribution and Communications Assistant, Emily Martin, the VDB presents in partnership with the festival the collaborative in-person screening program, AAFF x Video Data Bank: Medium Meet Medium. This program, highlighting work from the collection at the Video Data Bank, features titles from seven artists that utilize the technical, aesthetic, and thematic conventions of both video and film in fluid, colorful form. It provides a reflection on the history of the Ann Arbor Film Festival and its relationship to video, noting that it is imperative to reflect on the moments in which mediums meet, converse, and converge.

VDB staff member, Emily Martin, will be in attendance during the week of the festival.

Sadie Benning: Pixelvisions
March 25th, 2022, 7PM EDT
Michigan Theater
Tickets Available Here

Programmed by Scott Northrup with support from the College of Creative Studies and community partner the Neutral Zone, this program surveys Sadie Benning’s early videoworks. They were made more than 30 years ago with a toy camcorder in their Milwaukee bedroom, at a time before they fully understood their nonbinary identity, and have not screened in the Ann Arbor Film Festival until now. These remarkable tapes were recorded with the Fisher Price PXL2000, which shot directly to audio cassettes in a flat, pixelated format known as Pixelvision. This might have been an underwhelming Christmas gift to the then 15-year-old who had been promised a camcorder, but it ultimately gave them agency to make sounds and images that are as tactile as they are emotionally and socially resonant. While Benning has made other complex and indelible works over the years, the time felt right to revisit these powerful, questioning recordings in light of the time that we’ve all spent inside these past few years, coping with who and where we are in this world.
 

We are also happy to highlight several artists in our collection that will be featured throughout this year’s programs including Ann Oren, Cecelia Condit, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Kevin Jerome Everson, and Sky Hopinka.

Tickets for the festival programs and general film schedule information can be found here.

Hope to see you there!