While on tour for his new book Exo-Psychology: A Manual on The Use of the Nervous System According to the Instructions of the Manufacturer, Timothy Leary gives a lecture at the University of Illinois Circle Campus (now University of Illinois Chicago). At the start, Leary draws parallels from various cultures from human history and asserts that those who migrated and moved beyond their known environments, the restless and the visionaries, are the ones who advanced human civilization.
Space Ghost compares the experiences of astronauts and prisoners, using popular depictions of space travel to illustrate the physical and existential aspects of incarceration: sensory deprivation, the perception of time as chaotic and indistinguishable, the displacement of losing face-to-face contact, and the sense of existing in a different but parallel universe with family and loved ones.
Physical comparisons such as the close living quarters, the intensity of the immediate environment, and sensory deprivation, soon give way to psychological ones: the isolation, the changing sense of time, and the experience of earth as distant, inaccessible, and desirable. The analogy extends to media representations that hold astronauts and prisoners in an inverse relationship: the super citizen vs. the super-predator. Astronauts, ceaselessly publicized, are frozen in time and memory whereas prisoners, anonymous and ignored, age without being remembered.
Begun as a consideration of the upgrading from manual to digital film editing techniques, Transitional Objects explores the anxiety and loss inevitable in such a transition while also suggesting the consequences of other life transitions. The video takes its title from D.W. Winnicott's theory of children's use of transitional objects to negotiate the gaps between internal reality and the shared reality of people and things.
An electronic disturbance created during a live audio meltdown by Animal Charm as part of their Hot Mirror Mix in the fall of 1998.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 2, Hot Mirror Mix.
A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted) is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions. Animals, human bodies, children, ritual, and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire, and a visceral movement that is more felt than seen.
"Love at first sight, one night, down at Silverror’s Saloon!" Mickey R Mahoney and jonCates direct Silverror’s Saloon, the next film in the 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) Glitch Western series of films and games. Written by Emily Mercedes Rich and jonCates, this experimental film queers, glitches, and questions the Western film genre. We encounter characters caught in a glitched cinematic magic moment: a love scene. First dance with a stranger. Home and far from home.
Hollis Sigler (1948–2001) was a Chicago-based artist. She received degrees from both Moore College of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her mature artistic style was faux-naïve, featuring paintings whose subjects, furniture and clothing set in doll-house type interiors and suburban landscapes, were stand-ins for the implicitly female figure. She was an openly lesbian artist and a prominent member of the faculty of Columbia College in Chicago.
Swamp Swamp and Wurmburth are each comprised of a series of tightly cropped shots of small, hand-made table-top sculptures or "sets". Paint and many other materials that behave like paint (i.e. lotion, shampoo, foodstuffs) are blown through these environments with plastic tubing and forced air. Each edited collection of shots makes an endless cycle of primal sludge and rupturing goo.
[This] is my first attempt to construct a video piece using one set of generative intervals for both sound and color. All of the color in the piece is orchestrated in brightness ‘octaves’ corresponding to the registration of the pitches in the soundtrack. Each hue from a circle of twelve corresponds to one of the pitches of a tempered scale. The articulation of the piece consists of a series of loudness and brightness ripples which move across the piece in speed relationships derived from the hue and pitch proportions.
In Stitch, computer graphics are altered with image processing effects. Beeps and electronic music provide a soundtrack as abstract structures and evolving shapes and patterns rotate in space. About halfway through the video, the music takes on a jazz and blues quality and at the end, Tom Defanti, a collaborator of Phil Morton’s, introduces an event with thanks to the artists and other people who made it possible.
An experimental documentary about the street drag racing scene on Chicago’s near West Side. This is a rambling textured film about obsession. It is about the mythos of speed for its own sake, but it’s also about waiting, and it is through waiting that The BLVD exposes community, inner-city landscapes and nomadic experiences of place. The film treats storytelling as a living medium for determining history. And it commands respect, for those who transform cars, or anything else, through passion.
This tape deviates from the more purely formal investigations of Snyder’s earlier work; it has no soundtrack and uses camera images exclusively. Employing Quantel digital effects and editing procedures, a novelty in video post-production at the time, Snyder manipulates images of tract houses shot in a small Indiana town. Cubist re-constructions of the monotonous facades fracture spatial planes into intricate geometric arrangements, with frames enclosing frames, spiralling like Chinese boxes.
Kipnis describes this tape as "an appropriation of the aesthetics of both late capitalism and early Soviet cinema—MTV meets Eisenstein—reconstructing Karl Marx for the video age.” She presents a postmodern lecture delivered by a chorus of drag queens on the unexpected corelations between Marx’s theories and the carbuncles that plagued the body of the rotund thinker for over thirty years. Marx’s erupting, diseased body is juxtaposed with the “body politic", and posited as a symbol of contemporary society proceeding the failed revolutions of the late 1960s.
Family Court introduces us to the world of good, clean, family fun and leisure.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 2, Hot Mirror Mix.
September 24th, 2016, North Avenue Beach, Chicago. It was a sunny day. According to the weather report, the temperature was 75°F, with the barometer reading of 30 inches height and the wind speed of 13 miles per hour. The time was 2:27 pm, I was standing by the Michigan Lake. In my hand there was a waterproof camera that weighs 2.6 ounces. I pressed the record button on the camera and threw it into the lake. The camera sank into the lake immediately and embarked on a mysterious journey. During the journey, it was elevated, pressed, panned, rotated, and spun by the water.
A hyper-collage endurance test of sado-masochistic proportions, mixing an anthology of corporate video music with a feng shui video.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 2, Hot Mirror Mix.
In Animal Charm's masterful example of video montage, a monkey is mesmerized as he watches two dolphins toss a woman from snout to snout. Go cross-eyed with cross-cutting. Sometimes, in order to prevent the insidious absorption of mass media, it is necessary to apply Vaseline to your eyes and ears. Other times, you only need to watch Stuffing — it’s inside of everything.
1. The idea that a film about a city, a quiet, architectural film no less, can tell us anything that we don’t already know about urban life at this point in our new century is perhaps a bit arrogant. But the city is an organism that changes constantly; our knowledge of it is provisional at best. So a film that examines the urban environment under the cloak of darkness must presume to reveal a reality that we don’t know, and tries to dispel projections and fears that are for the most part located in the imagination... in a memory of film, television, or the novel.
An over thirty-minute static long take of a grass lawn in front of a lake. A camera is set still to capture a day trip of a group of people around the lake. The causal conservation suggests they are having a picnic on a breezy day, where a wind chime occasionally rings, alongside the random blowing of a horn. The video processing focuses on the keying of two distinct areas: the lake and the surrounding grass lawn and trees.
