THIRD EDITION program ten

Trailings – Lisa K. Lock

6:27 · USA · 2020

I attempt to create works that are collages of instances in a person’s life, inspired by deeply felt emotions and a desire to grasp fleeting memories. I want to offer a different reality that is haunting both in its beauty and its metaphoric imagery, drawing from the unassuming ordinary.

Waiting for the Dawn – Pedro Rodotá

4:12 · Brazil · 2020

An audiovisual poem exploring time, gender, origins, The flow of images and sounds attempt a reflection of a lethargic feeling of the isolation. The main techniques used were the multiplicity of different images on the screen, the mixing of different sounds, the attempt to generate a connection between the film planes in the montage process, etc.

Four Void – Pedro Sena Nunes and Cinema Vo’Arte

16:00 ·Portugal· 2020

An experimental/art-leaning short, screendance film in which four human characters appear stuck in an interior, futuristic landscape outside of time. As they struggle with themselves as well as with each other, they seem to reach upon dance (whether experienced or internalized, solitary or otherwise) as an instinctive/conceptual way out of an inescapable void.

All the while, an unknown, omniscient observer – perhaps one of them, perhaps one of us – appears to be monitoring their every move, watching as body and architecture stealthily seep into one another, nourishing each gesture with an underlying sense of levity, sustaining their collective journey in an existential limbo where hope meets despair.

CUNTSTRUCTION #MattMiwa “Desperado” – Lesley Marshall

15:28 · Canada· 2018

Presented at HTMLLes Biannual Festival hosted by Studio XX in Montreal – performance artists Les666, Amy Ede, and Matt Miwa explored the ideas about rebuilding a new world from a feminist or matriarchal perspective. In this installation video – Matt Miwa cuntstructs his new cat suit out of garbage bags – his questions for Cuntstruction included “Why can’t we just build everything out of garbage?” was put to test. At the time of this production, in our context we were confronted with a lot of popular media issues in the USA #MeToo movement and at the end he sings “Desperado” to lure the white male elite to their senses.

Y&I Go Outside – Yolande Brener, Danielle Imara

1:00 · UK/USA · 2020

Brener and Imara fill their time with frenetic activity at home during the Corona pandemic. As lockdown rules are eased they brave it and go outside. It’s scary though, and they return rapidly to the virtual cocoon they’ve become used to. Beyond the immediate time-frame in which it’s set, Y&I Go Outside speaks to the increasing recession of human life from nature to the artificial and also questions what is more real, an unconnected ‘natural’ life, or connectedness via the virtual.

The Window Appearances – Danielle Imara

1:00 · UK · 2020

During lockdown Imara made regular window appearances to post as looped videos on Instagram. Imitating the theatre that we couldn’t perform in or attend, these works express the inherent trapped-ness of lockdown. Here the appearances are combined, their natural soundtracks making a jerky music, and imitating a gig that couldn’t happen live.

T-POSE: To Dance With One’s Hands – Steven Sych

4:45 · Canada · 2020

T-POSE: To Dance With One’s Hands, is a 3D digital work of procedural choreography. ‘Procedural’ here means that the choreography is created and performed through code and executed in real time. T-POSE is not a video: it is computer code generating infinitely variable, computationally improvised dance segments referred to as ‘performances’.

T-POSE critically explores the commonplace movements found in video games. The title refers to the default T-shaped pose that digital characters are set into during the modeling stage, and which allows them to eventually accept stock animations. Beginning with sets of stock animations such as shooting guns, swinging swords, and so on, T-POSE works to re-interpolate these gestures into an ongoing, ritualistic, infinitely variable dance. The artist  uses a set of animations from shooting a pistol and works to recontextualize and playfully subvert the violent, mindlessly masculinist pretenses of these movements. The masculine is doubly undone by the pink fuzziness of the morose dancers, whose gestures still bear the trace of gunshots in the form of stuttering reverberations of the arm. T-POSE in this sense involves the application of continual turbulence to the quotidian: because it runs in real-time rather than being a video, and because it uses artificially intelligent dancers who are reactive to one another as well as to their musical score, the contingency added to these stock movements grows over time and differs with each performance. Even the camera angles are decided via algorithms. Through the introduction of such computational improvisation, the violent and masculine-coded gestures are both set into relief and continually undermined.

In T-POSE, the animated dance of the avatars is a choreographed pacified-violence, and a ritual designed to defamiliarize the habitual performance of bloodthirsty actions. This ritual demands of its audience a critical reappraisal of the movements we see every day on screens, as well as the embodied but taken-for-granted gestures we ‘perform’ when we interact with digital devices.

Amis du Lac – Stephen St. Francis Decky

10:00 · USA/France · 2020

Amis du Lac depicts an interstellar terrarium containing some of the last vestiges of earth’s living creatures: surveilled by a large, blue alien, the complexity of human life and longing is brought into clarity via the daily lives and waking dreams of the terrarium’s inhabitants. The film stands as a treatise on the innate ability of the imagination to envision perpetually better worlds than the one we’re currently inhabiting, as well as the evocative power of music and art. The earthlings of Amis du Lac are no longer physically connected to their planet, but the planet itself lives on in an ever-expanding world of self-contained dreams and ideas.

The Gods Of Tiny Things – Deborah Kelly

5:22 · Australia · 2019

The Gods of Tiny Things thinks poetically and urgently about the current array of threats to life; the shift to the right across the political world, the tolls of colonialism, climate catastrophe, human profligacy; and conversely the dynamic, kaleidoscopic pleasures and desires of life itself, at all scales, in all its teeming, prancing, hectic, clamouring fertility. We are dancing at the end of time.
The Gods of Tiny Things is a collaborative collage animation work produced through a residential workshop at Bundanon, on unceded Yuin Country. The imagery, musical composition and soundscape design were devised to reflect upon the imperilled lives on a climate-changing planet. The work speculates upon parthenogenetic, queer insurrection, and the choreography of the dance at the end of time.

BOOKANIMA: Dance – Shon Kim

7:31 · Korea · 2020

BOOKANIMA, a compound word of ‘Book’ and ‘Anima’, is Experimental Animation to give new cinematic life to book.

It aims to create ‘Book Cinema’ in the third scope between Book and Cinema and experiments with Locomotion based on Chronophotography Animation, paying homage to Edward Muybridge and Étienne Jules-Marey.

It experiments with the locomotion of Dance along with its stream: Ballet-Korean dance-Modern dance-Jazz dance-Aerial Silk-Tap dance-Aerobic-Disco-Break dance-Hip hop-Social dance.