FUTURE PROJECTIONS : THE CAGE OF SAND
Edward Rankus + Barbara Hammer + Michael Robinson + Tony Conrad + OJOBOCA + Makino Takashi
“As [we] watched, [our] lean arms propped against the rusting rail, the last whorls of light sank away into the cerise funnel withdrawing against the horizon, and the first wind stirred across the dead Martian sand.” – JG Ballard
Like Ballard’s protagonist in The Cage of Sand, we-the-audience find ourselves slowly being covered over by an alien sandstorm of the decidedly televisual sort. We drift to sleep and awaken with a start, lost within a videogame daydream (Robinson). In a wash of flickering static (Conrad), post-industrial Amiga-animated “dirty pictures” (Hammer), and derelict images narrated by what seems to be a German robot (OJOBOCA), we find ourselves anew: we are chaos, we are sandstorm (Takashi). Featuring the world premiere of a new work by NC-based video artist Edward Rankus!
FEATURING:
The Cage of Sand by Edward Rankus (3:00, video, 2016)
No No Nooky TV by Barbara Hammer (12:00, 16mm, 1987)
And We All Shine On by Michael Robinson (7:00, 16mm, 2006)
Eye of Count Flickerstein by Tony Conrad (7:00, 16mm, 1967)
Wolkenschatten by OJOBOCA (15:00, 16mm, 2014)
Cinéma Concret by Makino Takashi (24:00, video, 2015)
TRT 68
FUTURE PROJECTIONS is a 9-part screening program of short film and video work drawn from 125 years of techno-prophecy and oracular future-visions. Taking its title from distopian sci-fi author JG Ballard’s short story collection of the same name, each program in Memories of the Space Age follows the thread of a different tale, tracing out a conceptual audiovisual line into the (im)possible horizons of our future planet(s) – an Earth vibrating under the heat of multiple suns, subject to the pull of infinite moons, and peopled by a population not unlike our own. Herein are 45+ short films, videos and movies-with-live-soundtracks conjured forth by the most forward-thinking media artists of our time(s): from computer pioneers to mechanical futurists, FX wizards to analogue feedback architects, landscape holographers to post-human anthropologists, cyber-essayists to Uncanny Valley voyagers, cut-up creationists to magical (un)realists, and 16mm futurologists to digital humanists – Future Projections presents a kinetic and syncretic history of All That Is Yet To Be.
Highlights include an embedded 16mm tribute to the great musician and filmmaker Tony Conrad (RIP); two radical video synth landscapes by Montreal artist Sabrina Ratté; Japanese noise filmmaker Makino Takashi’s 3D-immersive Cinéma Concrete, late German essayist Harun Farocki’s videogame dissection Parallel I-IV, French avant-garde filmmaker Rose Lowder’s flicker tour-de-force Bouquets 21-30, Cauleen Smith’s Eternals-track’d Afrofuturist collage Songs for Earth and Folk, commissions of 9 new shorts by local and national filmmakers, and more!
FEATURING NEW COMMISSIONS BY: Alee Peoples + Bill Brown + Brendan and Jeremy Smyth + Edward Rankus + Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby + Ephraim Asili + Mary Helena Clark + Sabine Gruffat + Stephanie Barber
FEATURING FILMS / VIDEOS BY: Adam Beckett + Barbara Hammer + Basma Alsharif + Beatrice Gibson + Ben Rivers + Cauleen Smith + Chris Marker + David O’Reilly + Deborah Stratman + Doris Chase + Harun Farocki + Hollis Frampton + Jacolby Satterwhite + Jeremy Bailey + Jesse McLean + JJ Murphy + John Whitney + Lawrence Jordan + Lillian Schwartz + Louis Henderson + Makino Takashi + Michael Robinson + Mike Stoltz + OJOBOCA + Peter Burr + Pierre Huyghe + Rachel Rose + Rosa Barba + Rose Lowder + Sabrina Ratté + Sara Magenheimer + Scott Bartlett + Semiconductor + Shambhavi Kaul + Tony Conrad + Wojciech Bakowski + Yuri Ancarani
With support from the Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org