FUTURE PROJECTIONS : THE DEAD ASTRONAUT
Sabine Gruffat + Jesse McLean + Harun Farocki + Pierre Huyghe + Rachel Rose + Wojciech Bakowski + Peter Burr
“A dozen astronauts had died in orbital accidents, their capsules left to revolve through the night sky like the stars of a new constellation…” – JG Ballard
As virtual self is replaced by virtual selves, a rapidly expanding world of cyber-explorers is abandoned and set adrift, left to orbit the ever-infinite WWW. Left without an end command, they scale hyper-mountains (McLean), stretch themselves into depressing new pixel-shapes (Bakowski), exhibit predictively loathsome behavior (Farocki) and wander drunk and chaotic onto the Information Superhighway (Burr). Like a digital poltergeist, they materialize in the real – crashing through the touchscreen glass of our window-sized screens (Rose), transposing their uncanny visage onto every organic form they touch (Huyghe). Featuring the world premiere of a new work by NC-based digital media artist Sabine Gruffat!
FEATURING:
The Dead Astronaut by Sabine Gruffat (3:00, video, 2016)
Climbing by Jesse McLean (6:00, video, 2009)
Parallel IV by Harun Farocki (11:20, video, 2014)
Untitled (Human Mask) by Pierre Huyghe (20:00, video, 2014)
A Minute Ago by Rachel Rose (10:00, video, 2014)
Suchy Pion (Dry Standpipe) by Wojciech Bakowski (13:00, video, 2012)
Green Red by Peter Burr (10:23, video, 2012)
TRT 73
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