FUTURE PROJECTIONS : NEWS FROM THE SUN
Brendan and Jeremy Smyth + Semiconductor + Rose Lowder + Louis Henderson + Doris Chase
“All the light in the universe had come to greet him, an immense congregation of particles.” – JG Ballard
From that fiery orb some 92.95 million miles away (Chase) comes an AV message of brilliant noise and plasmatic beauty, a broadcast echoed out through the kinetic vibrations of solar wind and rain (Semiconductor). Traveling for eight minutes and 20 seconds through the inky darkness of our universe, this gift of light is absorbed so as to be shouted back out, finding its voice in the radical 16mm vibration of organic matter (Lowder) – of life itself. Thus spoken, the trace of sun is turned to gold – interned in the earth’s crust where it awaits the hand of man - who in turn awaits his post-colonial revenge (Henderson). Featuring the world premiere of NC-based filmmakers and programmers Brendan and Jeremy Smyth!
FEATURING:
News from the Sun by Brendan and Jeremy Smyth (3:00, video, 2106)
Brilliant Noise by Semiconductor (5:45, video, 2006)
Bouquets 21-30 by Rose Lowder (14:00, 16mm, 2005)
Lettres de Voyant by Louis Henderson (40:00, video, 2013)
Circles I by Doris Chase (6:45, 16mm, 1971)
TRT 67
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