FUTURE PROJECTIONS : MYTHS OF THE NEAR FUTURE
Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby + Lillian Schwartz + Basma Alsharif + Deborah Stratman + Ben Rivers
“…space was not a linear structure at all, but a model of an advanced condition of time, a metaphor for eternity which they were wrong to try to grasp…” – JG Ballard
This is a five-part proposal for a time out-of-time, for an oracular cinema that envisions the possibilities of multiple futures – as determined by histories rewritten and yet-to-be. Beginning with a visionary Moog-sountrack’d computer animation from 1970 (Schwartz); followed by an epileptic un-telling of the 1948 Palestinian exodus (Alsharif) and a new fable for our found-footage existence (Stratman); and ending with a set of sci-fi island utopias recorded in the distopian present (Rivers) – here is cinema as evidence, as proof of worlds unseen. Featuring a score by Olivia Block and the world premiere of a new work by video duo Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby!
FEATURING:
Myths of the Near Future by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby (3:00, video, 2016)
Pixillation by Lillian Schwartz (4:00, 16mm, 1970)
Farther Than the Eye Can See by Basma Alsharif (13:00, video, 2012)
Second Sighted by Deborah Stratman (5:05, video, 2014)
Slow Action by Ben Rivers (45:00, video, 2011)
TRT 70
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