FUTURE PROJECTIONS : THE MAN WHO WALKED ON THE MOON
Alee Peoples + JJ Murphy + Beatrice Gibson + Scott Bartlett + Tony Conrad
“I, too, was once an astronaut.” – JG Ballard
His lungs filled with pure oxygen and his body clad in a pressurized spacesuit, our spaceman’s foot lightly grazes the fragile surface of the moon. He stares out at the distant blue satellite as moon dust fans out in a slow eruption from his footfall; he thinks back to the disjunctive voyage that brought him here (Murphy), about Minecraft and capitalism and his hallucinatory childhood (Gibson). He thinks of the landing and of the present and he is overwhelmed (Bartlett) – he is Moon! He rotates, he moves from day to night to day; dark to light to dark to light. He is everything, Moon caught in a flicker of time (Conrad). Featuring the world premiere of a new work by filmmaker Alee Peoples!
FEATURING:
The Man Who Walked On the Moon by Alee Peoples (3:00, video, 2016)
Science Fiction by JJ Murphy (5:00, 16mm, 1979)
F for Fibonacci by Beatrice Gibson (16:25, video, 2014)
Moon 1969 by Scott Bartlett (15:00, 16mm, 1969)
The Flicker by Tony Conrad (30:00, 16mm, 1966)
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