FUTURE PROJECTIONS : MEMORIES OF THE SPACE AGE
Ephraim Asili + Deborah Stratman + Chris Marker + Jacolby Satterwhite + Harun Farocki + John Whitney
“Here are clouds formed from squares.” – Harun Farocki
A collection of visionary works from days not-yet-past, films and videos which peer backwards on the promises of what-is-to-be. Anchored by the late French essayist Chris Marker’s reality distortion machine and illustrated with oracular 15th century astronomical broadsides + NASA JPL footage (Stratman), gloriously CGI’d home movie footage (Satterwhite) and early computer-generated motion graphics (Whitney), this program takes Harun Farocki’s inquiry into a technology-of-representation as a metaphor for our own collective advance. Featuring music by Terry Riley and the world premiere of a new work by Ephraim Asili!
FEATURING:
Memories of the Space Age by Ephraim Asili (3:00, video, 2016)
These Blazeing Stars by Deborah Stratman (14:16, 16mm, 2011)
2084 by Chris Marker (10:00, video, 1984)
The Country Ball by Jacolby Satterwhite (12:38, video, 2012)
Parallel I by Harun Farocki (15:00, video, 2014)
Matrix III by John Whitney (10:00, video, 1971)
TRT 66
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