Body

The violent surgical act of a boy’s circumcision is contradicted by the peacefulness of his facial expression. Proud to join the world of men, the boy is trying his best to be brave. Yet can the passage to adulthood be that simple?

This title is only available on Radical Closure.

Soft Science is a collection of video-curiosities created by artists and scientists. Behind laboratory doors are some of the most astonishing "outsider" art projects around. Autopoetic bacteria, tethered flies, ebullient nanogears - these data gems create wonder, beauty - not to mention knowledge. Artists have been mining science for years - in diverse experiments with icky substances, authority figures, and the ever-elusive idea of Reason. This unique program includes digital movies by biologists alongside contemporary video art.

A Perfect Pair posits the idea that individual consumers are walking billboards for the products they use; product slogans and brand names peeking out from every crevice and cranny of the actors’ bodies. Export demonstrates how the body of the consumer, especially that of the female consumer, is co-opted by commercialism. In tongue-in-cheek fashion, A Perfect Pair celebrates the modern-day co-mingling of fetish objects, as a body builder seduces a prostitute at a bar saying, “Your eyes are the most beautiful blue ad-space. Your cheek could promote a Mercedes.

Identically dressed, and with sibling-like resemblance, performance artists Trevor Martin and Kym Olsen shift between spoken word and athletic dance choreography in a collection of 29 scenes. Set in various locations--including a gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, and a trailer park circus--Martin and Olsen slip between a ventriloquist and his dummy, a seducer and his surrogate, a doctor and his patient, and synchronized dance partners. The film examines a complex social psychology--questioning the colonization of the human body for various political, medical and religious agendas.

Black Body is a harsh and compelling meditation on the contradictory values assigned to black bodies in American culture: they exist as both desired and feared, abject and powerful. The “black body” is a body whose surface reflects projected fears and repressed desires; as such, it exists as a site of ideological struggle, a surface which is simultaneously eroticized and denegrated.