HalfLifers is an ongoing collaborative project created by longtime friends and fellow media artists Torsten Zenas Burns and Anthony M. Discenza. Embracing a gestural improvisation-based performance style and championing a rigorously low-fi aesthetic, HalfLifers engages a shifting region of speculative fictions, from play therapy and improvised crisis re-stagings to zombie architectural systems and psychic sandwich surgery.
This 2-disc compilation gathers together for the first time all of the HalfLifers single-channel work produced between 1992 and 2010, and features rarely-seen documentation of several large scale media installations. Also included are excerpts from early projects created prior to the official formation of the collaboration, along with the complete text of a 1999 Film Comment essay, "Quest for What: Jim Supanick Locates the HalfLifers in the Video Badlands."
HalfLifers projects have been presented at venues around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Pacific Film Archive; the New York Video Festival; the Chicago Underground Film Festival; Video_Dumbo; the Impakt Festival; the Stuttgart Filmwinter Festival for Expanded Media; EMAF; and many others. Their work was recently included in the book, Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the Bay Area, 1945 - 2000.
