FEELINGS

C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1 is a collaborative video and performance work by artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski. Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) present a full-spectrum video, set to a score by rock quartet Kinski. Edited in succinct rainbow-hued sections, each sequence features robbinschilds in monochromatic gear, acting in psychedelic contrast and communion with their surroundings. The artists traverse through desolate desert landscapes, darkened parking lots, and geological formations, responding to the environment through choreographed duets. In a style that is obsessive, persistent, and often humorous, robbinschilds reveals their observations of the human imprint on the world.

An audience-interactive game of Mad Libs, with support from a linguistically challenged newcomer. We replace various parts of speech in newspaper articles to create new, customized meanings.

This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Post Pony Trilogy.

In Dani Leventhal’s Platonic, geometric specters twirl in space; pet cats foam at the mouth; a little boy mistakes his junkie dad for a superhero; and a confused adolescent worries he has sired a centaur. Platonic references both the ancient philosopher’s metaphysics of ideal Forms, which simultaneously exist outside our perceptions and yet give rise to them, and the related meaning in common parlance of non-romantic love. Leventhal trains her searching lens on the distance separating bodies, moments, and perspectives. The result is a study in the awkward gaps between appearance and reality, seeing and understanding, desire and its object.

Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.

Second and Lee is a cautionary tale about when not to run. It uses archival reportage and voiceover recollection to trace through repetitive corridors of presumption, justice and judgment.

Cast: James Williams.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

Standing on the brink of elimination, the suspense threatening to fracture their composure, contestants wait and see if they will be going home. The audience at home is also waiting... Part two of Bearing Witness Trilogy.

Bearing Witness is a trilogy concerned with how we, as a culture, watch ourselves, especially in moments of great emotional significance. With footage culled from mainstream media and television, the single-channel videos (The Eternal Quarter Inch, Somewhere only we know, The Burning Blue) distill moments of sincerity from perhaps insincere sources (televangelists, reality show contestants, screensavers, B-movies). This trilogy puts pressure on the infrastructure of distributing images, particularly those that represent what might have normally been private experiences made public for the sake of entertainment. Located in interstitial spaces, these videos continually shift the role of the viewer between voyeur and participant.

Short for "Probably The Last" (of the series), Spiral PTL uses the image processor like a musical instrument to create variations on a spiral, transforming its basic form into an ever-moving gyro. The movement is synchronous with an audio track that varies from electronic buzzes and Space Age voices to the quiet sounds of running water.

Super 8mm film transferred to digital video. Installation composed of footage from three separate sequences that interweave frame by frame. Shot in the interiors of empty homes in Amman, Jordan. Sound composed of recording of food ingredients for unspecified dishes looped repetitively over ambient noise from film transfer to digital video.

Produced by Manifesta 8, Region of Murcia.

This title is also available on Basma Alsharif Videoworks: Volume 1

Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah, and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.

Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.

Thornton asks viewers to question how one sees “space" — whether literally or figuratively — and what is being revealed? Images of a sonogram session grant viewers access to what is typically reserved for medical analysis — “inner space.” The body, probed and revealed through technology, is collaged with imagery from lunar probes, drawing parallels with how technology also allows us to see where we were previously unable — “outer space.” A poem by Rilke about the interior quality of thought is contrasted with the clinical voice accompanying the images. 

Moving Stories strings together scenes of passenger aircraft in flight.  In this short study of the dramatic and narrative power of image and sound, Provost manipulates cinema language and reaches, though minimal means, a strong, emotionally loaded result.  With a limited number of images, an absorbing soundtrack, and a suggestive story line, the viewer's imagination is stimulated to the maximum.

Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.