Experimental Film

"A film about the time of the blast furnaces — 1917-1933 — about the development of an industry, about a perfect machinery which had to run itself to the point of its own destruction. This essay... on heavy industry and the gas of the blast furnace, convinces through the author's cool abstraction and manic obsession, and through the utilization of a single example of the self-destructive character of capitalistic production: 'The image of the blast furnace gas is real and metaphoric; an energy blows away uselessly into the air. Guided through a system of pipes, the pressure increases.

Petrolia takes its name from a redundant oil-drilling platform set in the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. The film looks at the architecture of the oil industry along the Scottish coastline where oil and gas supplies are predicted to run dry in the next forty years.

2005-2007 What is explained can be denied, but what is felt can't be forgotten. -- Charles Bowden Ghost: the outward and visible sign of an inward fear. -- Ambrose Bierce

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

“Spellbeamed uses the acts of translation and transcription to amplify the questions: ”what is a score?” and “what kind of musicalities can be transmitted through extended ideas of scoring?” The inspiration for the piece was the archival collection of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. The Benjamin Archive is a collection of texts, lists, commentaries, scraps, markings, dreamy musings, constellations, word fragments, toys, postcards and books.

This is the gaze that is reflected in the dark obsidian mirror.

Between 1892 and 1927, almost 16 million people came to Ellis Island attempting to immigrate to the United States.

Under the spell of Toloache, the hypnotic images come up.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

"A meditation on history, memory, and change in Central and Eastern Europe, Buried in Light is a non-narrative journey, a cinematic collage. Cohen’s “search for images” began at a time of extraordinary flux, as the Berlin Wall was dismantled—opening borders yet ushering in a nascent wave of consumer capitalism. What he saw struck him as a profound paradox: the moment Eastern Europe was revealed was simultaneously the moment it was hidden by the blinding light of commercialism.

Born out of an "objective hazard" (a 16mm roll where two different subjects were imprinted by mistake), jeny303 is a composite work intertwining two portraits. On the one hand there is jeny, the feminine alter ego of a transgender millennial dealing with a heroine addiction. On the other hand there is the 303 building, an iconic modernist architecture in a public university in Bogota (Colombia). The images of the body and the edifice interlace and depict jeny303, a character on the threshold of a transformation to come.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

This is the arche-fossil and the presence of the decay-image rate of his radioactive nucleus as an omen of interesting times. Part of the Scattered Geology Audiovisual series.

This is the audiovisual translation of the Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History.

This film was made from The New York Times newspaper articles. The semi-automated animation process resulted in sentence recombinations that sometimes made sense while randomly emphasizing certain words and images.

The computer animation was transferred to one 100ft roll of 16mm Tri-X reversal film and then hand-processed. The reversal negative is the original.

Producer/ Director: Sabine Gruffat
Hand Processing: Matthew Kelson

Polished obsidian mirrors, tezcatl, were once used in ancient Mexico for divination, to traverse into the worlds of the gods and ancestors.

Through the obsidian mirror, the solar and lunar ritual used to be a celestial dance. In Ritual, suns and moons whirl around, glowing brighter as their paths cross.

1968 was the opening of the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, ten days after the massacre of students and civilians by military and police on October 2 in the "Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Tlatelolco."

This is the third part of the hyperkinetic still life. This triptych is part of the Hyperkinetic and Hauntology film series.

The supposed existence of a golden kingdom motivated numerous expeditions, and the belief remained in force until the 19th century, although its location moved from Colombia to the Guianas, as the process of conquest and colonization of the South American territory progressed. A journey and a drift from extractive colonialism that is far from over.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin deals primarily with monumentality, narcissism and the ways in which our heroes are embedded into our identities, and manifested through the body. Through a variety of gestures, the pervasiveness of this practice is highlighted alongside its ultimate, inevitable failure. The viewer moves through various stages of anxiety, idolization and actual touchdown with 1970s gay sex icon Peter Berlin himself, capturing both the apparent and the hidden.

Mother’s Day in Mexico is considered one of the most important family holidays of the year. Thousands of mothers have nothing to celebrate. They are the mothers of victims of forced disappearances. Mothers and relatives of the disappeared participated in the "March of National Dignity. Mothers searching for their Sons, Daughters and Justice."

A vision of our brother Deer.