Music

A Spy is a gender-bending and thought-provoking mixture of pure visual pleasure with disturbing undercurrents. As Reeve lip-syncs to a Doors song (“I am a spy in the house of love. I know the dream that you’re dreaming of, I know your deepest secret fear...”), we see a new manifestation of Jesus walking in a video field of pulsing rainbows, amoebic forms, and B-movie girls in black panties — suggesting the desires we try to hide from ourselves and others.

Paul D. Miller (b. 1970) is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician better known as DJ Spooky. A popular and prolific recording artist, he has collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Butch Morris, Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth), Kool Keith, and Killa Priest (of Wu Tang Clan). Miller’s work uses a wide variety of digitally created music as a form of postmodern sculpture.

A drummer and guitarist on a rooftop high above New York City. A beat, a song, a trance, or just a celebration…? 

The film is a durational performance document, direct but mysterious.

The Double are Jim White and Emmett Kelly. Jim is an Australian drummer known for his work with Dirty Three, Xylouris White, Cat Power, Bill Callahan, and many others. Emmett Kelly is an American guitarist known for his band, The Cairo Gang, and his work with Will Oldham, Ty Segall, and many others.

Using a pulsing rock soundtrack and music video-style editing, X-PRZ combines archival footage of Malcolm X, advertisements, and corporate logos in No Sell Out to provide a scathing commentary on commodity culture.

“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”

-- Graham Harvey, Animism

Trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Filmed in a single take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist's everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps -- embodiment is our eternal everything.

Why Not A Sparrow is about a girl who enters a fairy tale land where the distinction between human and other animal species is blurred. In this kingdom, survival and extinction are on the tip of every birds’ tongue.

"An Eco-Fable about a girl, a rare bird, who experiences the pleasures and perils of another animal kingdom."

— Big Muddy Film Festival, 2002

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT/SUMMARY: This film centers around one performance, when Holland-based musicians, The Ex, visited New York to play a concert. This performance is intercut with city scenes, first from Amsterdam and then New York, of construction sites, street life, and protests against the Iraq war and the Bush administration. The construction site scenes relate to the band's dedication to music as a realm for collaborative building and creative destruction.

In the spell of one of the most exquisite pop songs I know, with the most rudimentary of animation skills, I sought to produce a smooth and rapid transition from innocuous kindergarten silliness to faux-Lynchian horror. As with Gaijin, I exploited the then-novel Google image search heavily for this video.

A video work that documents the annual orchid show at the New York Botanic Garden, Orchid Show critically observes notions of spectacle, gender and beauty as a query into the staging and imaging of nature. For the audio, the sounds of the garden fold into a classical composition for piano, Kaleidoscopic Changes on an Original Theme, Ending with a Fugue (1924) by Ruth Crawford Seeger, one of the few celebrated female composers of the early 20th century.

A sort-of music video that focuses on and under young women and men engaged in focusing video and movie cameras on other young men and women.

This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.

“Drawing on the ancient Nahuatl concept of the animating soul or life force, Tonalli engages the ritualistic powers of the cinema, summoning fire, flowers, and many moons into a frenetic and mesmerizing in-camera collage. Here, amid thickly swirling images and textured abstractions, the gods of creation and fertility manifest, dissolving into iridescent colors and dense, corporeal rhythms.” NYFF59

Some forms we can only know by their shadow.  In homage to the spirits of space test dogs, or any being we use in the name of progress. 

This video was made by invitation of composer Olivia Block for the release of her album Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea (Room40).

Composer: Olivia Block

Additional Imagery: NASA, Jeremy Inglis, Suan Hsi Yong

In The Jungle playfully and sorrowfully tells the tale of an unreliable narrator in a self-imposed exile. Given a grant to study the equivalent of animal cries and whines in jungle flora our heroine has lived for 1,612 days deep in an unnamed jungle. This jungle serves as an extended metaphor for excessive and continual growth and death and fear and sustenance; a metaphorical space of chaos in which the scientist finds solace and which stands in contrast to the human jungle of 'civilization'.

The music of John Bender punctuates a flow of processed images.