play and repeat, 3:20, HD video, 2014
audio by Max Jeffers

play and repeat is a technological rendering of a cityscape and the experience therein. A sequence of altered still images shot in New York is repeated, each time manipulated and layered over the artifacts of the previous sequence. Images of concrete and pavement are digitally smeared, transmogrifying the architectural structure of the street. Billboards and graffiti become the passage of color and texture through the 2-dimensional space of the screen. play and repeat takes both the city and digital video itself as subject and explores the effect of the addition and removal of the representational image on perception and memory.

The five-part structure is loosely based on the five-part Dog Star Man, in which Stan Brakhage manually manipulated layers of film to create effects like scratching and tinting in a way unique to film. The digital images inplay and repeat, shot on the way to a screening of The Art of Vision (the expanded form ofDog Star Man), are layered and manipulated using software-generated effects unique to video. Composition, color and movement give way to accumulation and eventual disintegration into its own ephemerality.

Screenings:
-SDSU Downtown Gallery, San Diego, July 2017
-AXW Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY, October 2016
-Director’s Choice Prize – Black Maria Film Festival, Touring program, Winter-Summer 2015
-L’Alternativa Independent Film Festival, Barcelona, Spain, November 2015
-San Diego Art Institute, San Diego, CA, August 2015
-Athenaeum Arts and Music Library, La Jolla, CA, August 2015
-Experiments In Cinema Film Festival V.10, April 2015
-Moving Image, New York, NY, March 2015
-The Parlour, Brooklyn, NY, March 2015
-Antimatter Film Festival [Media Art], Victoria, BC, Canada, October 2014

Available for rental and sales from Film-Makers Coop

Maelstroms (excerpt), 7:30, HD video, 2015

Using animation, heat sensitive camera footage from US border patrol screens, military bombing drone monitors, and other collected footage, Maelstroms is a mediation on the dehumanizing use of image technology to control borders by land, air and sea.

audio Upon Maelstroms of Unbearable Reality by Steerage
on caduc. records

Screenings:
-*Winner of Audience Choice Award* CROSSROADS 2016 (San Francisco, April 2016)
-Anthology Film Archives, Another Experiment by Women Film Festival (NY, NY, Feb 2016)
-Microscope Gallery Event Series (Brooklyn, October 2016)
-San Diego Underground Film Festival (San Diego, Nov 2016)
-Havana Film Festival (Havana, Cuba, December 2016)
-Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Hawick, Scotland, March 2017)
-Montreal Underground Film Festival (Montreal, May 2017)
-Chicago Underground Film Festival (Chicago, June 2017)
-Currents New Media Festival (Santa Fe, June 2017)
-Sign on / Sign off (Stuttgart and ACRE TV, June 2017)
-SDSU Downtown Gallery (San Diego, July 2017)
-WDNX Festival of Moving Image (Winnipeg, October 2017)
-Twisted Oyster Film Festival (Chicago, October 2017)
-Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson (Tucson, AZ, October – December 2017)
-Experimental Response Cinema (Austin, TX, January 2018)
-That One Film Festival (Muncie, IN, April 2018)

Available for rental and sales from Film-Makers Coop

The Loveliest Mountain of China (2012/14) is a 3-channel video installation that lays bare the bones of the participatory documentary medium, deconstructing narrative film production modalities, and presenting them across a wall space on three screens simultaneously. Comprised of one screen of interviews, one of fixed camera landscape views and one of “B-roll” of tourists posing in front of the mountain, a self-reflexive epi-narrative unfolds between the screens with an awareness of the illusion of ethnographic representation, gaps in translation, and the complexities of the politics of landscape. Ecological change is approached through the voices and perspectives of people who inhabit and visit – the locals and the tourists – the picturesque landscape of Huangshan (Yellow Mountain).

And the stars look very different today
360°-video virtual reality experience
Duration of experience is variable and individual
And the stars look very different today (2016) is a site-specific 360°-video experience was made for an event curated by Ginger Shulick Porcella at San Diego Art Institute Project Space. This video documents that artwork.

The visitor arrived at an art gallery full of people for a one-night event of expanded cinema: video works were projected on walls, sculptures emitted sounds and images, and performances unfolded. Standing in the middle of the gallery holding the artist-made virtual reality viewer to their eyes all the people and artworks disappear. The video in the viewer situates the visitor in the present and the past simultaneously. In the 360º-video viewer, the visitor experiences the same gallery space around them, yet the gallery is empty, excepting projected images on the walls, as it was a week prior when the footage was recorded.

Multiple projections of planets in a kinetic field of digital stars swirl around the viewer. Covering the empty gallery walls were projections of galaxies, planets, nebulae and blackness from a procedurally generated outer space captured while exploring this fictional environment. In this parallel reality, our long-standing fascination with space travel and colonization has been taken to the next level. The visitor is no longer limited to two-dimensional representations of space, nor to the known universe. Traveling beyond our earth to virtually inhabit a speculatively generated universe, while simultaneously in the past and the present, this work considers the notion of space exploration and colonization as a speculative future.

HedonHeathen 2, HD video from 16mm film, 2:20, 2013
Audio by Max Jeffers

From the snow swept landscape, into pink crystals, a journey from the hibernation of winter to a thawing arctic, where polar bears are struggling to raise their young atop diminishing ice.

Best viewed with headphones.

Selected Screenings:
-Crossroads Film Festival, San Francisco, 2014
-Antimatter [Media Art], Victoria, BC, 2013
-Edinburgh International Film Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2013
-Woodshed IV, Gallery 51, North Adams, MA, 2013

Patches of Snow in July, 8:19, 2017

Gods, natural disasters and the end of radio…mythology, religious fanaticism, climate deniers, environmental profiteers, and the threat to free speech reflected in the mirror of an unnatural, morphing landscape.

Upcoming Screenings:
-That One Film Festival (Muncie, IN, April 2018)
-Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Hawick, Scotland, May 2018)
-Chicago Underground Film Festival (June 2018)

Errata, 20:40, HD video
Sound by Alan F. Jones and Lana Z Caplan
2017

Rhythms of the mundane become a meditation on leisure, work, and time. As the visual cycle repeats – passengers load, unload, reload, boats arrive, depart, arrive – the reading of the Italian ferryboat schedule – town names, times, and departures – morphs from announcement to chant, boats transform, deconstruct, and twist into a mindscape, rendering the unseen, the errata, seen.

Screenings:
-Downtown at Sundown, SDSU Gallery/Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (San Diego, July 2017)
-San Diego Underground Film Festival (San Diego, August 2017)
-Paris Festival for Different and Experimental Cinema (Paris, October 2017)
-Visions (Montreal, May 2018)
-Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Hawick, Scotland, May 2018)

Future Teller
30 seconds, 360 degrees, 80 feet tall, 7 screens,br />
Video Sculpture, Public Art Commission
Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, Boston
2014