Winter-Spring 2025
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Our Heavenly Bodies (1925)
POSTPONED Experimentations 11: Our Heavenly Bodies: Indexicality in Astronomy I
Date: Jan 10, 2025 7:30PM
Location: Brain Dead StudiosDue to the fires, we are postponing this show. Decision to be made about Sunday.
Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 11. Three silent films from the 1920s demonstrate the state-of-the-art of the time. Two educational films from 1920, “If We Lived on the Moon” by Max Fleischer, later of Betty Boop and Superman cartoon fame, and “Tides and the Moon” show basic illustrative educational films of the time. By the time of Our Heavenly Bodies, released in 1925, the cinematic possibilities had advanced greatly. Partly a summary of what was known about the solar system, and partly a sci-fi journey on a ship to those planets, Our Heavenly Bodies was a tremendous success in its time.
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Venus Transit 2012 (NASA)
POSTPONED Experimentations 12: Images of Broken Light: Indexicality in Astronomy II
Date: Jan 12, 2025 3:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 12. This showcase presents a series of films related to astronomy that examine how scientific knowledge depends on traces left directly by natural phenomena themselves - so-called "indexical" images. Before being ideas, scientific theories are themselves constituted by image making. With computer-generated imagery, it has become increasingly difficult to recognize the indexicality of the film image, mainly because of simulation. With increasingly aestheticized images, scientific images in turn are captured from distant spaces, through sophisticated hybrid technologies, very different from the optical array images of telescopes. Followed by a panel discussion.
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Wrought, by Anna Sigrithur & Joel Penner
POSTPONED Experimentations 13: Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation
Date: Jan 12, 2025 7:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 13. It is impossible to overestimate the influence of scientific knowledge on artists’ investigations of the world, and nowhere is this influence more apparent than in contemporary moving image artists’ responses to the climate crisis. In the context of mass extinction and global climate change, the science of ecology underlies key issues currently facing humanity, and, thus, ecological considerations are understandably pervasive in contemporary moving image artworks. This program presents a selection of works that engage with aspects of ecology in the form of natural history.
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From the Belly of the Earth (Uit den schoot der aarde) (1919)
Experimentations 14: Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era
Date: Jan 19, 2025 7:30PM
Location: Brain Dead StudiosExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 14. This screening of archival natural history films from the 1910s and 1920s reveals how animals, science, industry, and geography were visualized by motion pictures one hundred years ago. Beautifully preserved by the EYE Film Museum Amsterdam, most of these films feature applied color processes such as tinting, toning, or stencil coloring. Strikingly different from today's nature documentaries, these films celebrate hunting, logging, mining, and other forms of resource extraction. It is precisely the disorienting perspective of the Anthropocene viewing condition that revitalizes these century-old natural history films films with new meaning. A live performance of ambient electronic music will open access points for the audience to more fully draw out these complexities and others through the experience of public spectatorship.
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Space and India, by Vijay B Chandra (1971) Courtesy of Films Division of India
Experimentations 15: This Bit of That India
Date: Jan 26, 2025 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, program 15. The history of experimental film in India is tied to the history of India’s quest for modernity and is particularly visible in the experimental films on science and technology produced by the Films Division of India during the cultural revolution of the late 60’s and early 70’s. This program will showcase a selection of these avant-garde state supported films that reflect the radical values, perspectives and ideas that shaped the vision of Indian democracy.
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Monisme, by Riar Rizaldi
Experimentations 16: Unstable Ground: Science, Extraction, and Belief in Monisme
Date: Feb 2, 2025 3:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 16. Many things collide in Riar Rizaldi’s Monisme: magic, science, indigenous knowledge systems, violence, and a tenuous boundary between the past and the future, fact and fiction. These all collide around Mount Merapi, one of the most active stratovolcano in the world, located in Java, Indonesia. Monisme’s multiple collisions ultimately illuminate the various modalities of relation between humans and nature. The screening will be followed by a panel with Riar Rizaldi, Fern Silva, and Jheanelle Brown and by a free dinner.
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Rock Bottom Riser
Experimentations 17: Resisting Western Science’s Colonial Mandate: Rock Bottom Riser
Date: Feb 2, 2025 7:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 17. Rock Bottom Riser is an essential document and an exhilarating tour-de-force, a palimpsest that traverses geology, ethnography and astronomy. Silva's feature is preceded by Telengut’s short which expands on the West’s concept of indigeneity while also putting forth the indigenous Mongolian and Siberian belief in animism as a way to nourish our world.
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The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets, By Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys
Experimentations 18: Science of the Word
Date: Feb 16, 2025 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 18. Aimé Césaire, the late writer, politician, and co-founder of the Négritude movement, proposed a new hybrid science in 1946 — a science of the Word. He argued that the study of the Word (mythoi, a poetics of knowledge) will condition the study of nature (bios). Philosopher Sylvia Wynter, inspired by Césaire’s idea, stated that humans must now collectively undertake a rewriting of knowledge as we have known and understood it. Can science deal with and make sense of the human predicament, as Wynter calls it? How can scholars, artists, scientists, and the general public reconcile the tension between scientific and technological advancement, the earth-centered mandate of indigenous wisdom, and righting historical legacies colonial violence?