Moving Image

New York-based artist Nina Sobell presents GammaTime in collaboration with Ed Bear, a real-time participatory brainwave drawing performance. GammaTime aims to create a foundation for understanding and experiencing gamma brain waves as well as other brain waves through art and music. By engaging with the installation, participants will not only gain insights into their own brain wave activity and each others, but also experience the potential cognitive and emotional benefits of 40 Hz gamma stimulation. The project seeks to inspire, educate and provide a platform for creative exploration, ultimately contributing to the broader discourse on the intersection of art and neuroscience.

Oddly Satisfying curator Allen Riley hosts an evening-length program of moving image works from artist and musician Taku Hannoda.
 

Roger Beebe returns to the road with a program of 16mm multi-projector performances celebrating the 25th anniversary of his first touring program. 

**All donations for this event will go toward emergency relief for artists and arts workers via the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund.**

Indexical welcomes Em Butler, a Social Documentation MFA student in the Film & Digital Media department at UC Santa Cruz. Butler received a BS in Human Biology at UC San Diego, with a minor in Visual Arts. She is a community organizer, writer, and filmmaker from Long Beach, California whose work struggles through the relationships between land, culture, embodied memory, and anti-imperialist movements. Alongside her work, Em will also screen Tsai Ming-liang's The Skywalk is Gone (2002), a mystery that unfolds against the backdrop of Taiwanese urban development. These will be followed by the 1996 short, Blight, which in the words of director John Smith, "revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition."

*POSTPONED - Due to unforeseen circumstances this event has been postponed. We're working to reschedule this event and hope to have an update on that as soon as possible.*

TILT-SHIFT, referring to a pair of interactions between a camera lens and the image plane, is a new film series about moving images and politics. TILT-SHIFT invites guest filmmakers to screen their work alongside a film that helped inspire it, and discuss with audiences how their work connects to longer lineages of radical cinema and anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle.

This workshop provides participants a basic introduction to the chemistry, tools and techniques necessary to print permanent cyanotype images on various outdated or new 16mm film stocks. Direct printing techniques highlight the use of pre-exposed archival or found footage film, plant materials and various objects serving as ‘image sources'. Sunlight and water are the primary means for developing beautifully rich and highly detailed 16mm imagery without the use of cameras or extensive lab processing.

This relatively simple approach utilizes techniques and knowledge gleaned from the artist/filmmaker (and founder of the Handmade Film Institute) Robert Schaller during the Handmade Filmmaking Workshop John attended on Orcas Island in 2015. Students will receive information on the history of cyanotype, techniques for making their own cyanotype chemistry, as well as how to source and use simple pre-made off-the-shelf chemistry solutions.

The goal of the workshop is to enable participants to utilize this simple filmmaking technique in a home lab environment, encouraging the use of recycled and outdated films stocks, minimal photochemistry and inexpensive exposure equipment for immediate, accessible cameraless filmmaking experimentation.

The workshop will provide all the materials necessary for demonstrating the techniques used to create cyanotype 16mm films, and we will as a group (sunlight depending) create our own exposed material to view at the end of the workshop.

While some additional basic film handling and editing techniques will be covered, including projecting hand-made 16mm films, the workshop is limited in scope to a basic introduction to the process.

Blending artist video, porn clips and experimental music, Dirty Looks’ Bradford Nordeen leads a visual lecture exploring the recent re-emergence of the bathhouse in queer culture. From the reissued sex soundtracks of Patrick Cowley and Coil, musicians like Ruth Mascelli and Jake Muir bring techno and vaporwave into the steamroom to ply new forms of embodiment. Videos by Oat Montien spin archival art by Patrick Angus, Alvin Baltrop James Bidgood and Jimmy Wright into their own digital utopias. These emerging artists gape the capacity for the bathhouse to create alternative strategies for pleasure that resound Cowley’s sacred pools while squatting them, revising that pearled white tile with a queer politics of the future.

Ahead of their evening performance, Cel Genesis presents a screening of Johan Johansson’s Last and First Men.
 

Ahead of their evening performance, Dreamcrusher presents a screening of Ken Russell's Altered States.
 

Working with a selection of appropriated short films from the New York art scene in the 1960's and 70's, John Davis performs an improvised set of music that offers relationships between recognizable landscapes, portraits and scenery found within these seldom seen but familiar films. Filmmaker Anna Geyer & sound artist Kevin Corcoran open.

Ahead of her evening performance, Lucy Liyou will share and talk about a collection of various TV programs, experimental video, and films in connection to her work.
 

Ahead of their evening performance, Ian Mugerwa aka Dawuna, presents a screening of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (ranked among the ten best films of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound Critics Poll) and talks about how the film relates to their artistic practice.

It was recently discovered that some advertising listed the incorrect start times. The correct timing is as follows: Doors at 7pm | Start at 7:30pm. Sorry for the inconvenience and we look forward to seeing you there!

Dirty Looks' Bradford Nordeen will lead a visual lecture of images and clips from Cookie Mueller's always fervent and sometimes-fleeting roles in the films of John Waters, through No Wave New York classics and in 1980s art videos. With a like flair for the anecdotal and in the collage spirit of Chloé Griffin's Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, Nordeen will present stolen moments and larger scenes from her diverse body of work in "the blessed profession."
 
Cookie Mueller was a firecracker, a cult figure, a wild child, a writer, a go-go dancer, a mother and a queer icon. A child of suburban 1950s Maryland, she made her name as an actress in John Waters' films, including Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, and then as an art critic for Details magazine and a columnist for the East Village Eye. She was also a writer of hilarious and shockingly wise stories, the ‘cure for a bad party,’ and a maven of New York’s downtown art world. Her writings, especially the collection of autobiographical stories Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black (Semiotext(e), 1990) have inspired and amazed many and gathered a kind of cult following.
 
Cookie lived an independent and wild life, going from Provincetown, where she kept a circle of romantic crack-pots and poets around her, to New York City where she collaborated with No Wave and avant-garde filmmakers such as Amos Poe, Eric Michell and Michel Auder, published her writing, and became a star of the nightlife and art scene. Cookie also lit up the stage at the Performing Garage alongside other NYC luminaries such as Taylor Mead, John Heys, Gary Indiana and Sharon Niesp.
 
Although she died from AIDS in 1989, Cookie has become a counter-culture icon, adored by those who have discovered her work.
 

Think of early electronic music and you’ll likely see men pushing buttons, knobs, and boundaries. While electronic music is often perceived as a boys club, the truth is from the very beginning women have been integral in inventing the devices, techniques and tropes that would define the shape of sound for years to come.  
 
The history of women has been a history of silence. Recent protests calling for greater recognition of women’s achievements have swept across politics, business, even Hollywood. The world of music is no exception.
 
As one of the film’s subjects, Laurie Spiegel explains: “We women were especially drawn to electronic music when the possibility of a woman composing was in itself controversial. Electronics let us make music that could be heard by others without having to be taken seriously by the male dominated Establishment.”
 
With the wider social, political and cultural context of the 20th century as our backdrop, this all archival documentary reveals a unique emancipation struggle, restoring the central role of women in the history of music.
 
With Laurie Anderson as our narrator, we’ll embark on a fascinating journey through the evolution of electronic music. We’ll learn how new devices opened music to the entire field of sound, how electronic music not only changed the modes of production but in its wide-ranging effects also transformed the very terms of musical thought.

Join us for a film screening of Consuela Alba's short film El Andalón / The Healer and a conversation with the filmmaker about the "Power of Storytelling." Consuelo is an award winning documentary filmmaker and Executive Director of the Watsonville Film Festival.

Jonesy, Fiend, Super 8 on HD, 3min., 1992
Greta Snider, Hard-Core Home Movie, 16mm, 5min., 1989
Jill Reiter, Birthday Party, 16mm on video, 9min., 1993
G.B. Jones, The Troublemakers, super 8 on DV, 20min., 1990
Scott Treleaven, The Salivation Army, super 8 and video, 22min., 2001
Rick Castro, “3. Dr. Chris Teen Sex Surrogate” (from Three Faces of Women: a feminine trilogy), VHS, 25min., 1994
Greta Snider, Our Gay Brothers, 16mm, 9min., 1993

Purnell's audacious and hysterical hit novel, 100 Boyfriends, leaps off the page through a series of madcap “mixtape” films. Blending performance styles, film footage, dance videos and hardcore porn, Purnell blends his chaotically queer art practice with slices of life in the age of social media. What the fuck is a film? Expect live interruptions and only the unexpected.

On breadboards and with basic electronic components, we will learn how to process analog video signals and display the results on cathode-ray tube televisions. Using sources like VCRs and old security cameras, we will learn the basic architecture of the analog video signal, how it differs from digital video, and how to manipulate that architecture in artistic ways. We will also learn through doing by exploring the basics of electronic signal flow in collaborative exercises.

Sarah Buckius is a 2023 receipient of Indexical’s new Micro-Residency Commissions for Santa Cruz-based artists. A new work stemming from her ongoing project !!! techn010ffspring !!!, her commssioned project If (x = Robot) … is an investigation into the female-coded personae of robots—from the ubiquitous disembodied voices of personal assistants Siri and Alexa to Cassie, “the Usain Bolt of robots,” who is simply a pair of fast-running torsoless robotic legs. 

Roberto Fatal [they/them/ellos] is a filmmaker and storyteller. They come from Rarámuri, Tewa Pueblo, Ute, and Spanish ancestors and Mexican-American culture. Their Queer, gender fluid, Mestize/Mixed identity informs the sci-fi, apocalyptic films they make.

Synchronization Station is a participatory video art project that reformulates present-day issues around video-based communications and feelings of connectedness through a sci-fi reimagining of cybernetics. Attendees will be invited to participate in creating a collective video synthesis recording or to just sit back and enjoy the performance.

German film enfant terrible Rosa von Praunheim trained his lens on the trans and gender-defying Americans who sought refuge in Berlin’s 80s club scene, catching some of the most honest and alarmingly prescient intergenerational dialogues about trans life ever dedicated to celluloid in the process.

Dirty Looks has dug deep into documents of trans history to assemble a program of archival trans portrait films that spool from experimental cinema of the 1970s, activist video, and personal portraiture. Spanning an early decade of production, illuminating (lost?) queer histories and liminal spaces across America, The Girl Can’t Help It screens poignant testimonials and early rhetorics of trans-femme ideation.