October 18, 2015
8:00pm
@ First Street Studio
2400 East Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, TX 78702 (map)
Admission: $7 ($5 w/student ID)

Experimental Response Cinema is excited to present a program of live projector performances and single channel works by Dallas film and video artist Michael A. Morris, with the artist in person. Creating idiosyncratic hybrids between 16mm film, analog video, digital audio synthesis, and interactive software, Morris probes the very essence of the moving image, generating sensory spectacles that defy easy interpretation. Not to be missed!
Michael A. Morris is an artist and educator based in Dallas, Texas. He works primarily with film, video, and expanded cinematic forms. Much of his recent work responds to the rapid changes in how moving images are created and experienced in the 21st century. He has performed and screened his films and videos at museums, galleries, microcinemas, and film festivals internationally, including recent events at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Vancouver, Oak Cliff Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, and the Texas Biennial. He teaches at several institutions throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth area and curates film / video / new media programs around the region regularly, most recently as part of the first Dallas Medianale.

This program of works gathers together performances and single channel works in a variety of media created over the last several years. Each work, in its own way, taps into an anxiety around the dichotomy of archival and ephemeral forms of moving images. Blue Movie and I Can’t Wait To Meet You There are concerned with the mortality of the image and extend this concern to those people represented. Fires deals with the anxiety of personal stories being lost as the people and physical locations connected to them disappear. Several works combine imaging technologies to create hybrid systems. In the case of the expanded cinema works that make up The Hermeneutics series, encounters between different technologies are staged in such a way that one medium “interprets” another to produce a hybrid result in image and meaning. 16mm film, analog video, digital audio synthesis, and interactive software are each considered for their own qualities and for how they can be combined to create new instruments that are more than the sum of their parts.

Second Hermeneutic – double 16mm projection, analog video signal as audio; 2013 – 8m

Blue Movie – 16mm, 2015 – 7m

I Can’t Wait to Meet You There – digital video, 2012 – 12m

Fires – 35mm on HD, 2013 – 14m

Third Hermeneutic – double 16mm projection, video projection, custom software; 2014 – 11m