December 14th, 2012
8pm
Tiny Park Gallery (map)

Experimental Response Cinema, in collaboration Tiny Park Gallery, is proud to present our first show dedicated to local moving image artists. In conjunction to our mission of bringing classical and contemporary experimental cinema to Austin, ERCATX! aims to showcase the rich work that is happening within our midst, while further fostering a community around an other cinema.

Tiny Park presents contemporary art exhibitions, readings, performances, and film screenings by local and national artists. Tiny Park also collaborates with guest curators and outside organizations to present conceptually and aesthetically diverse works.

Program

Interstate (part one) by Jason Cortlund & Julia Halperin
6min, digital video, sound, 2006 
The Interstate Project is an ongoing series of short video experiments designed around original footage shot at a traveling circus encampment alongside a busy Texas highway.
It serves as a critique of popular media practices in the United States—the fetishism of surveillance, the status of detained foreign bodies, the irony of cultural appropriation, and the detached compulsion of witnesses.

Interstate (part one) is a night surveillance artifact. Elephants and zebras move in circadian rhythm while tracers from passing automobile traffic flash across the screen in waves.

Materia Medica: Ocularium by Rachel Stuckey
3m, digital video, silent, 2012
Materia Medica: Ocularium is a visual study of herbology, apothecary practices, and plant folklore pertaining to eyesight, culled from 15th century European Herbals, 19th century American Pharmacopœias, and contemporary texts. The piece is comprised of magnified, rapid-moving imagery of flowers said to benefit to the eyes interwoven with apothecary implements and preparations, and botanical diagrams. The imagery is composed using a narrow-focus macro lens that will both limit and expand the audience’s range of vision, conjuring an intimate and curious space.

Still Life 1 (Flowers) by Metrah Pashaee
2.07min, digital video, silent, 2012
Death be to the image; may she wilt in her duration.

Kiss by Lyndsay Bloom
1.30min, 16mm, bw, silent, 2012 
starring: leslie supnet & lyndsay bloom
cinematography christine harrison
thanks: phil Hoffman film farm 2012

Too-Fast Spring Birds by Ekrem Serdar
2min, digital video, silent, 2012
A brief video in anticipation of the publication of Hoa Nguyen’s As Long as Trees Last, a short flight and fall from one of her poems. For this screening, a recording by Nguyen reading the poem (a former Austin resident) will precede the video.

MANUSCRIPT by Caroline Koebel
1.45min, miniDV, sound, 2012 
Filmed with a crew and cast of one (CK) ca. 2003 at the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, a City of Buffalo Historic Landmark, MANUSCRIPT breathes new life into an architectural relic through exploratory image and sound juxtapositions.

Interstate (part two) by Jason Cortlund & Julia Halperin
4min, digital video, sound, 2007 
“Interstate (part two)” uses a Choubi-style pop song from Iraq, “Oh Mother, The Handsome Man Tortures Me,” as the basis for a caged tiger dance video. The original 40 second source clip has been manually remixed for time and syncopation with the song’s gunfire-inspired beat.

ASH by Nathan S Duncan
10min, HD video, sound, 2012 
ASH wanders the abandoned spaces of the Austin State Hospital (formerly the Texas State Lunatic Asylum) using found doctor logs from the late 19th century to light the way. It recites and examines the cultural implications of admittance.

Fly by Scott Stark
3min, 16mm on video, sound, 2012 
A found, slightly edited film of the purest sport, with added music.

Puddle Lightning by Jarrett Hayman
3:20min, Super 8 transferred to DV, music by Peter Hofstad 
This film came about after a meeting with Ernie Gehr jump-started my desire to make films. I lived in a shabby studio in a shabby apartment building at the time, which had a great alley way behind it. That’s where I found this puddle, and like all reflective surfaces, I wanted to film it. Later I had a friend come over and she and I developed it in my bathroom, which was full of light leaks. Half way through the process we realized we couldn’t use the clock because it was plugged into the wall, and when you turned out the light it cut off electricity to the outlet. So I had to count every minute out, which I undoubtedly got wrong. It’s a miracle we got any picture at all. The footage sat around until I finally got it onto my computer, and Hofstad wrote the music specifically for it.

Materia Medica: Haptic Optics by Rachel Stuckey
6min, digital video, 2012
Haptic Optics explores the moving image as relating to the sense of touch. Film grain and video artifacts from footage of printed patterns, natural textures, and bodies are drawn out and manipulated to forge a chaotic sense of loss and exploit the medium’s tactile qualities.

Bios

Lyndsay Bloom is a graduate of Cooper Union and thinks 16mm is the best. She lives in Houston.

Jason Cortlund and Julia Halperin met in the University of Texas graduate film program and have collaborated since 1996. They programmed for the Cinematexas International Film Festival (founded by Athina Rachel Tsangari) from 1997-2004. Cortlund & Halperin co-directed films have shown at festivals and arts institutions including MoMA, Lincoln Center, Museum of the Moving Image, Royal Belgian Film Archive, SXSW, and International Film Festival Rotterdam. Their feature narrative Now, Forager will open at New York’s IFC Center in October 2012 and screen theatrically across the US and Europe.

Nathan S Duncan is an image & sound -maker residing in Austin, TX. He likes topics of urban design, experimental geography, and finds interest in exploring both through a film essay approach.

Jarrett Hayman: A recent graduate in film from Portland State University, I have been making experimental short films and videos for a little less than a year now. I generally work alone, making pieces either from found sources or from my immediate surroundings.