June 10th, 2013
@ Farewell Books (map)
8pm
Free! ($5-$10 Suggested Donation)
Experimental Response Cinema and Farewell Books present a very special evening of live film projections with Steve Cossman in person! Cossman is founder and director of Mono No Aware; a nonprofit cinema arts organization whose annual event exhibits the work of contemporary artists who incorporate live film projections and altered light as part of a performance, sculpture or installation. In 2010 the organization established a series of analog filmmaking workshops in conjunction with the event that currently works with over 250 participants a year. Steve’s first work on film, TUSSLEMUSCLE, earned him Kodak’s Continued Excellence in Filmmaking award and has screened at many festivals and institutions internationally. In 2013, he completed residencies at MoMA PS1’s Expo 1 and the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. He has been a visiting artist at Dartmouth, the New York Academy of Art, Yale, SAIC, and each summer tours through Texas offering analog film making workshops (Locally at ASoF June 9-12). Steve’s newest work on film, WHITE CABBAGE (2011-2014), a collaboration with Jahiliyya Fields of L.I.E.S., had its U.S. premiere at Anthology Film Archives. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn as a director, curator, visual artist and member of the collective DecayNY, creating time-based works on film, video, and paper.
Remember! Steve Cossman will be teaching a Direct Filmmaking and Animation workshop at the Austin School of Film on June 6th! Click here for details.
Farewell Books, founded in February 2013 and run by Travis Kent & Mikaylah Bowman, is a progressive new and used bookshop and art gallery in the city of Austin, Texas.
Program
TUSSLEMUSCLE by Steve Cossman
5 min / 16mm / sound / 2007-2009
16MM color film with optical sound track by Earthen Sea (Jacob Long, Imminent Frequencies/Lover’s Rock)
The works presented are a reflection on humanity’s ecological relationship and the ritual of restoration. The violent pulse speaks with a sense of urgency and chaotic struggle while the hypnotic arrangement keeps us in blinding awe us to its condition. These collage films are composed of 7,000+ single frames, which were appropriated from view-master reel cells. Each frame was hand-spliced to create a linear film-strip using musical and numerical patterns to compose visual rhythms. WHITE ROUGHAGE is the raw optically printed footage used to create the companion piece to TUSSLEMUSCLE, WHITE CABBAGE.
CRUSHER by Steve Cossman
12 min / 16mm / sound / 2010
Color film with optical sound track by Daniel Caldas (ex. Black Eyes, Dischord Records)
To expedite the transfer/loading speed of representational images online they are assigned a low resolution of 72 dpi. In the “de-res” process, a considerable amount of visual information is labeled unimportant and discarded by software. I worked with a programmer to create PHP code in order to read a thumbnail image from left to right, top to bottom, placing each pixel’s color as a full frame of the same color along the timeline. The sequence of frames plays out at 24 frames per second. In the same way that the persistence of vision creates the illusion of smooth linear movement in frame-by-frame animation, the mind is able to re-instate some of the lost visual/color information. Concurrently, the static composition of the photographic image dictates a pattern in time. A vertical line will appear at the same place in time repeatedly creating a “beat” while horizontal lines and forms become an undulation. Composition of form creates visual rhythm.
RED CABBAGES by Steve Cossman
3 min / 16mm / silent / 2013
WHITE ROUGHAGE by Steve Cossman
10 min / 16mm / digital sound / 2013
Color film with digital sound track by Jahiliyya fields (Matthew Morandi, L.I.E.S.)
PHOSPHENE by Kenneth Zoran Curwood
6 min / 16mm / silent / 2014