Calendar

Program 2

THE UNCERTAIN LANDSCAPES

Landscapes, either rural or urban ones, are always undergoing mutation. A same wind will never caress twice the same cherry tree branch. Everything is moving. But how can we record what is changing? How can we film what will not be any more tomorrow? How can we anticipate the mutations? Video art brings reality up to our dreams.

• Camet Norte by Elsa Justel (Argentina/France, 2009) 4’10

Camet Norte is a little village of 1500 inhabitants, at 490km south of Buenos Aires in Argentine.
Face to the Atlantic Ocean, their settlers have found in that place a refuge of calmness, far from the noisy vortex of the great city.
In that ambiance, ideal for creativity development, this people have put a touch of colour and originality in their houses.

• Distances by Sébastien Rollot (France, 2009) 26’

Images filmed on Islands of Java and Bali. It starts from the desire to restore the sensation and the abstraction of situations met on the road. Film without dialogue. Drone Music from Pierce Warnecke.

• Lost landscape by Amanda Gutierrez (Mexico, 2010) 5’12

Light and time are main elements in this animation. The Rocky Mountains frame and portrait one minute extended words from emigrants who live and work at the Banff Centre of the Arts in Alberta, Canada. The concepts of "memory" and "home" are reflected in three different languages. The strokes of the pencil fallows the phase of light and sound, constructing an abstract metaphor of the word meaning. These landscapes constitute the daily space where people from Mexico, Peru, Korea, China and Vietnam find symbolic and formal similitude with their own homeland.

• Cellular actimy : respect for red and green by Neil Ira Needleman (USA, 2009) 6’15

Playful and intense red-green rhythms joyfully bouncing, bopping, flashing, and evolving. A newly refurbished tennis court that I’ve trained to dance via video editing. Or perhaps it’s a large-scale, hard-edge colour field painting come to life under my feet. (no sound)

• Sans ciel ni mer (without sky nor sea) by Lola B. Deswart (France, 2009) 21’

What is my country of origin ?
It was by going to shoot film in the Paris Metro, at the closest of my everyday life, notably by following the itinerant building site for the replacement of the railways and track beds, that I found my way into this quest. Started in the tunnels of the Paris metro, the path led me into the depths of the fears and mournings of the child-turned-mother in me, in a recomposed land of childhood memories.
Neither Sky Nor Sea is a cinematic ghost train shooting through different strata of perceptions and symbolic recompositions in which Super 8 images are mixed with computer-generated 3D images.

• Autio by Nelly-Eve Rajotte (Quebec, 2010) 6’25

Autio is a cross-country American road trip under the sign of abandonment, the extremely large and the detail. From a sound point of view, the abandonment is everything we leave behind; everything already past, like a landscape passing by through the windshield of a car. The extremely large becomes so if we confront it sternly. The sounds clash and file past under the gaze of outsize landscapes.

• Seasonal Transmutation Suite by Mike Celona (USA, 2010) 12’30

A series of four short videos edited into a suite depicting the seasonal changes in New York State as seen from both human and technological perspectives at the macro and micro levels with the two often overlapping, interfering and/or complimenting each other. As people’s senses become increasingly augmented by machines at rates previously envisioned only in science fiction stories, this project attempts to encapsulate the experience of viewing the cycle of nature through the current lens of relative technological/biological equilibrium for posterity should our cyborgian descendents ever decide to eschew one element in favor of the other in the course of their evolution. One question that arises from all of this is whether natural beauty will have any meaning in a post-human world or will we simply appreciate it in new ways ?