Automat 2022

Some of the most rewarding and memorable experiences at Antimatter are artist talks, Q&As and informal social events with local and visiting filmmakers. As the situation in 2022 again precluded many participants attending the festival to engage with peers and audiences, Automat presented a self-serve option. 

We coerced the following artists into making short videos that somehow “talk” about themselves and their work, whether by actually talking or otherwise. The results are as amazing as we’d hoped—spontaneous, revealing, witty and poetic insights into their lives and practices.  

 

Pierre Ajavon

Pierre Ajavon is a Parisian visual artist, composer and musician. After studies in Ethnomusicology and Sociology with a focus on psychedelic culture, he embarked on a long musical journey as a composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist and expanded into media art when he saw the possibility of bringing the sound and moving image together. Mixing electronic music, psychedelic rock and field recordings, Ajavon hinges his musical thought on postmodern visual aesthetics which draw references from psychoanalysis, surrealism, psychedelia and the pop-art artistic movement. 

Pierre’s film Humarithms screened in the 2022 festival.

 

Siku Allooloo

Siku Allooloo is an Inuk/Haitian/Taíno filmmaker as well as an award-winning writer, interdisciplinary artist, poet and community builder from the Northwest Territories. Siku is an artistic innovator who often reimagines conventional forms as imbued by her cultural traditions, oral history and land-based practice. Her artwork has exhibited nationally in several groundbreaking Indigenous art exhibitions (including INUA, the inaugural exhibition at Qaumajuq-Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2021-2023). Her writing has been published nationally and internationally (The Guardian, Canadian Art, Truthout, The Capilano Review and Chatelaine).

Siku’s’s film Spirit Emulsion screened in the 2022 festival.

 

Melina Kiyomi Coumas

Melina Kiyomi Coumas is an award-winning experimental filmmaker from the island of O’ahu. She enjoys experimenting with both narrative structure and the filmic medium, while exploring themes surrounding memory, identity and perception. 

Melina’s film $hithole Paradise screened in the 2022 festival.

 

Scott Fitzpatrick & Alyssa Bornn

Since 2010, Manitoban visual artist Scott Fitzpatrick has produced a large body of experimental moving image work across a variety of media, with more than 45 short films, videos, performances and installations to his credit. Adhering largely to rigorous structural forms, tempered by a punk/DIY aesthetic, Fitzpatrick’s films engage ideas regarding adaptation, appropriation, art history, colour theory, semiotics, sexuality, mathematics and more. A duality is explored as formal abstractions and assaultive flicker films engage the reptilian brain; diary films and conceptual works invoke the analytic. Rhythm, as in the body, holds ultimate authority. Some kind of balance is proposed, though likely never reached.

Alyssa Bornn lives and works in Winnipeg. Her work is primarily centered around ideas relating to transference, interchangeability, language, failure and the poetics of technical processes. She makes images and objects informed by an interest in early computing, textile production, play and in the pursuit of visual joy.

Scott and Alyssa’s film Deep Vision screened in the 2022 festival.

 

Laurence Henriquez

Laurence Henriquez is a recovering academic, filmmaker and machine learning animator based between the Netherlands and Romania.

Laurence’s film Fin. Finito. Infinito. screened in the 2022 festival.

 

Anna Kipervaser

Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born artist whose practice engages with a range of topics including human and animal bodies, ethnicity, religion, colonialism and environmental conservation. Her engagement with these topics is informed by a commitment to formal experimentation, DIY and alternative processes, spanning disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in both 16mm film and digital video. Her work has screened at festivals internationally and in classrooms, galleries, microcinemas, basements and schoolhouses! She is also painter, printmaker, educator, curator and programmer.

Anna’s film in ocula oculorum screened in the 2022 festival.

 

J.M. Martinez

J.M. Martínez is a film, video, sound and still-image maker based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.

J.M.’s film Sea of Sighs screened in the 2022 festival.

For years I have been making works that feature Northern California’s landscapes. From old-growth forests to tide pools and eroding rock formations on the coast, to the wind-sculpted Juniper trees on the sea cliffs of San Francisco Bay. Field recordings made with contact microphones record the internal vibrations of natural surfaces. For Locus Suspectus, it was the eroding sandstone formations juxtaposed with internet servers of Silicon Valley. For Cyclical Refractions the contact mics were placed inside existing holes within tree trunks. For Sea of Sighs hydrophones were placed inside tide pools and within layers of sea foam in the surrounding ocean.

I learn about each landscape’s interconnected systems. Each season I return to the same location. With each visit, the light alters the landscape. The fog diffuses the sun into an otherworldly glow. A complex assemblage of textures in the sandstone appears. A process of weathering called Tafoni, created by the interaction of wind, salt spray and biogeochemical weathering by lichens on the rock creates cavernous designs. Organisms grow in and on the landscape. New life. Continuously evolving.

 

Nicole Rayburn

I’m obsessed with pink. And repetition. And absurdity. All of which pair nicely with obsession. Most of what I make is shit. Witnesses to failed attempts to finding meaning or value in the world. What remains offered fleeting glimmers of clarity at some moment. I barely even remember of what now. I bid you godspeed. 

Nicoles’s film black bird screened in the 2022 festival.

 

Matt Soar

Matt Soar is an uninvited settler living in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal. His handmade films are often affective responses to regressive cultural politics. Grounded in a deep admiration for the rich histories of avant-garde filmmaking, Soar’s films represent a tactical retreat from the digital dogma of early 20th century “new” media. 

Matt’s film Billionaires Gnaw Their Tongues from the Pain screened in the 2022 festival.

 

Kalpana Subramanian

Kalpana Subramanian is an artist-filmmaker and scholar of experimental film and media. Her films have been showcased at several international festivals and she has received various awards and honours for her artistic practice and films. In 2015–16 she was a Fulbright fellow at the Brakhage Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her doctoral research at the Department of Media Study, State University of New York at Buffalo, articulates a new transcultural framework of aesthetics in media, called Cinema of Breath.

Kalpana’s film Incantation screened in the 2022 festival.

 

Erin Weisgerber

Erin Weisgerber is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist working with photo-chemical film to produce installations, performances and short films. She manipulates the photographic, chemical and material properties of film to transform the world framed through her camera, rendering moving images that exist between figuration and abstraction, external vision and internal landscape. Weisgerber is a member of the Double Negative Collective, a group of moving-image artists dedicated to the creation and exhibition of experimental and avant-garde cinema and who maintain an artist-run film lab. Since 2019 she is a member of Jerusalem in My Heart, a live audio-visual performance project, with Lebanese producer and musician Radwan Ghazi Moumneh.

Erin’s film Dans les cieux et sur la terre screened in the 2022 festival.