Automat 2020

Graeme Arnfield

An artist talk gets abandoned for an afternoon listening to an old techno record from the artists’ youth. As the record spins thoughts turn to science fiction, the functionality of dance music and the struggle for the future.

Graeme Arnfield is an artist filmmaker and curator living in London, raised in Cheshire, UK. Producing sensory essay films from found imagery, his films use methods of investigative storytelling to explore issues of circulation, spectatorship and history. Research topics have included the politics of digital networks, the distribution of ecological matter such as peat and asbestos and the adaptive circulation of global and local histories. His work has been presented worldwide including Berlinale Forum Expanded, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Courtisane Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Sonic Acts Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Transmediale, IMPAKT Festival, Antimatter, Videoex, Kasseler Dokfest, LUX, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Berlinische Gallerie, Signal Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery and on e-flux and Vdrome. He graduated with a Masters in Experimental Cinema at Kingston University.

Benjamin Balcom

Benjamin Balcom is a filmmaker currently living and working in Milwaukee, WI. He is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee and co-founder and co-programmer of Microlights Cinema. Since 2013, Microlights has hosted over 50 film and video artists from around the world. His films have been exhibited at venues and festivals such as the European Media Festival, Media City Film Festival, Antimatter [media art], Alchemy Film, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Slamdance. Combining elements of documentary, fictional narrative and abstraction, Balcom’s cinematic vocabulary is multi-faceted. He has explored melodrama, essay film and, most recently, regional histories. Balcom received his MFA in Film, Video, Animation and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and his bachelor’s degree in Film-Video Production from Hampshire College. 

Lori Felker

Lori Felker is a Chicago-based filmmaker/artist, teacher, programmer, and performer. Her films and videos attempt to study the ineloquent, oppositional, delusional, frustrating and chaotic qualities of human interaction. She loves every facet of filmmaking and has worked as a cinematographer, editor and actor for artists and directors such as Jerzy Rose, Melika Bass, Jesse McLean and Geof Oppenheimer. She has also spent beloved, valuable time as a Festival Coordinator and programmer for Chicago Underground Film Festival and Roots & Culture Gallery and as a projectionist at the Gene Siskel Film Center. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Film Department at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Felker has shown her work internationally at festivals and spaces including Rotterdam International Film Festival; NYFF: Views from the Avant-Garde; VideoEx, Zurich; Slamdance, Park City, UT; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal; Curtas Vila do Conde Film Festival, Portugal; Glass Curtain Gallery, Chicago; LA Filmforum; BAMcinemaFest, Brooklyn; and Space Gallery, Pittsburgh. She is a Wexner Center Artist in Residence and a Fulbright Fellow. 

Federica Foglia

Federica Foglia is a transnational visual artist, director of photography, editor and writer. She holds a BA in Multimedia Languages and Digital Computing for Humanities: History of Art, Theatre and Cinema from the University of Naples L’Orientale and is currently an MFA candidate at York University. She is interested in issues of migration, displacement, women of the diaspora, accented cinema, post-humanism, digital kinning and finding a visual language to represent these experiences. Her films have screened and won awards at Anthology Film Archives, Camerimage, Toronto International Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Engauge, Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova, Vancouver International Film Festival, Reykjavík International Film Festival, Antimatter, Coop Microcinema, Visions in the Nunnery (Whitechapel UK), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Alicante MACA, BIDEODROMO, BilbaoArte Foundation, Groupe Intervention Vidéo Montreal, SCAD Savannah International Film Festival, Equinoxio Film Festival, Muestra de Video Arte Faenza. In addition to filmmaking her poems have been published by Giulio Perrone Editore.

Caroline So Jung Lee

Caroline So Jung Lee is an award-winning Korean-Canadian filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist. She was born in Tkaronto, traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples (colonially known as Toronto, Canada). Caroline is interested in exploring kinetic, emotional and spiritual movement on screen and with sound. She received a degree in English Literature from the University of Toronto in 2011 and a degree in Film, Video and Integrated Media from Emily Carr University in 2020 (located on the unceded ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, Stó:lō and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, colonially known as Vancouver, BC). Through experimentation in analogue and digital filmmaking techniques, sound compositions, autoethnography, performance and documentary, she explores themes of diasporic identity, feminism, spirituality, community and ecology. Caroline is a member of the Experimental Media Outsiders Collective.

Ella Morton

Ella Morton is a Canadian visual artist who has recently expanded her practice into filmmaking. Her expedition-based work has brought her to residencies and projects across Canada, as well as in Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Working primarily with photography, she uses experimental analogue processes to capture the sublime and fragile qualities of remote landscapes. Originally from Vancouver, she earned a BFA from Parsons School of Design (New York, NY) and an MFA from York University (Toronto, ON). She has exhibited her work internationally, including shows at Walnut Contemporary (Toronto, ON), Idea Exchange (Cambridge, ON), Foley Gallery (New York, NY), Galérie AVE (Montréal, QC), Viewpoint Gallery (Halifax, NS), Photo Center Northwest (Seattle, WA) and the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art (Kelowna, BC). Her films feature altered Super 8mm imagery of Northern landscapes in Canada and Nordic Europe.

Nisha Platzer

Nisha Platzer is a filmmaker and photographer from Vancouver, Canada. She holds a Communication Studies/Film degree from Concordia University in Montreal and a Masters in Documentary from the International School of Cinema and TV in Cuba (EICTV). Her films and photos have been exhibited at festivals on three continents and she has attended artist residencies in South and North America. Nisha teaches workshops in analogue practices and is a current member of Iris Film Collective. An alumnus of IDFAcademy, the Vancouver International Film Festival mentorship program and the Hot Docs Doc Accelerator Emerging Filmmaker Lab, her work can be found in music videos, narrative and experimental films. 

Rajee Samarasinghe

I sourced videos shot on my iPhone between April 10th, 2018, and August 5th, 2020, to create something of a self-portrait rendered through videos never intended for cinematic use but rather for my own personal archives, texts, and social media accounts. Some of the videos were even shot accidentally. I wanted to examine the implications of these images in the context of contemporary documentary practices; why I had relegated these images to a "non-cinematic" categorization. I chose to embrace the original intention I had for the footage, which ranges from Shing02 concert footage to quietly observing a rat drink water at my home, in developing a hybrid language to speak about myself and my gaze as a filmmaker.

Rajee Samarasinghe is an award-winning filmmaker born and raised in Sri Lanka. His work tackles contemporary sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of his own identity and the deconstruction of ethnographic practices. Rajee received his BFA from the University of California San Diego in 2010 and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2016. He is currently working on his debut feature film, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, inspired by his childhood experiences during the Sri Lankan civil war. Rajee’s work has been exhibited at the Tiger Short Competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films by Film Society of Lincoln Center/MoMA, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance Film Festival, SFFILM Festival, REDCAT, Message to Man, Havana Film Festival, EXiS, Tirana International Film Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival and Media City Film Festival. 

Dan S

Dan S is a writer/director/editor and sometimes camera operator residing in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A recipient of two McKnight Fellowships and The Creative Capital Award for Moving Image, Dan has been recognized primarily for his experimental narrative work (Seeking Wellness, Invincible Force) which has been called “uncomfortable to watch” (Urban Cinephile 2009), “sublime yet terrifying” (Filmstock), “stunningly depraved” (Melbourne Underground) and “the kind of thinky/sadistic exercise that even the dark prince of psychological horror Michael Haneke might find difficult to watch” (City Pages). In 2013 he delved into documentary with a personal exploration of fatherhood, familial violence and the death of record stores entitled Old Man, described by film scholar Jack Sargeant as “an exceptional and poetic work.” In 2015 Dan shot his second feature documentary, Vore King, a detailed portrait of R.P. Whalen, world famous horror host, trash movie guru, carnival sideshow barker and America's premier purveyor of vorarephilia fetish pornography. Shortly thereafter Dan suffered a traumatic brain injury and subsequently his projects have become smaller in scale and more introspective.

Paul Tarragó

I’m a filmmaker (and sometime writer) living in London. My work? A mix of underground experimentation and metafiction, tugging at the leash of film language but with narrative often held close at hand. This has shown widely on film festival and gallery circuits (including l’Alternativa (Barcelona), Brooklyn Museum of Art, Tintype, Pompidou Centre (Paris), Moscow and Rotterdam International Film Festivals) and includes several award winning experimental narratives, video installation, a collaborative feature film, moving image live soundtrack performance work, etc. Recent writings have appeared in The Wrong Quarterly, 2HB, decomP magazinE, Leopardskin and Limes, and Ink, sweat and tears. My latest short story collection is The Water Rabbits (2018) and before that came The Mascot Moth and several other pieces (2013). Both are available from both good and bad booksellers. I currently work as a lecturer at the University of the Arts London.

Nicky Tavares

Nicky Tavares is a multimedia artist whose work sheds light on systemic inequalities through personal storytelling. Her work has evolved through an array of media—photography, film, video, animation, sculpture, VR 360, as well as across film forms and presentation formats such as documentary, experimental, installation, GIFS and moving image projections for live performance. This process of evolution has been intuitive; with each project she simply looks for the best creative tools that will serve the content. Her work has been shown internationally in both gallery and screening contexts, including New Directors/New Films at the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; TIE: The International Experimental Film Exposition; IMPAKT Festival; the Dallas Medianale Festival; Balagan Experimental Film and Video Series; and Other Cinema. Nicky is currently an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Grinnell College.