Installations
to be with you (grotto)
October 17–27 | dusk–Midnight
Installation @ Deluge (transom window)
Sara Ballard | 2023 | USA | 3 min
16mm hand-processed film and digital artifacts fused in an attempt to adapt a love song written and performed by the filmmaker’s mother in the 1980s.
Sarah Ballard is a filmmaker and educator currently based in Milwaukee, WI. Her work has screened at venues and festivals such as CROSSROADS, Antimatter, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Florida Film Festival, Light Matter Experimental Film and Media Arts Festival, San Diego Underground Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival and Onion City Experimental Film Festival, among others. Sarah is a recipient of the 2023 Princess Grace Award in Film and is a Lecturer in the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Night Over R32
October 17–27 | festival hours
Installation @ Deluge (entrance foyer)
Felix Dierich | 2023 | Germany | 3 min
At night, R32 is like a kaleidoscope. The colourful lights are as manifold as the occupants are diverse, living close together and yet worlds apart. Experimental documentation of a winter night in an apartment block in extreme time lapse. Schematic insights into completely different living environments, united by the building. It seems so close and yet is only a fleeting reflection, a scratch on the surface.
Felix Dierich was born 1980 and grew up in Lübeck. He studied computer science as well as arts and media at the University of Oldenburg. His short films and video installations are experimental documentaries, providing new (in)sights and unseen points of view in unusual, hypnotic or playful ways combined with immersive sound.
Why is water so heavy?
vol i, time never changed water
October 17–27 | dusk–Midnight
Installation @ Legacy Art Gallery (window)
Ghislan Sutherland-Timm | 2023 | Canada | 3 min
vol i, time never changed water is part of an ongoing autobiographical-fictional collection of works entitled Why is water so heavy? (2022–present), interlocking the fluidity and borderless nature of water in relation to diaspora and landmarking. I dwell on self-ambiguity as time continues to spatialize fragments of my ancestral histories and cultural practices lost in water.
Ghislan Sutherland-Timm (Je-iz-lan/Jess-lin) (they/she) is a multidisciplinary craftsman and amateur media archivist based in Tkaronto/Toronto. As part of the queer Black Canadian diaspora, their artistic practice is influenced by their ancestral ties and reconnection to their Afro-Vincentian heritage and Carib (Island Carib/Kalinago) roots. In this process of activation, they seek to merge their identities alongside their English and Scottish (Clan Sutherland) ancestry in understanding fragmentations of their multicultural identity hosted within embodying living entities, memories and land formations. Their work is also ignited by the ephemerality and tactility of sound and film. In creating "incomplete complete" works, collage-making across diverse mediums is frequently utilized within their practice to shape autobiographical-fictional narratives and subjects of ambiguous beings. Through this intersection Sutherland-Timm navigates unravelling the mythologies and romanticization of home and homecoming.
ESP
October 17–27 | 24hrs
Installation @ Millie’s Lane (window gallery)
Laura Kraning | 2024 | USA | 3 min
ESP depicts a brutalist monument to the Empire State as manifested by a malfunctioning inkjet printer. Photographed in the Capitol City of Albany, New York, Empire State Plaza’s massive government complex of concrete, marble and steel looms over the city, while the ovoid structure, appropriately named “The Egg,” appears like a stranded spaceship from a bygone decade. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s 1960s ideal vision for a futuristic city obscured the dark side of eminent domain and the displacement of thousands of families and businesses across 40 city blocks. Thirteen years in the making, the vision of the future was already out of date by the time construction was completed.
ESP dematerializes the city’s overpowering structures, not through digital glitching, but through the disordered happenstance of faulty reproduction technology. Cyan and magenta dominate the printed image, while fading ink streams of yellow and black leave behind streaks of erasure. The juxtaposition and repetition of single frames sets the static structures in motion, with alternating vertical and horizontal lines merging into tactile grids of iridescent specks and grey noise. The audio track’s rhythmic pulses and clicks were created solely through the digital sonification of the chrominance and luminance of the image yet invoke the mechanical whir of a printer carriage advancing line by line. The only prominently visible named structure, “Agency Building 1” suggests a mysterious headquarters befitting its sci-fi atmosphere. ESP meshes a brutalist landscape with a machinic intervention to picture the degeneration of the monumental image of the city.
Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates landscape as a repository for memory, cultural mythology and the technological sublime. Exploring absence and the fluidity of time, she evokes liminal spaces of neither past, nor present, but a landscape of the imagination. Laura’s work has screened widely at international film festivals and venues, such as MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Visions du Réel, National Gallery of Art, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, REDCAT Theater and Los Angeles Filmforum, among others. Laura currently resides in New York, where she teaches in the Department of Media Study at University of Buffalo.