Selection #2

Through a Glass, Darkly

62 mins
In attendance: Lena Ditte Nissen, Tivon Rice

A series of works where the architectural body speaks from a state of penumbra. To scry in and out of a glowing black crystal, we encounter a black stone, a formless shade and a monolith portal through which we traverse the in-between. Space and motion decay in conflicting separations. Existence is abstracted to fit within a given structure, as trauma originates from a power set of chiaroscuro alienation. A monologue that produces the impossibility of its own, as the monochrome quality of a disappearing ocean. The mind enters the architectonics of the body in a liminal state where the sound is to light what the flesh is to the psyche. A magnetic force that pulls forth the woe of an act of recollection.

N.S.

Fri 24 May

17:00h / ACUD STUDIO

Shona Masarin
Ruins
USA, 2018, 3’ 30’’, 16mm > HD video, b&w, silent, World Premiere

“Ruins” imagines a landscape where the past and the present have been expunged, reduced to shadows. Here, in this silent and vacant future, geometric forms and planes of light melt into one another before disappearing into the film grain, lending only glimpses of a whole. A black rectangle floats in space, simultaneously a monolith and a portal. Unlike the shy shapes that open the film, the rectangle asserts itself, repeatedly making its presence known. Like the surface of a perfectly calm ocean, its pitch-black face disturbs us with all that is unknown hidden in its depth.

Tivon Rice
Environment Built for Absence (an unofficial/artificial sequel to J.G. Ballard’s “High Rise” )
Netherlands, 2018, HD video, 17’ 45’’, colour, sound, German Premiere

Beginning in early 2018, the demolition of the Netherland’s Central Bureau of Statistics office provided a type of slow cinema for railway passengers traveling between The Hague and Amsterdam. Over the following year, as the building was methodically deconstructed from the top down, I visited the site each month to document the gradual erosion. Using a drone and a digital mapping process, photogrammetry, I created an archive of virtual 3D models.
As the building’s architecture and its inevitable collapse were reminiscent of English Author J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise, I further sought to accompany this scene with the voice of a machine learning system trained on the complete corpus of Ballard’s writing. This A.I., or recurrent neural network, generates texts that describe the materials, invisible bodies, and possible narratives residing within the broken grounds of the building.
Aligning with my research on the intersections of art and technology, this project explores intertextuality, automatic writing, language, vision, and the uncanny divide between human and machine cognition.

Lena Ditte Nissen
EIN TEIL/TEIL EINS (Der Mond ist aufgegangen)
German/Denmark, 2018, 6’, 16mm > HD video, b&w, silent, World Premiere

This film is an abstract meditation about the appearance and disappearance of a man. Slowly abstract white forms appear, they clear up and a man can be seen. He is seen in positiv and his own negativ, these two forms of the same man touch each other, hunt each other.

Simon Payne
Set Theory I-IV
UK, 2018, 19’, HD, b&w/colour, sound, German Premiere

Aspects of this series were informed by some of the terms used in the branch of mathematics called Set Theory. These terms include: 'union', 'intersection', 'difference', 'complement', the 'empty set', the 'universal set', 'elements', 'subsets', 'operations' and 'groups'. The representation of elementary Set Theory in the form of Venn diagrams was also suggestive. In the first instance, Set Theory involved producing and collating different sets of vertical, horizontal, diagonal and curved graphic transitions. These were subsequently combined or sequenced by way of different rules that keep the conflict of planes, forms, tonal values and colour foremost. Other than that there is no prescribed (or set) theory behind the series and there are multiple ways in which the basic elements could have been handled, and might be again, in different iterations.

Roger Deutsch
My Echo, My Shadow, and Me
Hungary, 2019, 8’, Super8 > HD video, colour/b&w, sound, World Premiere

A man loses himself

Timothy Hodkinson
Soft Lock
UK, 2018, 7’ 19’’, HD video, colour, sound, German Premiere

You are an onlooker, from a fixed point of view. A version of the past is endlessly replayed. A psychological state punctuated and signposted by warnings, questions and realisations. Images sometimes masked, faded or corrupted by time and the process of recollection.
Using metaphoric, symbolic and poetic imagery Soft Lock represents how the our subconscious chooses to make real the negative events in ones life via our memories. The creation of worlds, places and narratives that are at once familiar and at the same time somehow removed from the self are used to mirror the way in which memories can manifest themselves in a confused and sometimes warped manner. This duality of state, metaphor saying one thing by saying another, can been seen as a construction of thought before it is manifested by language or translated by form.

Through a Glass, Darkly

Fri 24 May

Thu 23

Fri 24

Sat 25

Sun 26