6:00 pm

Blue Scrubs, Yellow Scrubs, Trustees All Above / Orange Jumpsuit (2019) by Cauleen Smith
Blue Scrubs, Yellow Scrubs, Trustees, All Above and Orange Jumpsuit were commissioned by Los Angeles Municipal Gallery at Barnsdall for the group show, Loitering is Delightful. Inspired by an essay by Ross Gay about the perils and pleasures of loitering, these videos use a longstanding device within Smith’s practice of the Ikebana to contemplate the vulnerability of black bodies in public space that are not deployed for labor, profit or entertainment. The colors of the flowers are the colors of clothing worn in LA County Jail (yellow and blue) and state prison (orange). (Cauleen Smith)

6:30 pm

Memento Stella (2018) by Makino Takashi
For several years I’ve traveled the world, screening my work. And throughout this dark, sad world, amid war and terrorism, with countless lives lost to natural cataclysms and human-caused disaster, there hasn’t been a single day that death hasn’t been in my thoughts. At the same time, I do realize that it is not only death that binds us. We are also born, raised and are living on this little planet among the stars. I pursue my work with the idea that if each day, we might be conscious of this truth for even a moment, then maybe perhaps somewhere deep in our hearts, we might find shared artistic expressions, keys to a place beyond the religions, politics, borders, languages and personal desires which tear us apart. (Makino Takashi, December 2017)

cinéma concret (2015) by Makino Takashi
Music：Machinefabriek. After researching the history of musique concrète, a practice which was developed by Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940s, I found the process of making Concrete Music was identical with my style of filmmaking. The process of “concrete music” is not making concrete music from abstract sounds but making abstract music from concrete sounds (i.e. already existing sounds). The film cinéma concret is then a 21st century response to Pierre Schaeffer and musique concrète and also an ironic interpretation of the history of abstract cinema. (Makino Takashi, May 15, 2015)

7:15 pm

WVLNT: Wavelength For Those Who Don’t Have the Time (2003) by Michael Snow
Michael Snow’s Wavelength has been acclaimed as a classic of avant-garde filmmaking since its appearance in 1967. In February 2003, Snow created a new work consisting of simultaneities rather than the sequential progressions of the original work. WVLNT is composed of three unaltered superimpositions of sound and picture. “A mixture of motives created the impetus for this work. On the one hand there were frequent inquiries as to whether Wavelength was or would be soon available on DVD. My position was that, as long as it was possible, I wanted to show the 16mm film in a cinema auditorium in the way it was intended and the way it is at its best. Simultaneously, I was aware of the (in some ways) wonderful democratization of the Internet in making the means to create and modify movies and sound available to everyone. The other motive was that horrible, bad-copy excerpts from Wavelength and La Région Centrale (Snow, 1971) were appearing on YouTube and other sites. My unreasonable reasoning went like this: If people want Wavelength on DVD, I will make a special digital version that is available to anyone; and If anybody is going to vandalize my work it should be me!” (Michael Snow: Sequences—A History of His Art. Ediciones Poligrafa, Barcelona. 2015.) This one-time-only four-screen presentation of WVLNT is presented at SFABF with the permission of the estate of Michael Snow.

HOW MUCH LONGER (ON BALLOONS) / CAN’T ANSWER YOU ANY MORE (ON FACES) / MARY (ON FLOWERS) / PHONE IN HAND (ON BALLOONS WITH A SHEET OVER DEAD BELONGINGS) / ALL HER PRECIOUS JPEGS (ON YELLOW) (2019) by Matt Whitman
Five films from a body of work of textual and archival responses to and documentation of ongoing discrepancies—between living and deceased, public and private, physical and virtual—found in moments of contemporary mourning. Shot on film and edited almost entirely in-camera, the works’ own form points to the material vulnerabilities, susceptibilities and affective properties of the physical archive, particularly alongside artifacts of digital and online memory. These pieces are seen to perpetuate, in vain, a synoptic visual language of social media, while responding to the immediacy and anti-preciousness of written language created for and within a digital social space by allowing it to be made readable only through its recording onto motion picture film. This group of works joins performed texts—including those originating from text and verbal conversations as well as complete fabrications—with documentation of both digital and physical remnants of the deceased. The Super 8mm camera is used as an arbiter of value as clothing, voicemails, plastic candles, .FLV files, pill bottles, .JPEGs and other personal items are sorted through, following a series of unexpected deaths. I’m going to die naked with my phone in my hand too. (Matt Whitman)

Climate Fictions (2017) by Jeanne Liotta
Basic climate science lead to the speculative visions of these Climate Fictions, a media series of 4 possible dystopic future Earths. All the imagery in Climate Fictions began as photographic landscape reality but were digitally “folded” as a visualization technique to form these planetary spheres. These pieces were created during the research period for my climate change media project Soon It Would Be Too Hot (2014), a commission specifically designed for 360 degree projection on NOAA’s Science on a Sphere. Global warming is happening now and human activity is the primary cause as rising carbon dioxide levels trap heat and drive up the planet’s temperature. (Jeanne Liotta)

Shimmering Spectacles (2015) by Scott Stark
Using a unique set of original stereoview photographs from the 1915 San Francisco world’s fair (the Panama–Pacific International Exposition), along with contemporary images he shot himself, Scott Stark’s Shimmering Spectacles commemorated the centennial of the 1915 fair, turning the images into “spectacles”—lenses that bring into focus the amazing “spectacles” that comprised this historic moment in San Francisco’s history. (Scott Stark)

Warnings in Waiting (2023) by Aura Satz
How do we hear and understand emergency signals at a time of intersecting environmental and sociopolitical crises? Does an alarm have to be alarming? And can we imagine sirens beyond the human? Composed of footage shot at sites where sirens are deployed, Aura Satz works collaboratively with a roster of musicians to speculatively reimagine what a siren is. Drawing on Satz’ ongoing documentary film project Preemptive Listening (2017–2024), the three-channel Warnings in Waiting explores the lifecycle of a siren: sirens in situ, placed within landscapes and architectures of threat; sirens in a factory, suspended in a preliminary limbo; and sirens in a state of obsolescence, in a siren “cemetery” or junkyard. The project reimagines sirens in order to forge a new understanding of present and long-term emergency. The siren serves as a worldwide symbol of potential trauma, an emblem warning of climate catastrophe, a mouthpiece for sonic governance and crisis management. Many sirens are relics from WW2 and the cold war, repurposed to communicate the threats of extreme weather, to suggest collective commemorative pause or have been resurrected to test disaster preparedness. The installation consists of films shot across America, Lapland and Fukushima that rotate across different soundscapes, with newly composed siren sounds by an array of experimental musicians. The soundtrack features the endlessly escalating sounds of planetary data; animal howls and the grief of extinction; soaring banshee-like warnings; defiant trumpets; intricate harp permutations; the sounds of the earth’s core. Warnings in Waiting offers an experiment in listening, exploding the soundtrack within a permutational logic specific to the gallery context, and echoing the modular logic of the siren’s code that can be used to communicate diverse messages across war, weather and civil unrest. (Aura Satz)

8:30 pm

THE CONTINUOUS MONUMENT (2021) by Peter Burr
An infinitely scrolling landscape of construction and collapse, THE CONTINUOUS MONUMENT depicts a self-generating world of disassembled body parts as a site of spectacle. Tourists mingle, stare and idle within a landscape of scattered oversized limbs in candy-colored variety. The artwork employs a collection of algorithmic systems in the development of this tableaux including crowd simulation, building assembly and music generation. What emerges is an endlessly expanding vertical landmark in constant limbo. The title pays homage to a 1969 artwork by the experimental architecture group SUPERSTUDIO. Their anti-architectural proposals used grid systems as a way to mediate space, often critiquing the dehumanizing tendencies of urban planning in the modern age. (Peter Burr)