Film Categories: Sound Art + Music

  • 28 Days

    This video pays stylistic homage to girl punks and 1960’s rock and roll girl groups. Camera moves and mise-en-scene are inspired by the 1963 music film for “He’s Got the Power” by the Exciters. The video responds to the song’s theme of menstruation by presenting a series of celebratory images of female solidarity.

  • I Know I’m Late

    Playing on the classic backstage drama, this short musical featuring Jef Barbara’s I Know I’m Late embeds the story of its own making into a fantasy performance in the dressing room of a Montreal cabaret. A chorus of backup dancers distracts the star of the show as he explains his tardiness through song. The film culminates in a dance routine reminiscent of ’90s MTV music videos and offers an appreciative reflection of idiosyncratic individuality, community and inclusion.

  • Auroratone

    This abstract cut-out animation attempts to create orderly pixel patterns using only hand-cut and hand-arranged materials, without any grids, rulers, or visual guides. A stream-of-consciousness series of abstract patterns dance, transform, answer to one another, and at times evolve into recognizable icons, as if sending subliminal messages from a child’s play session. Back-lit pastel colorscapes reflect the airy, other-wordly transmission of Julia Holter’s song “So Lillies” .

  • Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds

    This solo performance for the camera pays homage to 1970s video art, exploring how the electronic manipulation of the video signal can create a choreocinema for body and machine. Choreographic patterns melding retro moves with a minimalist aesthetic participate in a jagged, pulsing duet with the danceable beats and noisy textures of the track “Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds” by Alterity Problem (Alexander Moskos and Joel Taylor). Effects were created in real-time with a raster-scan device built by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, accessed during a residency at the now-closed Experimental TV Center in upstate New York.

  • Skeleton Dance

    Have you ever wondered what would happen if you X-rayed a skeleton at a dance club? This experimental cut-out animation offers something of an answer. Besides dancing between abstract shapes throughout the video, the skeleton character cuts out a pair of pants from some paper, tries them on and runs away. The footage is processed using a variety of analog video synthesizers, including a Paik-Abe Raster Scan Device (aka Wobulator). The electronic voltage of the soundtrack by LA’s Dva Damas directs the parameters of certain effects. Artwork, animation, processing and editing done by Emily Pelstring while in residence at the…

  • Jack

    This is the official music video for the U.S. Girls song ‘Jack’, the first single off of the album Gem (FatCat Records, 2012). In the video, a sequined woman (played by Meghan Remy) sings from the perspective of Jack the Ripper, confounding the relationship between looker and looked at, predator and prey. This glam-inspired video was befittingly shot on a Hitachi FP-22, 3-tube vintage camera by an all-female crew. It plays on classic images of American femininity, and the lyrics of the song contribute a subtext of the misogynistic serial killer’s gaze. With references to Kenneth Anger’s ‘Puce Moment’ and…

  • Goin’ Ape

    A man driven to the edge seeks refuge in a go-go bar while sleaze bags plot against him. He saves a girl he once knew from unspeakable perils.

  • Far From

    Constructed with repetitions and variations in reference to the musical form of a nocturne, Far From is an accumulation of the layers, density and noise of existence. The film evokes the ghosts of lives lived and the traces of lives being lived, rising. French Synopsis: À l’instar d’une nocturne, les variations et les répétitions du film « Loin de » agencent les couches, la densité et les bruissements de l’existence – les fantômes de vies passées et les traces de vies toujours présentes, en devenir.

  • Former Models

    A public and private history undo themself(ves) as they mutually encounter the trials of Labor, Love, Loss and Planned Obsolescence. A body desires its Other: a simulation is transgressed and the ultimate price is paid- “No-body is above The Law.” In this docu-narrative, the tragic story of Milli Vanilli’s Robert Pilatus and his descent into a post-racial and post-gendered pure image is told through appropriated video footage. A fabricated narrative conceived by the artist collides with Pilatus’ public biography in a technologically mediated flash of desire and information. This video is dedicated to the very real life of Robert Pilatus, 1965-1998.  

  • MY WOUNDED HEAD

    A transwoman puts on makeup. The makeup and her movements are a metaphor for her transformation, as well as the dialectical revealing and concealment of herself from the scrutiny of the outside world. Taking its title from Marc Chan’s composition, MY WOUNDED HEAD is an experimental short film that investigates issues of representation, preconceived notions and reflexivity. Marc’s music, featured in the soundtrack, is itself a reflexive reinterpretation of a set of chorales from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (“O Sacred Head Now Wounded”).