Cosmic Rays Touring Programs

Program One: Space is the Place

A program of short films that explore outer spaces and inner spaces. Taking a variety of formal approaches, these cosmonautical films map star systems high above or deep inside.

Program Running Time: 73 Minutes

Space is the Place
Rupert Jörg RT: 6:03
A photographer tries to harmoniously combine a small child with symbols of state violence in one photo.

Seeing Spacecraft Earth
Lisa McCarty RT: 5:51 
A pulsating cosmic montage; an alternative view of the seminal Earthrise photograph. We are all astronauts whether we like it or not.

Laika
Deborah Stratman RT: 4:33
Some forms we can only know by their shadow.  In homage to the spirits of space test dogs, or any being we use in the name of progress. Made by invitation of composer Olivia Block for the release of her album Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea.

Of this Beguiling Membrane
Charlotte Pryce RT: 5:00 
The story unfolds on the Eve of Midsummer: on the day when the threshold between worlds is porous, and an idle gesture can tempt fate. Inspired by Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth (1671), this work takes the outward form of a nature film. But observation gives way to illusion and the surface gives way to murky waters strewn with debris of those who have succumbed to its lures. (The Lady of Shalott, Ophelia). They remain trapped; menacing reminders of the dangerous seduction of beauty, and anger of the elusive spirits who resent being examined.

Continental Drifts
Georg Koszulinski RT: 12:00 
A fictional account of David Koresh’s last words, a cursory analysis of the pantheon of Icelandic sagas, a home movie taking into account 20 years of filming on an old Bolex 16mm camera, a series of reflections on the destructive nature of industrialized societies: a collage film, metaphysical road trip movie in time of pandemic and social uprising. A point-and-shoot epistolary fever dream collage film made in times of multiple crises. 

in ocula oculorum
Anna Kipervaser RT: 12:14 
An interrogation of the unknown and the internal, in both subject matter and experience. Dealing with the contemporary state of perpetual doom, the film contemplates various stages of life and death from the point of view of our human bodies and perceptual systems. It explores beta movement and phi phenomenon, pushing the limits of intermittence and persistence of vision, playing with our innate desire for continuity and cohesion by forcing image slip.

Time Crystals
Abinadi Meza RT: 5:35 
This synthetic narrator remembers time through images. Real, fantasy or something in-between, the narrator describes finding patterns in time, which “she” calls time crystals. We do not know if this enigmatic film is a record, a signal, or a dream.

To Live and Die in the Shadows: Meditations on Ferns, Survival, and Horizontal Gene Transfer
Shannon Silva RT: 5:29 
180 million years ago, through a chance horizontal gene transfer, ferns acquired a much needed light sensor (neochrome) that allowed them to modify and survive in low light environments. We should all be so lucky.

If a Tree Falls in a Forest
Leonardo Pirondi RT: 15:00
Following the discovery of a mysterious metal structure in the desert, this film documents the encased objects found within the structure. This film is made up of speculative recreations of the study conducted, analysis of the found objects, and surrounding landscapes.

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Program Two: Look and Learn

Look and Learn: a selection of films that investigate the nature of vision and visuality. The program foregrounds the materiality of the image, featuring work that makes innovative use of found footage, archival documents, scientific imaging, new media, drones, and celluloid. These films ask us to consider how the visual world is historically, technologically, and sensorially structured.

Curated by John Winn.

Program Running Time: 73 Minutes

LOOK AND LEARN
Janie Geiser RT: 11:15  
LOOK AND LEARN excavates the visual vocabulary we use to operate and construct our daily world. Look and Learn investigates a range of material image forms: elementary school books, visual instructions (furniture assembly diagrams, how-to manuals, safety instructions, maps) and photographs—with a focus on 1950’s era school class photographs, images from photography manuals, and others.
 
Another Horizon
Stephanie Barber RT: 9:00
When I was twenty, I lived in Richard and his wife Mary’s apartment, the site of their voodoo spiritual temple in New Orleans. Of course, as priests and priestesses, Richard and Mary spoke often of death, transcendence, ethics and health. Our days were slow and filled with philosophical rumination. Richard a brilliant old man schooling a young wandering wonderer.
 
Are You Tired Of Forever?
Caitlin Craggs RT: 6:06 
A surreal montage of selfdom in a lensed world. We start in transit and end in the boudoir. Tea and light snacks will be served.
 
The Glass Note
Mary Helena Clark RT: 9:00  
In The Glass Note, a collage of sound, image, and text explore cinema’s inherent ventriloquism. Across surface and form, the video reflects on voice, embodiment, and fetish through the commingling of sound and image.
 
Sky Room
Marianna Milhorat RT: 5:55 
Someone is missing. Plants grow, but at what cost? Technology threatens and seduces as humans attempt to solve a mystery through telepathy and mirrors. Stainless steel and broken glass strewn about an intergalactic discotheque. Commissioned by the Chicago Film Archives and made in collaboration with sound artist Brian Kirkbride, with footage and sound from the archive chopped, manipulated and arpeggiated into a fertile mix of anthem and narrative.
 
The Air of the Earth in Your Lungs
Ross Meckfessel RT: 11:00 
Drones and GoPros survey the land while users roam digital forests, oceans, and lakes. Those clouds look compressed. That tree looks pixelated. A landscape film for the 21st century. 
 
Please Step Out of Frame
Karissa Hahn RT: 4:10 
from your desk(top)   mistrust the manufactured image  distrust the assembled picture  give no credence to the massed account  discredit the aggregate narrative  defame the corporate chronicle  denigrate the collective annals  doubt the constructed copy   – consider the clone.    accept the dismantled vision  exalt the forged now brain  subscribe to the ditto  fuel the doodad delusion  nourish the gizmo nightmare  incite the idiot box prophecy  inflame the dingbat phantasm  a film burn becoming pixels as band-aid  a manufactured reinforcement  in the empire of computer and you   feeding machine-vision  the partition of screen
 
khôra
Caroline Key RT: 7:45 
An incursion into Medicine, specifically gynecology, exposing problem origins and fraught desires.
 
Void Vision
Alexander Stewart RT: 7:30 
In Void Vision the real and the simulated are equally constructions; a space where doubles, twins, duplicates, re-creations, and copies blend into one another. Void Vision combines a science-fiction sensibility with the aesthetic of early CG animation experiments. Rotating arrangements of lasers and duplicated women fade in and out onscreen, appearing as both photographed scenes and CG-modeled recreations. The audio track, incorporating text from Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, features an improvised electronic score and a voice espousing theories about the mind and the universe.     Void Vision presents a consideration and re-consideration of reality; a cold fever-dream of paranoia and reification.  

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Program Three: Dislocation Blues

Dislocation Blues: a selection of films that explore the instability of place and place-making from various historical, formal, and personal perspectives. For each of these films, the here and now is always elsewhere, another history, another time and place. The program features work that adopts original and diverse approaches to its subjects, subverting the traditions of documentary, ethnography, as well as animation.

Curated by John Winn.

Program Running Time: 69 Minutes

Notes from the Periphery
Tulapop Saenjaroen RT: 13:31
Mainly shot in the peripheral areas of the ever-expanding Laem Chabang port in Chon Buri, Thailand, An interrogation into the notion of territoriality, globalized networks, and ownership through fragmented relations of the affected sites and communities nearby. Shipping containers that become a policing tool, and the life cycle of a barnacle.
 
Hoarders Without Boarders 1.0
Jodie Mack RT: 5:44 
Featuring crystallized magic markers and the kidney stone of a horse, the generously-curated mineral collection of Mary Johnson comes to life in a manual labor of love for the process of archival procedure.
 
La Mesa
Adrian Garcia Gomez RT: 9:45
Masculinity and queer desire in rural Mexico. La Mesa explores the intersections of memory, identity and queer desire.  It recreates fragmented and romanticized stories of a childhood in rural Mexico as told by the filmmaker’s father. These disjointed vignettes are interwoven with queered reenactments of scenes from popular culture. The filmmaker casts himself in the old Mexican films and American Westerns he grew up watching with his family in California.  He appears as the romantic lead opposite the male actors, including Pedro Infante, Mexican national hero and the filmmaker’s childhood crush.  The animations are laid over footage of the old family home in Mexico which now sits alone, slowly being consumed by the surrounding countryside.  By centering queer desire in his family’s history, the filmmaker validates his childhood experiences while challenging popular representations of masculinity as well as traditional notions of power and vulnerability.
 
Off (I don’t know when to stop)Erica Sheu RT: 2:45
Day after day, bars of sunset pass the kitchen. Lamps carry on when the sky gets dark. The frame finds its balance. Life in work and work in life.
 
Spontaneous
Lori Felker RT: 14:00
You never know when someone is miscarrying; it could be happening right next to you.
 
Amusement Ride
Tomonari Nishikawa RT: 6:00 
Shot with a telephoto lens from inside a cabin of Cosmo Clock 21, a Ferris wheel at an amusement park in Yokohama, Japan. The distorted image shows the structure of the Ferris wheel, focusing on the intermittent vertical movement, which resembles the movement of a film at the gate of a film projector or camera.
 
Dislocation Blues
Sky Hopinka RT: 17:00 
An incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock. Cleo Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at, and leaving the camp and the difficulties and the reluctance in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become.