A Skate Media Inspired Shorts Program
Sunday, October 14 at 8:00 PM, $7-10
Bail or No? takes its name from a moment of indecision, the intuitive, instinctual moment where one decides to either bail from a skate trick or to ride it out. The shorts assembled as part of this program, while disparate in their approaches and proximity skateboarding, ruminate on the spirit of skating, namely the ways in which it has embraced individual and idiosyncratic contributions to the form and how the very practice of skateboarding insists on risk in the face of both futility and injury.
Bail or No? is an experimental shorts program in the guise of a collage film, with concrete and asphalt video-poetry riffing on the aesthetics of skate media, DIY culture, bailing as a form, and the metaphor of micro-rebellion. Aware that such rebellions are easily commodified and co-opted, the program is nonetheless knit together by a mutual spirit—that having to bail is okay, but to move without risk or chance, is to throw in the towel regardless.
Featuring contributions by Brandon Alvendia, Liz Cambron, Chris Johanson, Joe Castrucci with Future Islands, Molly Colleen O’Connell, Rick Silva and Jordan Tate, Jennifer Chan, John Auer, Dina Kelberman, Caitlin Ryan, Jacob Riddle, Rick Charnoski, Philippe Blanchard, Thad Kellstadt, KC Milliken with Eric Fleischauer, and surprise cameos by many more. Programmed by Chris Reeves and Aaron Walker.
Total screening time: 60 minutes
Filed under:
anarchy,
animation,
artist in attendance,
experimental,
new media,
Uncategorized,
video
Featuring Ezra Claytan Daniels
and Ben Passmore with Vicko Alvarez Vega
and Jessica Campbell
Tuesday, October 9 at 8 PM, Free
The Nightingale is delighted to welcome back Ezra Claytan Daniels as he celebrates the book version of his inventive graphic novel Upgrade Soul. Originally released as an interactive iPhone App, the innovative sci-fi story follows an aging couple in the aftermath of an experimental operation to clone themselves gone awry. Daniels asks probing questions about what shapes our identity -Is it the capability of our mind or the physicality of our bodies? Is a newer, better version of yourself still you? This page-turning graphic novel follows Hank and Molly as they discover the harsh truth that only one version of themselves is fated to survive.
Touring with Daniels is Philadelphia-based cartoonist Ben Passmore reading from his comic-collection released in March of 2018, Your Black Friend and Other Strangers. Passmore masterfully tackles comics about race, gentrification, the prison system, online dating, gross punks, bad street art, kung fu movie references, beating up God, and lots of other grown-up stuff with refreshing doses of humour and lived relatability. These comics are essential, humorous, and accessible, told through Passmore’s surreal lens in the vibrant full-color hues of New Orleans.
At this event, Ben and Ezra will both present sections of their new releases. Afterwards, they will join Chicago-based comic artists, Jessica Campbell and Vicko Alvarez Vega in a roundtable discussion about creating comics that address white supremacy, sexism, and xenophobia.
(more…)
Filed under:
animation,
artist in attendance,
expanded cinema,
Free Screening!,
literature,
narrative,
new media,
reading,
science,
social justice,
Uncategorized,
video
small matters and cosmic scans from Nina Barnett + Jeremy Bolen, Deborah Stratman, Mike Gibisser and Semiconductor
Wednesday, September 19 at 8 PM, $7-10
The Beam plays like a science nonfiction road film–– following the largely invisible NOVA experiment path over 550 miles – from Illinois to Northern Minnesota – in search of something that’s everywhere: neutrinos, the tiny subatomic particles that fill our world, unbothered by matter or its related matters. Visually striking, enlightening but never didactic, first time collaborators Barnett and Bolen—draw out the poetics of seeking the unseeable, of trying to name and know the invisible bits that we share space with. In celebration of its world premiere, we’ve paired it with some other incredible films playing in the interstices of the scientific and poetic, dispensing with those classifications, but keen to understand the links between technologies of vision and visualization, the metaphors through which we understand the universe.
Nina Barnett + Jeremy Bolen — The Beam | 27 mins. | HD | color | sound | 2018
“They go through everything and they never stop.”
…
“There is no stop.”
…
“It just keeps going into the cosmos”
Mike Gibisser — Second Law: S Leh St. | 14 mins. | 16mm to HD | color | sound | 2010
The second of a four part series. The second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, states order tends toward disorder. An old woman passes time in her home. The dust in the air sometimes floats skyward.
Semiconductor — 20Hz | 5 mins. | HD | b+w | sound | 2011
20Hz observes a geo-magnetic storm occurring in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Working with data collected from the CARISMA radio array and interpreted as audio, we hear tweeting and rumbles caused by incoming solar wind, captured at the frequency of 20 Hertz. Generated directly by the sound, tangible and sculptural forms emerge suggestive of scientific visualisations. As different frequencies interact both visually and aurally, complex patterns emerge to create interference phenomena that probe the limits of our perception.
Deborah Stratman — …These Blazeing Starrs! | 14 mins. | 16mm to HD | b+w | sound | 2011
Since comets have been recorded, they’ve augured disaster: catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage.
…These Blazeing Starrs! juxtaposes a modern empirical desire to probe and measure against older methods, when star gazers were translators, explicating the sky more intuitively for predictions of human folly. Comets are now understood as time capsules harboring elemental information about the formation of our solar system. Today we smash rockets into them to read spectral signatures. In a sense, they remain oracles – it’s just the manner of divining which has changed.
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programmed by Jesse Malmed
Filed under:
artist in attendance,
collaboration,
documentary,
environmental,
essay,
experimental,
place,
science,
sound,
video
