Competition 6: Shifted Angle

Four stories about shocked pigeons, stolen underpants, judgemental robots and thrown marbles are interwoven in a world view that enables the narrator to confront her date with unexpected abilities.

A short digital film portrait of dance artist and art model Sawami Fukuoka. Referencing a traditional Japanese folk tale, it meditates on the ways one navigates the difference between interior and exterior worlds. The film employs visually layered stylistic perspectives to illuminate the tension between being and being seen.

Based on the themes of loss and grief through dementia, Potter’s Mirror symbolically represents the internal structures of the mind. We follow the daily activities of the Watchman as he tends to his memories and nurtures new emerging ideas. All is well until a deterioration of the environment forces him to escape through the window.

A photograph is a window into the past, but sometimes the border between the past and the present is not entirely clear. This stop-motion animation invites us to think about our relationship to time by portraying one woman caught in the middle.

“Interdeviation” visualizes a world where humans, technology, and nature become inextricably merged. The video blends live action footage taken from the environments surrounding the artist’s home as well as images and footage of the artist herself. This footage was used as reference within generative AI to cultivate new and imagined landscapes as well as speculative human-plant hybrid organisms.

The music video for Black Taffy’s Riding Day is a loving nod to British experimental filmmaker Malcom Le Grice’s 1970 film Berlin Horse, an iconic work of Structural/Materialist filmmaking that featured a soundtrack by Brian Eno. Like that film, this film is an exploration of the material qualities of celluloid film in ways that are analogous to gestures in electronic music. Just as Black Taffy has sampled and reworked the soundtrack for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to create a new musical composition, this film samples and reworks images from its sequel Tears of the Kingdom, translating the interactive game world into a physical form. Similar to the way Eno’s tape loops fall in and out of sync with one another, the images of Link’s horse are made into loops that superimpose positive on top of negative and allow them to drift away from each other.

I dream My dream
Exploring, loving and dreaming
Unearthing freedoms, instinctively
with consciousness and unconsciousness intertwined
Circles define as if nothing be something
Some moves for true nearness, I give ground
but my dream after the real you, is real

Our newest collaboration with renowned poet Lucy English combines footage shot on location In Cancer Alley with images of nature, especially cypress groves, which are as fragile and as threatened as the Cancer Alley communities. The visuals are accompanied by a poem about what it is like to live in the small towns near the Mississippi River, between East Baton Rouge and New Orleans, which are now dominated by more than 200 chemical plants and oil refineries, sometimes literally located in residents’ back yards. The cypress trees can live for more than 1000 years, if they are not chopped down for cypress mulch or their habitat destroyed. Human lifespans are much shorter, but we may not survive as a species unless we stop living as if all that matters is today, and learn to think on the time scale of the trees.