I’m Not Your Monster - Karen Yasinsky

Karen Yasinsky is an artist and filmmaker working with experimental film, animation and drawing. She received a BA from Duke University in Mathematics and Art History and received her MFA from Yale University in Painting. She is a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and the American Academy in Rome. Grants and residencies include the Baker Award, Headlands Center for the Arts and the Ucross Foundation. Her work has been shown in many venues internationally including the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art, NY, UCLA Hammer Museum, LA, the Wexner Center, Columbus, Kunst Werke, Berlin, Museum Folkwang, Essen and Baltimore Museum of Art. Her films and videos have been screened worldwide at various venues and film festivals including Museum of Modern Art, NY, National Gallery of Art, DC, the New York Film Festivals Views from the Avant Garde, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Images Festival, San Francisco International, Crossroads, London International Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Best Sound 2013). Publications including her work include No. 1: First works by 363 Artists, The World is a Stage Stories Behind Pictures, Armpit of the Mole, and >>fast forward Media Art Sammlung Goetz.

Lizzy - Susanna Wallin

Lizzy is the result of the days spent in the aftermath of the death of a neighbour, who passed in the house where she had lived out her whole life on the Hillsborough River in Tampa, Florida and who left behind an electric organ addressed to the filmmaker, without a note. To receive it was like a wild riddle.How might one story continue in the hands of another? What powers organize the telling? Through weaving indoors with outdoors, dust with swamp, celebration with critique, the film traverses binary notions such as self-world, truth-fiction, witnessing-imagining and nature-experience among others.

Susanna Wallin is an artist and filmmaker engaged in questions regarding what to do with our time, our bodies and the tools we are given to live a life. She probes subject matter across diverse contexts, modalities and timescales, often immersing herself in a particular place over extended periods. She is attentive to what emerges in hesitation, together, through experimentation and open ended, lending an ear to the unspoken with fiction as practice.
Born and raised in Sweden, she studied filmmaking and art practice/theory at Goldsmiths College and University of the Arts London in the UK. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including The Flamin London Artist Film and Video Award, New Approaches, Film London UK, Pure Fiction, Sweden and commissions from the UK Film Council, Channel 4, BBC, Arts Council England, Arte France/Germany, SVT, Sweden and the BFI in the UK. Her award-winning films are shown in cinema and gallery contexts and have appeared in venues such as MOCA LA, The American Cinematheque, The Barbican, Whitechapel Gallery, The London Underground, ICA and the British Film Institute.

Exo Gestus #2 - Yvette Granata

Exo Gestus, Granata examines the artistic lineage of feminist craft in experimental moving image arts in which the performance of the body is central, yet the direct representation of the body remains outside of capture technology. While feminized craft has often been tied to the intricate work of the hands and fingers, such as weaving, stitching and other textile practices, in the tradition of feminist experimental film and media arts, the whole body has often been conceived as a method of inscription.
With the Exo Gestus series, Granata extends the tradition of experimental feminist image-making and brings it into the realm of digital animation. Utilizing an ill-fitting motion capture suit, she records choreographies of the body as a mode of critique of capture technologies and as a method of digital animation. The result is a series of warped digital figures that stretch out, glitch, and break apart in the process of being animated.

Yvette Granata is a media artist, filmmaker, and media scholar. She creates work across multiple media formats and makes immersive media experiences, VR art, video art, experimental animations, and hypothetical technological systems. She is currently interested in interrogating how socio-technological systems affect the body and vice versa, how the body interrupts socio-technic processes. Yvette holds a Phd from SUNY Buffalo’s Media Arts Program and a Masters from the University of Amsterdam. She is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan in the department of Film, Television and Media and the Digital Studies Institute.

Listening In, Resounding Out - Eislow Johnson, Dominic Bonelli

Through the ears of an acoustic engineer, the film explores how in the near silence of the anechoic chamber, listening is a straining toward understanding and connection. It engages with cinema as a body — one given presence and depth through sound — and a body as a resounding instrument, which listens to its own vibratory depths and amplifies its feedback.

om Dixon is a sound designer/mixer, educator and filmmaker (under the name Eislow Johnson) from Skokie, Illinois. His practice engages with cinema as a sound art and as a way of navigating and responding to the world's vibration and instability. His films have screened nationally and internationally at festivals and venues such as Prismatic Ground, L'Alternativa, Cinemateca Nacional del Ecuador, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Light Matter Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, and Cosmic Rays Film Festival. Films featuring his sound work have screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, SXSW, Museum of the Moving Image, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, FICUNAM, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and Open City Documentary Film Festival, among others. Tom has taught in universities, bilingual schools, libraries, forest preserves, co-ops, and living rooms. He recently earned an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MA in Sound Arts and Industries from Northwestern University.
Dom (Dominic Bonelli) is a sound designer based in Chicago with six years of experience in sound from film to podcasts. Dom graduated from Northwestern University and interned at Periscope Post & Audio.

Night Music - Edwin Rostron

A little night music for the eyes. Geometric shapes dance… the rain falls, a storm approaches.

Edwin Rostron studied Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and Animation at the Royal College of Art, and is currently based in London. His work is rooted in drawing, often taking the form of animated films which employ an experimental approach to traditional and digital processes. His animations have been shown at festivals such as onedotzero, Pictoplasma and the Australian International Animation Festival. Edwin also runs Edge of Frame, a blog devoted to experimental animation, featuring interviews with artists, exploring the ideas and processes behind their work.

Species of Analogy - J.M. Martínez

A field guide: Flora evolving with environmental changes, and pollinators utilizing biomimicry. Natural objects are gathered, and sculptures of and from the landscape cast reflections of nature being infinite, self-knowing, and alive. Extinct species and stages of evolution are suggested, accompanied by field recordings capturing the underground soundscape of soil. Bird calls and wingbeats offer greetings and warnings. -A rock, a tree, a human—each dissolving into matter and transmuting into new forms.

J.M. Martínez is an artist based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, working with film, video, sound, and sculpture. Focusing on elemental works that highlight art forms found in nature and the interconnected relationships of species within an evolving landscape.

File No. 2304 - A. S. M. Kobayashi

Canada forcibly incarcerated and dispossessed thousands of Canadian citizens of Japanese heritage, relocating them to internment camps, or in the case of the Kobayashi family, a sugar beet work farm in the Canadian Prairies. After accessing the 119 page custodial file of her great-grandfather in the National Archives of Canada, Kobayashi discovered details about her family history and their life before their internment that were previously unknown. File No. 2304 is a chapter of her interdisciplinary work, Electric Neon Clock, which explores the government's custodial file about her family consisting of court transcripts, inventories and forms that reveal hidden narratives and family history.

A.S.M. Kobayashi is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid, interactive work mixes documentary and fiction through video, performance, installation and illustration. Her critically acclaimed performance, Say Something Bunny! based on found audio recordings, was heralded as "The best new theater experience in town" by Vogue and a NYTimes critics’ pick. Additionally, SSB! was listed in Time Out’s 2017 top ten productions and BOMB’s Best of Performance in 2018. Kobayashi has received nominations for a 2018 Drama Desk award and 2019 United Solo Special Award and is the recipient of the 2006 TSV Artistic Vision Award. Her video work has been exhibited internationally at museums and film festivals. She was a fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell, and a guest artist at the 2008 Flaherty Film Seminar. Kobayashi was the founding art director of the documentary journal, World Records. Currently, she is based in Brooklyn and Toronto and is the Director of Special Projects at UnionDocs, Center for Documentary Art where she collaborated on Living Los Sures, described as “one of the most comprehensive, incredible and in-depth interactive projects that we at the film society have ever seen” by New York Film Festival.

An egg, the white is gone but the yellow remains - Mohamed Thara

Inside an egg, the white and the yellow coexist… but when there is a fracture or rupture between them, each follows its own nature.

Mohamed Thara was born in 1972 in Fez, Morocco. He lives and works between Bordeaux in France, and Fez in Morocco. As a multidisciplinary artist, he holds a National Diploma (DNSEP) in Visual Arts a Master’s degree from the Ecole supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux in France. Mohamed Thara is a Doctor in Aesthetics and Art Theory (Ph.D.) from Bordeaux-Montaigne University in France. Painter, photographer, video artist and multi-talented performer, he tries to extend the boundaries of painting with a very personal pictorial work that questions the ambiguity of the representation. His performances question the sense of "living together" and give his images the capacity to make us analyze the world we live in. Through his videos oscillating between tension and balance, giving birth and generating death, Mohamed questions the imminence of death to let us comprehend about life’s fragility. His photographic work contains a promise of ritual writing, a thought rightly thrown into the world, a global and critical project about society through the moving image that raises many questions: history, memory, evil, identity, pain, chaos... Mohamed Thara has taken part in numerous exhibitions around the world, including the group show Jeune Peinture at the Grand Palais, Paris (1999), the exhibition Mutation at the CAPC, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux (2001), the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany (2017), the Museum of Modern Art in Rio Janeiro, Brazil (2017), at the Kochi Musiris Biennale in Kerala, India (2017), at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Italy (2018), at Les Rencontres de Bamako, the African Biennial of Photography, Mali (2019), at the 13th Havana Biennale in Cuba (2019), at the 14th Biennial of Contemporary African Art in Dakar, Senegal (2022). In 2020, he presents a retrospective of his video films at the International Film Festival at City College in New York and in 2023 at the Raleigh Studio in Hollywood, Los Angeles, USA. In the same year, he takes part in the Cigarreras exhibition at MACA, Museum of Contemporary Art in Alicante, Spain, and in the Glocalities exhibition at the Villa Kolla Contemporary Art Center organized by the University of Peloponnese in Patras, Greece. Her installation works have been exhibited in galleries and digital arts festivals worldwide and his work has been acquired by several private collectors in Morocco, France and abroad.

ESP - Laura Kraning

A brutalist monument to the Empire State as manifested by a malfunctioning inkjet printer. Chroma and luminance are made audible as architectural and printed lines converge and dissolve into pattern and noise. Photographed in the Capitol City, Albany, N.Y.
"Glitchy, warped photographs of Albany’s modernist Empire State Plaza are paired with percussive digital noise. The erratic imagery was 'co-created with a malfunctioning Canon inkjet printer,' a complete accident that Kraning interpreted as the machine “asserting its agency.” In a time where the use of generative AI is hotly debated, the unintentional intervention of a broken printer could be interpreted as degenerative image making, a ghost in the machine.” - Alex Truong

Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates liminal spaces at the intersection of nature and machine. In recent films, she deconstructs the material textures of landscape, engages with machinic interventions in image making, and meshes the handmade processes of film and textile. Laura’s work has screened widely at international film festivals and venues, such as MoMA's Doc Fortnight, the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Visions du Réel, National Gallery of Art, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, REDCAT Theater, and Los Angeles Filmforum, among others. She is a recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation John H. Johnson Film Award, the Leon Speakers Award and Jury Awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award at the Athens International Film and Video Festival, the 2018 Jury Award for Short Film at the Rencontres Internationales Sciences et Cinémas, a 2019 NYSCA/Wave Farm Media Arts Grant, a 2021 “Geological Anxiety Award” from the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and a 2023 New York State Council for the Arts Support for Artists Grant. Laura currently resides in New York, where she teaches in the Department of Media Study at University of Buffalo.

The Big Day of Coloane - Keng U Lao

In order to strengthen the happiness, sense of belonging and sustainable development of residents in Coloane, the “Coloane Construction and Development Association(Macau)” will hold an opening ceremony for the audience of Macau. Together with representatives of development areas in Coloane, we sincerely invite you to join our ceremony to witness a historical moment of Coloane.

Keng U Lao is a filmmaker and artist. He graduated from Arts University Bournemouth with a BA degree in Film Directing. Lao explores the performativity of theatrical magic as an expanded metaphor for how perceptions and imaginaries of reality are manipulated and generated. Situated within the cultural and historical milieu of Macau, a former Portuguese colony and present Chinese special administrative region, his works refract conceptions of identity, memory, and futurity in contemporary Macao.