Traces with Elikem
Traces performed and captured by scanner and monitor surfaces. Other surfaces include paper and film. Light reflects and passes through, layers slide past and sometimes meet, punctuated by sounds vibrating and percussive. With the participation of Samuel Elikem Kwame Nyamuame, Ph.D. Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and Dance Departments of Music, Theater (Dance) & Africana Studies
Skin in the Game
As a filmmaker I could never throw anything away. Frames cut out of a larger films were still amazing objects, like fragments of time made visible and tactile, and I kept most of them. At some point I began making collages on glass with these frames and mounted them in light boxes. Here I could see all the individual moments gathered in a very different way then when they were projected as one film. Here, their animated quality was removed, physical and immobile, but still a new whole out of many disparate parts. With Skin in the Game, I began a process of returning all those frames to time based sequences by scanning the collages, cutting them up and animating them digitally. Elements of the soundtrack are also made of fragments heard, written down, and then read by my daughter Maya when she was 9 years old. She is now almost 18. The end of the film is made from a longer piece of found footage, also kept for many years, and appreciated as a strip of film in hand and re- animated along with the optical printer used to view it. This collection is tactile and intimate because of the way it has been kept and played with over time and through process.
UpCycles
2016
A very long process starting with original Super 8 film.
Next came hand processing, printing onto 16mm and then 35mm.
Back down to 16mm, building imagery along the way including
cutting and taping the film. Finally, printed via JK
onto a DSLR and finished digitally with sound.
Explores the scale of the frame and the c
hanging ratio or the screen.
In Glass Houses
Synopsis: An interview is conducted exploring methods used to facilitate a real research project whose aim it is to capture and analyze human micro-expressions for use by a variety of industries (including lie detection and entertainment/animation).
But the particular research or the use of human subjects is really just a point of departure. This film takes a moment to touch on our use of technology and vice versa.
The images in the film are created in three ways; 1. by scanning the actor and two other support figures interacting with the scanner glass and each other, one frame at a time 2. By filming the actor revealed by the light of the scanner as he is being scanned. (Each light pass represents a frame of the reanimated scanner image) 3. through line drawings and smears which trace or mark points of contact between the actor and the scanner glass.
Close The Lid, Gently: A Home/Document/Scan
2013 00:05:00
Close the Lid Gently is a video made entirely from 2 home desktop scanners- one a photo scanner, the other a refurbished low end document scanner. Each has it's own texture and sees the domestic environment in it's own particular way, one scan at a time. This piece deals with the deliberate misuse/re-purposing of commercial image producing machines for a slow, individual, low end, approach to the motion picture making process
Performance For Perfection 1200
2014 00:13:26
The piece is experimental, a photographic animation with some drawing, and a portrait of a man and his views on life and art. The audio interview recordings that I did with Don Boros had to be painstakingly mated with phoneme mouth shapes that we scanned in order to create moments of sync sound. The result is an uncanny piece that is at times both "both quotidian and numinous" Gregg Biermann
arianagerstein