TRAVERSING THE WILD 2

In travelling through nature, what possibilities might open to our sight? Is nature just a box of aged, foil wrapped chocolates? Maybe it is constructed through a spatial temporal grid, or is it a metaphoric landscape mirroring the transience of life? Diving beneath surfaces, looking up at what is down, we forge new zones of encounter on the trails of unknown peoples. We dwell deep among petals and shimmering forests. Should we even talk about these things? See below for full programme details.

Robert Todd, Sam Spreckley and Sean Martin will be present for an audience Q&A.

Sunday 28th October, 1.30pm
Heart of Hawick, Tower Mill

within

Directed by: robert todd
European premiere

Running time: 00:8:30
Year: 2012
Country: United States

Synopsis:

A 16mm film screening.

Moving inward, and bringing that inward out into the world - a layered journey through a local landscape, all made in camera

Biography/Filmography:

A lyrical filmmaker as well as a sound and visual artist, Robert Todd continually produces short works that resist categorization. In the past twenty years he has produced a large body of short-to-medium format films that have been exhibited internationally at a wide variety of venues and festivals including the Media City Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Le Rencontres Internationale, Black Maria Film Festival, Nouveau Cinema in Montreal, Cinematheque Ontario, the Harvard Film Archive, Pacific Film Archive, the Paris Biennial, Slamdance Film Festival, and others. His films have won numerous festival prizes, grants, and artist’s awards. He teaches film production at Emerson College in Boston.

Artist's Website: http://www.roberttoddfilms.com

Venue: Main auditorium - Heart of Hawick, Tower Mill
Screening date: Sunday 28th October
Screening time: 1.30pm
Tickets: £4 (for the 'Traversing the Wild 2' programme)
Programme: Traversing the Wild 2

Wash by fire

Directed by: Alexander Isaenko
Scottish Premiere, United Kingdom premiere

Running time: 00:01:15
Year: 2011
Country: Ukraine

Synopsis:

This story of the latent terrorism, the accidental, not realized harm, to loss of reference points. Forest - a metaphor for the human inner space, destroyed the world. Psychic-connection man with nature.

Biography/Filmography:

Alexander Isaenko was born in 1976 in Izmail, Ukraine. Ukrainian artist who works with various media, including photography, video, text. Lives and works in Odessa, Ukraine.
The white air
Eclipse
Ring/Change point
Turns
Wash by fire
Calendar

Artist's Website: http://isaenko.mu.ru

untitled 3

Directed by: sam spreckley
Not a premiere

Running time: 00:04:28
Year: 2010
Country: Scotland

Synopsis:

A short moving image work exploring the natural world and how it is perceived by altering the sound track. The smallest detail has been accentuated and re imagined sonically to try and create a new sense of the natural world.

Biography/Filmography:

Filmography: Sam Spreckley is a British visual artist whom
specializes in the moving image and sound design. Spreckley has
exhibited both Nationally and Internationally most recently being
selected to represent the UK at the European Young Artists Biennial
held in Thessaloniki in Greece.

Artist's Website: http://www.vimeo.com/samspreckley

Tamalpais

Directed by: Chris Kennedy
United Kingdom premiere

Running time: 00:14:00
Year: 2009
Country: United States

Synopsis:

A 16mm film screening.

Shot on Mount Tamalpais, a spatial matrix replaces temporal causality with contiguous space. A view of landscape is taken apart, to be reconstituted through memory. The grid, a reference to the “veil of threads” invented by Albrecht Dürer as an aid for perspective drawing – to transfer vision to a sheet of paper – is used for an opposite effect – to disperse a landscape across time. The viewer is asked to remember the space as it passes and reconstitute it from memory, actively connecting the image across space and time.

Biography/Filmography:

Chris Kennedy is an independent filmmaker, film programmer and writer based out of Toronto. He programmed for the Images Festival from 2003-06, Pleasure Dome from 2000-06 and co-founded Early Monthly Segments in 2009. His short experimental films have screened at over one hundred film festivals worldwide and have been featured in solo shows at the Canadian Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Forum, Nam June Paik Art Center and the Pacific Film Archive. He has presented the work of others in Belgium, Egypt, Germany, the US and Canada. He holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was co-founder and host of a weekly film salon. His work as an artist and programmer operates in dialogue with the history of film as art, exploring the medium’s materiality in a contemporary context.

Artist's Website: http://www.theworldviewed.com

Spectral Analysis Loops - Petals

Directed by: Tarrl Lightowler
Scottish Premiere, United Kingdom premiere, European premiere, World premiere

Running time: 00:05:27
Year: 2012
Country: United States

Synopsis:

the Spectral Analysis Loops are a series of films by Tarrl Lightowler (image, editing, sound) and Matthew Swiezynski (editing and sound). There are three so far, they can be shown together or separate. The starting off point for this is a quote from Paul Celan "I attempt to render sections from the spectral analysis of things, to show them in many aspects and permutations simultaneously: their relations, sequences and oppositions.
Unfortunately I am unable to observe things from all sides...I consider my so-called abstraction and my actual ambiguity to be moments of realism."
The films are Loops made from animated photographs of Natur taken by Tarrl Lightowler and then generally remixed by Matthew Swiezynski with either new soundtracks, or extended versions of sound from their LP "Fragments of Night". Nature, landscape, poetry, alchemy and perception are very important to this series.

Biography/Filmography:

Tarrl Lightowler and Matthew Swiezynski have been making films/videos exclusively dealing with nature for 20 years now and about 15 years together. The collaboration comes from a desire to use abstraction (in image and sound) to deal with Natur directly, in a way not dissimilar from the great Romantics.

Artist's Website: http://invisiblebirds.org

Scene Box

Directed by: Sheri Wills
European premiere

Running time: 00:05:20
Year: 2011
Country: United States

Synopsis:

The visual equivalent of a dusty box of aged, foil-covered chocolates, Scene Box presents a barely overheard promise of mystery – seductive, but not necessarily pleasant. A veiled diorama of uncertainty.

Biography/Filmography:

Sheri Wills is an artist whose work is based in film, video performance & installation. Her work has been exhibited around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the London Film Festival and the San Francisco Cinematheque and is included in the Rizzoli book, Sonic Graphics: Seeing Sound, by Matt Woolman. She has had one-person screenings at the Director’s Lounge in Berlin, the Robert(a) Beck Memorial Cinema in NYC, and the Telluride International Film Exposition.

Her collaborations include video projects with music composed by Bright Sheng, Jan Jirásek, Lyn Goeringer and Ofer Ben-Amots and video performances with music ensembles, including the Providence String Quartet, Luna Nova, and Ensemble QAT in Montreal. She is the director of the film media program at the University of Rhode Island, and she lives in New York City.

Artist's Website: http://sheriwills.com/

Mere Mystery

Directed by: Lori Felker
European premiere

Running time: 00:12:44
Year: 2010
Country: United States

Synopsis:

On the trail of Tall Tales, on a tour of an American treasure, on the path of an area once inhabited by people we don’t know, people we’ve never met, on a land complete with gift shops, parking lots, and sky rides, at the foot of a tree that predates and outlasts all of this, we now insert ourselves into a fog of layers.

Biography/Filmography:

Lori chose Filmmaking as her official second language in 2003-ish, bumping German into third place. Eventual fluency is important to her, so she employs many forms/formats, practices frequently with others, and tries hard not to shy away from expressing her thoughts on human behavior, travel, inter-activity, frustration, failure and political irritants. Lori has many lives to live simultaneously. They currently live, make films/videos, teach, project, curate, and compulsively collaborate in Chicago.

Currently faculty and staff at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Festival Coordinator for the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Her work has screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival; NYFF: Views from the Avant-Garde; VideoEx, Zurich; Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal; Curtas Vila do Conde Film Festival, Portugal; Wexner Center for the Arts; MassArt Film Society; MuHKA_media, Belgium; Boston Underground Film Festival; Video Fest, Dallas; Space Gallery, Pittsburgh.

Artist's Website: http://www.FelkerCommaLori.com

Koan

Directed by: Sean Martin
Scottish Premiere

Running time: 00:00:45
Year: 1997
Country: United Kingdom

Synopsis:

A meditation on Wittgenstein's comment, "What we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence."

Biography/Filmography:

Mystery Play (2001)
The Notebooks of Cornelius Crow (2005)
Super-8 Cities (2007)
Lanterna Magicka: Bill Douglas & the Secret History of Cinema (2009)
Folie á Deux (2012)

Artist's Website: http://891filmhouse.blogspot.com

ICELAND

Directed by: Fabienne Gautier
Scottish Premiere

Running time: 00:04:19
Year: 2006
Country: France

Synopsis:

Iceland's landscape seemed to reflect a particular internalization of feeling.
This work speaks to this internal mind
ICELAND observes the continuum of time and space in which we occupy a passage from birth to death. I use this landscape to narrow the difference between beginning and the decay of a human cycle demonstrating the dynamic order in Nature.
A notion of infinity.
Landscape is like an evolving language. It is a powerful force which explains itself mirroring our existence, life. Landscape evokes our existence from beginning to end.
The landscape is in constant movement.
Landscape is like a journey which never ends, a passage from one stage or experience to another

Biography/Filmography:

Fabienne Gautier is an Artist and Filmmaker living in Paris.
Her work includes Film - Video - Photography and Installations. She is interested in developing the interplay of Audio and visual
Internationally, her work has been exhibited at The New Museum of Contemporary Art NYC, Locarno and Rotterdam as well as Galleries and Underground Festivals.
Her Short Film NIGHT WALK has been awarded Best Experimental Film at the Delta Festival 2006.

2010 RESISTANCE Color, Super 8 to DV, 27min
2007 PASSING Color Video, 09 min 40s
2006 ICELAND B&W, Super 8 to DV , 04 min 19s
2004 NIGHT WALK Color, Super 8 to DV, 07 min
2000 I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU B&W, 7min 51sec
Realised with Tom Jarmusch,
1997 LEFT ASIDE Color Video, 10min also a related installation

Artist's Website: http://gautier.fabienne.free.fr

...niland 2

Directed by: Leneweit & Rodriguez
Scottish Premiere

Running time: 00:09:56
Year: 2011
Country: Germany

Synopsis:

..niland 2 tells about the adaptation and transformation of man to a life beneath the water surface. The interface of air and water functions as the indicator of a climate influenced by humanity, raises questions regarding the ambivalence of the symbiosis human-environment and examines the stringent concurrence of climate change and cultural change.

concept of …niland 2

After reflecting upon nature, environment, art and the artificiality, we would like to present a quote as the origin of ...niland:

„If nature is defined by being the opposite of culture, does not a nature protected by culture become culture itself in this way?“ (Sieferle 1997)

Environment is a relational term and according to Darwin's „the Descent of Man“ (1871) has always referred to a species and as such been a requirement for humane perception. Shaped by this viewpoint Sir Arthur Tansley (1935) was the first to formulate the term ecosystem, developing an understanding of any habitat as a coherent, more or less closed and complete unit. In accordance, a system is the aggregation of multiple interdependent parts that function as a unit and relate to each other through reciprocal exchange or even show symbiotic dependencies. A human for example undergoes adaptation processes on micro- and macro-levels and is hence subject to the consequences of his own influence on nature. The inspiration for ...niland stems from the environmental changes triggered by humanity and the challenges that in turn force humans to adapt, consequently emphasizing the existing interdependency. Based on these considerations the work focuses on the climatic changes of the seas and constructs futuristic visions of the human self in adaption and transformation to artificially exaggerated aquatic environments. Another focus within the conceptualization of ...niland is the interface of air and water, positioned at eye-height. This borderline indicating the water level that transects the human or lets him be perceived as situated in between two elements seeks to, besides disputing the questionable symbiosis human-environment, illuminate its immanent ambivalence and guide the view towards the stringent concurrence of a cultural change connected to it.

Biography/Filmography:

Videography/ videoinstallations

• …niland 2
One channel video art, digital video, stereo, colour, 9’56“. Germany/ Spain, 2011

• …niland 2:2 (work in process)
Two channel installation, digital video, colour, stereo, 2 DVD’s x 7’52“ loop, 2011

• …niland 1:4
Four channel installation, digital video, colour, stereo, 4 DVD’s, 10’04“ loop, 2010

• …niland al cubo
One channel video projection on acrylic glass tank and water.
Digital video, colour, stereo, DVD (loop), 2010

• …niland 1
One channel video art, digital video, stereo, colour, 13’11“. Spain, 2009

• 10Msol
MiniDV, stereo, colour, 4’25“. Spain, 2009

Artist's Website: http://www.gruppefisch.com