The Kentucky Shape Fair

 

The Kentucky Shape Fair was created with the Sloppy Films Animation Station on September 10, 2022 at the Louisville Maker Faire. It had been 2 and a half years since its last outing in public, when it created collage animation on Family Day at the Walker Art Center in March 2020, just before the COVID closedown started.

This was a tabletop set-up, like many of the most recent versions of the public animation appearances. A thin light green plastic tablecloth was placed on the table with my clip stand and the webcam hooked up to Dragonframe software. I had lots of colorful paper which could be cut into simple shapes to make a state fair out of shapes.

I made the titles and the running horse and Ferris wheel before the first people started coming up and wanting to make things. I had a few other things in mind to make during slow times but didn't need those because it was pretty non-stop for the rest of the day. The public part was from 10 to 6 pm but I started animating a little before 9:30 and wrapped it up a little after five.

The Animation Station table was next to the table of the U of L rocket club, so rockets made several appearances in the film. The Demolition Derby was an idea I had for a big finish. I had one dedicated volunteer who stayed with me the whole time to make it happen.

And with that, the Animation Station returned from a long absence, and in a new city!

The Birth of the Animation Station

 It was nearly ten years ago that the Animation Station made its debut at the Lowry Avenue Open Streets/Harvestfest even on September 29, 2012.

Margo Ashmore, a friend of mine, told me that the folks organizing the neighborhood Harvestfest part of the event were looking for artists to do different kinds of art on the street. I had been playing with a new stop motion application on my laptop, and thought that maybe I could do stop motion animation with people, pixilation, like Norman McLaren had done in "Neighbors" way back in the 1950's. 

It all came together pretty quickly. I could bring my laptop computer with the stop motion software and I could mount a webcam on a tripod. I bought a video projector, so I could project the laptop screen on one of the portable movie screens I had. I was going to get power from the hardware store on the corner of Lowry and Penn, and they were also going have a table and a chair that I could use. The chair ended up being used as an animation prop as much as anything else. I didn't spend too much time sitting down.

I loaded up all equipment on my bicycle trailer and went up there. On the way to the spot where I would set up the animation station, I did some filming and shot some interviews. I would also edit together a video of the event, which is above.

The animation was just about anything that could happen. I didn't really have a spot on the street, it was really on the sidewalk because I didn't have an extension cord long enough to get any farther than that. I had some chalk, and there was drawing on the sidewalk, and lots of improv pixilation with mostly kids. I didn't exactly know how or when, but I knew I wanted to do something like this again.

Behind the Scenes - 20 Years of Art-A-Whirl

 In May of 2015, I set up the Animation Station in the Northrup King Building for the 20th Anniversary of Art-A-Whirl in Northeast Minneapolis. Building Manager Debra Woodward let me use a partially finished space on the second floor of the building for the three days of the art crawl. I used tape to attach a webcam to the ceiling and then ran a USB cable from there to my laptop on a table below. I taped out an area on the floor. The webcam was aimed straight down so that area on the floor was the table top for a gigantic animation stand.

The space had served as a gallery in the past so it already had some bright lights on the ceiling, which I took advantage of to light the floor. At the top of a ladder I attached my Go Pro Camera to record a time lapse of the whole process, which you can see at the end of the full video here:

Before the big day setting up, I made a list of twenty one word themes and put a theme on each of the 20 years. I divided up the hours of the three days to focus on roughly one year each hour.

On Friday afternoon I set everything up and started animating on my own. Soon people were passing by, and some of them stopped and spent some time. I would try to get a group to stay for each hour theme. They would spend part of the the hour making things. I had a table set up with lots of bright colored paper, tape, scissors and pens that people could use to make things. I told them to make things that were big. I had already made some things, some of the Northeast Minneapolis buildings that Art-A-Whirl revolved around, some giant drops for the occasional storms that would go by during Art-A-Whirl weekend in May, and some lightning bolts. The storms were also a great way to clear the frame to get to a new topic.

There was a lot of leaning down and getting up, moving things a little and then pressing the button on the Dragonframe keypad to take a frame. Several times people stayed on the floor so they could be part of the animation. I had some people who stuck around for a while and even took over some of my work in having to explain what was going on to every group that came by.

Sunday was pretty quiet at first. That gave me time to use some masking tape to spell out the word creativity for day 17. Other times there were lots of people. At the end of Friday and Saturdays session I showed some of the videos I filmed the first few years of Art-A-Whirl.

One wall was the projection wall. The screen of my laptop was projected onto that wall and I tried as often as possible to run what existed of the project so far up on the wall so people could see how the thing was working and growing.

A lot of very cool people stopped by and helped me make the movie over those three years. I used my camcorder to try to record a little from each person who participated. I asked them to either share a memory or thought about Art-A-Whirl, to create a sound effect for their section, or at least give me their first name, so I could put them in the end credits. Using the camcorder to record the audio helped me to visually match the person with the section that they contributed to.

Editing the video part was easy - it was just putting down the animation that had been done over the three days without making any corrections to it. The audio mixing took quite a bit more time!

Here's a little Behind the Scenes video, with camera by Beth Peloff.

CAVE 4

Often I'll go to a screening of short films after the sun has set and the sheer number and variety of them, and the fact that after sunset I always seem to be fighting sleep, will completely defy my memory. What did I see and hear, and how do I made sense of it now as that experience is fading into the distance? I like to take notes, but the notes I take in the dark are almost always unreadable when the lights have turned on. But those notes sometimes do help me pull out some moments and impressions, some bits of the experience, that I can attempt to put into readable words after the fact, when the sun is rising.

The fourth CAVE Festival of Cinematic, Audio and Visual Experimentation began at Bryant Lake Bowl on the last day of January 2020. The first program featured Nazli Dinçel of Milwaukee, both films that she made and films she selected that others had made. The program started with her film, "Untitled," which was about film exhibition, a view from the booth with headset jocks running the show insulting the program being presented and everyone around them. It's a trip into the mind of someone hostile to experimental films who is actually the one showing those movies to an audience. 

She partly throws us off by putting her subtitles on the top of the frame rather than the bottom.

The other films of hers also used subtitles, but never leaving them in a sub-postion. Often they are directly on the center, and made by scratching the emulsion off the film or even typing on the film with a typewriter. Sometimes the words on screen don't match the words we hear, but by the time we even realize that, the words and sounds of them are gone and we're left questioning both our eyes and ears. Her last film, "Instructions on How to Make a Film," shows us how to make a movie by growing a garden.

Her camera is often pointed straight down at the ground, or into a mirror that may or may not pull away to show what actually is in front of us. Her program was called "Do Not Look At The Picture," which is the hardest thing to do in a dark room where they only thing you can see is the bright image on the screen. But it was exactly what her movies were saying to us, as well as the others she chose to show.

Joyce Wieland's "Solidarity" showed us a Canadian cookie company strike through the shoes of the strikers. Greta Snyder's "Futility" presented the story of an abortion with happy archive images of people working. And George Landow's "New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops," probably cannot even be explained, but has some of the greatest baffled eyebrow acting to ever grace the screen.

The second program Friday night was all local shorts and there were so many of them, my notes are such indecipherable scratch, I lost the little piece of paper that listed the program, and it was late for me - because of all that I am left to scramble for what was even there, which was backwards muscles on a beach, Goldilocks danced by a forest, a Lynchian dream of orange wigs, Richard Nixon lying opera, the delicious embarrassment of seeing one of my own movies on that screen, a fireworks of young faces, a life told by a circle, a wrestling match between water and forest, and blue bodies splashing black ink out of yellow water while fashion meets the wizard of oz meets prayers of snow angels, and so much more.

On Saturday, I was one of the people who took a cyanotype filmmaking workshop with Margaret Rorison, whose work would be featured in the Saturday night program. Sam Hoolihan and John Marks were also there to guide us. We dipped short strips of film into a chemical that left an iron-based emulsion on the film. We then placed flat or flatish objects on the film such as lace, dryer lint, other pieces of film, plants, clay, pressed it under glass, and then exposed the strips of film to UV light for more than a half hour. The slow exposure time meant that we could place our objects on the film under low light without exposing it.

After the UV exposure, we developed the image in water and then spliced all our short strips together to project a work of white ghosts on blue.

Rorison's program that evening did not feature any cyanotypes, but like the small objects pressed on the film and then blow up to the screen, her films got close, close to the worn brick, manholes, shiny concrete and falling walls of Baltimore, close to her grandmother's hands and face, close to the walls and shadows of Los Angeles. Even her shots of vineyard rows, jets in the sky, and windmills felt intimate.

She also showed us a film made by the radiation released by the Fukishima Nuclear disaster and a family tree made with a real tree, films by Tomonari Nishikawa and Brue Baillie.

She said she likes to walk with her camera and observe. The next day, at the Walker Art Center, she showed us her mother's hands in a piece that she optically printed. She said it was all about her love of the process.

Love of the work and the struggle to make it was the subject of the Sunday panel, which included Rorison, Dinçel, local filmmaker Richard Wiebe, and University of Iowa students Trevon Coleman and Michael Wawzenek, all of whom showed a film, a part of a film, or a work in progress and then talked about they struggle to make work while trying to work to make a living. It was an intimate conversation in the rows of the Walker's Mediatheque while a line of chairs, a microphone and table sat empty in the front as if they were the real audience.

And then, after some food and drinks at the attached cafe, everyone went their ways to keep on doing and exploring in all their faraway places however they might manage to do it.

Powderhorn Park Art Fair 1992

In 1991, a group of Powderhorn Park Neighborhood artists and volunteers organized the first ever Powderhorn Park Art Fair in the big bowl of Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis. The event was a success and they decided to repeat it for a second year. Now, almost 30 years later, it continues.

The first year of the fair, I filmed and edited a 30 minute documentary video about the fair which played on public access TV in Minneapolis. So I decided to film at the second fair.

I shot two hours of video of that fair and maybe I wasn't able to spend as much time at the fair, or maybe I was too busy with other things, but that two hours of video stayed on a tape and I never looked at it or edited it after I shot it. That tape remained unviewed and unedited until last spring, when I digitized it so I could edit it on the computer. I edited the video down to a little over 20 minutes and here is what I made of it.

It was filmed on Hi-8 tape with my Sony TR81. The video was all on one two hour tape, which was close to film. If I were going to edit it in 1992, I would have had to transfer it to SVHS and edit it on an SVHS edit system at MTN, the public access center where I was volunteering, and where by 1993 I would join the staff.

Today I was able to edit it with Adobe Premiere on my computer in my home office. As I write this, John Karrigan, the volunteer delivering flowers at 1:55, has died over the past weekend. His funeral is this coming Saturday. I'm sure a number of people in this video aren't around any more.

CAVE 3 Day 3

CAVE 3's third and final day was yesterday. Kevin Obsatz, our second set of MC eyes, started off the 3 pm program of experimental documentaries saying that the festival itself was experimental, and that some of the work we would see was newly finished, or still in draft form, or might never be finished.

Jonathan Rattner of Nashville put together the program of short experimental documentaries that, like traditional documentaries, walked us to places we might never visit without film, but did so without the confident strut of traditional documentary. Instead, the makers made films that weren't sure if they should be looking or listening or not, and whether and what they should be presenting to the likes of us, people who might not even have any business walking in those other peoples' shoes.

The show began with Robin Starbucks' "The Stag's Mirror," and with Starbuck present as well to introduce the film, which combined super 8 film she shot in Chiapas with the text of an allegory native to the people she was filming. She regularly disturbed her sober observational images with animation that recalled the weave pattern of improperly interlaced video and fragments of images we would see later in the film, and sometimes blotting out the text of the native story by re-writing it upon itself.

Other films in the program used alienating strategies like frames and interruption to complicate their stories of home and looking. Lisa Danker's "Foreclosed Home Movie" used a linoleum print of a welcoming front door to tell a story of real estate boom and bust in Miami. Sometimes we saw just parts of the print skipping by, stamped directly on 16mm film. At the end we saw repeated printings with less and less ink to say goodbye to the house after foreclosure.

Ratter's own "Southern Refuge," which he said he was re-cutting that very morning, looks inside or around the corner of or doesn't quite look into the work of a Nashville resettlement agency for recent immigrants, refugees working to start a new life in Nashville USA. As they tell Rattner and us about the horrible experiences that led them to the US to try a new life, Rattner withholds focus, just barely showing us one person's broken hand, and just barely shows us others through fogged 16mm end rolls. But he also surrenders his camera to the children at the agency, as they mob him and us in extreme close-up, pressing themselves tight to pose and smile and dance their identity with it.

CAVE 3 ended with a 7pm show of work by Sky Hopinka, currently of Cambridge, MA. Hopinka's films took us into and out of the body of this continent, beginning and ending with the two parts of his "Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer," which approaches the land from the sea and then takes us back to the sea at the end. This first and last film takes us on a journey through Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida, a five hundred year old fort built by the Spanish invaders that looks like an instrument of torture when seen from above. Hopinka shares with us the stories and faint pencil drawings of the fort's indigenous prisoners before releasing us back to the horizon line of ocean.

Hopinka's films are all about the horizon. The horizon line, often horizontal but also sometimes vertical, leads us through the texts and places he takes us to. At times he doubles the horizon, with land above and below and sky between, a powerful sandwich of creation that also might feel like the end of time.

In "Jaaji Aprox," Hopinka tries to find and remember and learn and understand a father who might be his father or one of the fathers, but someone distant but also full of light and history. After the film played, Hopinka read in the dark theater an alienated academic essay he wrote to explain the film and then footnoted that with deeply personal recollections of the people and places that those images and sounds came from. Illuminated only by the penlight he used to read, the only real light besides the Exit signs, he held us spellbound as he spoke the supreme DVD commentary track.

Leaving us drowning in the ocean off the coast of Florida, Hopinka waved goodbye and CAVE 3 was completed.

CAVE 3 Day 2

Day two of the third year of CAVE (the Festival of Cinematic and Audio Visual Experimentation) featured the work of two visiting artists at Bryant Lake Bowl brought to us by Cellular Cinema.

The first show was composed of short videos by Anaïs Duplan of Iowa City, Iowa. Duplan introduced himself as someone who came to video through poetry, and the director's credit used in most of Duplan's films was, "A Poem by..." Duplan's spoken poetry was never narrated, but presented as text on-screen. Instead of carefully placing text at the bottom of the screen so as not to challenge the image as is traditional, Duplan boldly smacked text dead center, blocking the image with a black box, challenging the pictures with words.

The combination of text and image in Duplan's work sometimes teetered on the brink of narrative, but never went over to that side completely. Duplan's first film, "Hickory Hill," at times threatened to turn into a spooky forest movie, but instead followed its subjects through the woods with no clear mission. At times Duplan's camera followed its subjects so closely that it almost got tangled in their clothing. "Cocaine Barbara" parallel cut between a murky grocery store and a light filled bedroom and "The Lovers are the Audience Who Watch" put its text in all corners of the screen to challenge found images that made me think about family trauma, truth, and the curse of having to look at that screen right in front of you.

In the second program, Carl Elsaesser of New York City, Maine and elsewhere, set up his computer on the stage and invited us into a tour of his work and concerns. He was a genial and open host, holding a candle in one hand and walking through the theater, standing in the projector light to declare his connection with the images, hunting through his hard drive to find the right file to play to us. I had seen some of Elsaesser's work before at Cellular Cinema and have to admit that I left feeling a little baffled; his unpretentious and playful exposition at CAVE 3 provided deep insight for me into his concerns and methods.

Central to Elsaesser is the notion of Ambience, all the things that go on in the background that we don't ever really notice. He strives to make films about Ambience, and also which are ambient themselves, which means that to him the idea that his film might play in the background and only occasionally be noticed by its audience is fine with him. His ambient subjects included mapping the portions of Maine zoned for strip malls, and exploring methods of file management used by artists.

His "Exercises in Resistance" are one hour gestures meant to be a middle finger to the Current Occupant. In one, he sits beneath a public restroom hot air hand dryer, reaching up to turn it back on every time it goes off. In another, a camera outside his house watches him dance deliriously to unheard music while framed by doorways and windows and the sound of crickets.

In "Exercises in Looking," he frames both himself and what he is looking at side by side, also for an hour. He showed a portion of one where he looks at his lover, covered completely by a blanket and motionless, in bed. He frames the shots to defy standard eye-line match, so Elsaesser appears to be looking at something off-screen, something that isn't the body in bed. The connection and disconnection in those side by side images of looking and object play havoc with our expectations and create both peace and unease. Elsaesser's emphasis on Ambience dares us to look away, or look at the thing that we are trained not to look at, and that forces us to look a little more inside than we might want.

And with that, Elsaesser turned off his shadows and put away his computer to clear the stage for the third and final day of CAVE 3.

CAVE 3 Day 1

CAVE, the Festival of Cinematic and Audio Visual Experimentation, began the first of three nights of its third year with films curated by Molly Garrett and Caitlin Horsmon of Plug Projects in Kansas City, Missouri at 7 pm and films from local filmmakers at 9:30.

The opening program, named, "Not Found," featured work from a number of artists appropriating, recreating and commenting on images and sounds discovered and rediscovered in various archives.

Sanaz Sohrabi's "Auxillary Mirrors" starts with representations and recollections of a soccer head bump before it enters a world of mirrors utilized by photographers in the past as well as Sohrabi to twist and turn and deepen the mystery of the moment a single image is taken. Afrikaus Okokon's "Nsibid Loops" erupts into a grid of repeating hand drawn metamorphic symbols that frame found images. In "Nike AFI (from white to red)" Jose Guadalupe Garza recreates the one shot tomato juice and hunting knife massacre of a pure white tennis shoe that Garza found on YouTube and then never found again. Garza's own foot and hand act out visually the strange actions without the thoughts in the head that the original video's creator had.

With "Answer Print," Monica Saviron of Madrid Spain cuts found faded 16mm film in 26 frame lengths, which insures that the sound that you are hearing at any moment went with the image you just saw, creating a thump and click track of splices and sprocket holes and sounds that sometimes match the action and sometimes make you want to recreate in your own head what you just saw a second ago.

The other films in the showcase also used found sounds and images to collage culture, YouTube performance, mirrors and mainstream media to consider identity and who controls representation.

All the films in the program seemed to be responding to the essay in the glossy CAVE program,  "Incomplete Notes on the Character of the New Cinema," by Travis Wilkerson, in which he writes, "The new cinema recognizes that any apprehension of the present is predicated upon an understanding of the past. Likewise, a new future can only be imagined after an understanding of the present is attained."

The present was well-represented in the 9:30 Local Program, where the 16mm projector and video projector played a kind of Dueling Banjos back and forth. 16mm played the first notes, Eddie Weinstine's nightime city symphony "At Night Parts I-III," where pearls of city light on black multiplied with superimposition as vertical movement was paired with horizontal stillness only to be flipped and angled by the end.

Video plunked the next strings with Maret Polzine's "Object Permanence," in which abstracted and very real human eyes interact with a nature brain of fossil and technology before returning to roots in wavy water. And also on video, Peixuan's Ouyang's "They'll be gone, just in time" also spoke about objects and brain, examining a well-used library book by Plato and its journey from many hands and brains to bedding for turkeys.

Video took a break and film reignited for Sarah Hubner-Burns' "River Loop 1," a single shot of a staircase to the sky walked up and down by ghosts looking for themselves, or for a reason to go up and down. Then film switched off and video came back for Kelley Meister's "Now I Am Become Death," a hand-drawn animated silent essay on the eternal dangers of nuclear waste that shudders at the horror with every transforming ink line.

Film shot back with Sam Hoolihan's "Class Portraits 2016-2018," silent screen tests with commentary first scratched and painted upon the film and then with double exposed nature that eventually obscures the faces and takes over everything.

All the lights went out for John Marks' Room Tone, an evocative audio-only piece that made me remember all the times I searched everywhere I could think of to find something that I couldn't find.

The film projector had the last word with Trevor Adams' "We Hang Christmas Lights," with a soundtrack by Marks. Adams says goodbye to 2018 with a corn maze (maize?) of a dream brain home movie haunted by multiple exposures, scratching and painting on film, puns and revelations in words and speed ups. A dental operation on a freeway and a Fair with fifty Ferris wheels are some of the Christmas lights that I am still seeing as if this moment were still last year.

Also featured as the video projector lamp warm up acts were my three short pieces titled, "Hats of the New American Cinema."

With hand-scratched end titles and the film on the reel rewinding, the first night of CAVE 3 came to an end.

35W Expansion Public Hearing

This is an edit I created this year from video that I shot in May of 1992 but had never edited until now.
The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) had proposed in early 1992 to do a massive rebuild of interstate 35W through south Minneapolis. Talk about rebuilding the freeway started not long after the highway was finished in the first place, in the 1960's.
In May of 1992, MnDOT presented several options, asking for feedback on them. Their plan was to construct one of those options, which were all pretty similar. They all called for widening the freeway by taking houses in both the Windom and Phillips neighborhoods. The options varied from taking hundreds of houses to taking around a hundred. All the options also called for a stacked freeway where 35W and 94 come together.
A public hearing was scheduled on those options. It was to take place at the Richfield High School, a place not very accessible to transit, though I took the bus there to get to the shoot, which meant that I walked several blocks to get to and from the High School.
The day before the hearing, groups opposed to the plan held a rally at Franklin Steel Park in the Elliot Park Neighborhood. The park sits right beside the freeway. I went there because I was filming all kinds of things happening in the Phillips Neighborhood, where I lived, and wanted to film this too. I filmed the speakers and also did some interviews.
I also went to the public hearing, but did not stay for the entire thing. It went until 2:30 the next morning. Rather than get a seat in the auditorium, I walked around to get interviews, film the media, and step in now and then in the gymnasium of the high school, where the hearing was being close circuit televised for an overflow audience.
I filmed an interview with a MnDOT Project Manager. I'm not sure what he thought of me with my small Hi8 camcorder, but he did do the interview for me.
At the time I thought I might do a documentary that looked at transportation in Minneapolis, and especially the disinvestment in public transit since the 1950's. Where the freeway now ran there used to run a very extensive streetcar system. That was long gone and people opposed to the freeway expansion were asking for light rail in the corridor instead of more freeway lanes. Around that time I did some filming of historic photos of streetcars to make this longer documentary project, but I never did. I filmed and edited other things and the tapes from these two shoots just sat in a box.
Now in 2018 35W is being reconstructed through the Phillips Neighborhood. Some houses were taken for this final plan, but nothing like the number of houses that were proposed to be demolished in 1992.
Light Rail Transit is not being built in that corridor, but a Bus Rapid Transit line is. That BRT line was give the green light for the federal share of its funding on the day that I finished this edit of this public hearing that happened 26 years ago.

A Drawing a Day March 2018

Here is a drawing a day for March 2018.

A Drawing A Day February 2018

The Name Has to Go: Super Bowl 26

I had bought my first Hi8 video camera just a couple weeks before this. It was small, a Sony TR30, I believe. I could carry it in my backpack, I could carry it in a pocket.

This was 1992. I was a student at the University of Minnesota and worked a night job that allowed me to sleep. So I had some extra times during the day. I filmed as much as I could that year, I filmed more than I could edit.

I lived in the Phillips Neighborhood of Minneapolis. I lived near Little Earth of United Tribes, which was the center of the American Indian community in the city. When the Super Bowl was coming to town, and one of the teams playing was the Washington, D.C. team, the American Indian Movement organized a conference and a protest to ask Washington to change the mascot of their football team, a racist derogative term.

I don't really remember filming this video, and am not sure why I never edited it (until now). At the time I usually liked to film interviews, and for this I just filmed the speeches and the march. I began filming at East Phillips Park, where Clyde Bellecourt, Paul Wellstone, and others spoke. I then followed the march to the Metrodome, where we circled the stadium and then listened to speeches from Vernon Bellecourt and others.

The Super Bowl is once again taking place in Minneapolis this weekend, and it is truly amazing to compare the level of security between the event in 1992 and 2018. In 1992, AIM has set up a teepee on the plaza right in front of the stadium entrance. We marched just a few feet from the open doors of the Metrodome. There were a few police officers around, but their presence was pretty minimal.

This year, a wall of chain link fence on concrete blocks surrounds the new U.S. Bank Stadium for a block. Downtown is peppered with National Guard humvees. It seems like there are hundreds of private security guards in downtown at any time. The comparison is simply unfathomable.

As I was finally editing this video, twenty-six years after I shot it, I had to do some searches to find the spellings of some of the names. It was sobering to see all the people in this video who have since passed on, from Vernon Bellecourt and Paul Wellstone to Brian Roberts, at the time a law student, Dixie Latu Riley, Matthew Little, and E. Randal T. Osburn. Look for a shot of Congressman Keith Ellison standing near me in the crowd around 4:45.

After I did this edited I found a few more minutes of Super Bowl video on another tape. That video had some issues, but I will try to edit a little out of that one too.

A Drawing a Day January 2018

Here is one drawing a day (or something like that) for January 2018.

CAVE 2 Day 2

The second day of the second annual CAVE (Festival of Cinematic Audio and Video Experimentation) included lots of moments when the theater of the Bryant Lake Bowl was just full of people talking to each other. Festival director Kevin Obsatz explained that he programmed shorter blocks of films to open up those opportunities for discussion.

Saturday afternoon's screening of Arab-American experimental film was co-presented by the Minnesota Museum of American Art and MIZNA, which puts on the Arab Film Festival. Co-curators Michelle Baroody and Andrea Shaker explained that they selected work for the screening that went beyond the stereotypes and dominant narratives.

The program began with Shaker's On Silence, which included a live performance element. Shaker stood on stage to the right of the screen to read a poetic narration while looking out a video window onto an endless expanse of water, sometimes the view blurred by waving bare branches and curtains, sometimes the view was so clear you could see that there was no distant horizon. She spoke about the luxury of stillness, the luxury of forgetting, and created a meditation both personal and universal on displacement that connected herself and us to the stories of refugees of Syria.

Shaker's use of news footage, both frozen still and rendered without sound, was echoed in other films in the program, many of which appropriated media images and sounds to pin and enlighten them. Ariana Hamidi's The Covenant Adam intercut home movie-like images of young people with TV images of a cartoon incredible Hulk to show how superhero images condition young people to problem-solve with violence. Usama Alshaibi's The Muslim Meme countered rabid anti-Muslim AM hate radio audio quotes with quiet subtitles that detail that pain that comes from being the human-being target of such vicious propaganda.

Following an afternoon break, CAVE resumed with two evening screenings featuring visiting artists. First up was Christopher Harris of Florida, who was also on hand to conduct an in-camera editing  workshop as part of the festival. His films featured lush 16mm images pristinely transferred to video. His 16mm frames were bursting with edge fogging, the sun flying through the edges of his films to re-assert itself, particularly in a dual screen rendering of a roadside passion play where the sun coming through the film edges was like a divine presence trying to strangle the Hollywood phoniness of evangelical Christian crucifixion re-enactors. The sun itself, and the transience of our whole universe, was at the heart of his film Sunshine State (Extended Forecast) which paired primary color images of beach ball planets floating in a swimming pool and suns drawn of sidewalk chalk with an audio track of scientific predictions of the sputtering out of our sun, and the end of the potential for life on earth.

The reflection or absorption of light on faces was referenced in Reckless Eyeballing, which set up a conversation between the lynch-victim Gus from D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation with Pam Grier, star of Blacksploitation films in the 70's. Both The Birth of a Nation and Grier could have flashed on the screen of The Criterion Theater in St. Louis, whose deterioration Harris documents in detail in still/here, an excerpt of which closed the screening. The long-closed building's brick walls were burst open to let in the sun to the Criterion's dusty tumbled seats, both suggesting the liveliness and community that once happened here with the devastation and emptiness that is its dereliction.

The final screening featured work of Jesse McLean of Milwaukee, who introduced her films by saying that she is a collagist, both in that she appropriates images and sounds, but also in that she collages ideas. Her films look at how media gets to the middle of our brain, from the mediated spaces of big box stores and surface parking lots, which may be our actual homes, to the sparkling international postcards we get in our email boxes via spam.

Her film See A Dog, Hear A Dog, was all about intelligence, and its YouTube images of a dog playing the piano and singing, and its dog facial expressions acted out by humans, really pointed out that it isn't really intelligence and emotion that distinguish humans from other animals, it might just be that our difference is that we have the media, and that doesn't really make us better.

Although we humans had media, we also had each other at CAVE. And after the very human Q and A with Jesse McLean ended, the unmediated humans in the Bryant Lake Bowl Theater formed a collective voice to sing Happy Birthday to Kevin Obsatz as a chocolate cake topped with slightly skewed burning candles was carried to him. But we also could also have been singing a happy birthday for CAVE, which lives and will live another year. Obsatz announced that there will be a CAVE 3 in 2019.

CAVE 2 Day 1

CAVE (the Festival of Cinematic Audio Visual Experimentation) is now officially annual, and once again taking us to a place of light and sound on some of the coldest winter days. You enter CAVE 2 at the Bryant Lake Bowl past all the crashing of bowling balls on pins around the corner of the kitchen and that strange box office inserted in a cubby that could have once held a phone booth and grab the luscious printed program in black and blue with a brown paper insert of Andy Sturdevant words about other equally cold nights when people gathered to watch movies together in town and found warmth and inspiration, wonder and community.

The 7 pm Friday show featured local work, mostly videos that featured images and sounds of nature, of water and waves and physically improbable human shadows in Julie Kouneski's Shapeshifter, of the interplay of water and rock with fingers and insects as landscape in Jonathan Kaiser's Canyons, with water and ice holding and releasing in Jason Cole's Same Bare Place and Kate Casanova's Slow Black Glow. Trevor Adams' Rumors of Train Barn broke the nature line with his images of night and people-rich places filled with ghosts etched and painted over and behind the lights and shadows of somewhere somewhat familiar but also maybe not. There were also a couple short videos by me.

For the 9 pm slot, both the cinema and the audience expanded, with people sitting on the walls and standing by the door and John Marks starting things out with his great wall of 16mm projectors to show Spirit Leveling, a four movement sonata for trees, water, water lilies, sun and sound. The sound was created on the spot with his analogue synthesizer, which he operated while turning projectors on and off. At one point the side by side sun was two eyes reflected in water looking back at us. The piece ended with one joyous sun reflection circling and sketching delirious commas on gently lapping water.

HIJACK (Kirsten Van Loon and Arwen Wilder) performed Volleyball, Basketball, Hanky, a dance that doubled down on Janis Ian's "At Seventeen," channeling teenage awkwardness into movement of body with repeated shadows on the screen and a dance-partner TV set with a clip of the volleyball/basketball they didn't get called to play. Kleenix turned into the pom poms of beauty queens but also reminded me of the snow and cold outside, and the cold inside that sometimes comes from seeing yourself through the eyes of others rather than just thinking about how great you really are.

The last piece, Kinski Wanted Herzog to Direct but He Turned It Down by Guillaume Vallee and Hazy Montague Mystique of Montreal, combined a film clip of Klaus Kinski that was transferred to videotape, distressed, and then transferred back to film and expanded and repeated with live video feedback to give us a multiplying brightly hued approximation of Kinski's grinning theatrical madness, or impatience and recalcitrance in general. Film scratches and dust conspired with the teeth of TV static to take us further and further down into a place of extreme color and lunar brain echoes. Mystique's synthesized sounds reprocessed voices and other kinds of unidentifiable blips and beeps and hums that kept on rising and up falling to match the feedback of the images. It was both cave painting primal and futuristic techno, eye opening and closed-eye rattling.

And then it was time to get out of there quickly to catch our bus. There are still two more days of CAVE! CAVE is presented by Cellular Cinema, which is a monthly series of screenings at the Bryant Lake Bowl.

A Drawing A Day December 2017

Here is one drawing I made every day of December 2017. All were done pretty quickly, some by pencil, some by pen and some by brush. Some were images from my imagination, some were observational on location.

Silence with Sound: Sam Hoolihan

"Silence with Sound" was the name of the program of films by Sam Hoolihan at the Trylon Theater last night, part of the quarterly Northern Exposure series. The program featured 45 minutes of films of which the only soundtrack was the sewing machine hum of the super 8 and 16mm projector, as well as any audience sound in the packed theater. The last part of the program was a multi-projector piece with live music performed by Crystal Myslajek and John Marks.

Hoolihan's show began on super 8, with what he called, "diary films." They mostly presented sunsets filmed one frame at a time, so that the trees shiver as the sky darkens, and clouds try to cross the sky before they bleed to darkness. Sometimes he would mount the camera vertically, so that the clouds would spill like marbles dropped down a slope or rise up like escaped balloons.

In a longer super 8 piece, filmed at an art residency, he cuts between single framing the passage of the sun and shadow over paintings of landscapes with showing the changes of light over actual landscapes. All these super 8 films were in blazing sunset color, which contrasted radically with his next film, made on 16mm in Black and White.

His "City of Lakes" is  a quiet meditation on the city of Minneapolis and its movement and stillness. Often filmed through a telephoto lens that flattens space, the images have the character of classic reportage still photography, but with slightly slowed-down movement that gives it all the feel of a waking dream. Most of the filming happened in 2015, but the images almost seem to want to overlap all of the city's years one on top of the other, so you can see the trails and trees that came before the streets and buildings, and even into the space age city that expands the city into the sky and stars. You can almost feel yourself as the disembodied observer standing a mile or two away from some scene but able to witness it with complete clarity, a time traveler in a world of life and presence that might also have happened before or yet, or never actually did or will happen.

The title of the film refers to the lakes of Minneapolis, but the film is really about the city's river, and the horizontal and vertical river movement that influences all motion there, plant, vehicle and human. When the people do make their first appearances in the film, after some time, they come in a river, one face after another, one bit of movement or action or expression after another, like waves and rolls on water. The city is full of people, and then it is empty again, or just single figures, bent wearily over a bench or framing themselves beneath a bridge while the river plays on.

The film ends with both a July 4th fireworks show and a snowstorm, the farthest extremities of the Minneapolis atmosphere, and in the night sky as millions of snowflakes defy all expectations of assumed motion and all we see are white dots on velvet black making swirls and streaks of pure beautiful chaos.

The river motion and the chaos also frame the last piece in the program, "Stasis and Motion," a collaboration between the two musicians and the filmmaker, though from the Q and A after the show it was clear that all three makers' roles were anything but firm. Most of the visuals were created based on musical ideas from Myslajek, and Marks, who distorted and looped Myslajek's piano and vocals through an analog synthesizer, shared filming duties with Hoolihan. Sometimes one would re-shoot the same roll of film that that the other had already exposed to create blind collaborative double exposures.

The double exposed film projected dually multiplied the play of light and dark, and expanded by the music, the effect was many times euphoric. Images of trees and water, abstracted into patterns of white and black through the hand-processed high contrast black and white film, tugged you in all directions. A rock in water was the setting for a final exploration of the dance of sun on water, a dance like that of the snowflakes in "City of Lakes," an orgy of forest spirits singing in circles of light and Myslajek's haunting echoed vocals.

Hoolihan's "Kenilworth Sketch," the last of the silent films to play, used double exposure in vivid color to turn the screen into a painting made on waving grass. One image, of a blooming white bush against a field of fading grass that suddenly turns into a gently waving lake through superimposition, is one that particularly holds to my retina and brain.

Hoolihan explained that his films were not so much about telling stories but making you look at things. He compared his filmmaking to music, and his role running the percussive projectors in back of the house as being part of the band with Myslajek and Marks, playing their keyboard and synthesizer up front beneath the light. 

Three Nights in a CAVE

For many years, the middle months of winter, January and February, meant experimental films to me. That's because the Walker Art Center always seemed to show programs of experimental films during those months, and I would go as much as I could to the Walker Theater and sit with some people and also many empty seats to expand my mind and also hear in person from many of the makers who had come from far away to share with us the zero degrees outside.

That all seemed to disappear at some point - one recent year I realized that I wasn't going to experimental films in the year's first months, but it seems like that tradition may have returned with something called the CAVE Festival, which Festival guy Kevin Obsatz kept referring to as the "first annual."

Is it Plato's Cave, where we can't see the real world but only shadows cast by fire on the wall, or is it the cave we all want to climb into when we really think about who is going to be our next president? No, CAVE stands for Cinematic, Audio, Video Experimentation. There were three very cold nights in three very warm places with visitors from even colder and much warmer places to present films projected on film and video, some with sound and some without.

Limited evening bus service and nights so cold that I didn't want to stand outside too long waiting for transfers meant that I missed some of the films when I had to exit in the darkness, images still flickering, to catch a bus. But I saw and heard far more than I can digest and process, and many of the images are still torturing and delighting me. It was three nights of layers and nylon coat scrapings and snow pack scrunching and industrial rat-a-tatting and microphones rubbed upon flesh.

The first night featured films from Winnipeg and the Twin Cities. Visitor Aaron Zeghers said hello from his belly with a "Hello, How Are You" Daniel Johnston t-shirt that took us completely into the world of his northern city, that and a program that included an absurd and hilarious documentary about what happens when beer bottles strike famous heads in Winnipeg, to his own piece of snowy crystal cinema, "Everything Turns..." featuring super 8 film of geography and geometry and numbers and then bursting into a projection through a crystal that turned the Bryant Lake Bowl Theater into a cathedral of colored light.

I had to leave midway through the local films to catch my bus, but I was so honored to have my own little video about an operation I had as part of it.

The second night filled to more than capacity the Mediatheque room of the Walker Art Center, which probably had the most high tech projection facilities but also the most technical issues. But I will never forgot the third shot of Nashville's Jonathan Rattner's film "The Interior," an extended image that put me as completely as I could ever imagine into the mind of a dog. Rattner's films, made during a four week stay in a remote part of Alaska, documented the life of dog mushers and their dogs.

After a couple images that both oriented and disoriented us to where we were, we kept on the expressive face of one dog as others began to howl in the snow. We were so close and intimate to this dog in image that I began to think, do I howl yet? And then, when it was time to howl, I howled too, or at least the dog that I was seeing so closely howled. With the movement of that dog's face and eyes and fur I was sharing some kind of thought with it.

This wasn't the kind of anthropomorphizing you do in a fairy tale or Disney film, it was a direct connection with a being very different from you, but still an intimacy of dinner and morning and night and speed and snores and the moon.

We shared a more remote intimacy with the humans in the film. It may even have been as cold in Minneapolis as it was in the places of these films, but this wasn't a cold of skyscrapers and bus stops, it was a cold of headlamps and constant overcoats and snow. Life was completely covered in ice and white, and had retreated completely into steam and breath.

The second program of the second night, curated by Hannah Piper Burns of Portland, I also only saw part of, but I remember a young woman defiantly defining herself against the monochrome men and the polychrome media that engulf her, a flea and servant allegory around a smoky fire, the hats and glasses of internet psychics.

The third night was at The White Page Gallery, in two storefront spaces. The white interior walls were a perfect setting for the winter films of Robert Todd of Boston. While we seek out eyes and smiles and facial clues from the dogs and people we see on screen, he denies us these to give us the most intimate, mundane and eternal details of the physical things around him. His film "Threshold," which he described as a piece about not wanting to walk out his door, begins and ends on Greek columns but mostly revels in water drops on a window that explode into a machine gun of splintered and sliced images that combine the negative with the positive.

The third night's second program, presented by Ariel Teal representing the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, presented us sunny images of swingset leg-shaving, Griffith's elephants blasted by Mountain Dew, and that bright summer sun burning through paper messages to us.

In the Gallery next door to the screenings was Colby Richardson's Inner Vision, an exhibit that sent a video feedback TV signal to three other TV screens in the room. Because the signal was actually broadcast from the room and traveled to the other TV's through their antennas and not through a cable, the images on those other TV sets changed as you walked between them and you interrupted the broadcast signal. By walking around these TVs playing, appropriately, TV snow, I could affect the image, I could create the technical difficulties that broke it all up and made it strange or interesting, I could dance my quick exit between the antennas before I rushed out into the dark and extreme cold to catch my bus.

Thanks to the Cellular Cinema crew, I have many many images and sounds that have broadened my own horizons, that can brew inside me and inspire me to brave some new trails of my own to illumine the rest of these cold dark days.

Some super 8 Time Lapse films of Minneapolis - early 1990s

Here are some short black and white time lapse films I made in the early 1990s. I had an intervalometer, which is a device I hooked up to my super 8 camera and that would automatically trip the shutter at the interval I chose, from one from every second to one every minute.

At that time one of my jobs was in an apartment in a high rise on the West Bank, so these films of the Minneapolis skyline were filmed from there.

This was made a few year before the Capella tower was constructed so there are only two tallest buildings. The skyline was a little thinner than it is today.

This next one is of the Cepro Mill, which is now the site of Cepro Park on the Midtown Greenway. There's a quick shot of a train on the tracks that would become the Greenway. I lived just a block or so away from here at that time.

Minneapolis was the Mill City not only because it had mills along the river downtown, but also because it had many mills in neighborhoods. It doesn't have so many of those any more.

In the last couple shots of the Cepro Mill you can really see how its grain towers dwarfed the neighborhood all around it. They even towered over the Lake Street Sears store, now the Midtown Global Market.

The last time lapse was made in what is now the very trendy Mill District neighborhood, but which then was pretty deserted. I was the only one around when I set up my camera on a tripod to get these time lapses on a beautiful summer day. The first building you see, the one with all the broken windows showing sky, is still around and now the home of the Mill City Museum, offices and loft homes. The long row of grain towers that my camera was loving is now gone. These were where the Guthrie Theater and Gold Medal Park are now.

Hugh Steers

Here's a 20 minute document I made of a gallery talk at the Montgomery Glasoe Fine Art Gallery in the Minneapolis Warehouse District at the opening night of the show Hugh Steers: Paintings and Drawings. Steers was a New York City artist who was dying of AIDS. The video was recorded in mid-January and he died less than two months later, in early March 1995.

I recorded it with my SVHS camera and used an audio mixer from MTN public access so I could put a lav mic on him and also a shotgun mic to record audience questions - you can even see it pop into the shot at one moment. I had the camera on a tripod and held up the shotgun mic in my hand.

Steers was fairly soft-spoken, so I probably heard him more clearly through the headphones than anybody else in the gallery in reality. At one point, Carolyn Glasoe adjusts my mic on Steers to help the audience hear him and I might have tried to say something like, that's only for the camera.

I did some slow motion inserts from the gallery and people interacting with the paintings just by playing the tape back slowly on the video deck. This was long before slow motion was easy with computer editing.

I edited it a little fragmentarily and randomly - maybe to match what his mind might have been like late in his illness - I don't exactly remember. He was right around my age and he was near death - I think it was Carolyn Glasoe who I had met somewhere and who asked me to tape this and told me that his health wasn't good. By the time I had gotten around to edit the video, he had passed away, and I ended the piece with his obituary from the New York Times.

I remember being introduced to him just briefly as I set up my equipment, and I also remember feeling so strange putting the lavaliere microphone on his collar and seeing so closely how thin he was from his illness. It's just a quick little video I made for public access TV, and I was making quite a few back then, but it has stayed with me because of his age and how close he was to death when he gave that talk.

I put this video on-line a few months ago, but yesterday got an email from the gallery in New York that represents his estate. First I thought they were going to ask me to take down the video, but they actually liked it and wanted to link to it on their page for him, which is here.