SKRFF 

Corrie Francis Parks & Daniel Nuderscher | Austria

Run time: 7:00 min.

Synopsis:
Public graffiti walls carry decades of hidden cultural and political history within their layers of spray paint. SKRFF_ology began as an investigative excavation of the public walls around Vienna. Treating the wall like both an archeological site and a sgraffito sculpture, the artists activate the layers of the past with stopmotion animation. The resulting animation invites the viewer into an overwhelming sensory experience that can be viewed from an aesthetic frame of reference or a philosophical one. Unraveling the past seems a necessary endeavor (both as society and as individuals) to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again, but the act of digging in raises the question of whether the past can ever be remembered clearly in all its complexity.

Bio:
Corrie Francis Parks brings life to the inanimate through frame-by-frame manipulation of physical materials. With one hand under the camera and the other in the digital realm, her films and installations maintain an organic connection to traditional production methods while fully integrating digital technology. In addition to her award-winning short films, which have screened at Annecy, Hiroshima, Ottawa, Zagreb, and at major festivals around the world, Parks also creates installations for international light festivals. She has been artist in residence at the MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, subnet Austria, Fundación Valparaíso and Klondike Goldrush International Historic Park. In 2023 she was a Fulbright Artist-in-Residence at the Museumsquartier in Vienna, Austria.

Daniel Nuderscher works with a multitude of artistic expressions like photography, sculpting, light installations, text, painting, visuals and land art. He lives and works in Austria. Central topics of his artistic work are security and intimacy in human relationships as well as the interaction between objects and materials, the design process of public space and the emotionality and self worth of humans. He has exhibited his work in Vienna, lower Austria, and Hanoi.

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The Motherfucker's Birthday

Saif Alsaegh | Iraq & United States

Run time: 6:20 min.

Synopsis:
Through dancing, the Motherfucker's Birthday shows the evil of the dictator and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders.  The film presents dancing, a universal and uniquely human activity often representing joy, with eerie footage of Saddam and his sons’ torture tools while they dance. Bush also dances with a smirk across the screen while announcing a war that would destabilize a whole region. Contrasting the dancing of these powerful men, who seem disturbingly unconcerned with the lives they impact, with the dancing of the people of Iraq amplifies the fear, control, and horror the general public lives under. Everything becomes a gesture of dance: the torture, the hesitant political humor, and the war.  Everyone becomes a dancer, the dictator and the oppressed performing a distorted version of this human act. Saddam dances, Bush dances, so what's left for the Iraqi people except to join in.

”The Motherfucker’s Birthday uses the concept of dancing to explore the conditions of living under the fist of a dictator and the warmonger whims of powerful political leaders. The film presents dancing, a universal and uniquely human activity often representing joy, with eerie footage of Saddam and his sons’ torture tools. Saddam’s son Uday dances with a young woman at a party moments after shooting, unprovoked, at the ceiling, as if the fear of the partygoers is indistinguishable to him from their performed joy. Bush dances with a smirk across the screen while announcing a war that would destabilize a whole region. Contrasting the dancing of these powerful men, who seem disturbingly unconcerned with the lives they impact, with the dancing of the people of Iraq amplifies the fear, control, and horror the general public lives under. Everything becomes a gesture of dance: the torture, the hesitant political humor, and the war. Everyone becomes a dancer, the dictator and the oppressed performing a distorted version of this human act. After all, when madmen dance, what’s left for the Iraqis except to join in. “

Bio:
Saif Alsaegh is a United States-based filmmaker from Baghdad. Much of Saif’s work deals with the contrast between the landscape of his youth in Baghdad growing up as part of the indigenous Chaldean minority in the nineties and early 2000s, and the U.S. landscape where he currently lives. His films have screened in festivals and venues including Cinéma du Réel, Kurzfilm Hamburg, Kassel Dokfest, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and The Gene Siskel Film Center. Alsaegh’s films are distributed by Video Data Bank. His work has been supported by fellowships and residencies including the Flaherty, Ucross and Yaddo.

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Chrysalis 

Edwin Lohmeyer | United States

Run time: 2:15 min.

Synopsis:
Chrysalis is a glitch-based film that explores the possibilities for experience beyond the human through concepts of transmigration; rather, the soul or anima passing on to another form after the flesh deteriorates. In this glitchy narrative created using performance, data corruption, and artificial intelligence engines, the artist is thrust into a phantasmagoric vision. He climbs a tall tree in hopes of turning himself into a chrysalis and emerging as a butterfly. Passing through a strange Bardo state of demons and demigods, Lohmeyer surrenders to the processual unfolding of things, letting go of self and taking a plunge to the forest floor. Instead of searching for progress, an outcome, or transformation into a butterfly, the artist sees his true nature: that there is no separation between things. In its themes of impermanence, surrender, and shared ontologies among the human and nonhuman, Chrysalis explores an ethics for artificial intelligence in new media art as a technology of everyday magic and spiritual introspection, imagining spiritual realms as states of the mind through speculative, immersive worldbuilding.

Bio:
Eddie Lohmeyer is an Assistant Professor of Visual Rhetoric and Information Design at Clemson University. His research and creative practice explore aesthetic and technical developments within histories of digital media. Using deconstructive approaches such as glitch and collage, his animations and video installations have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, most recently at Bucknell University Art Galleries, Milan Machinima Festival, Platform 101 Gallery (Tehran, Iran), and the Fotografisk Center (Copenhagen, DK). Drawing from pop culture debris, Buddhism, art history, as well as traditions of magic and the occult, Lohmeyer’s art explores intersections of digital worldbuilding, speculative ecologies, and modes of spiritual reflection to think through environmental futures that counter global inequalities and the climate devastation of late capitalism. Through experimental animation and the vibrancy of kinetic digital forms, Lohmeyer uses glitch practices and artificial intelligence engines to imagine alternative worlds that decenter the human and value emergent forms of plant and animal intelligence. Imagining glitch and error as a process of generative reincarnation, his work explores future possibilities for ecological symbiosis among human and nonhuman bodies through expressions of alternative cosmologies, ritual, and mythmaking.

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Eye Bird Blink

Scott Turri | United States

Run time: 9:30 min.

Synopsis:
The soft, slow unveiling of an internal voyage, the procession of time, breathing, heart beating, the engine like the wheels of an industrial machine churning to the rhythm of the murder of crows. The sleepy eye is the home, the nest within our frail human-built architecture; it remembers the rituals.

Bio:
Scott Turri moves fluidly between intersecting creative outlets: self-taught drummer, painter, experimental animator, writer on the arts, and poet. He is rarely bored.

While a senior in high school, the band he played in opened for Snakefinger at the venerable East Side Club in Philadelphia. Years later, as a performance art band member, Turri participated in a live improvised audience interactive performance on the local independent radio station WYEP. Then, in the ’90s, as part of a Power Pop band, he recorded an EP with Kramer at Noise New Jersey.

As a painter, he works in series. Perhaps due to his age, he has been placed in the position to bridge his pre-digital existence with the current digital milieu. As a result, the practice has been inextricably linked to how the information age shapes our culture’s visual awareness. The work has many parallels with minimalism, but it has an implicit connection to the digital world. From the still image to the moving image, creating animation has become an extension of his practice. By building various animated parts, he then works at combining, looping, and overlaying these lyrical components by sequencing these passages into a hypnotic rhythm. There is a reciprocal exchange between animation and paintings, fostering a dialogue between the two mediums.

Hailing from suburban Philadelphia, where he spent his formative years, Turri now calls Pittsburgh home. In addition to his art-making habit, he is also a self-taught drummer and has written for New Art Examiner, BOMB Magazine, and Afterimage. Turri also holds a Teaching Associate Professor position in the Studio Arts Department at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently represented by James Gallery.

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The Machine 

Daniel Brody | United States

Run time: 13:08 min.

Synopsis:
In the short AI film "The Machine," William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg and Orson Welles come together to investigate the digital apocalypse. They must travel deep inside the mysterious entity known as The Machine to unravel the mystery at its core.

”AI has created a crisis.
And as the reborn Allan Ginsberg says in the film: ‘Crisis is opportunity, look deep!’ The film, ‘The Machine,’ is my attempt to look deeply into the disturbing new reality that the birth of AI has unfolded into the universe.”

Bio:
Daniel Brody is a multimedia artist who is interested in creating works that open up new psychological and spiritual spaces. Brody was born in 1961 in New York City and is a graduate of The Cooper Union School of Art. He currently resides in upstate New York. His films have been installed in museums, won numerous awards and been screened at festivals around the world. Highlights include: screening on PBS, first place Ann Arbor Super 8 Festival, top Jurors Award at the Artist of the Mohawk Hudson Region (juror Rachel Uffner), and screening at Athens Digital Arts Festival 2024 “Techno(s)cene.”

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