Ruminations and Abstractions
Friday, March 5 - Sunday, March 8
Noon - 11:00 PM
Section One
The following installations are located in the Paul Mesaros Gallery
Canady Creative Arts Center, 3rd Floor
seen, stored, remembered
Bio: Tracy Miller-Robbins is an animator and educator who creates works that range from prints, art projections, short films and site specific animated installations. Her projection art and animations have been presented nationally and internationally at venues including: Siggraph, InterCHI, European Media Arts Festival, Digital Graffiti Festival, SUPERTOON, Torpedo Factory Art Center, Melbourne International Animation Festival, Animafest Zagreb and the World Animation Celebration. She lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Tracy Miller-Robbins
Year: 2025
Run Time: 2:00
Country: United States
Synopsis: "seen, stored and remembered" A 2-min AI video loop of 30 evolving portraits—life glitching in and out, like breath—born from 64 digitally hand-drawn female faces.A two-minute vertical video loop, created as a collaboration with machine learning. I began with 64 digitally hand-drawn portraits of women, each one unique, capturing different expressions, moments, and imagined identities. These drawings became the foundation for training a machine learning model—feeding it my imagery so it could learn from my lines, my choices, my visual language.
As the model generated new portraits, I selected from these machine-created faces, retrained the system with them, and repeated the process. Over time, the machine began to echo something deeper—an evolving aesthetic, a shifting identity built from fragments of my input.
The video stitches together this iterative training process, showing more than 30 portraits in transition. These transitions—glitches, flickers, slow morphs—are edited to create a sense of rhythm, breath, and emergence. The portraits appear to grow out of static and dissolve back into it, evoking the fragility of memory and the persistence of presence.
In this loop, life seems to surface, momentarily, from the algorithm—only to fade again. It’s about creation and disappearance, about how machines remember, and how we see ourselves reflected in the code.
The Gravedigger's Spy
Sylvia Toy St. Louis
Year: 2026
Run Time: 7:16
Synopsis: A woman has a cardiac event and collapses unconscious on a public sidewalk. In the void of consciousness without existence that is near death, she realizes her brain is escaping cell by cell. She tries to recover her brain before it is collected by The Gravedigger, a sentient phenomenon of the Milky Way that is obsessed with decomposed organisms.
"The Gravedigger's Spy" is a standalone short, based on the beginning sequences of THE BEST DEATH by Sylvia Toy, which is currently in pre-production.
Bio: Tracy Miller-Robbins is an animator and educator who creates works that range from prints, art projections, short films, and site-specific animated installations. Her projection art and animations have been presented nationally and internationally at venues including Siggraph, InterCHI, European Media Arts Festival, Digital Graffiti Festival, SUPERTOON, Torpedo Factory Art Center, Melbourne International Animation Festival, Animafest Zagreb, and the World Animation Celebration. She lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio.
A Life Half-Lived
Rob Munday
Year: 2024
Run Time: 7:30
Country: United Kingdom
Synopsis: A propulsive journey through places seen, dreams glimpsed and lives cut short.
Within kaleidoscopic loops we find the oppressed and suppressed. From kidnapped Argentinians to pro-democracy campaigners and proponents of socialist body culture. And then the individuals: an astronautical scapegoat, an accidental artist's muse and the much-studied victim of a botched lobotomy. Time flies by in a whirl of faces, dates and developing structures that build into a lattice of memories that refuse to die.
Caffeine Phosphene Reverie
Alanna Floreck
Year: 2024
Run Time: 10:03
Country: United States
Île tête nue
Aitor Ibáñez
Year: 2024
Run Time: 7:30
Country: France
Synopsis: A hill emerges, a stone unfurls: since the film is projected digitally, we'll say it's a nursery counting rhyme, we're trying to count beyond one. It's not sure that we'll succeed.
Bio: Catalan filmmaker based in Paris, Aitor Ibáñez alternates between editing fiction and audiovisual creations in a porous territory between video installation, experimental cinema and films for dance and opera. He is interested in the materiality of the body as a place of tension between the memory of the gesture and the trace. He is a member of Etna, a collaborative laboratory focusing on experimental cinema and the use of analogue film. He is currently working on his first feature-length documentary.
Surface Recordings: Palo Duro Red / Ogallala Unfiltered
Andrew Weathers
Year: 2025
Run Time: 3:15
Country: United States
Synopsis: Surface Recordings is a series of experimental expanded cinema work that uses found 16mm film as a foundation for psychogeographic procedures and play. The source film for Palo Duro Red / Ogallala Unfiltered was left to process in clay from Palo Duro canyon and unfiltered water from the Ogallala aquifer and sound was sourced exclusively from field recordings made in Palo Duro canyon.
Bio: Andrew Weathers (1988) is a composer, improviser, and intermedia artist currently based in the Pueblo, Colorado after spending forative time in West Texas, the Bay Area, and North Carolina. His work is primarily concerned with place, duration, and repetition, explored through field recording, psychogeographic methods, and recursive resonances. Weathers has collaborated alongside a wide swath of artists inhabiting disparate currents of media, approaches, and aesthetics.
In 2008, Weathers founded Full Spectrum Records, beginning a long-standing commitment to production and curation that went on to encompass a number of projects for Other Minds Records and Rural Situationism. After 16 years and 175 releases, Full Spectrum came to an end in 2024. He currently curates the imprints Editions Glomar and Bastard Countryside and continues to work as an in-demand producer and audio engineer.
Doxology for Ella May Wiggins
Bio: Rachel Pittman is a writer and film scholar based in Los Angeles where she is currently a PhD student in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at the University of Southern California. She holds a B.A. in Multimedia Journalism from the University of South Carolina and an M.A. in Film Studies from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her research deals with experimental, avant-garde, D.I.Y. cinemas, media production histories, and aesthetics and politics. Other research interests include Appalachian moving image media and punk visual culture.
Jonathan Furnell, Rachel Pittman
Year: 2026
Run Time: 4:55
Country: united States
Bio: Jonathan Furnell is a media artist, experimental filmmaker and musician. Jonathan's work explores environment and the supernatural, the Appalachian South, and the space between sight and sound. His work aims to create a kind of Bluegrass film, drawing on hillbilly histories and cultures of Appalachia.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in Media Arts from the University of South Carolina and an MFA in Filmmaking from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
His work has appeared in the Athens International Film and Video Festival, the Cucalorus Film Festival, Cosmic Rays Experimental Film Festival, Sidewalk Film Festival, Indie Grits Film Festival and other venues.
He is passionate about Appalachian media, archival/lost media as well as analog, experimental and collaborative film culture. He is currently based in Los Angeles but his home is the southern Blue Ridge Mountains.
Section Two
The following installations are located in the “Slab” Practice Space
Canady Creative Arts Center, 2nd Floor
NECROPOLIS
millie DREAD
Run Time: 38:17:00
Country: United States
Synopsis: "A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING EARTH… AND MIDNIGHT IS IMMINENT… The abstract, monochromatic visual manifestation of MILLIE DREAD's second music record, NECROPOLIS brings you on a journey through time and space and into the head and heart of the artist, who describes her sound as “cybergothic antipop.”"
Bio: Hailing from Nowhere, Pennsylvania but now a proud Pittsburgh Yinzer, Hannah RB is a musical wildcard. While gothic and somber at its core, her solo project, millie DREAD, transcends genre, encompassing styles such as darkwave, synth pop, industrial rock and ambient, even pulling influence from cinematic and classical masters. Never formally trained in music, RB relies on her keen ear to do it all—her own composer and producer, she programs virtual instruments to create her compelling works, all without fluently playing any physical instrument. A poet at heart, her sharp and witty lyricism is highlighted by her theatrical vocals, spanning from ethereal choral harmonies to spoken word that hits with a fist. With her continuous, infectious passion, RB invites her listeners to the gloom and doom of the underworld, ensuring that every step of the journey there is a memorable one.
Interview
Bio: Michael Mersereau (b. 1977) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Durham, North Carolina. He explores the boundaries of cinema and television genres, including horror, suspense, and soap operas, to create experimental sound, video, performance, and installations that elevate specific film production elements, resulting in absurd and uncanny worlds. Mersereau has exhibited internationally at museums and galleries such as Cordoba Lab, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca and Oaxaca Graphic Arts Institute in Oaxaca de Juarez, Mexico; The Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City; Eastern Bloc and Maison de la Culture Claude-Léveillée in Montréal, Canada; and Wassaic Projects in New York State. His videos have been screened at the Lausanne Underground Film Festival, The Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles California, Traverse Video Festival, and ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark. He has performed at The Lab in San Francisco, Galerie B312 in Montréal, Sala Elia in Oaxaca de Juarez, Mexico, and Mills College Art Museum with choreographer and dancer Molissa Fenley. Mersereau plays guitar, electroacoustic music and Expanded cinema. He holds an MFA from Mills College and a BFA from California College of the Arts.
Michael Mersereau
Year: 2026
Run Time: 4:55
Country: united States
Synopsis: "Interview" is a video work framing a dialogue between myself and my digital double, a deepfake AI trained on my image and voice. I initiate an absurd call-and-response using variations of the paradoxical phrase, “I am your doppelgänger. I am not you. You are my doppelgänger.” In response, the double strains to recall my words, its performance failing through uncanny blinks and vocal stutters.
Midst the Sky
Kiley Brandt
Run Time: 6:31
Country: United States
Synopsis: 6:31 min Original poetry intertwined with excerpts from historic Wilmington-born David Bryant Fulton’s works: “Hanover; The Persecution of the Lowly. Story of the Wilmington Massacre” and “Recollections of a Sleeping Car Porter”, read by Elton Burgest. A poetic exploration of time, grief, and contemplating the multi layers of home on lands that hold memory beyond our own.