Threshold to Threshold:
Elemental Findings
Highlights from the
Revolutions per Minute Festival
Wednesday, June 21, 2023 8pm
AUTOMATA presents Elemental Findings - Highlights from the Revolutions per Minute Festival
The Revolutions per Minute festival (RPM Festival) is an artist-run festival that celebrates the importance of short-form poetic, personal, experimental works in various styles such as essay films, avant-garde, animation, documentaries, audiovisual performances and installations. This program selected works from the past five years, showcasing artists who have contributed multiple pieces throughout different festival editions.
Elemental Findings - Highlights from the Revolutions per Minute Festival is curated by Wenhua Shi, who will be present at the screening to introduce the program.
For more info of RPM: please visit https://revolutionsperminutefest.org
This program is organized by Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, the curator of Automata's Threshold to Threshold film series.
Tickets
$10 students, members, underemployed
$12 general admission
click here to purchase tickets
Seating is extremely limited, advance reservations strongly encouraged
Note: Masks are required for all events at Automata.
YA YI - IT IS NOT SPRING, UNTIL ALL FLOWERS BLOSSOM
by Curry Tian (2020, 6, sound, Color, Digital)
“IT IS NOT SPRING, UNTIL ALL FLOWERS BLOSSOM” (a quote from Shui Mak Ka, one of the factory workers initializing the 1982 Garment Strike) is a homage to the overlooked and objectified laboring body of Asian Immigrant Women in the western world, with an eye on the garment factory owners and workers within the New York garment production sector as a representation of the US social panorama.With reference to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelars’s topo-analysis theory from his literature work The Poetics of Space — a form of research that examines the intimacy of objects and spaces; the working space itself becomes the representation of one’s identity, cultural behaviour and a kind of consciousness. Thus, this collaborative project aims to explore the poetic relationship between these women factory worker’s invisible social identity, the workspace, movement and fashion in the Chinese diaspora in America, dating from the 1970s to present times.
Amusement Ride
by Tomonari Nishikawa (2019, 6, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
Shot with a telephoto lens from inside a cabin of Cosmo Clock 21, a Ferris wheel at an amusement park in Yokohama, Japan. The distorted image shows the structure of the Ferris wheel, focusing on the intermittent vertical movement, which resembles the movement of a film at the gate of a film projector or camera.
Another horizon
by Stephanie Barber (2020, 9, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
the horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, a promised place where these two elements come together. a metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. a place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart. also, here, the space between narrative and documentary, fact and fiction, is scratched between two voices.
A Perfect Storm
by Karel Doing (2022, 3, Color, Sound, 35mm to Digital)
A Perfect Storm is a landscape film or, more precisely, a landscape imprinted on the film's emulsion. The artist has used seeds, tiny composite flowers and other small elements of cultivated plants that grow in his garden and wild plant species gathered from a nearby nature reserve. The film consists of sequences that are intricately composed and parts that are completely 'self-organised'. As such plants appear not merely as inanimate objects but rather as characters who are expressive in their own right. Such otherworldliness is also reflected in a sequence of gargoyles, providing a link to the hidden animist tendencies that prevail in human culture. This primordial expressiveness is underlined by an improvised guitar solo by the inimitable Florian Magnus Maier.
Summer Light For Tula
by Silvia Turchin (2021, 9:24, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
"Summer Light for Tula" is a garden symphony of sorts, a tribute to the light and beauty, and an effort to reconcile with death.
Fragile
by Sasha Waters (2022, 8, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
"Maybe I will cast a younger woman to perform me, the 'hockey mom' in the voiceover..." And so I did: six women a decade or more younger than I am, all artists I admire, speak a personal meditation on the early history of cinema, the anxiety of aging, and the woeful comedy of professional envy. 16mm footage of six “magic lantern” glass slides from the turn of the last century wryly evoke the Structural film tradition of anti-illusionist cinema and demystification.
"Hockey mom" performed by T.J Dedeaux-Norris, Lori Felker, Kelly Gallagher, Penny Lane, Jesse McLean and Courtney Stephens.
Move
by Douglas Urbank (2021, 4:35, B/W, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
A nature of children, birds, and insects. Made from a series of contact printings taken from different found footage films and other materials onto 16mm negative, part of the soundtrack from a film with the image blacked out.
SAYOR
by Kathryn Ramey (2022, 10, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
An acronym for swimming at your own risk, SAYOR refers to a forum without a moderator. Three years in the lives of three AMAB (assigned male at birth) children with a parent/observer. What does it mean to be a male in the 21st century?
Laomedeia
by Youjin Moon (2019, 11:04, Color, Sound, Digital)
Laomedeia is an experimental video that travels through transitional spaces, which continuously unfold into different dimensions in a nonlinear trajectory. The migrating elements, such as water, birds, and trains, allow the viewer to navigate between painterly compositions of oceanic landscapes and cosmic spaces.
About the Artists:
Curry Tian
Curry Sicong Tian is a US-China based multidisciplinary filmmaker and artist, whose talent ranges across Director, concept/digital, 3d, and photographer, and not in a segregated way but artfully blending the vastly different mediums into a seamless harmony of leading edge expression.
In 2020, Curry won an Academy Award for her student short film “Simulacra”, and in such a short span of time went on to create masterful works for clients such brands as Mercedes, Apple BEATS, Chanel, L’oreal, Canon and more. Her visual creation of the 88rising MainStage Coachella performances, made waves at the world’s premiere music festival.
Tomonari Nishikawa
Nishikawa’s films explore the idea of documenting situations/phenomena through a chosen medium and technique, often focusing on process itself. His films have been screened at numerous film festivals and art venues, including Berlinale, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival. In 2010, he presented a series of 8mm and 16mm films at MoMA P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and his film installation, Building 945, received the 2008 Grant Award from the Museum of Contemporary Cinema in Spain. He served as a juror for the 2010 Ann Arbor Film Festival, the 2012 Big Muddy Film Festival, and the 2013 dresdner schmalfilmtage. He is one of the co-founders of KLEX: Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival and Transient Visions: Festival of the Moving Image. He lives in Japan/USA, currently teaching in Cinema Department at Binghamton University.
Stephanie Barber
Stephanie M Barber is a writer and artist who has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media, often literary/visual hybrids that dissolve boundaries between narrative, essay and dialectic works. Her work considers the basic philosophical questions of human existence (its morbidity, profundity and banality) with play and humor.
Barber’s films and videos have screened nationally and internationally in solo and group shows at MOMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for Art, OH, among other galleries, museums and festivals.
Karel Doing
Karel Doing is an independent filmmaker, photographer, writer and researcher currently based in Oxford, UK. In his practice he investigates the relationship between culture and nature by means of analog and organic process, experiment and co-creation. Doing's work has been shown internationally in the context of film festivals, museum and gallery exhibitions and live events, including solo exhibitions in London and Paris. In 2012 he received a FOCAL award for his film Liquidator. He regularly gives workshops in analog film and photography practice and teaches at Ravensbourne University and the University of the Arts London.
Silvia Turchin
Silvia Turchin is a Bay Area experimental and documentary filmmaker whose work is concerned with memory and loss. Her films are experiential in style, encouraging viewers to immerse themselves in keen visual and aural observation of urban and natural landscapes.
Silvia is currently Associate Professor in the Cinematic Arts Department at California State University Monterey Bay and has also taught film production at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Sasha Waters
Sasha Waters is a moving image artist and Professor of Film at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 1998, Sasha has produced and directed 18 documentary and experimental films, 14 of which originate in 16mm. With the exception of her first documentary, she has edited all of her films. Embracing a personal, artisanal approach to craft, she also served as the cinematographer, primarily in 16mm, and sound editor, on ten of them.
Douglas Urbank
Douglas Urbank, based in Boston, Massachusetts, is an artist with a background in sculpture and drawing who began to experiment with filmmaking in 2008. His short films have screened in festivals and curated programs nationally and internationally. Since 2001 he has hosted a radio program devoted to experimental, improvisational, and other unconventional music and sound art. He is also a member of Fort Point Theatre Channel, an independent theater company that brings together an ensemble of artists from the worlds of theater, music, and visual arts. And he is a founding member of the AgX Film Collective. He works to promote cross-pollination between art forms on the fringes of alternative culture: experimental music, film and theater.
Kathryn Ramey
Kathryn Ramey is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose work operates at the intersection of experimental film processes and ethnographic research. Her award winning and strongly personal films are characterized by manipulation of the celluloid including hand-processing, optical printing, and various direct animation techniques. Most recently she has been focused on creating an anti-colonial film practice with collaborators in Puerto Rico and researching environmentally friendly photochemical processes utilizing indigenous flora. She is deeply committed to sharing her knowledge of alternative analogue technologies through workshops and publications.
Youjin Moon
Youjin Moon is a visual artist and experimental filmmaker based in Boston. Moon holds MFAs in Painting and Film/Video from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has shown her work at national and international film festivals and exhibitions, including the 2016 deCordova New England Biennial, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, and the 56th Ann Arbor Film Festival. She received the Korean EXiS Award at the 12th and 16th Seoul International Experimental Film and Video Festival.
About the Curator
Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. He is the founder and one of curators of RPM Fest.