From the 1920s on one can locate a fascinating, global convergence of avant-garde anthropology and experimental cinemas. In Latin America, this has often resulted in the manufacturing of social utopias and calls for radical figurations of the New Man, often by blurring nationalist and cosmopolitan fantasies dreamt up between Old and New Worlds. Chilean exile film artist and theorist Raúl Ruiz belongs uneasily and dissonantly to this tradition.

In this expanded cinema event featuring 21 artists and organized in collaboration with Microscope Gallery and taking place at the Parrish Art Museum, the New York based Optipus collective and orchestra will perform The Watery Owl of Minerva, a new live multi-projection and sound performance composed by Bradley Eros.

The screening is programmed around the work of two artists who interweave phenomenological bodies and cosmic dimensions with a resolutely post-digital approach. Both draw their images and sounds from nature while combining them with non-realist post-production techniques. From these methods emerge image flows and acoustic rhythms that take the viewer to other worlds. The films screened were chosen so that this cosmic dimension in the interaction of visions of human and non-human bodies alongside those of affective nature becomes readily apparent.