IFI & Experimental Film Club present:Devoted Songs, The Films Of Nathaniel Dorsky

The devotional cinema of American filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky is a rare treasure that allows for a distinct experience of time and meditation. His films blend a poetic and introspective view of his environments with an exploration of the different cognitive and emotional associations that can be established between one shot and the next.

Available to view only on 16mm, this programme of Dorsky’s films, curated by EFC member Esperanza Collado in collaboration with Lumiére magazine, represents a truly unique opportunity to experience this important work. The programme features three films: The Visitation, the first of Dorsky’s Devoted Songs; Winter, a seasonal portrait of New York; and Alaya, one of the filmmaker’s most radical and structural works.

Screensavers pairs musicians with filmmakers for three brand new audio visual performances featuring live cinematic projections edited before your eyes, decaying feedback loops, powerful drones, audio reactive graphics, deconstructed VHS tapes, electro-acoustic improvisation, drum machines and maybe even some guitars.Nathan Halverson + Jason Robinson Taka Suzuki + Ryan Maguire/Jon BellonaGreg Nachmanovitch + Will Bollingercollaborative, improvisational, pretty cool.

The shifting physicality of the written word in the age of digital surveillance continuously warps and renegotiates notions of the personal and the political throughout this selection of films. Personal footage and self-interrogation are re-appropriated in narratives that blur the lines between documentary, manifesto and fiction.

With 40 years between them, John Latham’s Encyclopaedia Britannica (1971) and Andrew Norman Wilson’s Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011) both interrogate the evolving physicality and accessibility of the written word. Helen Benigson’s The Future Queen of the Screen (2011) starts with an old-fashioned, echoing keyboard clang, never letting go of the seductive tactility of the digital interface. Equal parts futuristic dystopia and childhood holiday nostalgia, Daniel Mann’s Future Diaries (2011) creates an improbably seamless experiment in narrative dissonance from the artist’s father’s Hi-8 family video archive.

A discussion will follow the screening. 

With thanks to Openvizor, LUX, and Angus-Hughes Gallery.

Karl F. Stewart: Impressions in MindPhotographs and VideoKarl F. Stewart makes a mark in digital photography and video with his saturated colors and his rigorous compositions showing urban landscapes. He works with a photographic hybrid combination between still images and videos that do not hide their origin in their photographic concept. After being a documentary photographer in the 70's in Pittsburgh, his home town, he worked as an English lecturer in Italy for 24 years, before he took up photography again only 5 years ago, now going fully digital.San Francisco, his next temporary residency after Italy, became his starting point for his relaunch in photography, where he mostly explored the downtown area. Not just the financial district of San Francisco, but a big part of the highly dense urban areas show an amazing economic growth with glossy surfaces and artificial contemporary green landscaping on one hand, and wide spread poverty of homeless people on the other. “The Unearthly Beauty of Simulated Nature in Contemporary Architecture” is Stewart's most pronounced piece from that period, presented as a video-photo essay. At the same time, the artist started exploring motion-blur and photoshop cut-outs. “Impressions of Movement” is a series of panoramic works that resulted and which he continued in different countries such as USA, Italy and France. The time-based presentation of digital pictures, that seems to be natural to the medium, led to digital video as his preferred medium at the moment. The artist recently moved to Düsseldorf, where he continues exploring landscapes and urban settings in often unearthly colors. Like with “K-20”, showing a small fountain at the K 20 Museum in Düsseldorf, the examinations of urban-nature relations combined with sometimes witty surprising experiments, seem to propel his creative energy most successfully.