MassArt Film Society: Bradley Eros
Wednesday, September 29th, 20h, 4$
Massachusetts College of Art, Film Department
Screening room 1. 621 Huntington Ave. Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA

An artist working in myriad media:  experimental film & video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text, expanded cinema & installation. Also a maverick curator, designer, researcher & investigator. Concepts include: ephemeral cinema, mediamystics, subterranean science, erotic psyche, poetic accidents, cinema povera & musique plastique.

Exhibited at 2004 Whitney Biennial & The American Century, The New York Film Festival, London Film Festival, MoMA, The Kitchen, Pacific Film Archives, The Warhol Museum, Arsenal in Berlin, Lightcone in Paris; he also works with the New York Filmmakers' Cooperative, Anthology Film Archives, Issue Project Room, Spectacle, & co-directed the late Roberta Beck Mercurial Cinema.

Various quotes about Eros’ solo & collaborative works:

“Eros’ richly layered tapestries of hallucinatory images are riddled with provocative rituals, from sex to science to surgery, that are guaranteed to produce frissions of pleasure” -Village Voice

“Technologist of the flesh, he creates hypnotic and voluptuous montages, reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s mystic incantations.” -Dargis, Village Voice

“Eros and Liotta (as Mediamystics) have worked for years in an area somewhere between cinema and ritual, finding alchemy in the chemistry of body and film. Their beautiful ‘fungus eroticus’ is sensual and disturbing, raw and lysergic.” -Owen O’Toole, Spool

“The films and performances of Bradley Eros are dark, mysterious, biomorphic, psychedelic and subterranean. Investigating cycles of decay and regeneration, the poetic nature of his work is substantiated by equally haunting soundtracks.” -Film Threat

Descriptions of works to be shown:

- Mutable Fire! (1984. super-8 on video, color, sound, 7 min)
Totems of destruction and desire. An operation on the combustible urges in a junk black mass. A swiftly-sliced nightmare of history and erotic autobiography.
- Pyrotechnics (1986. super-8 on video, color, sound, 11 min), made with Aline Mare/Erotic Psyche
Telepathic music from the lab. The human tabula rasa and the pregnant androgyne in the ecstasy of transmissions. Science-friction myths of bio-electric energy.
- Dervish Machine (1992. 16mm, B&W/color, sound, 10 min), made with Jeanne Liotta/Mediamystics
Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin’s Dreamachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenousness of the material. The film itself becomes the site to experience impermanence, and to revel in the unfixed image.
- Osmosis (2002. 16mm, color, sound, 10 min)
A panoramic composition for three simultaneous images blown-up to 16mm from an original triple projector performance. This highly personal document of architecture, nature, and intimacy is constructed from thirty years of original super-8 material.
- Deliquescence (2003, DVD, originally double film projection, B&W and color, sound, 9 minutes)
An ephemeral film of subterranean science, Deliquescence creates an aquatic environment that emphasizes the liquidity of projected light. The work employs external glass lenses, plus violet and rose-tinted gels, and strategic hand-masking to interlace the figures in a sexual melange, overlaying a particularly tender fragment of pornography with the amorphous undulations of a Japanese documentary on marine flowers.
- burn (or, The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) (2004, DVD, originally super-8mm in a 16mm projector, color, sound, 5:15 min.)
The work uses a short strip of super-8 footage of 1970s bondage porn pulled through the projector gate and burned frame-by-frame, in a live performance. A soundtrack fragment of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver seeps beneath the disintegrating images. Here the fragility of the plastic material is both magnified and transformed, serving as a physical fact of film and a brutal metaphor.
“No image satisfies me unless it is at the same time Knowledge, unless it carries with it its substance as well as its lucidity.” -Antonin Artaud
- Aerodynamics of the Black Sun (2006, HD/DVD, color, sound, 6:00 minutes, originally plastic gels in a 16mm projector)
“Life is a process of involuntary oxidations.” -Novalis
Aerodynamics of the Black Sun is an alchemical process reflecting decay and regeneration in the solar realm. The elasticity of materials under chemical change creates metaphors & abstractions for manipulated plastics burning in the gate. These pyrographic ruptures are inspired by entropic phenomena and disintegration, as well as by artists who explore surface distress, puncture & erosion, such as Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri.
- TRANSTRANS (TRANSFORMERS Transformed) Bradley EROS + Tim GERAGHTY {2009, 12 minutes, HD / digital video}
Soundtrack mix includes Francois Bayle, Frank Zappa, Einsturzende Neubauten, Terry Fox, Christian Fennesz.
All text from F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909) & Manifesto on Futurist Cinema (1916). Commissioned by PERFORMA 09
“Our cinema must detach itself from reality and become deforming, synthetic and dynamic!” ~ F.T. Marinetti
A radical remix of the recent Transformers film, via synthetic collapse and critical revenge on its old & new fascist tropes > celebrating SPEED. NOISE. + DANGER. The fervent declarations & violent poetry of the Futurists are superimposed on the mythic morphology of the Autobot blockbuster’s machine mayhem. Images of death & destruction reign in a delirium of transformations as, to quote Marinetti: “We Decompose the Universe!”