Tea With Teresa

Wood Nymph

Just posted my film, Wood Nymph, on You Tube for your viewing pleasure

Wood Nymph was conceived and directed by artist Teresa Brazen as part of an ongoing body of work, The Daydream Series. Each tone poem in this series explores human behavior and emotion within the framework of a single moment or situation.

The intention of this specific piece is to explore social contexts in which human beings are made to feel shameful about very natural tendencies toward desire. The woman represents society, norms, and rules about “appropriate” behavior. She lures the viewer to her, and then gives them a figurative slap on the hand for looking. The viewer’s desire, in turn, is never fully satiated; they unable to gaze fully upon the woman’s nude body, nor establish a personal connection through eye contact. Wood Nymph also toys with the perception of power, hinting both that woman’s power may often be underestimated, and that the concept of power may be an illusion all together.

Produced in 2009, this project was created in an unusual way: all nine crew members donated their time, equipment, and expertise via an entirely community-driven film cooperative, Scary Cow. As a result, no monies were spent on production. Video was shot with two Sony EX-1 cameras using Letus Extreme 35 mm adapters to give a more film-like aesthetic. The footage was edited in Final Cut Pro and After Effects. Sound Editor Brandon Hopp created the original music score and most of the sound in his home recording studio.

(An interesting aside about the production: During the shoot, a hive of bees was disrupted, and the entire crew scattered as bees flew everywhere, stinging most of the team. Lead actress, Jenni Bregman, was stung on the face, and that bee is visible on her cheek when the footage is slowed.)

* Photo by Martin Klimek

I Found Africa in the Wall (and a bunch of other things)

Little discoveries I stumbled upon in an abandoned house, a forest, a kitchen, a shrine, a bathtub, on a trail, and in the sky.

(I found Africa in the wall…)

Puddle Song Exhibiting at LA Center for the Digital Arts

Puddle Song, a short art film I wrote/directed with the help of a fabulous crew + actors (via San Francisco-based film co-op Scary Cow) is showing in this exhibition:

“FEED_BACK”
July 8-24, 2010
Reception and Live Performance: July 8, 7-9pm
In conjunction with Downtown Art Walk
Los Angeles Center for Digital Art
107 West Fifth Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
lacda.com

Forty-eight artists from over 18 countries are gathering at LACDA via the Live@808 networked performance space. Live@808 is a custom web application where realtime video, audio, texting and countless other media collide and intermix in a playful and exciting environment facilitated by emergent technology. The live webcams and video feeds projected in the gallery will be accompanied by a multi-screen installation of video shorts looping on monitors throughout the space.

The FEED_BACK exhibit is a zone of participation, input, response, and transformation that beckons us toward openness, spontaneity and improvisation. It is an inter-media experiment in collaborative international connection and communication that engenders an awareness of the cogent ability of internet technologies to galvanize the world culture in a constructive manner.

FEED_BACK MANIFESTO

All views simultaneously in equal amplitudes illuminate the newly mediated grid of the social. A high bandwidth sense of being unfurls where all notions of anything or everything collaborate and communicate instantaneously over a reverberant labyrinth of wide area networks. This is discursive critical mass—no opinion can exist at the expense of another and all identities, genders, skins, species, preferences and desires are transmutable. The didactic dissolves and philosophy is aesthetisized as infinitely malleable and interactive audio-visual spaces. Anteriorly recursive plagiarisms download, mutate, intermix and upload again. Vocabulary becomes a poetics of redefinition, and concepts become the vertigo of a shimmering ideological spectrum moving at light speed.

This is the new music of the technologized psyche: the electronic symphony of every instrument and every note synchronously blended to one monolithic and ecstatic tone. A meditation. An intercultural over-excitation where all colors combine to create a brilliant light. Each computer screen is a glimpse-a partitioned selection-of this luminous digital site, of the total epistemic memory residing in the global database for instant retrieval, update, recombination and re-storage. This vortical workstation of the internet is a tributary, a feeding bottle or breast, and an hermaphroditic genital of the info-communicative circulatory/nervous system where through interaction we sate the antique dictum for being the smarter monkey that better survives a hostile nature, that better survives its own hostile nature.

And then, noise becomes the signal. Find the signal in the noise. Overexposed, overloaded, distorted, meters in the red. Hissing, scratched, discolored, alaised, unintelligble and unreadable. Lens flares. Warped, faded, clipping, bleeding, and humming. Dot screens, moiree patterns. Raster lines. Corrupted data. Feedback. Modem hash. Channel offsets. Degenerated dubs, replications and simulations.

Allow random access thoughts. Art is assembly language. Be a noise-to-signal processor. Processing and filtering all input. Be electronic. Sampling, capturing. Reconfiguring. Inputting, communicating, disseminating. Be a feedback loop. Be an answering machine. Be a disconnected number, out of service. Be a busy signal, unreachable. Be a signal. Be a system error, crash applications. Be an error message. Be an error. Be an assembly language translator. Be machine level code. Be code. Be corrupted streaming data. Be an aliased side effect. Be aliased.

Make feedback. Be noise.

Networked artists:
Roxanne Brousseau-Félio (Canada)
_8_O_8_ (USA)
catgotwasted (UK)
Setenay Ozbek (Turkey)
Katy Hick (Brunei Darussalam)
Nancy Bechtol (USA)
Audri Phillips USA)
Jorge Llaca Serna (Mexico)
Ali El Hadj Tahar (Algeria)
Nahrain Michael (Iraq)
Marco Battaglini (Costa Rica)
Joao Santos (Qatar)
N. Ajayan (India)
Marc Lougee (Manila)
Mir Kian Roshannia (Iran)
Frédéric Boulleaux (France)
Debbi (Sosum) Chan (USA)
D. Lammie-Hanson (USA)
Russel Hulsey (USA)
Dana Tomsa Oberhoffer (Italy)
Lois Siegel (Canada)
Tirthankar Biswas (India)
Louise Dionne Jackson (UK)
David Poulter (Taiwan)
Michelle Wardley (Australia)
Julie Collins (Australia)
Rex Bruce (USA)
Tiffany Trenda (USA)
Victor Solomon (USA)
Takaki Hashimoto (Japan)

Video artists:
Patricia Stone
Lana Citowsky
Sim Sadler
Raissa Contreras
Patricia Wells
Susan Shaw
Sylvia Toy
L. Ashwyn
Teresa Christiansen
Jessica Leza
Teresa Brazen
Jon Shumway
Nelson and SIxta
Kiyomitsu Saito
Julia Morgan-Leamon
Hyla Skopitz
Jesus Jimenez
Michael Lasater

My Film, Puddle Song, Showing in Berlin & Barcelona

Exciting week on the video art front! Puddle Song, a short art film I wrote/directed with the help of a fabulous crew + actors (via San Francisco-based film co-op Scary Cow) was selected for the following shows:

“Best Of” the Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema in collaboration with Ob-Art Collective
Barcelona, Spain
July 14, 2010
Punt Multimedia, Casa del Mig, Parc de L’Espanya Insutrial
Calle Muntades, 5 – 08014 Barcelona

On The Wall
Berlin, Germany
July 2, 2010
ada Studios
Schönhauser Allee 73 / QuARTier 73, 2.HH
10437 Berlin
Film list/descriptions
* In this curated series of films, each selected piece addresses one of 5 themes – location, sound, costume, movement, camera angle. ‘Puddle Song’ was selected for sound.

If You Need a Boost…If You’re Having a Bad Day…

Go HERE: http://tinyurl.com/1cl9
Type your name in the box, and watch yourself smile.

Forbidden Tree

The National Film Board of Canada, in association with the Cannes Short Film Corner, welcomes you to the 6th NFB Online contest. Vote for your favorite short film.

Director: Benafsheh Modaressi
Length: 7’14
Origin: Iran

A story of an imaginary city under a harsh ruler. Love is forbidden, and freedom a distant memory. Few people have the courage to fall in love, challenging the forbidden symbols….This film has no dialogue because the people are too scared to express themselves….in the end, love shines back in to the city. The courage of those who dared to love has saved it. The last clip shows a child tasting life and freedom by eating the apple (symbol of life) freely.

Tehranian-born Banafsheh Modaressi worked from 1999 as a freelance photojournalist and reporter for magazines such as Paris Match, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as well as several local newspapers. Government restrictions in Iran hampered her photojournalism career, so Modaressi obtained an M.A. in Graphics and Design in 2005 then began teaching at the University of Applied Science and Technology in Tehran. She has had over 20 photo and mixed-media exhibitions, both inside and outside of Iran, and her love of photography and drawing ultimately led her to animation. Modaressi started film-making in the workshop of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami ın 2008 and followed his workshops from Tehran to Villa Arson.

What Happens When Children Build Their Own 3-Story Playground

The Kolle 37 bauspielplatz in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of Berlin is a wonderland. A place of imagination and exploration that melts even the most hardened cynics. A social hub for the neighborhood, a place that parents want to go. A soaring structural and architectural delight that has a better safety record than playgrounds that have been designed to be ’safe’.

Does YOUR Death Move YOU?

My friend Scott Berkun really threw me for one. He sent me a submission to a blog/community project I started entitled “What Moves You?“. The gist is simple: people submit their answer to that question, I curate the responses and then post for the public. It’s supposed to be an inspiration library, an abstract mapping of our emotional core, a kick in the butt, an eye opener, a make-me-feel-something kind of place.

Ever since I got Scott’s submission (Scott Is Moved By…His Own Death) (which you MUST MUST read), I’ve been asking myself a question in the morning: If I were to die this evening, what would be my #1 priority for today? And, I mean that in the context of what I was already planning (not shifting gears dramatically and hopping a plane to another country). This question has been helping me get really clear about what is really important to me.

Also, I can’t stop thinking about how disassociated we are to our own death. What a strange illusion we live in — we know we will die, and yet we live as if this life thing lasts forever, taking so very, very much for granted.