The Hoosac Institute Journal #5
If you haven’t encountered The Hoosac Institute, you are in for a treat. I am delighted to be included in Journal 5. 
“The Hoosac Institute is a curated platform for text and image focusing on pieces that don’t fit conventional disciplinary narratives.” Girl, do I feel at home in that genre category. So many in-between and not-quite-realized ideas by brilliant folks can be found here. My contribution is a new film trailer (Trailer II, 2020) for Survivalist Cinema, made from fragments of 1970s eco disaster and survivalist films processed with analog tools at Signal Culture. More on the trailers here.
Deep thanks to Jenny Perlin, Director and mastermind, of course. I am a true fan of her work.
Also take note of the excellent hashtag navigation:
#avoidance
#book
#breakup
#california
#care
#ceramic
#collaboration
#contrast
#creditcards
#displacement
#dolphin
#double
#drawing
#ennui
#essay
#estrangement
#framework
#futurity
#game
#grid
#insurgency
#language
#list
#loss
#misunderstanding
#nature
#notebook
#nuclear
#paintbrush
#password
#photography
#poetry
#pollution
#reenactment
#reflection
#sculpture
#sound
#star
#technology
#video
#website
Body Memory at Union Docs
So fun to introduce and facilitate this discussion with Faith Holland and Seth Barry Watter of their essay on work by Shana Moulton paired with Jennifer Reeder’s terrific film A Million Miles Away on the occasion of the launch of Millennium Film Journal #70, Body Memory. So many thanks to Union Docs in Brooklyn, one of my favorite venues for independent and experimental cinema, for hosting and co-presenting this evening on December 15th. Having grown up surrounded by “New Age” influences I particularly enjoyed delving into Shana Moulton’s work and remain a big fan. Faith and Seth sparkled with brilliance.
From Union Docs:
Among the common tropes of the New Age healing narrative is that the self must be dismembered before it can be made whole. Visualization and channeling, aromatherapy and crystals are aids to that labor of self-excavation. Moulton’s deft use of the video medium has often gone far to portray such experience—to make graphically manifest the metaphysics of feeling-good. […] The riddle posed by Whispering Pines as a whole is: what’s wrong? Each episode attempts in some way to solve it. Moulton offers one clue in Whispering Pines 7 (2006) when she sings in the form of a cubistic sphinx: “Now that I’m a woman, everything is strange.” —Faith Holland & Seth Watter “From Picture Plane to Astral Plane: Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines”
We are excited to host a festive evening dedicated to the latest volume of Millennium Film Journal, BODY MEMORY. In celebration, we have invited featured writers from this volume, Faith Holland and Seth Barry Watter, to unpack and walk us through their essay “Picture Plane to Astral Plane” that examines Video Artist Shana Moulton’s video performance series Whispering Pines. We will share a program of Moulton’s videos alongside Jennifer Reeder’s film A Million Miles Away, also featured in this volume of the journal to open up a conversation around contemporary feminist filmmaking perspectives and practice. Millennium Film Journal’s Editor Grahame Weinbren will be in attendance with Rachel Stevens to introduce this volume and the program. Following a presentation from Seth Watter and Faith Holland, Stevens will lead a conversation with them on the films and their work.
https://uniondocs.org/event/2019-12-15-body-memory/
Environmental Storytelling and VR Symposium at Penn
I’m delighted to be speaking at the upcoming Environmental Storytelling and Virtual Reality tw0-day symposium in the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities on November 22nd. There should be some great conversations and I’m looking forward to learning more about what goes on in Environmental Humanities at Penn in general. I”ll be talking about Oyster City, the AR game/walking tour I made with Meredith Drum using original software developed by Phoenix Toews. Our project came out of our interest in getting people to interact with actual places and in knowledge and experience that is situated. We went for mixed reality using geolocation—in this case on Governors Island in NYC—rather than something virtual and fully immersive.
At least one VR experience I am looking forward to is Lost City of Mer, created by Liz Canner and team, a beautiful dive underwater which includes getting to build a colorful coral reef.
Queer Paranormal (an exhibition concerning Shirley Jackson and The Haunting of Hill House)
Queer Paranormal (an exhibition concerning Shirley Jackson and The Haunting of Hill House), a project I co-curated with the curatorial collective Two Chairs and Anne Thompson, Director of the Usdan Gallery at Bennington opens October 31st!
Photo: Peggy Ahwesh, still image from “Nocturne” (1998)
Queer Paranormal (an exhibition concerning Shirley Jackson and The Haunting of Hill House)
Curated by Jillian Brodie, Cindy Smith and Rachel Stevens of Two Chairs; and Anne Thompson, director of Usdan Gallery, with special thanks to Two Chairs collective members Yinan Cheng, E.H. Dalton, Tony Do and George Wichelns
October 29-December 7, 2019
Halloween Opening Party | October 31, 6:00 pm
Screening of The Haunting | October 31, 8:00 pm
Lecture by Patricia White | November 5, 7:00 pm
Artist Talk and Screening | November 19, 7:00 pm
Participating Artists
Peggy Ahwesh, APRIORI (techno-botanical coven), Anna Campbell, Tony Do, Lana Lin, Susan MacWilliam, Senem Pirler, Macon Reed, Zoe Walsh, and Sasha Wortzel.
Queer Paranormal (an exhibition concerning Shirley Jackson and The Haunting of Hill House) presents a range of artistic practices “haunted” by historical, political, and sexual difference. Taking Jackson’s gothic horror classic and its 1963 film version as jumping-off points, the exhibition identifies queerness in themes including witchcraft, the uncanny, the stranger, and the haunted house as undiscovered country and object of desire. Site-specifically located in North Bennington, where Jackson wrote The Haunting of Hill House, Queer Paranormal installs artworks in locations across the Bennington campus, including the Jennings music building—a former mansion believed to be haunted and said to have partly influenced Jackson’s portrait of Hill House. Works in mediums including painting, sculpture, film, video, and sound are spectral in their subject matter and occasionally positioned to otherworldly effect, such as pieces by Senem Pirler and Sasha Wortzel that perform sonic hauntings of everyday spaces.
…more info on the Queer Paranormal PRESS RELEASE
Puffin Foundation grant
So honored to receive funding from the Puffin Foundation for the research and film project I am working on. It the first grant we applied for! The working title is Place of the Big River (Kaniatarowanénhne) or On the Rough Waters (Kahnewake) and the project explores ecological, infrastructural and territorial entanglement at the St. Lawrence River. Artist and filmmaker Pawel Wojtasik is a primary collaborator and cinematographer. We still have way to go with funding, but this is an auspicious start. Thank you Puffin Foundation!