House of Sound
Saturday, June 5th, 20:00h, free entrance
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
4454 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, USA

MOCAD and Toronto's Images Festival are thrilled to be collaborating on an evening of short experimental films culled from recent festival presentations, alongside classic avant-garde shorts. This salon-style screening will highlight experimental short works by film and video artists from around the world who are pushing the boundaries of the medium in form and/or content.

Whether the instigator of a melodramatic moment, a vessel of history or the materialist marker of time, the presence of recorded music throughout the films and videos presented in House of Sound are all united by the role of sound as harbinger of change.

The musical selections found in these contemporary and historical works by Keren Cytter, Maya Deren, Nelson Henricks, Laida Lertxundi, Vanessa Renwick and Nikolai Ursin merge the popular and the perplexing: the songs playing back into each house mark control gained, control lost.

Cinema Project: Makino Takashi
June 1 and 2, 19:00h, $7 Suggested Donation
Clinton Street Theatre
2552 SE Clinton St., Portland, OR, USA

Cinema Project brings Japanese video artist Makino Takashi to Portland for two nights of dynamic images and sound, including the world premiere of his newest work Inter View with a live score composed and performed by Portland-based musicians Tara Jane O'Neil and Brian Mumford. Preceded by a night of short recent videos with soundtracks composed by Jim O'Rourke, Takashi's work is experimental and abstract, exploring dark and crackling landscapes heightened by the transfer process from film to video. He will be in attendance to present and discuss his work.

Takashi describes his latest work, Inter View, as "dark, fast, complex, blue, and poetic," revealing the potential intangibility of his images. For this world premiere, curated and presented by Cinema Project, Takashi collaborates with Portland-based musicians Tara Jane O'Neil and Brian Mumford who will perform live their original score.

With glimpses of representation rising to an often scratched and hand-painted surface, texture is key in the work of the Japanese artist. Combining his images with dynamic soundscapes created by experimental musicians like Jim O'Rourke, Takashi's work is a seemingly tenuous bending of both time and space. A telecine master, Takashi uses the transfer process to translate initially film-based images into crackling digital landscapes, making him part of a new generation of Japanese experimental film and video artists.

Tuesday June 1st
- No is E [2006, video, color, sound, 23 min.]
- Elements of Nothing [2007, video, color, sound, 20 min.]
- still in cosmos [2009, video, color, sound,18 min.]
All music by Jim O'Rourke

Wednesday June 2nd
- The Seasons [2008, video, color, sound, 30 min.] music by Jim O'Rourke
- while we are here [2009, video, color, sound, 15 min.] music by COLLEEN
- The Low Storm [2009, video, color, sound, 16 min.] music by Lawrence English
- Inter View [2010, video, color, 25 min.] original score performed by Tara Jane O'Neil and Brian Mumford

Supported in part by a grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council

Directors Lounge: Within Landscape and Time
Video Works by Elena Näsänen
Wednesday May 26th, 21:00h, 4€
Z-Bar, Bergstraße 2, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Elena Näsänen’s reference for her work on video is the big screen, the glory of grand cinema, and with that, the picture of nature in cinemascope. She is one of the few artists who work exclusively on video, and who are rarely shown on a cinema screen. Instead, the audience finds her work in art shows, galleries and international exhibitions.

The films of the Finnish artist who lives in Helsinki contain structures of narrative cinema: most of them are written by the artist, are played by actors, and they are building up a suspense of uncanny possible occurrences, which the audience anticipates to happen. In “Before Rain” Elena uses fragments of Hollywood crime movies that stay unresolved, in “Night” a female character follows an urge to leave the house at night searching through the adjunct woods, and in “Wasteland” a group of women are on their way to an unknown task and destiny.

There are two other elements, however, that seem to mark Elena’s work just as strongly: time and nature. Time is strictly connected with images. If her images stay in our memory, their time seems to persist, thus making time ambivalent, a “film time” that stands still or becomes endless, depending on the viewer. Nature, on the other hand seems to dominate the image, and Elena’s characters. Maybe, Elena Näsänen here revives a contemporary view onto the sublime other: Nature as it has become the unfamiliar other for us city dwellers. And this mystery may be contained by the Australian outback, the Chinese yellow mountains, or the Finnish landscape.

Artist Link:
http://www.elenanasanen.com/

Directors Lounge
http://www.directorslounge.net/
More infos and video stills:
http://www.richfilm.de/filmUpload/1-framesElenaNasanen.html