For part six of our Teaser Screening series, writer, cultural critic and journalist Juliet Jacques will introduce a documentary on the life and work of artist Bas Jan Ader. The film will be followed by a selection of Ader's film and video works during which Jacques will read a short text relating to Bas Jan Ader's decision to cross the Atlantic on a 13ft boat.

(Near) extinct technologies make sound visible in this program of shorts that delve into ideas of knowledge, memory, and communication. On a Chladni Plate, a device that marked the birth of acoustics, grains of sand, moving like Busby Berkeley dancers, form intricate patterns in response to changing sound frequencies, their shapes recalling the utopian quest for a “pure,” onomatopoeic alphabet. Wax cylinder recordings combine with modern scientific instruments to animate a text by Rainer Maria Rilke on the possibility of hearing the dead by playing their skulls with a gramophone needle. A histrionic voice-over, translated into a wave of small flames on a Ruben’s Tube, provokes unexpected associations, from the biblical burning bush to various acts of ventriloquism in pop culture...