Context Shorts: Experimental Program

Zero Feet Zero Inches is a "datamosh" video employing open source material from historic footage hosted by at archive.org. This piece features a performance of Variations V by John Cage, with a dance elements by the Merce Cunningham Company. The West German television performance footage was juxtaposed with video from NASA Apollo missions.  

Variations V was originally composed as a mixed-media piece, involving contemporary dance movement, electronics, film, and distorted video images by Nam June Paik. Stan VanDerBeek also made major contributions to this staging, which debuted in the same period as early human space flight. Through the video Nohe desired to honor Variation V's experimental approach and  Cage's questioning of time itself, especially the notion that time could be made to stand still.  

The sound was created on a modular synthesizer, using recordings of John Cage as a foundational element. Video datamoshing and sound synthesis by Timothy Nohe.

A woman looks around in her dream. Deserted landscapes and invisible things are left. The wind carries her memories.

On the very first day, Vadim began to build towers of stones. But it wasn't until the end of our stay there that I seemed to have solved the mystery of the pyramids. Probably, these are the stairs to the sky that should be made of solid stone and at the same time very fragile. Existing only in the balance. Breaking perception — turning heaviness into fluff. And in full accord with gravity.

The second stone was laid by Katya — when she went to her classes with Asaf (the language does not turn to call this Shaolin "contact improvisation classes") she brought a bag of stones. We moved these stones, then the stones moved us. Sometimes we became monolithic with them, and sometimes we forced them to stick to one point in space.

There were also special stones, stones with arrows drawn. Directed stones, stones-vectors, within the indivisibility of which there was already movement.

We spent the whole week in silence. And this video was invented by me and filmed in silence, too. They explained themselves with their hands, drawings, but I was sure that everything would work out, because we didn't talk, but listened.

And we also had only a couple of hours for filming between the rains)

I would like to dedicate this video to matter — when it manifests itself as a source of knowledge. And the masters. Those whose bodies themselves become knowledge in order to transmit it to others without distortion, knowledge — as a physical quantity, as a weight — from stone to stone.

In Éist we are invited to listen to the dancer. 

An experimental short dance film created to explore the musicality of percussive dance. The soundtrack was created through a collaboration with Irish dancer, Stephanie Keane, Concertina player, Cormac Begley and music producer, Moises Mas Garcia.

With sound and movement, Éist explores the internal experience of the contemporary traditional dancer, speaking to wider themes of identity, authenticity, defiance and reclamation.

Based upon the legend of Sisyphus and using the voice of the late-philosopher Alan Watts, Yurodivy explores contemporary humankind's relentless pursuit for wealth and happiness.

Clarity and obfuscation, entropy and order- explored through movement, music, video and film. The Sound of Sinking Ships is a dance improvisation documented in film, video, and animation. This video highlights movement itself as the figure flows through mediums, styles and levels of obfuscation and abstraction. Including video, degraded 16mm and 8mm film, and hand drawn animation.

Oona Taper is a Chicago-based conceptual artist working with film, installation, and animation. She is invested in materiality and the  andmade, using materials as symbols that are in themselves expressive. She creates liminal spaces between tangible  bjects and the smooth, virtual world of video. Her work uses chance,  ntropy, and decay to describe everyday hauntings, forgotten ephemera, and mundane apocalypses.

Kaja Škorjanc , Director: 
I started from a period of (over)saturated work, loss of energy, stress, decay, transience, overload, effort... In search of moving away from negativism, contemporary dance and rave were two ways out of feeling left behind. Although fairly different "relaxation" techniques have a common point for me, which is the feeling of timelessness, energy, euphoria that fills you, frees you, you are in a moment of detachment, trance. It is in both cases allowed and accepted any expression through dance, which has unlimited possibilities. Sensual experiencing music through movement, where the body leads the rhythm, where it is allowed on the dance floor individual free expression.

Inspired by Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble.

El lago de Cuitzeo -Cuitzeo’s lake, (Mexico’s second largest), is in danger of extinction. Urban development, change of land use, fires and negligence are provoking its imminent drought.

Sylphides 3.1 is the first entry in the Sylphides 3.0 video series, created from the hybridity of dance and 3D simulation. The name of the collection is a reference to Germanic mythology and works of importance in the history of dance: “La Sylphide” (1832) and “Les Sylphides” (1909). They are used as inspiration to provoke the relations between classic and contemporary, and to reflect on what is to come in the future of Art and Dance. Several bodies. Various dances.

The isolated body is an infinite plane with instantaneous cuts, an almost motionless movement of the body, it is an approximation of the consciousness of the body in isolation...

The space where live performances happen is usually divided: artists and audiences stay apart and are rarely brought directly together, much less asked to interact. The stage isn’t just sacred: it is prohibited. As such, audiences usually remain passive observers, and the performers the object of their fetishistic gaze. Let’s try and bridge that gap. Centered on one dancer, this collaborative, multi-sourced dance video is based on interconnectivity, collectiveness, and the participating audience’s own smartphones and spontaneity.

In Russian language there is a saying ”утро вечера мудренее”- the morning is wiser than the evening. This means that in the darkest point of the evening, in our most emotionally vulnerable state, we risk making poor impulsive choices; choices that we would not otherwise make in the morning, which breaths clarity and even wisdom into our thoughts. As a kid, hearing this saying, I used to picture a physical journey of the thoughts, from dusk to dawn; imagining a stranger as he walked his way through the night, until he reached the ease of a clear mind by sunrise. UTRO, means morning in Russian; and in this film, the concept of morning is embodied as the culmination of a long and winding, physical and emotional journey. Spanning the distance and time of a single night; UTRO captures the tension which dissolves and resolves, in the city and ourselves, as the quietness of the morning approaches.

I saw myself in the cracks between the buildings of the old city, running, fleeing and escaping...

"Zar" is the name of a mythtical creature in the culture of Hormozgan (Iran), that rides the waves from the south, it conquers everyone on it's way and makes one weak, ill and helpless, in a way she/he can't endure life anymore. 

In every region there is a chosen "shaman" who is called "Mama Zar" or "Baba Zar" and tries to cure the conquered person by holding the "zar ritual". By inviting those who have been cured before who are called the "ahl'e hava" (people of the wind) and by playing ritual music and dancing they make a ritual circle and enthuse the Zar so much that it dances away from the hosts body. 

Zar Al-Sana'i (industrial zar) is a free interpretation of this ritual that is held today.

We’re trying to find ourselves in the dark, trying to find a way to behave. We’re choosing the way, right or wrong, if it exists. But everything we’re doing through our life is a reborn from the inside world to outside one. Birthing is painful. But there is only one way to see the light.

It was interesting to combine artificial intelligence, human movement and nature. Improvisation of the character, decisions that the drone makes on its own, based on its own algorithms, and nature that exists according to its own laws.

There is nothing to be written in stone that lasts forever.

Isn’t time probably one of the strangest things we humans have come up with a term for?

Everything happens under the infinite umbrella of space and time.

Transformation and change seem to be the core components of our existence...