Scott Stark

This film is a succession of visual and aural "notes" generated by the patterns in animals' hides, which are arranged and re-edited into a complex musical architecture, developing intricate rhythms not unlike the complex syncopations found in traditional African music. Elements of sand, dirt, light and shadow cross-reference the film's emulsion with evolutionary history and provide a second level of musical structuring through which the first layer is filtered. The animals' fur patterns, which evolved naturally as camouflage to hide them from predators, ironically now make the animals more visible to human predators who are attracted by their exotic uniqueness. This cinematic analogy underscores modern humanity's relationship to the natural world.

The movements across the 2-dimensional space, and in and out of elevators through 3-dimensional space, suggest a conceptual map of the visible environment, which is perhaps drawn by the camera itself. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2010.

Worldly surfaces, shifting shadows and overlooked patterns: a series of short 35mm films generated from digital still images and printed onto movie film. The top and bottom half of each image alternate in the projector gate, arranged in a dizzying array of rhythms and patterns. The images also bleed onto the optical soundtrack area of the film, generating their own unexpected sounds.

Abstractions are gently lifted from the urban palette and are posited against shapes both organic and inorganic, in an ebb and flow of urban movement. A kind of breathing. Shot entirely on 16mm film.

Compressive/Percussive is a double-projector performance using two digital video projectors. The imagery is taken from a double-decker interstate freeway a few blocks from my current residence in Austin, Texas. At certain times of the day, this monstrous structure, which years ago laid waste to a thriving neighborhood and divided the city between the haves on the west and the have-nots on the east, comes alive with a mesmerizing interplay of light, shadow and rapidly moving vehicles. The sequences are all randomly edited using a random sequence generator I developed for Final Cut Pro, with cuts between 4 and 10 frames in length. During the performance, I will use the computer to pull the sequences together in real time, at times matching them up, and at times letting the images drift in relation to each other. Compressive/Percussive is a meditative study of a monolithic urban structure that is both monstrous and beautiful.

NOEMA is philosopher Husserl's term for "the meaning of an object that is formed in the domain of consciousness." Pornographic videos are mined for the unerotic moments between moments, when the actors are engaging in an awkward change of position or when the camera pans meaningfully away from the urgent mechanisms of sex up to a cheap painting on the wall or the distant embers of a crackling fire. A piercing musical score loops endlessly throughout, and the repetitive and curious iterations of movement become furtive searches for meaning within their own blandness.

Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The "girlie" cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

More Than Meets The Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda is a remake of one of Jane Fonda's exercise videos, with Scott Stark as the performer, set in a variety of locations, both public and private. The filmmaker underscores a sense of the supposed embarrassment a male might feel by inhabiting what is essentially a feminine landscape. By overlaying the diligent exercise imagery with provocative and pointed quotations from Jane Fonda's activist days, as well as her thoughtful ruminations from her recent autobiography on war, political transformation, female anxiety, and the "need to be perfect," this remake gives voice to the artist's feelings about the criminality of contemporary war-making and our complicity in a world that gives rise to a kind of cultural bulimia. In the process, the video becomes an indirect chronicle of the remaking of a celebrity activist and the cultural shifts that allowed it to happen.

All About The Illusion (2006) uses two synchronized cameras, one pointing forward and the other behind, to explore an abandoned train repair yard: a site of industrial neglect, decay, toxicity and new growth. The journey also becomes a shared experience of visual discovery with a close friend.

An instructional video for a software development platform is illustrated with found family photos and musical accompaniment.

“Discarded Christmas trees, colorfully arranged flea-market finds, a museum of animal kills, microscopic views of kitchenware, and other overlooked cultural artifacts are interwoven with flickering journeys through mysterious, shadowy realms. Traces/Legacy uses a device called a film recorder to print a series of still digital images onto 35mm film. The 35mm projector can only show a portion of the image at a time, so the viewer sees alterations between the top and bottom half of each frame. The images also overlap onto the optical sound area of the film, generating their own unique sounds.”—Scott Stark

"Probability" (1985) presents a series of handmade signs featuring wild headlines taken from the tabloid "Weekly World News". Stark temporarily intervenes into the everyday scene of a bustling corner of San Francisco’s Financial District where he held a day job.

An instructional video for a software development platform is illustrated with found family photos and musical accompaniment.

Two cats become visual elements as they are playfully dragged through fields of pattern and color, followed by a manic section of breathless vocalizing by the filmmaker.

“Using found family photographs (mostly 35mm slides), I cracked open the family archive to generate imaginative and at times illogical narratives. “The Last Forever” (in collaboration with Polish filmmaker Kamila Kuc) unravels a story of a missing spouse and possible murder." - Scott Stark

Archival films from itinerant filmmakers who traveled the south in the 1930s through the 1950s are reworked, the footage presented as ghostly apparitions in modern urban Texas settings.

Hand-printed sections from 35mm movie trailers create a chaotic and densely layered retelling of Hollywood form. Loosely about desire, fear of coupling, and the consequences of moving forward, with results both catastrophic and ecstatic.

A film for three Super-8 projectors by Scott Stark

A Super-8 film by Scott Stark

Driven attempts to blur the lines between video gaming and urban reality, finding in both a seductive resonance.