Ariana Gerstein

"It shows my interest in materials, medium, and apparatus of cinema. The sound will be produced from the visual on the optical soundtrack – for some parts, I used a 35mm still camera to expose the soundtrack area, and I scratched off the film emulsion directly for other parts. This is my senior thesis project at Binghamton University, and Julie Murray was my advisor." (Tomonari Nishikawa)

A literal corporal imprint of the skin, expressing the layers of history and identity.

Images from Chicago elevated train, Museum of Science and Industry, and nature surrounding Lake Michigan are collected and combined frame by frame.

Notes on Milk is a short variation of the 2007 feature documentary Milk in the Land: Ballad of an American Drink. Ariana Gerstein and Monteith McCollum, whose Hybrid aired on POV in 2002, take a quirky and poetic look at some lesser-known aspects of America’s favorite drink: the industry’s spiritual underpinnings, politics and the struggle of independent farmers.

Close the Lid Gently is a video made entirely from 2 home desktop scanners- one a photo scanner, the other a refurbished low end document scanner. Each has it's own texture and sees the domestic environment in it's own particular way, one scan at a time. The 'narrator' is taken from the sound of an instructional software disk, which accompanied one of the scanners. This piece is deals with the deliberate misuse/re-purposing of commercial image producing machines and celebrates a slow, individual, low end, approach to the motion picture making process.

In the darkness outside of our cities, there are lights that we have forgotten how to see. Alice laments the loss of her view of the universe, one of her initial reasons for living in the country. The change in her environment is the result of "security lighting" for a large corporate storage facility.

By interrupting film in the developing stage, the film offers an exploration of the chemical properties of the medium.