Zoe Beloff
Directing
Biography
Zoe Beloff works across a wide range of media, including film, stereoscopic projection performance, interactive media, installation and drawing. Seeking to graphically manifest the mind's unconscious processes in her work, she uses both archaic apparatuses and new analog/digital hybrids. Beloff has written that she considers herself a medium, an interface between the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary. With each project she aims to connect the present with the past, to create new visual languages where, she writes, "modern media will once again be invested with the uncanny." Beloff, who has directed many independent films, has also created numerous interactive digital media projects. Her interest in early cinema has led her to explore links between 19th-century industrial mechanics and 20th- and 21st-century computer technologies, in the transition from the "real" world to virtual space. Writes Beloff: "Interactive cinema is itself an emerging media. Its language is in the process of being invented. This is my ongoing project." Beloff has collaborated with artists from other disciplines, including composer John Cale, the Wooster Group Theater Company, and composer, singer and performance artist Shelley Hirsch. Beloff was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and moved to New York in 1980. She received an MA from Edinburgh University and an MFA in film studies from Columbia University, and was in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2003), The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (1997), NYFA (1997, 2001), The Graham foundation, The Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and Change City College to Queens College CUNY. She has received individual artist grants from foundations including NYSCA, Jerome Foundation and the Experimental Television Center, and has had residencies at Harvestworks, Hallwalls in Buffalo and Tesla in Berlin. She teaches digital media at City College in New York. Her work has been shown internationally at venues that include The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Freud Dream Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Biennial de l'image, Paris; Galerie Vox, Montreal; San Francisco Cinematheque, 2009 Athens Biennale; and MuHKA Museum. Antwerp, among others. Her exhibition The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and their Circle was exhibited at the Coney Island Museum in Brooklyn from October 2009 to November 2010. Beloff lives in New York.
Known For
Beyond is a mysterious virtual world. In a playful spirit of philosophical inquiry, it explores the paradoxes of technology, desire and the paranormal posed since the birth of mechanical reproduction. One might call it an investigation of the "dream life" of technology, from around 1850 to 1940.
Beyond
Alice ends up in the derelict houses of Coney Island and Times Square. She sinks into a wonderland of decadence and despair, into the no-mans-land of lost souls, charlatans, broken dreams and cheap perversions.
Wonderland USA
In 1948 the James Agee wrote a scenario for his lifelong hero, Charlie Chaplin. Deeply disturbed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Agee imagined New York destroyed. In the ruins, Chaplin's Little Tramp builds a shack in Central Park. Gradually a small community of the dispossessed grows up around him. For Agee, his story was a thought experiment about how one might start again in the aftermath of disaster, to go beyond capitalism and just how hard that is in the face of our modern technological world. The film focuses on his imaginative journey and what it might mean for us today.
The Tramp's New World
Inspired by J.G. Ballard's novel Crash, the film focuses on Jack and Diana Weston, who, after suffering a car crash, find their lives intruded upon by Dr. de Freis, a chronicler of car accidents who attempts to verify the psychological changes that occur in victims of accidents and the subsequent articulation of their anxieties.
Nightmare Angel
(Fictional history): Year: 1926 Filmmaker: Albert Grass Transfer note: copied at 18 frames per second from a 16mm black and white Kodak safely film original. Running time: 2 minutes 41 seconds Silent
The Midget Crane
Zoe Beloff Surprise: Bertold Brecht and Walter Benjamin have been reincarnated as an Iranian and an African-American and they roam today’s New York. At times they are a comic duo, at others the voice of our conscience: the babbling couple provides good weapons to attack the world.
Exile
(Fictional history) A film by Stella Weiss (1962) 16mm silent
The Abandoned Ark
This interview is with Michael Paul Britto, Community Coordinator at Forsyth Satellite Academy High School, as well as an arts educator and artist.
A REALITY SHOW
This interview is with Ah Bao, a knife sharpener and shoe repair man in New York City's Chinatown.
SEVEN DAYS A WEEK
An exploration of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein's notes and drawings for a science fiction movie that he pitched to Paramount in 1930 about the residents of a skyscraper with walls and floors of clear glass.
Glass House
(Fictional history): Year: 1954 Filmmaker: Beverly d'Angelo Transfer note: copied at 24 frames per second from a 16mm Kodachrome original with magnetic stripped sound. Sound: from the album "Wild Percussion and Horns A'Plenty" Dick Schory's New Percussion Ensemble Running time: 3 minutes 5 seconds
The Lonely Chicken Dream
(Fictional history): Year: 1945 Filmmaker: Molly Lippman Transfer note: copied at 18 frames per second from a Regular 8mm black and white Kodak film, and Regular 8mm Kodachrome original. Running time: 3 minutes 46 seconds Silent
Chasing Louis Schnekowitz
(Fictional history): Year : 1964 Filmmaker: Robert Troutman "Bobby Beaujolais" Transfer note: copied at 18 frames per second from an 8mm Kodachrome camera original with magnetic stripped sound. Music: "The Man that Got Away" and "Somewhere over the Rainbow" sung by Judy Garland on the album, "Judy at Carnegie Hall" Running time: 5 minutes 10 seconds
My Dream of Dental Irritation
No description available.
Visitor
The title and the narrative are taken from the 1897 autobiography of Elizabeth d’Espérance, a materializing medium who could produce full body apparitions. We discover a lonely little girl who can conjure imaginary friends that appear, to her, completely real. This remarkable ability causes her much suffering, for upon reaching adolescence, she is diagnosed as mad on account of seeing people who are not there. Only later does she find a way to cultivate her gifts within the spiritualist movement.
Shadowland or Light from the Other Side
Augustine was the most extensively photographed of the young women hysterics at the Salpêtrière in Paris of the 1870's She was 'the Sarah Bernhardt' of the asylum. This is her story.
Charming Augustine
Our emotions are increasingly being turned into commodities, manipulated by global corporations. This hack of an IBM commercial suggests how. What does the future hold for a world where people are treated like objects, while online objects are being granted agency and becoming increasingly anthropomorphic?
The Cognitive Era
Teddy Weisengrund, a member of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society, recreates one of his dreams on film and analyzes it according to Freud's theories.
The Lion Dream
(Fictional history): Years: 1926,1927,1934 Filmmakers: not known Transfer note: copied at 18 frames per second from a 16mm black and white Kodak safely film original. Running time: 5 minutes 28 seconds Silent
The Society Documents Itself
Zoe Beloff introduces the other installation, Days of the Commune, in her exhibition at the Talbot Rice Gallery. Beloff studied the activities at Occupy Wall Street and created documentary style drawings of what she saw. She then recruited actors, activists and artists to take part in performances of Bert Brecht's play, 'Days of the Commune', written about the Paris Commune of 1871.