Directing
In "Lossless No. 1," Baron and Goodwin attempt to visualize the difference between film and digital video by isolating a particularly powerful sequence of 48 frames from "The Wizard of Oz," scanned from a 35mm film print, but also extracted from a DVD release of the film. The artists then digitally subtracted the DVD frames from the scanned film frames, leaving an image that reveals the difference between the analog and digital formats. The result is 31 seconds of Dorothy's ruby slippers clicking together, over and over, the shoes, her legs, and her dress a shimmering beacon, an immortal moment of intense wishing.
Nearest Neighbor explores the relationship between technology and the living, applied here to birds. How far is humankind willing to go to invent tools designed to replace their understanding of the world? In this film, transhumanist AI technologies turn into ornithologists, resulting in some unlikely and absurdly comical scenarios.
Lossless #2 is a mesmerizing assemblage of compressed digital images of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s 1943 masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon. Baron and Goodwin play heavily with Teiji Ito’s 1959 soundtrack, making the film’s lyrical ambience feel more astonishing than ever before
The keyframes — reference frames that define the starting and ending points of smooth transitions — from a digital version of John Ford's 1956 Western "The Searchers" have been removed, resulting in a fluid movement, "unanchored from the original photographic print," per provided information. Horseback riders slide along the landscape, trailing pixilated fragments of themselves, as if leaving traces of their presence on the scene. A man turns his head and his lips run along his face as if smeared with make-up, blocky clouds slide across the sky, and splashy cubes are kicked up when the riders cross a river.
The picture has been removed from Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity, leaving only the vectors that describe apparent movement within the frame. Here, a black void is filled with a grid of white dots from which white lines are anchored and shift about hypnotically. This is the digital medium, stripped down to its skeleton and exposing the formal qualities of the film. It is much like encountering not a foreign language, but an inhuman language; a language meant for machines, though created by humans.
The great voyages to the "New World" were seen as expanding the frontiers of the visible and displacing those of the invisible, therefore maps from that time render the real and imaginary. The film follows a voyage of the Brazilian Military in search of an imaginary island with the same name as their country. In the myth from 1483 Brazil, or Hy-Brazil, is known to exist to the west of Ireland and above the Fortunate Islands. Visão do Paraíso is an examination of the capacity of the human imagination and computer simulations to construct environments. Amidst the fine threshold of the real, simulated, and imagined, the film analyzes the contemporary ideas of virtual reality and their ambition to expand the frontiers of the physical world into a "New World".
A three-minute digital video of a water ballet film by Busby Berkeley. Bodies become flowering abstractions, blooming and undulating forms slowly twirl and revolve. One scene resembles a chain of duplicating bacteria, snaking around each time it doubles its numbers. The watery, almost kaleidoscopic effect is ethereal and mysterious, slow flowing movements giving the sense of a sacred ritual.
