SFIFF new media events

Join us at the following new media events at the San Francisco International Film Festival (e-mail to arrange tickets and rides)


Generator Thu, May 1 / 1:45 / Kabuki / GENE01K and Sun, May 4 / 8:30 / Kabuki / GENE04K
The 20 short videos in this program run quickly between intensely complicated structures and achingly beautiful abstractions. These works use computers and software design as a bridge between traditional media like film and sculpture. Each of these animated works, presenting finely crafted visions and sounds, is an example of “generative art.” The term defines artistic production generated through algorithms or other computational processes. In essence, an animator, engineer, designer or group produces parameters within which particular works materialize randomly. It is as if the artist produced her own counterpart—the artist she wishes existed—and had her make the video you will watch in this program. Another unique aspect of generative work is that the media produced through specific virtual algorithms or processes can in many cases vary wildly. The algorithms that generate the videos could just as easily make sculptures, music, drawings, paintings or poems the form of the finished works. In this program, SFIFF will present single-channel video work only. The bulk of the program was assembled by Lia and Miguel Carvalhais for a Generative Art program presented at the 2006 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. Three other works were taken from the forthcoming DVD Advanced Beauty, assembled by Matt Pyke of Universal Everything and Freeform.





Scott Arford: Static Life Wed, May 7 / 7:15 / Kabuki / SCOT07K
Over the last decade-plus, Scott Arford has quietly been shaping the Bay Area’s new media culture, producing video and musical works, developing exhibition spaces and engineering at (among other places) Recombinant Media Labs. This program presents Arford’s artistic practice through both a retrospective and his latest multimedia performance, Still Life (almost) Another Day in Three Acts. One trope reworked throughout Arford’s artistic career is that of “static.” Arford’s incredibly soothing, ethereal pieces conjure stillness and contemplation. But Arford also visualizes the intense dance of minute structures like electrical static that appears when objects are closely examined. His works tend to oscillate between the poles of movement and stasis, and Still Life is no different in this regard. In it Arford edits and condenses a classic Italian horror film, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (directed by genre master Jorge Grau), into a super slo-mo series of stills. He transforms the violent epic into a rich visual feast, while composing a new soundtrack for it live and onstage. The zombie film is a perfect vehicle for Arford’s interests, as he kills the film and brings it back to life—the undead being both a little more still and intense.