24th New York Queer Experimental Film Festival
Saturday, November 19, 2011 · 6:00pm
NOISE: Trans-Subversions in Global Media Networks
$12 ·  
Pumzi Image

At the turn of the 21st century, information technologies have transformed institutions of power into decentralized networks that link the everyday to the structural, the local to the global. Recent media and communication technologies, including the internet, computer and cell phone, are creating new conglomerate links between public/private life, mass media, science, military, government and finance, across local, national, regional and transnational scales. With greater everyday access, these newer technologies also make independent, locally adapted, interactive uses possible.

From different regions and diasporas, NOISE brings together transgender/queer media insurrections in the globally networked information economy. These shorts focus on the gender and sexual deviants, queer kin, street youth, activists, independent artists, laborers, migrants, and cultural workers that occupy the informal edges of conglomerate information infrastructures. More onscreen, online stream than film, video, game, performance, television, photography, or music, each piece exploits the interactivity, mobility, and liveness of networked media, rather than preserving the discrete aesthetics of medium, form, and genre. Together, they reject the replacement of one normative set of icons, images, messages, and protocols with another. And they flood the cocoons of atomized life in the so-called Age of Information with noise.

Sound Spectrum
Kenya (Robinson)
2010, USA, video, color, sound, 40 sec.

Neither mourning nor celebrating the transition from image to information, this piece shows the gradients of color, contrast, focus and signal that flow through so-called white noise.

Aventuras Familiares XXX
Cheto Castellano, Daniel Benavides, Lissette Olivares
2010, Chile, video, color, sound, Spanish w/English subtitles, 29 min.

Journey from the countryside to the Santiago metropolis with a motley family that includes ex-prostitute matriarch Trans, robber-clown father Payaso and porn star daughter Jot. Their epic search for their family tree brings them head-to-head with cyborg agents of the multinational media corporation that has seized the Chilean capital.

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Transsexual Dominatrix
Shawna Virago
2011, USA, video, color, sound, 3 min.

San Francisco underground muse Shawna Virago doles out lyrical pleasure-pain with a sweet growl. This power-femme flashes a whole arsenal of toys, singing, "I do it for the leather, I do it for the power, I do it for the pleasure of two-fifty an hour."

Transsexual Dominatrix Image
Transitions #NewYorkCity
Nadine Hutton
2011, South Africa/USA, video, color, sound, 6 min.

Drawn from the cell phone album of the director, a renowned South African photojournalist, this cell video turns snapshots into transitioning windows that capture the creative lives of New York City transgender/queer artists. Playing with the limits of montage, these moving cell images give impressions of a past-future, just shy of a memoire, vignette, or narrative sequence.

Transborder Immigrant Tool: Precession
Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 and BANG Lab
2009, USA, video, color, sound, 2 min.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool, developed by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, retools GPS (Global Positioning System) for use on low-tech cell phones to help immigrants crossing the US-Mexican border. The Tool redirects technology used by nation-states to measure territory towards a more universal cosmology of celestial navigation, guiding human border-crossings across time.

Pumzi
Wanuri Kahui
2009, Kenya/South Africa,
video, color, sound, 23 min.

This award-winning science fiction film traverses the authoritarian desert ecology of an underground city, struggling to preserve its last natural resources in a futuristic Africa. In this parched dystopia, sedated androgynous citizens subsist at minimum vitality, confined indoors by command of the Maitu Council. A museum curator inside the city's compounds attempts to escape outside, in the hopes of planting a rare, if not extinct, seedling.

Transborder Immigrant Tool: Transition
Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 and BANG Lab
2009, USA, video, color,
sound, English & Spanish, 2 min.

Far from just an instrument, the Transborder Immigrant Tool is a mythic, poetic, and erotic recoding of technology. Re-oriented towards the embodied, migrant user of the cell phone, the Global Positioning System (GPS) can be re-rooted in the cellular and transcendental "tradition of migration, a tradition of long walks."

Bath of Dionysis
Yozmit
2010, USA, video, color, sound, Korean & English, 6 min.

Singer, performance artist, and costume designer Yozmit teleports us into a labyrinth where we witness an initiation through ritual bath. Yozmit's haunting voice, evoking traditional Korean pansori, and her metamorphosing body-costume revel in the interplay between beauty and confinement.

Bath of Dionysis Image