Looking Backward

One sunny afternoon in the middle west, suspended in a time between, two commuters daydream of a life lived otherwise. Adapted from a letter written by Victor Berger in 1895.

Two slow pans across a public park in Milwaukee. Words from Bernadette Mayer imagining the possibility of a perfect summer day.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

A feeling of forgetting rendered with first-person camera work, lens play, and image stabilization. I am old where I was born. It must have been magnificent once. The way it appears now is not how it used to be. It couldn’t be, otherwise this would be something else. Perhaps for a moment I am there again, but when I open my eyes I can’t remember anything. There is only this longing for someplace I've never been.

Wandering through the body puzzling out a system of symbols. The trouble is, affect resists signification outright. The inside and outside become muddled when you start to feel your body in relation to the image.

An affective portrait of place. An exploration of the city as abstraction.

Wandering through the city, wondering about the potentialities of space, wishing and wanting a full experience of the virtual. These thoughts are rooted to spaces on the outskirts that have been rendered without detail. Listen to the code. An indecipherable alphabet floods the brain. “Space” is really a bad metaphor for the Internet.

A mirrored discourse. The object we see is that which craves articulation, but is never said quite right. We are looking at speech from both sides of the mirror, listening...

Here are the playful recordings of a naturalist—the observations of a difficult object. As the studio accelerates and numerous cinematic strategies are employed, the information gathered becomes noise; all these measurements become doodles.