Film Format: Digital File

  • Auroratone

    This abstract cut-out animation attempts to create orderly pixel patterns using only hand-cut and hand-arranged materials, without any grids, rulers, or visual guides. A stream-of-consciousness series of abstract patterns dance, transform, answer to one another, and at times evolve into recognizable icons, as if sending subliminal messages from a child’s play session. Back-lit pastel colorscapes reflect the airy, other-wordly transmission of Julia Holter’s song “So Lillies” .

  • Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds

    This solo performance for the camera pays homage to 1970s video art, exploring how the electronic manipulation of the video signal can create a choreocinema for body and machine. Choreographic patterns melding retro moves with a minimalist aesthetic participate in a jagged, pulsing duet with the danceable beats and noisy textures of the track “Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds” by Alterity Problem (Alexander Moskos and Joel Taylor). Effects were created in real-time with a raster-scan device built by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, accessed during a residency at the now-closed Experimental TV Center in upstate New York.

  • Skeleton Dance

    Have you ever wondered what would happen if you X-rayed a skeleton at a dance club? This experimental cut-out animation offers something of an answer. Besides dancing between abstract shapes throughout the video, the skeleton character cuts out a pair of pants from some paper, tries them on and runs away. The footage is processed using a variety of analog video synthesizers, including a Paik-Abe Raster Scan Device (aka Wobulator). The electronic voltage of the soundtrack by LA’s Dva Damas directs the parameters of certain effects. Artwork, animation, processing and editing done by Emily Pelstring while in residence at the…

  • Jack

    This is the official music video for the U.S. Girls song ‘Jack’, the first single off of the album Gem (FatCat Records, 2012). In the video, a sequined woman (played by Meghan Remy) sings from the perspective of Jack the Ripper, confounding the relationship between looker and looked at, predator and prey. This glam-inspired video was befittingly shot on a Hitachi FP-22, 3-tube vintage camera by an all-female crew. It plays on classic images of American femininity, and the lyrics of the song contribute a subtext of the misogynistic serial killer’s gaze. With references to Kenneth Anger’s ‘Puce Moment’ and…

  • Gaysian

    When a gay Asian man notices that many gay men are taking a ‘no-Asian’ stance, he tries a group he previously avoided – rice queens, men ONLY attracted to Asians. Gaysian is a comedy that explores how we all bring prejudices into the bedroom, and sometimes learn we were wrong…or not.

  • Kissing Drew

    Inside a drab middle school in 1992, a sexually-confused eighth-grader attempts to regain his dignity after being bullied by a sex-obsessed ‘cool kid’ whom he privately fantasizes about.

  • My Father, Francis

    My Father, Francis: a father and daughter collaborate. A comment on kinship, diasporic labour, devotion and the factory as a site of creativity.

  • Little Devil

    A troublesome, disabled fag hag absconds to London to find love and opportunity. But life deals her some unexpected twists when she winds up peddling drugs to the queer community and forms an unorthodox relationship with a washed-up gay male escort. On its surface, Little Devil is designed to be an entertaining, but controversial comedy-drama with some crazy and off-the-wall characters trying to get by, and ultimately find happiness, in a troubled and often unfair world. But scratch beneath the surface and it is a film that has a lot to say about perceptions of sex and disability while opening…

  • Solarization

    An experiment in solarization filmed at the Independent Imaging Retreat in Mount Forest, Canada.

  • Mindtease

    The accidental reveal of a burlesque dancer’s “true” identity leads to a moment of self-questioning for the audience, and for one voyeur in particular, some deeper self-exploration.