Sleepwalking the Cliffs of Visioneca (day 1)

What to say at the end of the day -- when 50 experimental films were thrown your way? Well I'll go for the creme the la creme that was left drooling from my image-tormented brain (enhanced by an original northern-wind cold), so:

The morning session left all the children quite happy, amused by Lizzie Oxby-the-prodigy's supershort extravaganzas and topically opened with Giovanni Bucci's "The Last Dream", reminiscent roughly of what most of us must have had last night -- concerning the fact that full moon is coming up those chilly skies. Lucky we were inside --just as the Marshmallow Laser Feast crew with their lo-fi yet mesmerizing real-time single shot playstation hacks that could rival any studio's post-production budget. The frivolous section closed with award-scooping "Doxology" by Michael Langan.

The second session was again hilariously flavored by the Marshmallow Lasers feasting, this time on a Transformers hack -- but then it all got quite serious. The curator of the day Paul Windridge gave an iconic lesson of how water<>life can be videod quite marvellously -- his "memories of the sea" is one of the most lyrical and at the same time formally pure filmic pieces I have ever seen, quite touching for all those with a fatal attraction to the sea, ever since childhood... The architectural approach to futuristic critique by Paul Nicholls is definitely entering my "Introduction to media" curriculum next year, quite sure the youngsters should get bewildered by that glitchy errored appearances of all the fancy stuff they can (never real*ly) get online.

After a nicely tuned Satsangi performance, fully analog, our video mentor from February's Fashion Week workshop at Kino Šiška with our students, Kathryn Ferguson enchanted the brim-full auditorium with a compelling video-triptych "Mathair" (re)treating (into) that very special Irish religiousness: a mix of ancient energy, aesthetical emancipation of Virgin Mary's image, and the dance -- which is probably the closest that man ever gets to god(s) anyway. The female image -- and how much the world would profit if women were really equal to men -- was beautifully (paper)cut, directed and partly performed by Joanne Hummel Newell.

Then before the last, "over-15-rated" session I had to first get some setting sun over the English channel recalibrating my visual sensors, to then more smoothly dip into the darker shades of the experimental film feast. The noir shaded screen had almost outrivalled the moon that already fought out the sun over those sheer cliffs of Freshwater bay, hadn't it been for the brilliantly scripted piece by Tim Bollinger, a stupendously shattering video-study of the human psyche, as far as German technical perfection goes (over the storyboard). The closing trio of the night sent me off to sleep dreamless (I hope):

Miles Boylan and Quantic Dream's "Heavy Rain" is a narrative hacked out of a Sony PS3 video game that would make any father worry over his video-hooked children -- or hypera(ttra)ctive martial-arts trianed wife..  Michael Langan  viral video-add for mobile-phone cases brought me "back to shool" thinking how great would it be to have students churn out such ingenious ideas for the "creative industries" while pursuing that fine balance between technological perfection and conceptual as well as aesthetical brilliance. Andrew Thomas Huang finally left us all visonecless with his mighty hollywood-smooth tricked video extravaganza -- watch out>>in for the "SOLIPSIST"..

..cause tomorrow>>today, my head cam is on again!