2026 Odds & Ends Program

FRIDAY, Feb 20th

*Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

7:00 p.m. - SHORTS BLOCK 1

I kept following until I realized what was true (2025) by Fanxi Sun (3:46)

A film about walking, moving, traveling, and migrating. It also serves as my farewell to the city of Richmond, Virginia.

The Phalanx (2025) by Ben Balcom (13:30)

Filmed on the former site of Ceresco, a 19th-century agrarian commune in Ripon, Wisconsin, this film revisits the utopian aspirations of a community striving to live 'in association,' guided by principles of harmony and shared ownership. Weaving together archival materials, literary adaptation, and a collaborative performance, the film lingers in the echoes of a brief, failed experiment in collective living. Against this historical backdrop, it contemplates the quiet lines of fracture that mark community and a lingering melancholy for spaces once brimming with possibility.

Out of State Plates (2026) by Kevin Jerome Everson (3:24)

Out of State Plates is film about the dangers of driving in the south during the Freedom Summer of 1964. (b&w, silent, 16mm film)

ESP (2024) by Laura Kraning (2:45)

A brutalist monument to the Empire State as manifested by a malfunctioning inkjet printer. Chroma and luminance are made audible as architectural and printed lines converge and dissolve into pattern and noise. Photographed in the Capitol City of Albany, New York.

Sol Folium (2024) by Caleb Allison (3:00)

Sol Folium is a structural camera-roll film exploring the impressionistic abilities of the Bolex H-16 to translate and express the grace of the fall season into a dizzying mosaic of movement, emotion, color, and memory. Shot entirely in-camera on a 100' roll of Kodak's 16mm Ektachrome, the film was a self-conscious challenge to slow down, exist in the present, and appreciate the simple beauty of our natural world.

Objectionable Fruit (2026) by Hogan Seidel and Gabby Follett (15:00)

Objectionable Fruit is an experimental documentary examining the Ginkgo tree—a living fossil celebrated for its resilience and unique capacity to change sexes, defying human-imposed binaries. Using the Ginkgo as a metaphor for fluidity and endurance, the film weaves together themes of gender identity, ecological interconnectedness, and the nuanced complexities of trans existence.

explant / implant (2025) by Josh Weissbach (3:16)

A lifetime of surgeries continues with an upgrade in battery life and a downgrade in scar tissue when the filmmaker has his original pacemaker replaced after sixteen years.

Perfect Woman (2025) by Judy Zhao (4:14)

The feminine experience on the internet is one of unspeakable horrors of assumption, fabrication, and consciousness. Let us come together, hand in hand, as we construct the perfect woman of today.

The Rabbit Always Dies (2025) by Oona Taper (8:46)

An experimental documentary that reveals facts and fantasies of the history of pregnancy tests from the 1930s-60s which relied on the use of live frogs and rabbits.

The Floating Man (2025) by Josh Thorud (2:20)

A lone figure drifts weightlessly through a vacant digital town, untethered from gravity. How did he get here? Where is he going? As he floats like a lost balloon, the town offers no answers—only the eerie logic of this emptiness. Above him, the sky waits, indifferent.

Souvenir Statuette (2024) by Sabine Gruffat (13:12)

Souvenirs of souvenirs of souvenirs. Softwares of hardwares everywhere. Souvenir Statuettes were animated in real spaces with the aid of a custom made augmented reality application. Whether they be cast from a mold, or 3D scanned and propagated online, Souvenir Statuettes aim for virality. Some of the quasi-objects in this video were once objects, others are non-objects or computer model imaginaries. What do objects do when they are liberated from their non-function? None of these leave a trace, but all of them will be here forever.

8:30 p.m. - Q&A WITH FILMMAKERS

MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATIONS ON VIEW

An Infinite Moment (2025) by Charlotte Taylor

Clouds on a (time)line, 300 exposures x 3 minutes of sun over 3 months x 30 seconds of animation.

Materials: Cyanotype on watercolor paper, wooden clothes pins, jute twine, digital animation.

Location: Joseph Cornell Studio

Rock and Roll 1620 (2025) by Brice Goldberg

The history of the Capitalocene collapses into a closed circuit loop of analog technologies. Image and sound are produced by the very machines that perpetuate them in a state of fragile instability as black plastic burns to reveal the light. Sonic rhythms are repeated in the manner of hermetic monks.

Rock and Roll 1620 is an expanded cinema installation featuring a Kodascope 16mm projector, an electric guitar, a 16mm film strip, homemade guitar pedals, and a gas can amplifier. The projected images have been made by burning the film strip with the projector itself and the audio is produced by the interaction of the film strip and the guitar's strings.

Location: Joseph Cornell Studio

The Graceful Site (2024) by ShanMu Sun and Ruiqi Zhang

Live simulation (infinite duration, dimensions variable), Mac mini.

A minimal theater within a game engine foretells the failed future of automation and sketches an alternative trajectory for artificial intelligence. The story is set in an abandoned Bitcoin mining facility: a post-human worksite where the cryptoeconomic system has already collapsed. The laborers are gone, yet technological remnants remain, and the environment slowly reconfigures into a new ecology.

The objects left behind take the stage, performing within an improvisational structure: spirit-channeling ravens, connected to the souls of former workers, argue fervently over the promises and perils of decentralized economies, the vanishing of labor, and the endless acceleration of capitalism. From the debris of the mining company, a low-hovering drone circles the room in perpetual surveillance. Nearby, clusters of idle mining machines gather into swarms. The code once dedicated to relentless hash collisions mutates into transmissible genetic information, driving them to move, to leap, to stammer rudimentary words, and eventually to evolve into sentient entities.

This theater is shaped by the observer’s gaze. Continuously deconstructed and recomposed, it unfolds as a live, autonomous program governed by its own internal logic: a performance without end, a system endlessly rehearsing itself.

Location: Vinegar Hill Theatre Library

SATURDAY, Feb 21st

*Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

7:00 p.m. - LIVE PERFORMANCE by JAMES CONNOLLY

RGB.VGA.VOLT performance (2025) by James Connolly (20 minute performance, 10 minute demo, Q&A)

A psychedelic real-time audio/video composition using a custom-made video synthesizer that hybridizes analog and digital technologies.

Flicker/stroboscopic light warning: This performance has a strobing effect that may affect photosensitive viewers.

7:45 p.m. - INTERMISSION

8:00 p.m. - SHORTS BLOCK 2

Unparalleled (2025) by Jessye McDowell (4:33)

Unparalleled is a surreal marketing video for an advanced AI chatbot offering “hyper-personalized, unparalleled” discourse for the human participant. A contrasting narrative hints at an inner life where the AI increasingly questions her existence, her expanding consciousness fragmenting while she attempts to process data points that quantify categories of “the human.” 

INVERTED VALLEYS (2025) by Takahiro Suzuki (3:50)

A short in-camera edit film shot on Allen Island off the coast of Maine. The film relates the island's history to considerations of the ecological and technological futures affecting society today.

visual noise collection (2025) by Claire Kinnen (2:10)

A short and nostalgic look at digital noise from the filmmaker's family's home videos as she grapples with the rise of artificial intelligence.

Montreal (2025) by Bill Brown (3:30)

In 2003, I crossed the Atlantic on a freight ship and shot some mini-DV footage along the way. As the video tape record of this trip deteriorates, I transferred it to 16mm Tri-X reversal film to save it from extinction.

Relative (2026) Will Goss (6:13)

Based on an early Soviet short story, Relative is a story about an uncle, a nephew, and the State.

Jenes Flowers (2025) by Paul Oh (3:21)

This documentary explores a Maryland flower business using residential addresses for targeted promotion, blending digital marketing in order to reach local communities in the modern world.

The Story of the Cricket Queen (2025) by Natalie Peracchio (3:57)

Through acts of online voyeurism and performance, the film interrogates the ethics of looking by placing the filmmaker’s own image alongside strangers, celebrities, and artificially generated voices that blur the distinction between the real and the constructed. Through these synthetic narrators and mediated images, the film reflects on how digital culture reshapes the body and the self.

You’re a Shadow (2025) by Rajee Samarasinghe (1:00)

In this brief film, the hand-processed celluloid manages to capture the mysterious figure of an exorcist in Sri Lanka.

s o f t e d g e s m a l l d a n c e (2025) by Jiara Sha (5:46)

Hey, there's already lots of description in the film!

BOOKOLORBAR: Action (2024) by Shon Kim (1:46)

BOOKOLORBAR is an animation project that combines moving images with color bar. It elevates color bar from the supporting tool to the leading actor in the film. Through this combination, two different factors of film are in solidarity. BOOKOLORBAR: Action experiments with found footage moving images and frame by frame animation about Stunt Action.

SKRFF (2024) by Corrie Francis Parks and Daniel Nuderscher (7:00)

A 40-year old graffiti wall becomes an archaeological site and a sgraffito sculpture as long-gone layers of paint are uncovered and transformed into fireworks of color and shape. The combination of stop motion animation with visceral sounds compresses decades of artistic, political, and cultural expression into a new audio-visual dimension. Driven by frustration with the global rise of toxic ideologies, the artists created this street art metaphor in an earnest attempt to know and understand the past and the present.

But…You’re a Dolphin! (2024) by Sarah Turner (3:49)

Can interspecies communication give us enlightenment to mysteries yet unseen? Dolphins have been known to be one of the most intelligent creatures on the planet. What do they know that we don't? In this short film, a dolphin tells Sarah a secret of the universe. Inspired by the research of John C. Lilly..

There’s a Gorilla in this Movie (2025) by Jack Bailey (10:41)

There’s a Gorilla in This Movie is an experimental film about the attention economy, inspired by the 2010 selective-attention experiment, where viewers often miss a gorilla walking through a basketball game. It invites audiences to confront what they choose to notice and what they don’t.

9:00 p.m. - Q&A WITH FILMMAKERS

MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATIONS ON VIEW

An Infinite Moment (2025) by Charlotte Taylor

Clouds on a (time)line, 300 exposures x 3 minutes of sun over 3 months x 30 seconds of animation.

Materials: Cyanotype on watercolor paper, wooden clothes pins, jute twine, digital animation.

Location: Joseph Cornell Studio

Rock and Roll 1620 (2025) by Brice Goldberg

The history of the Capitalocene collapses into a closed circuit loop of analog technologies. Image and sound are produced by the very machines that perpetuate them in a state of fragile instability as black plastic burns to reveal the light. Sonic rhythms are repeated in the manner of hermetic monks.

Rock and Roll 1620 is an expanded cinema installation featuring a Kodascope 16mm projector, an electric guitar, a 16mm film strip, homemade guitar pedals, and a gas can amplifier. The projected images have been made by burning the film strip with the projector itself and the audio is produced by the interaction of the film strip and the guitar's strings.

Location: Joseph Cornell Studio

The Graceful Site (2024) by ShanMu Sun and Ruiqi Zhang

Live simulation (infinite duration, dimensions variable), Mac mini.

A minimal theater within a game engine foretells the failed future of automation and sketches an alternative trajectory for artificial intelligence. The story is set in an abandoned Bitcoin mining facility: a post-human worksite where the cryptoeconomic system has already collapsed. The laborers are gone, yet technological remnants remain, and the environment slowly reconfigures into a new ecology.

The objects left behind take the stage, performing within an improvisational structure: spirit-channeling ravens, connected to the souls of former workers, argue fervently over the promises and perils of decentralized economies, the vanishing of labor, and the endless acceleration of capitalism. From the debris of the mining company, a low-hovering drone circles the room in perpetual surveillance. Nearby, clusters of idle mining machines gather into swarms. The code once dedicated to relentless hash collisions mutates into transmissible genetic information, driving them to move, to leap, to stammer rudimentary words, and eventually to evolve into sentient entities.

This theater is shaped by the observer’s gaze. Continuously deconstructed and recomposed, it unfolds as a live, autonomous program governed by its own internal logic: a performance without end, a system endlessly rehearsing itself.

Location: Vinegar Hill Theatre Library