What: Site specific film performance
When: 8:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all

Tonight is the first in a four-part series investigating the role of abstract and affective processes in a contemporary revolutionary politics, featuring performances and experimental film and video. The evenings will mix lecture elements with screenings in order to recontextualize select works from the experimental film and video canon, and set them to work for an idiosyncratic, aleatory political activism.

The films shown in the screening tonight – selections from the American, British, and Japanese avant-gardes along with work from contemporary filmmakers such as Bradley Eros, David Baker, and Stom Sogo – will serve as didactic tools and points of departure to construct a narrative of aesthetic/political Passage, into which the writings of others – Jean Epstein, Robert Smithson, Mike Kelley, and Hollis Frampton, for example – will intervene.

Abstraction and the informe as evolutionary principles; the biological and mimetic desire; film as ritual; the timeless and political ecstasy. To trace a conceptual line between these sources as an act of paracinematic performance.

Abstract film serves here as a focal point in which to investigate the importance of the ecstatic in a contemporary revolutionary politics, with a particular focus on contemporary Marxist theory, as a continuation of some of the ideas – exodus, aesthetic autonomy, recomposition, and spiritual exhaustion – raised in Bifo Berardi’s recent seminar at 16beaver.

Later nights will include abstraction and psychedelia in the formation of intentional political communities, with films by David Cronenberg, Tony Conrad, and Ira Cohen; the alogical as a narcissistic strategy in contemporary video work; and alchemy and the transformation of heavy material.