Jean Painlevé au CAC, Vilnius

"HUMAN. MATERIAL. MACHINE."

Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius
5–16 AUGUST 2015 

Contemporary Art Center Vilnius

A film and video programme curated by Lukas Brasiskis and Leo Goldsmith :

Thursday, 13 August / The Posthuman Body / 68 min
The Incredible Machine (Bell Labs/AT&T, USA, 1968, digital, 15 min)
The Love Life of the Octopus (Jean Painlevé, France, 1967, 35mm, 14 min)
Scratch Free State (George Barber, UK, 1982, digital, 6 min)
The Third Body (Peggy Ahwesh, USA, 2008, digital, 9 min)
Former Models (Benjamin Pearson, USA, 2013, digital, 20 min)
"... transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities ..."—Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”

Painlevé intraterrestrial science fiction emerges at the same moment as Bell Labs’ promotional film, narrated by Orson Welles, announces the birth of a computer voice (which, anticipating Kubrick’s HAL, learns to sing “Daisy Bell [A Bicycle Built For Two]”). Scratch Free State is a wildly exultant vision of the body transformed through the aesthetic of Scratch Video, a video-synthesis of animal, machine, human, and video-game character, which rhymes with the “thirdness” that Ahwesh proposes, using found footage to imagine us on the verge of a new Garden of Eden. Finally, Pearson’s speculative biography reimagines Milli Vanilli’s Rob Pilatus as a corporate clone in an age of planned obsolescence for pop culture and humanity alike.

Friday, 14 August / Liquid Aesthetics / 52 min
Cristaux Liquides (Jean Painlevé, France, 1978, 16mm, 6 min)
Anathema (The Otolith Group, UK, 2011, digital, 37 min)
Landfill 16 (Jennifer Reeves, USA, 16mm, 9 min)
“The image of water is the perfect environment in which movement can be abstracted from the thing moved, or mobility from movement itself.”—Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: Movement-Image. 

Each of the three different films selected to this subprogram offers a rare glance toward processes that take part in worlds unseen to the human eye. While Jean Painlevé employs microscopic optics to document how changes in pressure and temperature affect the appearance of liquid crystals, The Otolith Group re-imagines the human tactile relation with the liquid crystals embedded within touch-screens that are converted into abstractions of entrancing turbulence of communicative capitalism. Landfill 16 by Jennifer Reeves presents a gradual demise of the 16mm film fragments buried in the landfill, dug up, painted over, and played at different speeds. Non-directly referring to such topics as resistance to the acceleration of digital capital, object-oriented ecology, and the non-human assemblages, all three works are situated between political, scientific, and fictional realms of often understated aesthetics of materiality in flux.