In some ways Lost in Linear Valley is a tech-demo gone wonderfully wrong. JJ Stratford’s formal exploration of the LZX Video Synthesizer and the Fairlight Computer Video Instrument (CVI) resulted in a suite of 10 short experimental videos questioning obsolescence and early video aesthetics. At first glance, one could mistakenly take this work to be a study of dead-media fetishism. However, one watches this suite unfold into a delicate investigation of the limits of technology, and the potential those limits enable. Through the use of preset wipes and crude RGB color palettes, Stratford uncovers hidden potential in what otherwise would be considered a long-outmoded device for creative expression. In doing so, the typical subversive gesture of using obsolete technology that occurs within contemporary art is supplanted by an earnest exploration into a crucial link between early video aesthetics and current technologically inflected imagery.
The octogenarian Angono Mba recalls the expedition in which he worked as porter for the Spanish filmmaker Manuel Hernández Sanjuán who, between 1944 and 1946, traveled through Spanish Guinea documenting life in the colony as he obsessively searched for a mysterious lake.
What is art and how does it relate to society? Is its value determined by its popularity or originality? Is the goal profit or expressing one's personal vision? These are some of the questions raised as we follow fiercely independent New York artist Robert Cenedella in his artistic journey through decades of struggling for creative expression.
In order to close the case files on over a dozen disappearances, a persistent detective, a bereaved senator, and a skeptical prison warden agree to the request of a convicted serial killer - Jim Gardener - granting him a live television interview in exchange for the locations of his remaining victims.
A people's struggle to save the animal at the heart of their culture. For centuries the Bunong indigenous people on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border lived with elephants, believing they shared the same destiny.
The death of Ottakring's last godfather and the encounter with a very clever young woman unintentionally turn the clever crook Sammy into the business-minded driving force of an Austrian parallel world in the midst of the global economic crisis.
