TONIGHT! MIX NYC presents: Short(s) Circuit! , a FREE Community Screening

MIX NYC presents: Short(s) Circuit! , a FREE Community Screening

Have you ever bumped into another passerby while checking your various social networks on your phone? Have you witnessed buildings rise and fall to the whims of tower cranes—not unlike marionettes subjected to their manipulators—? Have you spent hours in a sex shop debating which dildo is worthy of being considered your new cock? Technology has invaded every crevasse of this dust-filled metropolis, folks, and we ought pay attention to how it has affected us.

Thus, MIX NYC is proud to announce Short(s) Circuit!, an evening of films that investigate the role that technology has had on informing selfhood, sexuality, embodiment, and spatiality. Curator Connor Donahue pored through the MIX collection to find works that highlight an expansive range of technologies: from online message forums to razors; subway trains to dildos. This program reflects on how we use these technologies to shape our bodies, relate to others, travel, fuck, and come to terms with our selves.

This FREE screening will be held at 9 PM on Wednesday, June 5th at:

Hell Gate Social
12-21 Astoria Blvd, Queens.

https://www.facebook.com/hell.gatesocial

(Closest Subway: N/Q at 30 Ave)

If weather permits, we will be projecting outside in Hell Gate Social’s backyard patio!

As this is MIX’s inaugural event in Queens, it surely is not be missed! Come one, come all!

Big Heart,

Connor Donahue

MIX NYC
www.mixnyc.org

ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION:

All of the sidewalk curbs are cut along Astoria Boulevard. There are three steps leading up to the backyard patio and the bathrooms are located down a flight of stairs.

************************************************

PROGRAM AND FILM DESCRIPTIONS:

Artist Statement
(Daniel Barrow, 2006, Canada, video, color, sound, 5:30 min.)

Using 1988 Amiga software (a veritable antique, by technological standards), Barrow uses a computer mouse to illustrate and animate his “gratuitously honest” personal manifesto.

Artist Statement is a video Barrow created to describe, but also to parody, his personal approach to art making. It is also representative of his recurrent themes, methods and preoccupation with obsolete technologies.

guy101
(Ian Gouldstone, 2005, UK, video, color, sound, 9 min.)

A man hears a story about a hitchhiker from the other side of the Internet.

Mansfield 1962
(William E. Jones, 2006, USA, video, B&W, silent, 9 min.)

In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department photographed men having sex in a public restroom under the main square of the city. The cameraman hid in a closet and watched the clandestine activities through a two-way mirror. He filmed over a two week period, and the resulting movie was used to obtain the conviction of over 30 men on charges of sodomy. Later the police, with the help of the Highway Safety Foundation, produced Camera Surveillance, an instructional film circulated in law enforcement circles. It showed how to set up a sting operation to film and arrest “sex deviants.” William E. Jones found the film in a degraded version on the internet, then reedited the footage to make Mansfield 1962, a haunting, silent condensation of the original.

Enraged By a Picture
(Zanele Muholi, 2005, South Africa, video, color, sound, 14 min)

A Photographer, Muholi is celebrating her exhibition in Johannesburg. Efficiently confrontational, the exhibition causes a stir and provokes an outcry on a subject that is particularly taboo: being black, and, in this case, being lesbian. Forthright and beautifully shot, each monochrome photo captures the present reality of the photographer’s subjects – the daily discomfort, double lives, abuse and hatred. The photographs present a window into their world. This absorbing documentary explores that world’s reality.

Something Dangerous
(Zavé Martohardjono, 2012, USA, video, color, sound, 7 min.)

Thoughts pass through my head when I perform my own weekly grooming rituals. Thoughts about you who sees–or doesn’t see–me. Thoughts about me, inside this body I happen to be in. Thoughts about those gentlest expressions of in-between-ness–a masculinity that is nothing other than dangerous.

Speculative Biologies
(Pinar Yoldas, 2012, Turkey/USA, video, color, sound, 2 min.)

This video introduces synthetic organs, perverse anatomies, and sexual excesses to interrogate the cultural perception of sex.

Pop Porn Party
(Panik Qulture, 2005, France, video, color, sound, 6 min.)

In this film, Panik Qulture constructs a new sexual body using packing tape, dildos, and a plastic suit. Music: Klaus Nomi.

Merci
(Blick, 2004, France, 35mm to video, B&W, sound, French with English subtitles, 5 min.)

Rehabilitations, destructions, constructions in a few years deeply modified the Chorier-Berriat district of Grenoble. MERCI observes the transformation of this industrial district into a district of business via electromagnetic filmic rhythm near to the movement which involved the modification of the landscape.

N Train
(Rhys Ernst, 2009, USA, video, color, sound, 3 min)

Capturing the frenetic beat of city life, N Train is a snapshot of a young, queer New Yorker who is confronted by the status quo, as outsider representation turns to comedy.

Green Room
(Matt Palazzolo, 2005, USA, video, color, sound, 6 min.)

“Green Room” is a rare opportunity for the parallels between growing up in a digital society and queer youth to collide. Through the archival footage and an intense existing process, “Green Room” offers unique insight into the experience of modern queer teen in the form of a visual autobiography.

Sensing the World by Echo
(Mark Taylor, 2006, USA, video, color, sound, 18 min.)

Sensing the World by Echo is a “Frankenstein’s monster” of a movie stitched together with parts robbed from the B-movie graveyard of horror and sci-fi films. A colorful, animated paper collage, the film is assembled from scraps of 1950s and ‘60s children’s books, home and how-to manuals, science texts and encyclopedias. Sensing the World by Echo tells an unconventional narrative about growing up feeling like an alien from outer space and of finding one’s place in a mad, mad world.

In Every Dream Home a Heart Ache
(John Caffery, 2008, Canada, video, color, sound, 3 min.)

Kids on TV and Johannes Zits have together created a music video art piece based on Johannes’ visual work and the song “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” performed by Kids on TV. The video takes the song’s plotline of a rich man falling in love with a rubber doll and uses it to critique queer consumerism and the advertising industry’s targeting of the gay-demographic–turning people’s desires into a fetishization of newly built condos and lavish furnishings. The rubber doll is portrayed by KOTV member John Caffery is covered with green-screen paint and super-imposed with gay male pornography by Johannes. KOTV’s Minus Smile sings the part of the protagonist whose alienation eventually drives him mad with affection for the artificial playmate. The barren white space in which the wandering plot occurs is ambiguously superimposed with advertising, store-room furnishings and palatial homes from architecture magazines–leaving the viewer to wonder how imaginary his dreamhome is.