Microscope Gallery is very pleased to welcome Spanish filmmaker Albert Alcoz to the gallery for the first time in person for a solo screening of his new and recent film works including manipulated found footage works and original Super 8mm. Alcoz’s appropriations – a B-movie Sci-Fi feature, home movies, a series of soda ads, and a classic World War II documentary – have been transformed in format and material, with several involving chemical dissolutions to distort the original photographic textures. The artist’s original Super 8 films (all shot in camera, some in color and others in b&w) offer silent impressions and accelerations of the cities and natural environments around him.

Artist in person (visiting from Barcelona, Spain). Admission $6

The work of Egyptian artist Basim Magdy uses film, painting, slide projection and installation. To him super8 is not a nostalgic medium. In his examinations of war, information systems, scientific theories and the visual vocabulary of mass media marked by paradox and shifts between demolition and renewal, ruins and reconstruction his humor shines through. As if in his "Six Memos for the Next Millennium" Italo Calvino had forgotten to add humor.

The next AXW Film Festival screening features work by:
Jesse Russell Brooks with poet Alexzenia Davis
Whitney Johnston
Olivia Ciummo
Cornelia Eichhorn
Tara Merenda Nelson
and a film by Beth Portnoy with dancer Amy Larimer.

Please visit the AXW Blog page for more about their film, gyre-ation: http://axwff.com/guest-blogs/beth-portnoy/

As part of the Kontraste Festival 2013

‘You hear it everywhere: Cinema is tipping over – its epic and dramatic forms are spilling over into television, avant-garde and experimental films have fled to the galleries, and all the images that once belonged to it are now available everywhere, anytime. At the Austrian Film Museum, we tend to refrain from such sweeping and simple-minded swan songs. For this very reason, we are honoured to participate in Vertical Cinema – a project committed to taking one step at a time. Instead of trying to tip cinema in its entirety into the digital netherworld, this project is content with just tipping the screen – observing how an artform changes if you respectfully chafe at its edges.’ – Alexander Horwath, Director of the Austrian Film Museum

What we usually identify as the indisputable ‘temple of film’, the Cinema, is not really a given, especially not in the realm of experimental cinematic arts. Yet this is somehow sidelined in the process of re-thinking the possibilities of cinematic experience, mostly because the architectural frame is already there, if only as a convention established a long time ago within the theatrical arts. Actually, the history of experimental cinema and the art of the moving image suggests that the space might very well be the crucial aspect of the total audiovisual experience – something one should always question and take into consideration when producing a work for audiovisual, sensory cinema.