This Light: The New York Announcement of a New Cinema
Wednesday, May 17 2017, 7pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002


Darren Bader, The Vagrant, undated. One-channel video, 13:32 min. Courtesy the artist; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.

This event is an attempt to describe a free cinema that emerges out of a desire to make private viewing habits public. The cinema goes by the name This Light. At a time when public space is rapidly dissolving into private property and attention is dissolving into the monetized distraction of streaming content in solitude, the cinema activates the possibilities offered through networked technology and opens the domestic up to what could be called anybody. 

To some extent, This Light is a reaction to the lack of a screening venue (or even a regular screening series) in Los Angeles committed to expanding the definition of moving images as an art form. With no particular allegiances to anything, This Light seeks to dissolve boundaries between different audiences through uncommon arrangements.

The architecture of the first cinema will be an informal, parasitic structure that exploits the environmental potentials of a private back yard in Southern California. By day it will be a functional camera obscura (closed roof) or breathable patio sunshade (open roof), by night a soundproofed cinema with an HD projector, hifi soundsystem, and comfortable seating. It will be lightweight and portable enough to be moved to a new site if need be, drawing on the history of nomadic units as an emancipatory project.

~Prelude~
Deva Deva by Alice Coltrane
7 min ● mp3 audio ● 1975

What Remains
by Anthony Discenza
15 min ● mp3 audio ● 2012

The text of What Remains is constructed from fragments of descriptive writing culled by searching Google for the title phrase. The text is then recorded as a voiceover played in an empty exhibition space.

The Palace
By Emily Wardill
7 min ● 16 mm film ● B&W ● optical sound ● 2014

The black and white imagery of The Palace is constantly moving, giving shapes to forms and shadows that recall an architectural surface, and yet giving sight to undefined shapes. The camera dictates the side to side or back to front rhythms, always oscillating and never fixed. This labyrinthine path of architectural forms is superposed to a strict narrative, closing the gap between the challenges of monochromatic perception and the visualization of a memory palace.

Indefinite Pitch
By James N. Kienitz Wilkins
23 min ● 2K video ● B&W ● Stereo ● 2016

Framed as a pathetic movie pitch set in Berlin, Indefinite Pitch points toward unconscious and elusive influences in life and in cinema mimicked by the rising and falling sonic frequency that, like an alarm, has an extremely indefinite pitch.

Delphi Falls
By Mary Helena Clark
20 min ● HD video ● Color ● Stereo ● 2016

Delphi Falls tests the limits of identification with a camera’s view, cycling through subjectivities. Two youths wander through the woods. A tree falls without cause, the weather shifts, a voice is thrown, blurring the distinctions between environment and self, grafting the interior to the landscape.

The Vagrant
By Darren Bader
13 min ● HD animation ● Color ● Stereo ● undated

The Vagrant imagines the dissolution of the United Nations and the aftermath of a competition in which eleven sculpture proposals are chosen to be launched into outer space.

This Light Creed
10 min ● Live Slide Presentation ● 2017 - ongoing

~Postlude~
Singing at Asia Roma (40 Mulberry St)