Visiting the Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016 exhibit at the Whitney Museum functioned as a powerful reminder as to the ways in which the exhibition space fundamentally alters the cinematic experience. Traversing the Dreamlands space became an interesting form of interactivity in which the placement of particular works and the foregrounding or concealing of … More Dreamlands Exhibit

The word “cinema” functions as a signifier that fundamentally challenges any notions of objective significates. Not only does the meaning of the word shift contextually (e.g. lets go to the cinema, this is a great piece of cinema, etc.) but it also chimerically modulates its very ontology based on the subjectivity of the speaker. Cinema, … More Suffering Cinema: New Media and the Challenge to Film’s Evolution

Since its emergence in the late 1970s the Video Home System, or VHS, has been a particularly contested medium within cinematic discourse. VHS not only functioned as a means of encapsulating and materially dispersing the otherwise ephemeral film object—hitherto experienced as a fleeting event in theaters—but additionally challenged the very understanding of a cinematic work … More From Sewers to Slumber Parties: VHS as Interactive Cinema in the Home

Norman Klein’s Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles (1920-1986) functions as a complex concatenation of database narrative, docu-game, i-doc, and digital archive charting the web of intersecting histories (both real and imagined) existent in Los Angeles from the 1920s to the year of the game’s release in 2003. The story itself recounts the history of … More (Un)changing History: Bleeding Through and the Illusory Barrier Between Past and Present

Yudai Yamaguchi’s “Tenth Dream” segment of Ten Nights of Dreams (2006) is an irrational, carnivalesque short that seems to revel in the lower bodily stratum. Farts, disembowelment, and vomit pepper this raucous short film and render it rather difficult to watch without feeling a creeping nausea. Beyond simply praising the film for accomplishing precisely what … More What My Ears Knew: Shotaro’s Luscious Pig Bowl

Network Effect Exploring the iDoc Network Effect was certainly a unique and fairly dark experience. Rather than trumpeting the great potential of interactivity and knowledge pools made possible by new media, Network Effect instead illustrates the underlying problems with such systems. Specifically, that the constant barrage of seemingly unfiltered content bombarding us incessantly through dings, … More Network Effect and the Limits of Digital Interaction

Crank (Neveldine/Taylor, 2006) is a film that I have admittedly avoided for some time. I distinctly remember viewing the trailer and writing the film off as a piece of mindless action schlock. Well, I was right, but…there is something surprisingly intriguing and even significant about the film that seems particularly relevant when taking into account … More Crank, Hardcore Henry, and Irreversible?

Quirky, DIY aesthetic approach…with a massive budget. Three of the six Lowes spots I worked on. Not only is the stop motion approach traditionally quite difficult, but couple that with the limitations of both the Vine platform (6 second limit at the time of production) alongside the iPhone’s inability to lock exposure (again this was … More Lowes’s “Fix in Six” Vines