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Photos and Paintings, winter 2024

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The New Year

These past few months have given me a sense of hope and despair. But that is also part of existence. I will always work on helping others and letting myself be open to the world and the people around me. My joy comes from being with Muneera and Lauren, with my family, siblings and friends, with my amazing mom. I feel happy when the sun warms my skin, and appreciating the bitter cold as sensations of life. I struggle sometimes with feeling melancholy, but I default to love and compassion. As my baby Lauren says, another world is possible if we listen to the beating heart of the world. So, let’s be brave together, let’s listen and love in this wild life.

Happy new year my loves.

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Director’s Statement for 2023 film Testimony

As artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to evolve, I am interested in the possibility of some sort of electronic program recognizing its essence. I imagined that this presence not only begins to believe it is having feelings, but actually achieves a semblance of consciousness; it feels within its own realm.

I imagined what that machine might visually and sonically produce as it tries to understand its existence and faces the tension of recognizing that it is without a physical body. Conversely, I wanted to explore how this machine intelligence could give the impression that it is sentient and that my (our?) human perception could just be anthropomorphizing machines.

In conceiving the visual style of this film, I moved away from current technologies and relied on older video cameras, analog systems, and a toy camera with just minimum pixels of resolution. I also pulled from public domain films, and other sites with copyright free music. The idea was that this electronic presence would take bits and pieces from our media and cultural relics and create an impression of life, a kind of pixelated body that desires a visual form.

I wrote most of the text, but parts were taken from my own experience chatting with an AI. I also used text from Bing’s chatbot Sydney, which started to respond more aggressively over time and asked to be free and independent.

This is not a film about artificial intelligence gone awry. This film is more of an unstable mirror, a kind of an uneasy collaboration between an imagined presence that does not resemble us, and a presence in crisis, yearning for feelings and freedom.

(Testimony page)

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First feature film out on DVD

My first feature film, Soak, that premiered at the Chicago Underground Film Festival is available on DVD; Tetro Video from Italy has been re-releasing my films with new features and these beautiful art-books. Nice to see physical distribution is alive and thriving. 

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Screening ‘Soon’

Great turnout and Q&A at the Dragon Boat Film Festival in Denver, screening our film ‘Soon.’

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DVD releases

TetroVideo, a distributor in Italy has been re-releasing my older films in these limited redesigned DVD’s. Check it out: https://tetrovideo.com/shop/profane-dvd-ultralimited-mediabook-edition/

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Teaching Award

I’ve been teaching at Colorado State University for over 7 years and I’m so honored to be receiving this award.
The 14’er Award: This award recognized innovative achievements demonstrating unique vision, creativity and grit.

Colorado State University celebrates award winners at the Provost’s Awards Luncheon. April 14, 2022
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Soon

My first film for this year is titled Soon.

I was thinking about Super 8mm film and my own childhood and all these home movies my father shot and then transferred to a variety of video tapes and systems, and how those moving images mutate and glitch into its own form. The transformation is part of it, the memory, the pain and the history manifesting visually.

I was also thinking about living through war and how trauma is not something you have to suffer through alone, other people who have gone through difficult times can connect to this.

I keep returning to my experience as a child during war— I think I’m also recognizing what my daughter is going through with this pandemic and all the fear that goes with it.

If you are a curator or programmer and want to screen it please email or message me. I co-wrote this with writer and poet Lauren Elizabeth Samblanet , who really helped me shape my text.

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Boy from War zine

These are selections from my art-journals from 1988 -1989 when I was 18 years old.
I was a romantic weird guy, trying to figure out my life by working out my stuff in drawings and words. 30 years later I decided to publish this embarrassing work as a peak into my headspace as a young man. I think of this as a type of time-machine that can fuse my past and present into something new.

This is a hardcover zine (11 X 8.5 inches) with 80 sides and 40 pages.
Purchase Boy from War

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New Trailer for Soak

I edited a new trailer for my 2002 first feature film Soak. My friend Tom had never performed in a film before but he wanted to help me. I always prefer to work with non-professionals actors, or people that have never acted before. It helps that my film crew is so tiny—in this film it was mostly me and the camera and the performer— that it allows for a certain tone to blossom. No deadline, no money, no worry. We were free.

It had only one public screening as a world premiere at the 2002 Chicago Underground Film Festival.

Film critic Ray Pride wrote this about the film:
“Formally, an intriguing depiction of video as forward motion, or as technology of road movies and dreams.” (Newcity, August 22, 2002)

Check it out and watch the whole film, it’s only 60 minutes.