AFS Avant Cinema 3

For this third in our series, Scott Stark has asked local video artist and former Cinematexas programming director Ivan Lozano to present selections from his body of work, contextualized by a few of his favorite videos.

21st Century Machines: A Technodrama for Future Generations, Ivan Lozano (2007, video, 6:00)
Using the technologies of the past (pen and paper, analog video) as filtered by the technologies of the present (Internet video, p2p networks) to comment on the technologies of the future (post-biological humanity, hive minds), 21st Century Machines chronicles a cyborg love affair soured by technological incompatibility.

Recall, Torsten Z. Burns and Darrin Martin (1999, video, 15:00)
Through the context of training tapes from the mid 70's, Recall mines the possibility of existing alternative therapies that have gone untapped and lie dormant within the body. Mediated memory exercises of reflective therapy sessions and staged fire prevention methods used in camping are coupled with the artists' own physio-dynamic interactions. The result opens up an arena of slippage that questions the very nature of human intimacy and distance through the framework of the controlled experience and its surveillance as a record of memory.

Sad Disco Fantasia, Steve Reinke (2001, video, 24:00)
“An episodic tour through the void of L.A., slips of pop culture, and Reinke's own astringent self-regard. Despite the blasts of dry wit and the hopeful embrace of gay porn, this is a lament. What grounds the tape like a bass line is Reinke's response to the death of his mother. What stops it cold is his tossed-off remark that this is ‘my last, my final video.'’” -Cameron Bailey

If I Had A Hammer, Bobby Abate (2001, video, 8:00)
“Crafted from softly pixilated QuickTime, NetMeeting sessions, emotive vintage pop, airplane disaster footage, online porn, streaming Hollywood trailers, and the curious hypnotic qualities of taping off computer monitors, Bobby Abate's internet-sex-n-death video explores new anxieties made possible by technology, and the profoundly intimate places that tiny images and lonely piano chords burrow deep within the soul. If I Had A Hammer is like a tender and tumultuous visual virus, created to infect a world where humans live through movies, die through malfunctions and, in between, email their love.” - Ed Halter

FANTASY VISION MEDITATION (Megamix), Ivan Lozano (2007-8, video, 5:00)
Structured as a continuous mix of videos from a recent series investigating the parallel historical narratives of disco, gay liberation movements and AIDS. Lozano creates a phantasmagoric elegy for the fallen soldiers in the hidden cultural wars of the 70s and 80s by transforming two sources generally dismissed as vapid and disposable. The musical collaboration between disco singer Sylvester James (a victim of AIDS) and producer Patrick Cowley (who succumbed to AIDS less than three months after the disease was codified) and A Night At Halsted's by queer porn auteur Fred Halsted (who overdosed on sleeping pills after the death of his lover from AIDS) who helped in defining the culture of the era. Lozano imbues his materials with pathos by a careful and labor-intensive digital exegesis of the unconscious spiritual elements hidden in the originals.

Papillon D’Amour, Nicolas Provost (2003, video, 4:00)
By subjecting fragments from the Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon to a mirror effect, Provost creates a hallucinatory scene of a woman's reverse chrysalis into an imploding butterfly. This physical audiovisual experience produces skewed reflections upon Love, its lyrical monstrosities, and a wounded act of disappearance.

IVAN LOZANO (b.1981, Guadalajara, MX) lives and works in Austin, TX. He received a Bachelor's degree in Radio, Television and Film from the University of Texas, Austin and was the programming director for the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival in its last two years. He currently writes for Glasstire.com and Artlies and is a founding member of the multimedia artist collective, Austin Video Bee, and a current member of MASS Gallery, an experimental co-op exhibition space. He creates video projections using heavily processed found footage with images sourced mostly from gay pornography from the years immediately before and after the AIDS epidemic exploded. Through careful and labored recombination, digital manipulation and time stretching, he creates a space for audiences to meditate on the links between mystical/religious experience and the aesthetics of eroticism. For Lozano, distilling images and elements from "vintage" gay pornography, beyond a choice born from libidinal identification, is a way to establish a connection with past generations of gay men that have succumbed to AIDS and to try to rescue them from invisibility. Pixelation, video compression and other forms of image deterioration are very important elements in his work, as a visual manifestation of the scars that the artifacts of this subculture have endured in the years since they were produced. A different level of meaning to the choice of images comes from the technologies with which they are acquired: peer-to-peer networks and internet video. Taking the internet as a repository of information that has no physical form and exists only as electrical impulses and radio waves, the videos and movies used as raw materials manifest themselves in his hard drives when summoned by specific commands, in a process eerily analogous to summoning spirits. Thus, the transubstantiation from data files to light and sound that occurs when the work is projected becomes a form of séance where the spirits of the dead are given an opportunity to interact with the living.