Blog

Sf Cinematheque in association with
Headlands Center for the Arts present, Peter Burr in person

Admission: $10 General/$5 Cinematheque Members and Headlands Center for the Arts Members
Advance tickets available here

A mix of intricate patterns that vibrate, flicker, and hypnotize. Viewing Burr’s work feels like entering into a dark, digital cave. —Alex Ginsberg, Electric Objects

I make infinite dungeons. —Peter Burr

Working extensively with computer animation and the tools of the video game industry, the digital works of Peter Burr present infinitely sprawling landscapes and environments which vacillate between abstraction and figuration and describe dystopian narratives of endless questing. Recent work explores the video game trope of the endlessly mutating, self-constructing labyrinth. Visiting from Brooklyn as an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, Burr appears in person to expound on his process and radical synthetic aesthetic and to present a retrospective of works 2012–2017, including a work-in-progress preview of his latest immersive environmental video Dirtscraper.

Burr’s art conjures the future—projection screens picturing high density structures that resemble malls populated by people who move in slow motion; text by video game designer Porpentine that describes opinionless cultures; undulating black and white patterns designed to mesmerize the viewer. Unlike movies, though, which tend to center around heroes and villains, there’s no morality attached to this environment. It’s not good, or bad. It just is. (Paddy Johnson, Art F City)

FILMS TO SCREEN:
Alone with the Moon (2012): Burr creates a slow, liminal illusion in black-and-white, switching perspectives and matrices and crescendoing in time with Christopher Doulgeris’s portentously pulsating soundtrack.

Special Effect (2014): Channeling Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), this film’s fractured and spiraling narrative is traversed through a hypnotizing blend of live action and various digital animation styles.

Green | Red (2014): Burr conjures a shape-shifting world where the sidewalks are endless, the radio is playing electric, and the night sky is broken open by a cataclysm of shuddering stars.

The Mess (2016): This film follows the perspective of a solitary woman who descends into an abandoned subterranean ‘arcology.’ She is tasked with cleaning up the mess that has spawned from this feral structure, becoming lost in the process.

Pattern Language (2017): Architect Christopher Alexander’s design theories are applied towards a generative video game labyrinth, resulting in this rhythmic animation made of rippling, skipping, and strobing arrays of light infused with programmatic digital pixelation.

Free

Join contributors Dodie Bellamy, Tammy Rae Carland, Xandra Ibarra, Glen Helfand, Johnny Ray Huston, Brontez Purnell, Larry-bob Roberts, and editor Bradford Nordeen who will read from the latest issue of Dirty Looks’ annual film publication, which contains chapters on Hippie Dick, Nao Bustamante, Rick Castro and Vaginal Davis’ Fertile LaToyah Jackson, Rosa von Praunheim’s City of Lost Souls, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Teo Hernandez’s Salomé and a round-up of DL’s first eight years of programming.

The Dirty Looks Volume series compiles a year’s worth of Dirty Looks’ programming into one pocket-sized black and white publication, brimming with original contributions, photocopy facsimiles, original program notes and queer film ephemera.

Contributors include Dodie Bellamy, Carl Bogner, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Richard Fung, Rudy “Bleu” Garcia, Raquel Gutiérrez, Glen Helfand, Johnny Ray Huston, Xandra Ibarra, William E. Jones, Bruce LaBruce, Clara López Menéndez, Amos Mac, Kelly Marie Martin, Bradford Nordeen, Iván Ramos, Larry-bob Roberts, Linda Simpson, Angie Stardust and Juan Antonio Suárez. Design by Nathan Hauenstein + Tiffany Malakooti. Cover by Scott Ewalt
167 Pages. $12.95 ISBN 9780578470634

$7-$10, Free for memebers

Ariel Goldberg

Ariel Goldberg’s publications include The Estrangement Principle(Nightboat Books, 2016) and The Photographer (Roof Books, 2015). Goldberg’s writing has most recently appeared in Afterimage, e-flux, Artforum, and Art in America. From 2014-2017, they organized readings at The Poetry Project and they currently work at The Jewish History Museum in Tucson as the Zuckerman Fellow, Curator of Community Engagement. They are on hiatus from adjuncting for universities in New York City with the continual aspiration to spend desert mornings and nights working on two books.

You’ll hear them read from A Century, a novel on the partnership of art critic Elizabeth McCausland and photographer Berenice Abbott. 

Lara Durback

Lara Durback  is a poet & interdisciplinary artist living in Oakland for 13 years now. She recently gave a talk on connective tissue and is working on a long poem about lawless friendships.

She has published books collectively under NoNo Press and Mess Editions. You can see her printed and/or written work in Drift Magazine, Mrs. Maybe, Bombay Gin, the UK journal Hi Zero, and Tripwire. Her archiving work is online at deepoakland.org. In 2013, with designer Andrew Kenower, she produced the letterpress publication Field Work: Poems on the Occasion of Mark diSuvero at Crissy Field for SFMOMA. She has taught a letterpress printing course at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, SF Center for the Book and was a founding member of the  press collective Material Print Machine. She is also the author of A Lizard, A Smashed Safe, And A Pillow (Encountered On A Walk In Oakland) (Publication Studio, 2016).

Claire Grossman

Claire Grossman is a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Stanford and co-curator of Cantíl, an Oakland-based reading series.