
Episode 8: Refuse Powers’ Grasp
Over 3 days Episode 8 celebrates all the unruly ways we escape attempts to constrain us, tear down the walls of normative culture and build joy in flight.
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
Over 3 days Episode 8 celebrates all the unruly ways we escape attempts to constrain us, tear down the walls of normative culture and build joy in flight.
Part old-fashioned Renaissance man, part hardcore avant-gardist, the Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in the exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, named after the ‘central region’ of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain’s two hemispheres.
This programme takes human subjects as the focus for sound and image construction. And it includes a couple of masterpieces of experimental film: Paul Sharits’ deeply empathetic interpretation of epilepsy and Peter Kubelka’s Webern inspired abstract portrait of Arnulf Rainer.
A dense, hard, immersive, chaotic spatial performance in sound: a momentary gap in consciousness, free of order or decision.
5 days of film, music, discussion and study of our collective incompleteness—arrayed against the colonial ordering of how we come to know the world—practicing how we might exist otherwise, right here and now. Can we start to know and practice the world to come?
“Hidden in the hands an alluvial transcription of reach and embrace. The final flickers of the body’s expression, caress and touch.” – boychild
Nothing if not repetitive, film is founded on the incremental succession of minute difference. But how does repetition of the same play out, and is it a tool to comment on the standardising repetition of the mass media?
One of the most startling cinematic debuts on record, The Flicker is more a hallucination than a film, an out of body experience and riotous celebration of visual harmonics frequencies. An experiment in perception, come with your mind and eyes open.
Bleu Shut reveals, and allows us to enjoy, our gullibility within the pervasive absurdity of modern life.
Are artists powerless in the face of technology? These often whimsical and amusing films are minimal technological interventions and appropriations but maybe also rigorous takes on the role of popular media and culture in our hyper-technological world.
A poetic multi-screen performance about “the inadequacy of the arbitrary passing moment and the impossibility of permanence”. About time and change.
A slowed down single tracking shot along a corridor as workers at the Bath Iron Works, (Maine, USA) take their lunch break.