Soma Sema

"Sandy Ding's WATER SPELL is a bold, abstract journey that takes us into the psychic interior of our very cellular structure... and back. For me, this film is about reincarnation and transformation, on both the spiritual and sub-atomic levels. This is not an easy film, but it is a powerful one."

--Nina Menkes

Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin's Dreammachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenuousness of the material. The film itself becomes the site to experience impermanence, and to revel in the unfixed image.

From the Sanskrit, ‘gentle gazing brings liberation’, the title is also the name of the particular body of water which is the image-subject of the film. Landscape as inscape, not inertly present but beckoning an active perception; a seeing and a seeing into.

"The visual was recorded through, not a lens, but an adjustable slit-like opening, which was attached in front of the image sensor. I was changing the length of the slit and rotating the angle to modify the visual, as my response to the activities taken place at Washington Square, San Francisco, on a beautiful sunny day." (Tomonari Nishikawa)

Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth.

Mistaken identities converge and separate again in the harsh burn of optical truths. Images revolt and stand on their heads. The story of photography told as a Western.

In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life. – Karl Marx A fantastic voyage through the cycles of decay and regeneration in the body and the world. Sublime psychotropic sound and a dark sensibility compels us into molecular memory, the structure of living culture, and the electronic architecture of Apocatopia, where beauty and terror merge. Unique chemical treatments emphasize the film's seething materiality.

A few simple techniques of the cinema--a direct quotation, a framed location, an actress in costume, a few cuts to the quick--conspire in a compact couple of minutes to produce an image replete with historical and geographic visibility, to wit: an implied and uncontainable expanse of a landscape bought, sold and inhabited. An anti-landscape film and a one-two punch.

Shot on location in Second Life, at "Beneath the Tree That Died" by AM Radio. Featuring Sunshine Hernandoz, BillyBob Mahoney, and Astra Thorne as themselves. Commisioned for the Artists Karaoke Throwdown at PDX Festival May 2009, Portland OR. "it is the possible we place before us" Gilles Deleuze, on the virtual

In a text collaboration with poet Lisa Gill, Jeanne Liotta parses the difference between text-as-image and text-as-text, as well as the variables of machine-made sound with elemental vibrations.

'Window' is a lo-fi, trance-inducing trigger into other realms. A static, formal elegance masks the teeming energy coursing through its electronic heart.

Erratic, erotic, arrhythmic lunar trauma. Strong poetic textures of female psycho-sexual experience, altering the film’s surface through selective bleaching and scratching, and uncanny percussive editing.

Animated glitch portrait of the eponymous television tower on the hill, guardian of fog and electronic signals in that earthshaking city by the Bay... sounds by Scanner, from Lauwarm Instrumentals

Riddles in the LAByrinth. A ritual shadowplay in 7 movements with intertitles, from a live performance at The Gas Station, East Village NYC circa late 80's. Thanks Jack Vengrow for the welding light, and thanks to the FDNY for dousing the burning chair (oops). Creating an intense aura in the blue light of the electronic cave, two creatures in conflict, creation, communication, and the urge to liberate.

A frottage film shot in the Jardín de Palestina, November 2023. Activated in the workshop by Jeanne Liotta Frottaged by: Gloria García, Fernanda Vincens, Brenda Boyer, Dídac Huma, Sandra Ostberg, Emiliano Reyes, Camilo Cañaveral, Ignació Gvirtz, Raffaella Rosset, Marta Lara, and Sofía Legarreta

video loop, duration eternal. One single film dissolve extracted from the media haystack of the mid 20th century.