Dervish Machine

"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

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.

The mummy signals from the threshold of the living and the dead. Secrets seep through the skin, and tattooed oracles reveal the body is a sign divine. This film is an inscription of the mysteries in action.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

'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.

Projector performance for 16 mm film loop, invented lenses and objects, inspired by the total solar eclipse of August 2017 yet contains no photographic images whatsoever. Simple objects both concrete and transparent are physically handled producing an expansive projection environment beyond the frame. Visual concepts of light latency, peripheral vision, and the cosmic imagination are activated and propulsive. Unsatisfied with photography’s ability to render the ineffable light conditions of the solar eclipse, I replace the solar with the projection system, deliberately creating a work that is not a picture of the physical world, but could not exist without it. Sounds by the band of poets: Eric Baus, Phil Cordelli, and Oren Silverman, originally performed live at Georgia Art Space, Denver Colorado.

"On January 28, 1986 the Challenger Mission 51-dash- L set out to observe Halley's Comet from space but exploded a minute into the launch killing everyone on board. A monument to Challenger astronaut Ellison J Onizuka stands in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, from which I made a graphite rubbing of the text onto a sheet of plain paper, and noticed it was nearly a perfect haiku. Then re filmed to emphasize poetic structure / disaster duration."