TOUCHSTONE CINEMA
A programming collaboration with Inbar Hagai dedicated to creating spaces of convening around experimental film and video.
06 Virtual Structures of Sabotage
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. February 16, 2024
A screening and conversation with artist|critic|curator Aria Dean and New Red Order.
Virtual Structures of Sabotage brings together two video works that explore the possibility of virtual space as a site for sabotage: New Red Order’s Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality and Aria Dean’s Abattoir USA! The screening will be followed by a conversation with Dean and the members of New Red Order (Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys) who will join us remotely via Zoom.
The conversation will probe the ways in which virtual cinema can be used as a means of sabotage. Whether the digital realm is used to break boundaries of access or to make peculiar what are known structures of violence, the program and discussion seek to propose ways in which virtual manipulation can be harnessed for incisive critiques of architectural manifestations of violent systems.
05 a seed a deer a seed presented in partnership with Tree News
Touchstone Cinema in partnership with Tree News (Erin Mallea & Paper Buck) is honored to co-present a seed a deer a seed a film by Marianne Hoffmeister Castro.
Saturday, October 14, 3-4:30 PM
Earth Theater, Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Pittsburgh, PA
https://carnegiemnh.org/event/a-seed-a-deer-a-seed/
a seed a deer a seed (2023) is a short film by Marianne Hoffmeister Castro that examines the conservation efforts at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center (Austin, TX). The film threads together stories and modalities of care and management of local ecosystems while bringing forth the alliances and challenges between plant, animal and human communities. What are the ecological alliances that need to be sustained in time? How long can the land management efforts continue to preserve balance on the local ecosystems? Who decides who needs to keep on living or who needs to be eradicated? By formulating these questions throughout the film, a seed a deer a seed becomes a meeting place to reflect on the human impact on managed landscapes but also on the entanglements with vegetal lives and nonhuman animals as agents in these conservation efforts.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with the filmmaker and Rachel Reeb, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
Tree News is a newsletter and event series produced by artists Erin Mallea and Paper Buck (Pittsburgh & Philadelphia, PA). Tree News focuses on tree and forest stories as entry points into discussions of environmental justice, ecological orientations in art practice, and climate change adaptation. Tree News profiles trees, people, places and projects to serve as a platform to share resources, build relationships, and develop deeper understandings of the world around us.
04 Rust Belt Renegades: Peggy Ahwesh Lecture & Pittsburgh Filmmakers Screening / Discussion
Touchstone Cinema presents a two-part program highlighting moving image artists working in and coming out of a movement of DIY and punk-aesthetics core to Pittsburgh Filmmakers throughout the 1970s-80s.
Friday, April 28th 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM
4919 Frew St
Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
CMU College of Fine Arts, Rm 111
We will welcome filmmaker and artist Peggy Ahwesh for a screening and artist talk about her work. Ahwesh was a programmer at Pittsburgh Filmmakers in the early 1980s and was central to the formation of the aesthetic movements of that time. Peggy’s talk will span her 40-year career as we screen and discuss works from the 1990s- today.
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Saturday, April 29th 6:30 PM – 8:00PM
Melwood Screening Room
477 Melwood Ave
A collaboration between Touchstone Cinema and Pittsburgh Sound + Image.com/, this screening and panel discussion will feature punk-aesthetic films made by women working at Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ in the 70s-80s. The program will include films by Peggy Ahwesh, Natalka Voslakov, Christiane Dolores, Elizabeth Nada Seamans, and Stephanie Beroes.
This event was made possible with generous support from the 2022-2023 Sylvia and David Steiner Speaker Series at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and the Carnegie Mellon University School of Art.
03 Faunal Eye
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. March 17, 2023.
Featuring artists: Yalda Afsah, Boaz Arad, Wim Catrysse, Hsu Che-Yu, Dana Sherwood
Can we truly see animals without projecting ourselves onto their reflected gaze? Can the tools we use to observe the world, designed for human perception, capture a glimpse of a nonhuman substance? The works in this screening examine the realities of domestication, conditioning, and instrumentalization of non-human bodies, whose experience ever remains unbridgeable to us. While they may not be entirely free of anthropomorphism (and perhaps no man-made work can ever be), they utilize the moving image to observe and reflect these existing systems of human dominance, rather than reducing the non-human to a mere tool for human storytelling.
* Thank you to Marianne Hoffmeister Castro for her programming support.
02 Horror of Here-ness
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. December 2, 2022.
With 16mm projections by Flea Market Films
A screening of Hollis Frampton’s “Winter Solstice” followed by a conversation between Rebecca Shapass and Dr. Adam Lowenstein, professor of Film & Media Studies at University of Pittsburgh and leader of the Horror Studies Working Group.
We review clips from Ray Henderson & Tony Buba’s 1996 documentary Struggles in Steel: The Fight for Equal Opportunity – a work that brings voice to the history of Black steel workers– and George A. Romero’s 1978 film Martin – a postmodern vampire tale set in Braddock, PA – to situate Frampton’s work within Pittsburgh’s industrial history & to examine the possible intersections of horror and documentary in Pittsburgh-made cinema 1970-1990s.
What happens when horror comes home? When horror is no longer something out there, something alien, something other, but something intimate? When horror seeps into the everyday and ordinary rather than being bound solely to the fantastic and ordinary? - Lowenstein, “Horror Film & Otherness (2022)
01 VISION MACHINES
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. October 7, 2022.
With support from the Sylvia & David Steiner Speaker Series
Vision Machines is a lineup of moving-image works focused on artists working with/against robots that see. This program reflects upon CMU’s complicated legacy as a major contributor to the field of computer vision.
Works in the program include:
Kuka (2016) by Lyndsay Bloom
Conversations with Bina48 (2014- ongoing) by Stephanie Dinkins
Eye/Machine II (2002) by Harun Farocki
Mine (2009) by Liz Magic Laser
Rover (2017) by Robert Twomey
Thank you to Eunsu Kang, Angela Washko, Golan Levin, Rich Pell, Johannes DeYoung, Paolo Pedercini, Geneva Skeen, and Garth Zeglin for their programming support.
