Beyond Resolution
Films by Sabine GruffatThis collection of experimental short films favors ambiguity and resists resolution, drawing from a range of genres and layered techniques.
The nearer the gaze, the more obscure the view. Illegibility here is not an escape from politics, but a way of inhabiting it differently: as a site of tension, friction and possibility. Images are processed to draw attention to the hidden logics in software, hardware and materiality. In repurposing media, the works call attention to the histories from which meaning's fragile frameworks emerge.
Runtime: 1h8m
Sabine Gruffat is a French-American artist born in Bangkok, Thailand. She co-founded and co-programs the Cosmic Rays Film Festival in Chapel Hill, NC, with filmmaker Bill Brown. Currently she lives in Marseille, France. Gruffat works on experimental, animation and essay forms and exhibits her work as installations, performances and single-channel screenings. By actively engaging with both current and outmoded technology, Gruffat's work questions our standardized and mediated world.
Gruffat's films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide, including the Image Forum Festival, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, Migrating Forms, the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Chicago Underground, Cinéma du Réel, 25FPS, Transmediale in Berlin and The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. She has produced digital media works for public spaces as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum and Hudson Franklin in New York. Her collected video works are distributed by the Video Data Bank in Chicago, IL.
Headlines: BOMB PARTS
Detroit, MI | 2007 | 3 | 16mm master negative transferred to digital
A semi-automated animation process of a New York Times article results in sentence recombinations that sometimes make sense while emphasizing certain words and images. The writing from February 27, 2007, is about bomb parts found in Baghdad that the newspaper speculates were planted by Iran.
A Return to the Return to Reason
Chapel Hill, NC | 2014 | 3 | Laser etched BW 35mm film
A tribute to Man Ray's 1923 film Le Retour à La Raison. In this film, Man Ray's "original" film was digitized with its scratches, and splices, then compiled into digital filmstrips. These filmstrips are used to output a dithered image that the laser engraver may etch onto black film leader.
Brave New World
Chapel Hill, NC | 2015 | 7 | 35mm Film transferred to HD
In 1927 Henry Ford bought land in the Amazon for a rubber plantation and called it Fordlandia. In this video, 35mm archival silent documentary film footage shot by Henry Ford's own filmmakers is reworked and given a soundtrack revealing the colonial lens through which the filmmakers apprehended unfamiliar nature.
Black Oval White
Owego, NY | 2009 | 3 | Mini DV/DVCAM transferred to digital
A video recording of a computer-generated abstract animation that is keyed, wiped and matted by electronic oscillators and feedback. The sound of the electronic oscillators is delayed and pitched to produce modulations.
Take it Down
Chapel Hill, NC | 2019 | 12.5 | Solarized color positive 35mm film
A last stand for the silent guardians of the old order. Take It Down is a filmic day of reckoning for the Old Confederate South. What is up must come down, like the Confederate soldier monuments standing in courthouse squares across the South. Solarized film makes positives bleed into negatives.
Framelines
Washington, DC and Chapel Hill, NC | 2017 | 10 | Laser-etched Color Negative transferred to Digital
Framelines is an abstract scratch film made by laser etching abstract patterns on the film emulsion of negative and positive 35mm film. The strips of film were then re-photographed on top of each other as photograms then contact printed. The soundtrack layers the noise made by the etched optical track.
Moving or Being Moved
Chapel Hill, NC | 2021 | 11 | Digital Video, 3D Animation, and Motion Capture
Post-modern dance theory by Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer is put to work while a woman cleans the house in a motion capture suit. The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers.
Souvenir Statuette
Ménerbes, France and Sante Fe, NM| 2024 | 11 | Digital Video, 3D Animation, and MoCap
Souvenirs of souvenirs. Souvenir Statuettes were animated in real spaces with a custom-made augmented-reality application. Whether they be cast from a mold, or 3d scanned and propagated online, Souvenir Statuettes aim for virality. Some of the quasi-objects in this video were once objects, others are non-objects or computer model imaginaries.
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