Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Familiars is an experimental video project re-imagining the Skinner family Massachusetts Wistariahurst house and grounds as a fictional residency program populated by speculative Holyoke entities. Improvisational scenes include collaborations between (Kirsten cameras),(Hanne recorders), kitten & Catman super beings, living memories, baseball ramblers, silk worms, immersion Man, frozen aviary bell jar, Japanese & American mill workers, ectoplasmic typewriters, and 20th century spectral publishing entities.

Torsten Zenas Burns is an artist, curator, and media arts educator living in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He received his BFA in video art in 1990 from the New York State College of Art & Design at Alfred University, and his MFA in New Genres: video and performance art from The San Francisco Art Institute in1993. He has created & curated video, photo and installation projects exploring speculative content, including re-imagined educational practices, experimental space programs, zombie / afterlife relationships, post-human fictions, and improvisational (splatstick). Other collabotronica projects include collaborations with Anthony Discenza under the name HALFLIFERS, Darrin Martin, and VIROCODE. Burns` selected video work is distributed by Vtape, (Canada), Video Data Bank (USA), LUX (England) and EAI (USA). Over the past 19 years Burns has participated in nine residency programs including Headlands Center for the Arts (CA), Experimental Television Center (NY), L.M.C.C. World Views Studio Program, and Eyebeam (NYC). Burns has had video work screened at the NYC Museum of Modern Art`s Video Viewpoints and Premieres series, The Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), The Pacific Film Archive (CA), SF Cameraworks (CA), Dumbo Arts Center (NY), Video_Dumbo (NY), Aurora Picture Show (TX), Migrating forms (NYC), Krowswork Gallery, (CA), The Chicago Underground Film Festival, The European Media Arts Festival (Germany), The Impakt Festival (Netherlands), The Melbourne International Film Festival (Australia), The Oberhausen Short Film Festival (Germany), The Busan international video festival (South Korea), and The Stuttgarter Filmwinter: Festival for Expanded Media (Germany), In 2011 HALFLIFERS was featured with an artist page in the book Radical Light: Avant Garde Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000. In 2012 he curated BODYRADIO for Parsons Hall Project Space in Holyoke, Massachusetts. In 2013 Burns & Discenza as HALFLIFERS co-curated a group exhibition and performance series called: I think we?re ready to go to the next sequence: the legacy of HALFLIFERS at Gallery 400, Chicago, IL.