Fragments
Filmmaker Darrin Martin in Attendance
Friday, August 13, 7PM
Location: DiverseWorks, 1117 East Freeway
Price: $7 Non-members; Aurora and DiverseWorks members free

Please note: Some mature content and themes in this program

For once, we encourage you to bring your cell phones to a screening so that you can participate in an evening of new video performance, as well as solo and collaborative video works from Darrin Martin. Titled Fragments, the selection of works chosen by Darrin Martin will adress the subject of parts and pieces.  This theme oscillates between pieces that take a personal interpretation of the fragmentary to works that engage the notion within an historic and narrative context.

The videos Every (Text, Image, Sound, Movie) on my cell phone and Other Turbans are both highly personal investigations concerning how technology is incorporated into the fabric of everyday life. The former work explores the thread of random communications and low res records of the everyday that are embodied through our use of personalized technology. The latter work engages the personal documentation of post-operative trauma as Darrin himself is recorded after receiving an implant to help compensate for recent hearing loss.

The Knocking engages the fragmentary through its appropriation of a sound effects record that is coupled with monochromatic and black and white film of landscapes and cityscapes of Eastern Europe. A central character moves in and out of drag as he enacts simple domestic activities seemingly unconscious but simultaneously threatened by the images and sounds around him that surface the ghosts of an unsavory 20th Century history.

What If? Beyond a CarnaLove a video made with Torsten Zenas Burns, an experimental video artist, originates from a series of role-playing dates where couples and groups reenact bonding experiences while dressed as characters based upon obscure Marvel superheroes or non-fictional art personalities that test the boundaries of such binary relations as man/machine or male/female.

Finally, the new piece Fragments will premiere as a work in progress. The work will use video, sound and the distractions of audience members' cell phones as a way to engage with notions of the fragment as a both a temporal technological phenomena and as a meditation on the remnants of ancient cultures.

 Darrin Martin is a Bay Area artist whose works loosely examine how technologies are used in an attempt to measure and augment our daily perceptions. Martin’s collaborations with Torsten Zenas Burns build diverse speculative fictions around re-imagined educational paradigms. Martin has toured his work nationally and internationally.  He occasionally curates screenings and teaches video and media arts at UC Davis.