Our experience of place is often a poetics of gaps. Moving as a form of autofiction, these works explore the intertwined gaps of memory, time, family, and landscape. This program features a range of work that reaches towards intermediate spaces, openings, and folds as we slope towards traumatic climatic forms.

Alex Ingersoll is a filmmaker and critical maker working with film, video, photography, audio, drawing, and animation. His work explores the complexities of place, memory, and media as a way to pose a series of problems regarding the aesthetic and sonic environments of our social imaginations of space. He combines experimental and documentary approaches to the moving image as a way to consider the mechanics of looking, listening, and remembering, which often include undefined edges and features.

He is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on media and technology studies with a focus on technologies of spatial representation, orientation, and memory. His work has been featured in venues and festivals in the U.S. and abroad, including the Alchemy Film Festival in Hawick, Scotland, the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Currents International New Media Festival in Santa Fe, and the Festival de Cinéma de la ville de Québec.

PROGRAM:
The Whole Bit (2013, video, sound, 3min)
light, shadows, and movement are cast by elements in the natural environment, combined with disoriented narration, and processed within reverberating cascades of audio as the viewer peels back layers of the unnerving, unsettling, and anxious scene that is unfolding. in an effort to sense the whole bit by uncovering what lies beyond space, the narrator questions our perceptions of the landscape as he guides us with echoes of do you see?

dis/orientations (2015, video, sound, 13min)
stories that speak to the experience of a disorienting encounter. these vignettes involve memories of personal and spatial disorientation when the wondrous, unexpected, or feared emerges from the mundane.

Needles and the Haystack (2015, video, sound, 4min)
a hike around cape falcon and the haystack rock marine garden off the coast of oregon.
Dark Objects (2014, video, sound, 4min)
drawing from a recurring childhood dream, this work swerves between physical and digital spaces of entanglement. watching the to and fro of a cube we move from a narrated moment of declaration regarding an object that resists possibility before a reconsideration regarding elements of affect, intuition, and memory.

Vestal Fire (2016, video, sound, 9min)
as carbon simmers, the digital blooms. an expectant mother receives a call after dark that opens up a world of absence. with this work, im interested in exploring cinematic media as a means by which nature is expressed and modified through experience and memory. this includes playing with affective techniques of anticipation and indirection as a mundane condition of the sublime. this project is rooted in the age of the anthropocene and outlines a phenomenology of horror where we gesture towards a world beyond the human.
Light of its History (2017, video, sound, 7min)
an archive of stone memory. mapping time with geological media. fumbling to reach through time to the things themselves. constructed using boulder stereograms, martian landscapes, mutable pixels, and glacial erratics. subtitles from the story of an african farm (1883) by olive schreiner.

In Case Things Go Poorly (2018, video, sound, 6min)
reel/reeled/reeling/reels (rl)
-to cause to stagger or recoil.
-to waver; to recoil or draw away from.
-of material things: to shake, rock, or swing violently; to totter, tremble.
-of an object or image: to have, or seem to have, a rapid quivering motion; to shimmer.
-of a person, group, etc.: to be emotionally or psychologically shaken by an event, experience, etc.; to feel disorientated, bewildered, overwhelmed, or intoxicated as a result of an occurrence, a powerful emotion, carrying a heavy weight, etc.
Our Blinding (2019, video, sound, 11min)
these are the dreams of the spar spectra. varying self, study of figure in a landscape. constructed with the birefringence of iceland spar and ways of being in a traumatic climatic form.