BODYBANKS

The Spectacular Semester
80:00 - Eight tapes - (C)2005
Curated by Darrin Martin+Torsten Zenas Burns
The Spectacular Semester is a collection of videos by artists and filmmakers attempting to 
redefine the learned experience. Historical,visceral and psychological techniques in reimagined 
workshop and training scenarios are presented in a world where the professor is the director and 
participants are method acting themselves into students. Philosophical soap opera training, 
animation reality inquiry, nursery vet school, and speculative security preparation are among 
some of the tropes overlooked by conventional education. This collection of works readjusts this 
problem while simultaneously reframing the use of instructional material.

Recall
Darrin Martin and Torsten Zenas Burns
Video,stereo,14:00 (C)1998

Mediated exercises of reflective therapy sessions and 
staged fire prevention methods used in camping are coupled 
with the artists' own physio-dynamic interactions. The result 
opens up an arena of slippage that questions the very nature 
of human intimacy and distance through the framework of the 
controlled experience and its surveillance as a reliable record 
of memory.

Strategic Cyber Defense:
For Top Military Officials only
Dara Greenwald, video, 4:00 (C)2003

In a war that will never end, we see unknown 
enemies and simulated freedom fighters participate 
in speculative global military disorders within an 
invented geographic theatre.

Dissolve
Aaron Valdez, 16mm film, 15:00 (C)2003

Valdez gives us a concentrated look at the space 
in-between scenes through the selected re-edit of 
excavated educational films.

Pornographic Apathetic
T. Arthur Cottam, video, 6:00 (C)2004

A foursome steam up the afternoon in a verbal 
orgy of aural exchange.

Broom
Michael O'Malley, video, 3:00 (C)1999

A residency program teams up with a charged workshop 
participant and re-activates a dormant domestic prop. 
5...4...3...2...1?

Smaller and Easier to Handle
Kristin Lucas, video, 7:30 (C)2003

Sci-fi and kitchen tongs make likely partners as 
the videomaker documents an anthropomorphic 
transanimal operation. Make believe becomes 
serious play when the subject changes its stripes 
for spots in a techno-centric lo-fi morphology.

Dire Mastery
Bernard Roddy, 16mm film, 9:00 (C)2003

In a workplace of fake ailments and false romances, 
there is nothing wrong with using the outtakes. Through 
the delivery of lines through dry actor types, the filmmaker
embraces the language of the non-sequeter to create a 
hospital where nothing is general.

How To Fix The World
Jacqueline Goss, video, 28:30 (C)2004

Using psychological questions as a catalyst for 
interviewing photographs of peasants in Uzbekistan, 
Goss tests critical thinking and the framing of reality 
as linked by the tenuous strands between literacy, 
collective farming and socialism.

Torsten Zenas Burns 
holyokeresearch@verizon.net

Darrin Martin 
martind@alfred.edu

THE SPECTACULAR SEMESTER
will premiere at Aurora Picture Show
Saturday, April 30th 2005

AURORA PICTURE SHOW

JOINT-BIOGRAPHY
Burns and Martin began their collaborations in the video and 
sculpture programs at the School of Art and Design at Alfred 
University. Burns was born in 1968 and received his B.F.A. from 
the School of Art & Design @Alfred University in 1990 and an 
M.F.A. in video & performance from the San Francisco Art 
Institute in 1993. Martin was born in 1969 and received his B.F.A. 
from the School of Art & Design @Alfred University in 1992 and 
an M.F.A. from The University of California, San Diego in 2000. 
Together, Burns and Martin have based their single channel 
videotapes and current installation works on their research 
into diverse speculative fictions and reimagined 
educational practices. They have jointly participated in residency 
programs at Eyebeam Atelier(NY)and Experimental Television 
Center (Owego,NY). In 2003, Electronic Arts Intermix 
commissioned from them a netart project called 
"Lesson stalls: Learning net."
Their videos have screened and exhibited at venues including 
The Museum of Art & Design,NY, The New York Video Festival, 
Pacific Film Archive,CA, Madrid Museum of Contemporary Art,
Spain, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art,FL, Paris/Berlin 
International Video/Film Festival, Cinematexas,TX, and most 
recently screened at the 50th edition of Oberhausen Short 
Film&Video Festival in Germany. Their videotapes 
are distributed by VTAPE - http://www.vtape.org