ESP (2.5 min, 4K, 2024)
A brutalist monument to the Empire State as manifested by a malfunctioning inkjet printer. Chroma and luminance are made audible as architectural and printed lines converge and dissolve into pattern and noise. Photographed in the Capitol City, Albany, N.Y.
"Glitchy, warped photographs of Albany’s modernist Empire State Plaza are paired with percussive digital noise. The erratic imagery was 'co-created with a malfunctioning Canon inkjet printer,' a complete accident that Kraning interpreted as the machine “asserting its agency.” In a time where the use of generative AI is hotly debated, the unintentional intervention of a broken printer could be interpreted as degenerative image making, a ghost in the machine.” - Alex Truong
AWARDS:
Ribalta Animata Best Film Award, Ribalta Experimental Film Festival
SELECTED SCREENINGS:
New York Film Festival
Crossroads, SF Cinematheque
ULTRA Cinema MX
Light Matter Film Festival
Revolutions Per Minute Film Festival
Ribalta Experimental Film Festival
Cosmic Rays Film Festival
Ann Arbor Film Festival
Athens International Film and Video Festival
Oberhausen International Short Film Festival
Istanbul Experimental Film Festival
VIDEOEX Film Festival, Zurich, Switzerland
International Animation Festival Soleil, Bulgaria
Ibrida Festival of Intermedial Arts, Italy
Chicago Underground Film Festival
Emami Art Experimental Film Festival, India
Filmfest Aachen, Germany
Buffalo International Film Festival
Living with Buildings, UK
San Diego Underground Film Festival
“In the most impressive of the program’s films, the merger between technique and meaning yields deeply moving studies of their subjects. ESP’s “collaboration” (credited as such in the film) with an inkjet printer (a wonderful fetishization of an obsolete technological object that nevertheless continues to function creatively here) as well as Szlam’s meditation on luminous yet disconcerting natural surfaces both hinge on their effective interplay with the technology/technique employed. " Sarah Keller, Millenium Film Journal
”In a time where the use of generative AI is hotly debated, the unintentional intervention of a broken printer could be interpreted as degenerative image making, a ghost in the machine.” - Andrew Truong, Buttered Popcorn