Billions of years away from now, who or what will have been our ancestors? From billions of years ago, what are the remnants we hold? What will have been our radiant future fossil, an exclamation mark for Earth’s double helix of resource exploitation, depletion and extinction and the resilience of ancestral spirits and of love? 

Drive a motorcycle through the woods at night. An arrow of failing speed. They never showed up but you just don’t care. An owl hoots as you plunge into your own shadow, but in this pool, in the mirror of the asphalt, what do you see? Marvel at the smell of wet meadow at night. The red sky opens and so does a well of memories—those sticky threads you unravel are ghosts, are ghazals reaching out. 

Do not stand by and watch! Refuse exploitative work, protest the work of cliché, refuse the fixed organisation of time, refuse complacency, and crochet your resistance. Denounce toxic patriarchy violently insinuating itself into every situation. The movies in this fierce program surely pack a punch!

“From the perspective of the crystal, we assert that things produce their own time, that there is more than one time depending on the diversity and difference of nature’s possibilities”

The Crystalist Manifesto, 1976.

Through a wormhole darkly, a hatch opens. The films in this program are little crystalline germs around which new rituals and coalitions can form. They ponder the mystery of a crystal, its vertigo of opaque and transparent faces, its capacity to graft an infinite new reality, the yet-unseen, a roar of contingency, into the mundane. 

“ Once I had a love and it was a gas/ Soon turned out had a heart of glass”

Debbie Harry, Blondie, 1978

The cold touch of glass, acting under hypnosis like the cast of Werner Herzog’s 1976 Heart of Glass, an unfeeling rock surface that goes on forever, unserenaded life-cycles of electronic devices, strange vagaries of flesh liberated from a determinate function, serialisations and permutations of an algorithm. These are non-human affects we don’t understand, their workings—a black box. Small-file media artists probe this glacial reality with a punk abandon. 

Space that is not one, a space that overflows, a space that you yourself are making when you are cruising aimlessly, lost to meandering thoughts, to the desire of a place outside the map. The movies in this category celebrate the freedom of losing your way and making it as you go.