Join us for a live-streaming of Nina Sarnelle’s 45-min video essay Nike X and my Dead Hand. The one-time screening will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Ana Iwataki!  

Nike X and My Dead Hand is a (forever?) unfinished research project in Air Force Blue - the color of the sky on a clear day. Conflating a history of basketball celebrity and sneaker design with the Cold War-era Nike Missile Defense system, the project began with performative installations at Angel's Gate/Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, CA. This site is a former Nike Headquarters charged with protecting the Los Angeles Defense Area from aerial attack, where today a basketball court in the clouds has become an iconic site for filming fantasies of flight, indestructibility and arch support. A couple yards away from the court, the "Korean Bell of Friendship" seems to hang in tension. It's gift from the South Korean government -- a monument to a war that never ended. Shot on location and installed again at Angel's Gate Park for visitors to experience in situ, Sarnelle's video work traces reverberations of the apocalyptic militarism of the 1950's to present-day tensions on the Korean peninsula. Nike is the Greek goddess of victory: a metaphor useful to branding both sporting goods and national security. As the project spirals outwards, it attempts to destabilize free market ideology by excavating a shared language of sports, capitalism and war. 

Screening and Talk with Casey Kauffmann (@uncannysfvalley) and her USC thesis Committee: Jennifer West, Amelia Jones, and Edgar Arceneaux. Register via Zoom: https://bit.ly/2WBUZlI Or join at twitch.tv/femmebit

FEMMEBIT Interactive alum Kristin McWharter takes over our Twitch channel with some of her favorite interactive experiences!

Join us for an encore screening of Weng San Sit’s films Call me by my true names (2017) and Searching for Liang Zhu (2019). Starting at 7pm!

Alex Pelly is a Canadian filmmaker and video artist based in Los Angeles. She has worked as a director, editor and motion designer, and has extensive experience in music and branded content, working with companies such as Spotify, BuzzFeed, Super Deluxe and Fullscreen. As a video artist, Pelly’s work incorporates multiple generations of video technology, both analog and digital. Frequently collaborative with musical accompaniment, her work serves as a reflection of and muse to the music simultaneously.

Filmed in China, Mexico and the United States and utilizing archival footage, “Searching for Liang Zhu” journeys into spaces that are echoing with the story of the Butterfly Lovers; a Chinese legend about a woman named Zhu Ying-tai who dressed as a man in order to have an education. The story is embodied and conveyed in a repertoire of gestures, spoken word, dance and other performances by individuals in the ‘imagined community’ who are often represented to be homogeneous. As the legend of Liang Zhu is retold, the singular narrative is destabilized by differing ideologies and personal histories.

“Call me by my true names” is a three channel video installation that explores meditation across different world views and communities, investigating the fluid space of care, healing, resilience and resistance. It features practitioners involved in social justice and healing work both on the cushion and beyond, examining ways in which meditation allow us to investigate with attentiveness to the circumstances of our own minds and also “prepares us for the discomfort of confronting the obscurations of the society we are individual expressions of.” (Reverend Angel Kyodo Williams)

Join us for a discussion and screening of Touch Museum by Julie Weitz.

In 2015-16, LA-based artist Julie Weitz envisioned a world in which physical contact would become obsolete, and perversely replaced by virtual touch simulated through the screen. Her immersive video installation Touch Museum combined multiple videos, an original soundscape by LA-based composer Deru and a Youtube channel featuring videos that examined the perceptual phenomenon known as ASMR. Writing in the LA Times Deborah Vankin described the exhibition, "Weitz's videos juxtapose the physical, textural experience of living with the more remote digital universe in which we're so often immersed. As the installation progresses, the videos become more rooted in the ASMR world while still offering a more universal commentary on sensuality." (LA Times article here.)