VISITING FILM & VIDEO ARTISTS & SPEAKERS AT BU

-THE LANTHANIDE SERIES (April 19) Erin Espelie’s The Lanthanide Series has been called experimental documentary and non-fiction narrative video essay. Each of its 15 chapters is based on one of the 15 Lanthanide elements on the periodic table- those which are essential to black mirrors, which make up the centerpiece of the film. It was mostly shot in the reflections of these so-called black mirrors: Aztec obsidian discs and the screen of a defunct iPad- what she calls the “modern-day black mirror.” She writes, “The novelty in image-capture aside, the piece is a meditation on how technology has been shaping the way we see the world, how we record the present and replay the past. It is also a consideration of the unusual visual and aural properties of rare earth elements (or the Lanthanides of the Periodic Table) and the political and environmental costs of their mining.”

-JOYS OF WAITING FOR THE BROADWAY BUS (April 26) Ken Jacobs, former professor and co-founder of BU’s cinema department, will be returning to present his new 3D video, Joys of Waiting for the Broadway Bus. Wrote Jim Hoberman for the New York Times, the video “is a perceptual ruckus created from time-exposed, digitally-enhanced 3-D slides. The nighttime street is transformed into a dynamic tapestry of light streaks and reflections that, floating in space, are at once transparent and eerily solid. Reproaching the visual paucity of Hollywood 3-D while reworking the compositional notions of his erstwhile teacher, the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, Joys is as experimental and energetic as anything in Mr. Jacobs’s long career.”

The showings and following discussions are free and take place at 7:30pm in Lecture Hall 6 at Binghamton University.