The BASEMENT Media Fest is an annual traveling survey of contemporary low fidelity experimental cinema. Founded in 2010 in response to the commercial race for higher resolutions and “true to life” image quality, BASEMENT is a celebration of the mediated experience as aesthetic experience. In its fourth year, the fest currently focuses on a short and highly curated program compiled from an open call for submissions.

From the outset of this festival, there have been two major threads in BASEMENT’s programs: the Old and the New. A number of works this year are concerned with the formal characteristics of technologies that have been abandoned by commercial producers, like celluloid film and analog video, while other works address the contemporary proliferation of digitally mediated experiences, dealing with topics of amateur media creation and the banality of media consumption. Despite an apparent divergence, all the works in this year’s program display an awareness of media as a complex of malleable forms. These works all exploit, in some way, the materiality of mediated form, and thereby problematize the use of media as seamless ideological tool.

$5

8:00pm