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Control Corridor

HalfLifers

1997 00:11:00 United StatesEnglishColorMono
Tags:
Humor

Description

In a fictional conduit space, language and function are recontextualized as the HalfLifers struggle to re-assess the nature of their mission while engaged in an eternal cycle of maintenance and communication routines.

“Slipping freely in tone between editing session and Hollywood story conference, they wreak havoc on the conventions of shot-countershot as their jargon-laced exchanges turn oddly self-reflexive, a comic subterfuge that’s the linguistic equivalent of biceps-flexing before the mirror."

—Jim Supanick, “Quest for What?” Film Comment (September/October 1999)

This title is also available on HalfLifers: Action Series, HalfLifers: The Complete History and American Psycho(drama): Sigmund Freud vs. Henry Ford.

HalfLifers is an ongoing collaborative project created by longtime friends Torsten Zenas Burns and Anthony Discenza. Burns received his BFA in Media Art from New York State College of Art & Design at Alfred University in 1990, and an MFA in Performance and Video from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993. He currently resides in Holyoke, MA. Anthony Discenza received a BFA in studio art from Wesleyan University in 1990, and an MFA in video from C.C.A.C. in 2000. He currently resides in Oakland, CA.

The HalfLifers create videotapes and installations exploring speculative fictions including zombie relationships, rescue rituals and re-imagined slapstick. Their sculptural installation projects and looping projections have shown at Smackmellon Gallery in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, and at the DiRosa's Gatehouse Gallery in California. Single-channel works, including the Rescue, Action, Island, Pioneer and Afterlifers series' have screened at the Museum of Modern Art in NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art in NY, Catherine Clark Gallery in CA, the New York Video Festival, Video_Dumbo in NY, Chicago Underground Film Festival in IL, Pacific Film Archive in CA, Impakt Festival (Netherlands), European Media Arts Festival (Germany), Pleasuredome in Canada. Their work was included in the book, Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the Bay Area, 1945 - 2000.