aDifferent Program 2 | a rose on the dark side of the moon
7:00 PM | Friday, May 15th 2026 | Woodland Pattern
720 E Locust St | Milwaukee, WI, 53212
Afterwards, Gizem Tonbak, 43 sec
Synopsis |
Driven by curiosity about my roots, I returned to my father's birthplace two decades after his passing. In the attic of a house soon to be demolished, I discovered his youthful paintings, my grandfather's wooden suitcase, and video footage my father shot in the 90s. Printing these frames using the cyanotype technique allowed me to linger in each moment, tracing the changes in the house and seeing through my father's eyes. This project became a journey of discovery, reconciliation, and farewell-an exploration of how memory fades yet lingers, and how curiosity bridges past and present.
Artist Bio |
Gizem Tonbak (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary filmmaker based in between Istanbul and Offenbach. Her work embraces the analog world's tranquility, often incorporating experimental cyanotype, cyanolumen, and cyanotype animation techniques to explore themes of identity, roots, belonging, and memory.
The Myth of Bison, My Mother, Asuka Lin, 8 min 27 sec
Synopsis |
There is a myth that bison are one of the only mammals immune to cancer, but this is false. A scientific journal from 2000 reports on one of the first instances found of cancer in bison: a mother who had to be euthanized. Excerpts of this finding are read as 16mm footage of bison (both painted and real) flicker on screen. Meanwhile, in digital, a mother lays in bed after her chemo treatment, surrounded by her paintings of animals.
Artist Bio |
Asuka Lin is a Japanese-Taiwanese writer/director known for their short films ‘Into the Emerald Sea’ (Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival), and ‘A.I. Mama’ (London Short Film Festival). Their directorial work travels from anarchic cyberpunk to meditative folktales, united by themes of yearning and conflicting realities informed by current socio-ecological phases. They earned their BFA at the California Institute of the Arts in film/video, currently based in Chicago.
Hurricane Season, Michelle Trujillo, 6:22
Synopsis |
Hurricane anxiety takes a visceral form as the image searches for an escape route. Inspired by true events. Created on 16mm film and developed with comfrey, mint, yerba mate and willow leaves.
Artist Bio |
Michelle Trujillo was born in Miami to Colombian and Costa Rican Parents and grew up in South Florida. The focus of her practice is to question and explore representations of Latine culture, gender and identity. She works in Spanish, English and Spanglish as a mirroring of her lived experience. She works in various mediums such as eco and hand-processed 16mm film, digital video, 35mm still film and cyanotypes. Her films have been exhibited in festivals, galleries and conferences nationally and internationally such as Alchemy Film Festival, RPM, Mimesis Documentary Festival and have won awards such as the Lightpress Grant and the LEF Moving Image Grant.
The Story of The Cricket Queen, Natalie Peracchio, 3 min 57 sec
Synopsis |
“The Story of The Cricket Queen” explores how digital culture collapses the divide between spectator and subject in a space where users both create and consume their own images. Through acts of online voyeurism and performance, the film interrogates the ethics of looking by placing the filmmaker’s own image alongside strangers, celebrities, and artificially generated voices that blur the distinction between the real and the constructed. Through these synthetic narrators and mediated images, the film reflects on how digital culture reshapes the body and the self.
Artist Bio |
Natalie Peracchio is a filmmaker whose work combines performance, archival materials, and animation to reshape familiar narratives, forms, and images. Her films explore physical transformation through puppetry, costume, and experimental techniques on Super 8 and 16 mm film, examining how the body can be altered, exaggerated, or displaced. Her practice interrogates the manipulation and exploitation of physical forms as a means of exploring identity, authorship, and control. Her short films have screened at festivals including Fantasia Film Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Lone Star Film Festival, Capital City Film Festival, and Bridge Chicago. Her work has also been featured online through Labocine, Discover Indie Film on Amazon Prime Video, Film Shortage, and NoBudge.com.
Ghost Protists, Sasha Waters, 4 min 27 sec
Synopsis |
A protist is an organism that is neither animal, vegetable, nor fungi. Plant-like protists are called algae – such as those “flowers of the sea” cyanotypes created by Anna Atkins and published in a landmark book in 1843. In a mesmerizing frenzy of images and text, Ghost Protists transforms her images into a protest of the colonial violence that enabled their creation.
Artist Bio |
Sasha Waters is a moving image artist and Professor of Film at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her latest documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, premiered at True/False in 2026 and will air nationally on public television. Her films have screened at the Telluride Film Festival, IFF Rotterdam, Kassel Dokfest, Microscope Gallery, the Tribeca, Ann Arbor, Woodstock, Chicago Underground, Big Sky Documentary Film Festivals, and the Museum of the Moving Image among other international venues.
The Swirl Of The Shine Pierced, Rankin Renwick, 3 min
Synopsis |
A radical whirlwind of a punk invocation for revolution
Artist Bio |
Rankin Renwick has been a singular voice in experimental cinema for over 40 years. Eschewing an allegiance to any one medium or form, Renwick builds authentic works revealing an insatiable curiosity and unflinching engagement with the world around them. Often focusing their lens on nature, freedom and the locales of their adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, Renwick uses avant-garde formal elements to explore radical politics and environmental issues. An artist who often self-distributes, their screening history reads as a map of independent cinema worldwide. They have screened work in hundreds of venues internationally, institutional and not, including The Museum of Modern Art, Light Industry, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Basel, The Smithsonian, Oberhausen, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Centre Pompidou, Bread and Puppet Theater and True/False Film Festival, among many others.
Resistance Meditation, Sara Wylie, 4 min 58 sec
Synopsis |
A meditation on crip time and resistance by a chronically ill filmmaker, shot on Super 8 and (mostly) eco-processed by hand. The short film addresses conventional narratives around the nature of illness and instead posits disability and crip time as natural sites of resistance against capitalism.
Artist Bio |
Sara Wylie (she/they) is a filmmaker, producer and researcher from the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations (aka Vancouver, BC). Her work focuses on counter-archives, radical histories, embodied methodologies, disabled ecologies and crip intimacies.
The Teacher’s Sauna, Natasha Cantwell, 2 min 33 sec
Synopsis |
On the boundary of the Haukijärvi school grounds, a teachers’ sauna was built in the early twentieth century. In rural Finland the sauna marked the edges of a life. Before modern hospitals, it served as a site for childbirth and for washing the dead, preparing them for burial. This film considers the sauna as a vessel for accumulated gestures, rituals, and time. It asks how spaces absorb human presence, and what remains when those bodies are gone - when absence itself becomes an active force.
Artist Bio |
Natasha Cantwell is a Melbourne-based experimental filmmaker whose work explores the tension between inner and outer selves. Drawing on performance art and horror cinema, her 16mm films balance humour with unease. Her work has screened internationally, including at Experiments in Cinema in the United States, as well as Stuttgart Filmwinter and EMAF in Germany. In 2025, she undertook an artist residency at Arteles Creative Center in Finland.
bby influencer / síntesis del rosa, Antimemoria Colectivx, 7 min 19 sec
Synopsis |
bby influencer / síntesis del rosa is an audiovisual piece developed through deepfake, AI, real -time 3D modification, and generative art. The work explores the deployment of the operative image in two of its gradients:
On one hand, the operative image emerges as a hyperstitional baby —stripped of any aesthetic interdiction—acting in a strictly functional manner, embedded within the social fabric through spectacle and the "trend economy," with military, strategic, and oppressive intelligence purposes that model the technosingular future. On the other, it manifests through the "becoming -cute": a plane where the technological image operates as a device of marketing and seduction, shaping human experience by means of supernormal, artificial, and unnatural hypersimulation that drives the species toward an annihilating addiction to the cute.
Through audiovisual speculation, this short film exposes the most embittered and delirious extremes of late capitalism, where pleasure and warfare merge within a single interface.
Artist Bio |
antimemoria_____is a research center and curatorial platform led by a Mexican multidisciplinary artist and Social Anthropologist. Their work focuses on post -internet art, developing experimental projects through artificial intelligence, generative art, sound production, and writing.
Their practice is based on the use of newtechs, critically addressing the relationship between technology and society. Drawing from the philosophy of technology and intelligence, as well as posthuman frameworks, they analyze how images and emerging technologies transform cultural dynamics under the influence of late capitalism. They exploring the contemporary mutation of the image and its inevitable drift toward alien rhythmslike the yotta-internet or technocomercial realism.They have collaborated with the open.secret festival, organized screenings in New York, and worked with the Berlin -based publisher Becoming.press. Their work has been exhibited internationally in venues across Vienna, Lisbon, Bangalore, and South Korea .
Uyghur Christmas song, Intizor Otaniyozova, 3 min 5 sec
Synopsis |
I've always loved Christmas songs, and it seems so unfair that they are only listened to for a short time of the year, and then kind of abandoned and ignored. I play them all year round and love them so much that I decided to try to write an Uyghur Christmas song.
Artist Bio |
Intizor Otaniyozova is an artist based in Central Asia. Themes of her research are identity, ecology, feminism and Beyoncé. Participated in exhibitions all over the world. Also was published in literature volumes. "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Side Chicks" is her debut feature-length documentary film in development.
Chance, Natasha (Rhia), 7 min 40 sec
Synopsis |
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Artist Bio |
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Komboloi, Krista Steinke, 7 min 12sec
