Doors 10:30a
Program 11:00a

Offsite
FATWOOD
Ivey Rd
Carrboro, NC

We’re excited to gather at Fatwood in NC — a collaborative workspace and rural zone for independent media, art, and design — with close connections toUNDO — for a special Cosmic Rays Film Festival partner program: FIELD STUDIES.

Presented by Fatwood as part of the Cosmic Rays Film Festival touring and partner programming, Field Studies offers a day of in-depth conversations with artists featured in this year’s festival. Across three sessions, filmmakers and multimedia artists will share insights into their practices, creative processes, and the experimental forms shaping their work today.

Throughout the day, we’ll move between presentations, informal exchanges, and time to explore the space. From reflections on the tools and forms that shape a film, to discussions of flicker, rhythm, memory, and the complex relationships between humans, nonhuman animals, and technology, these sessions open up the thinking behind the works on screen.

In addition to the talks, visitors are invited to step inside the CINEBUS—a converted school bus functioning as a collectively run mobile microcinema, gallery, and workshop space—featuring an installation by Charlotte Taylor.

Between sessions, wander around Fatwood’s grounds, grab a bite, and connect with fellow artists, filmmakers, and festival-goers before reconvening for the final conversation of the day.

Join us for this intimate day of dialogue, experimentation, and community around the moving image.

Come through.

Program

Session 1
Nicky Tavares
11am

Nicky Tavares is a multimedia artist whose work sheds light on systemic inequalities through personal storytelling. Her work has evolved through an array of media – photography, film, video, animation, sculpture, VR 360, as well as across film types and presentation formats such as documentary, installation, GIFS, and moving image projections for live performance. Tavares will share insights into her process through a close look at A Telephone for God, featured in the festival program The Call, alongside a broader reflection on the tools and forms she draws upon to meet each new idea.

Session 2
Linda Scobie
12:30pm

When spending a lot of time at home in isolation, the walls begin to move. The sense of time fades, the days pass quietly, everything seems to repeat itself endlessly. Spaces, conversations, visual impressions and sounds merge and make everything seem like a long dream. After her session, take a moment to wander around Fatwood, explore the CineBus, grab a snack, and enjoy a quick BBQ before our final conversation.

Session 3
Magdalena Bermudez
2:45pm

Our final session features filmmaker and educator Magdalena Bermudez, whose essayistic films explore the entangled relationships between humans, nonhuman animals, and technology.
Bermudez will discuss her body of work and share more about her film Hiding Places, featured in this year’s festival, which examines camouflage and the shifting boundaries between visibility and concealment in the living world.  Join us for this final conversation before we head back to the Chelsea Theater for the festival’s closing evening program.

Bios

Nicky Tavares is a multimedia artist whose work sheds light on systemic inequalities through personal storytelling. Her work has evolved through an array of media – photography, film, video, animation, sculpture, VR 360, as well as across film types and presentation formats such as documentary, installation, GIFS, and moving image projections for live performance. This process of evolution has been intuitive; with each project she simply looks for the best creative tools that will serve the content. Her work has been shown internationally in both gallery and screening room contexts, including New Directors/New Films at the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; TIE: The International Experimental Film Exposition; IMPAKT Festival; the Dallas Medianale Festival; Balagan Experimental Film and Video Series; and Other Cinema. Among other honors Nicky has been recognized as an Artist-in-Residence at the Visual Studies Workshop, Fine Arts Work Center, Kala Art Institute, and the Institute for Research and Dialogue in Islamabad, Pakistan. She has been awarded grants from the Austin Film Society, LEF Moving Image Fund, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Center for Cultural Innovation, and Puffin Foundation. She received her MFA in film and video from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and BA in photocommunications form Saint Edward’s University. Nicky is currently an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Grinnell College.  

​​Linda Izcali Scobie is a filmmaker, programmer, and projectionist living in San Francisco. She formerly served as the Assistant Director of Canyon Cinema, one of the oldest distributors of experimental and avant-garde film, and was on the Board of Directors for Artist Television Access. Her 16mm film work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at film festivals and venues such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival, LA Film Forum, Antimatter, Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City and XCÈNTRIC – de Barcelona. In 2018, she was the Artist in Residence at White Leaves Residency in New Mexico. She is currently a Senior Projectionist at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

Magdalena Bermudez is a filmmaker and educator whose practice examines the entangled relations between humans, nonhuman animals, and technologies through essayistic film and video works. Her practice is research-based, often recontextualizing scientific or operational images to interrogate their formal and political implications. Magda received a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has screened internationally at film festivals such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], Athens International Film + Video Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival, Kasseler DokFest, İstanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, and Science New Wave Festival. She is an Assistant Professor of Cinema at Binghamton University.

Bill Brown is a filmmaker living in North Carolina where he is an Associate Professor of Media Production at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  Brown‛s films have screened at venues around the world, including the Rotterdam Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and Lincoln Center. A retrospective of his films was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Sabine Gruffat is a French-American artist born in Bangkok, Thailand. She works with experimental video and animation, media-enhanced performance, participatory public art, and immersive installation. In this work, machines, interfaces, and systems constitute the language by which she codes the world. The creation of new ideas means inventing new ways of using existing tools, crossing signals, or repurposing old hardware. By actively disrupting both current and outmoded technology, Gruffat questions the standardized and mediatized world around us. She has produced digital media works for public spaces as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, Devotion Gallery, and more. She is also a filmmaker with a special interest in the social and political implications of media and technology. Her experimental and essay films explore how technology, globalization, urbanism, and capitalism affect human beings and the environment. Sabine’s films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, The Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan, and Migrating Forms in New York, the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, and more.