Notes Towards an Infinite Film, an online screening series of video, film and digital media curated for Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center’s Virtual Video Viewing Room, launches on Monday, May 25 with “Program One: The Promise of Props.”

Notes Towards an Infinite Film is a series of online screenings that surveys four decades of film, video and new media work created by Buffalo New York’s extended community of media artists. Channeling the spirit of Hallwalls’ physical video viewing rooms of yore, each program will be online and viewable for two weeks before being archived. Visitors are invited to spend time with individual videos and films, following the program Laura has curated or self-curating their own version. The films and videos presented as part of The Promise of Props engage a quintessential and identifiable Buffalo media genre – the experimental narrative. Playfully transforming narrative through the use of props and costume, these works demonstrate how experiments in film and video can extend beyond cinematic form and structure to the storytelling process itself. Fisher Price toys and plastic cowboy figurines, photographs and Hostess snack cakes, accordions and playing cards, all become performative tools through which the artists create visual fables that are, in turn, whimsical and droll, farcical and poignant: a lonely spaceman finds himself lost and confused amidst the violent culture of gun-toting cowboys; a young woman searches for identity across a landscape of magazine covers; an array of dolls enact a story of class consciousness and envy; individually packaged cupcakes express gender politics; eggs and potatoes convey mystical qualities. Exploring issues ranging from gender construction and the environmental impact of tourism to memory, ritual and tradition, the films and videos that comprise this program demonstrate that the promise of props lies in their capacity to imaginatively convey a host of real-life concerns.

Featuring work by Emily Anderson and Jen Morris, Don Bernier, Dorothea Braemer and David Kluft, Ruth Goldman, Cheryl Jackson, Carl Lee, Lara Odell and Anya Lewin, John Saxe, and Kelly Spivey.

Read more about the program here and here.