With the rise of new technologies in the digital realm, physical media has become a rare commodity, particularly with motion picture film.  As institutions move towards a more dominant digital platform to showcase cinematic projects, works on celluloid are often discarded, leaving them as “orphans” in the analog world. Orphan works are copyrighted material that no longer have an owner or sponsorship, thereby falling into the public domain or becoming obsolete. In his Orphan Morphin' presentation, filmmaker and curator Craig Baldwin “surfs the wave of obsolescence” using spoken word, graphics and motion picture clips to advocate for the radical re-working of marginalized film material in the forms of collage, compilation-doc and speculative fiction.  

About the Speaker:

Craig Baldwin is a filmmaker, artist and curator from San Francisco, California whose creative interests involve the repurposing and remixing of found imagery. In his films, he reassembles footage from educational, industrial and other cinema sources to create genre defying alternative histories with manic visual rhythms. For three decades, his weekly film series Other Cinema has screened experimental, essay and documentary pieces, as well as unique, mind-bending orphan works from his infamous film and video archive. Baldwin has been invited to numerous international festivals, museums, universities and institutes of contemporary art, often in conjunction with panels, juries and workshops on fair use and cultural activism. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including those from the Rockefeller Foundation, Alpert Award, Creative Capital, Phelan, American Film Institute, Film Arts Foundation and California Arts Council. 

This event is open to the public and admission is free.