Joel Stern, Co-director, OtherFilm Festival
Flashes of danger, misdirection and surprise ...
Whether it be music, sound or film, these mediums show no boundaries in the experimental and avant garde forms. Drawing focus to local and foreign expanded cinema, OtherFilm Festival returns in its sporadic glory this weekend. Finding interest in experimental forms of art, co-directors Joel Stern, Danni Zuvela and Sally Golding bring moving-image artworks to both the gallery and the exposed space. The opening night of the Brisbane program will be held upon on the warship at Queensland Maritime Museum, with 15 artists commissioned to create works that respond to the ship’s environment. Running Thursday November 29 to Saturday December 1 locally, OtherFilm Festival will go on to tour Melbourne and Meredith Music Festival. The Weekend Edition caught up with Joel Stern to chat inspirations and weekend essentials.
How do you like to start your weekend?
I like to ask: is the colonisation of the old by the new complete, or is divergence still possible?
What’s your favourite thing to do on a Saturday morning?
To search for the difference between word and image; space and movement; you, I, and me.
How do you like to unwind?
Anti-clockwise to the music of Morton Feldman.
What are your essentials for a well-spent weekend?
Flashes of danger, misdirection and surprise. A forensic scalpel.
What’s something you’ve been meaning to do on the weekend but haven’t got around to yet?
To challenge the assumption that improvisers engage with one another in a hermetic bubble while a passive audience listens on.
What’s your favourite thing to do on a Sunday evening?
Visit the site of an unnamed cataclysm; ‘the zone’, an off-limit space, pregnant with magic, mystery, and hope, where, it is said, dreams come true.
What are you looking forward to next weekend?
The OtherFilm Festival – we have set out to explore the vibrational potential of the moving image. I hope it vibrates though.
What are you reading at the moment?
The semiologies of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. And Wayne Rooney’s biography.
What inspires you?
The progressive revelation of unconscious material. The ‘now’ of experience remains an ongoing communicative delirium to me.
What was your childhood dream?
To subjugate the innerspace, chuck open the escape hatch and enable the immoderate two-way flow of synthesised realities.
What has been your greatest achievement?
Not consenting to indiscriminate platform promiscuity. Also, channelling my subconscious, co-opting my illusions.
What is success to you?
Pressing up against the limitations of my critique.
What are your words of wisdom?
My diagnosis is also my prescription: more of the same!
Only a local would know … I am not from around here.
FAVOURITE WEEKEND SPOT TO:
Perk up … Torbreck Observatory
Relax … Someone’s passenger seat
Dine … Mu’ooz, Moorooka
Indulge … I Life Factory, Fortitude Valley
Shop … West End Markets
Catch-up … Magic Mile, Moorooka
Be inspired … The brain
