YPHSTB Curator: On the magic of the archive

How did you choose your specific theme for the screening?

My original working theme was spurred from a curatorial concept I had been mulling over for quite a while: Reflections in Time: Water in Experimental Film & Video Art. However, the more energy I have given this, the more it has grown beyond a screening of moving image works and has blossomed into an outline of a full-fledged seminar. Still, I approached the archive with Reflections in Time in mind, hoping it could serve as a meaningful starting point and with the possibility of finding some gems within the archive. What really got me jazzed was finding IULMIA’s copy of H2O by Ralph Steiner.

But as I spent time with the collection, I began to uncover other works that started speaking to one another in exciting and unexpected ways. The theme slowly expanded from a focus on a single element into a broader meditation on states of matter and change. In many ways, the archive itself guided the curatorial direction, which feels like part of its magic. It mirrors the advice I often give my students: you can begin with an idea of what a work might become, but in the end, it will be what it demands to be, you must listen to it.

What excites you about You (probably) Haven’t Seen This Before?

Aside from reencountering forgotten or overlooked works, I have always been fascinated by how YPHSTB allows us to reconsider how media once functioned in educational and public contexts. Many of the films in the archive were created not for galleries or festivals, but for classrooms, television, or institutional use, spaces where art, learning, and experimentation were once far more intertwined.

One piece in the program, A Time for the Sun, an Encyclopedia Britannica educational short, opens with a nearly three-minute experimental sequence set to classical Indian music filled with static shots of the rising sun. Its pacing and tone feel radically different from contemporary educational media. It is slow, meditative, and unafraid to let viewers linger in ambiguity; it has the breath of a photograph but the life of film. It reminds me of early children’s television, like Sesame Street’s 1974 short Sad Flower, where reflection, emotional resonance, and visual poetry were valued as much as instruction.

Seeing these works today reveals how much our relationship to time, attention, and learning has shifted. You (probably) Haven’t Seen This Before creates space to experience that difference by allowing us to slow down, become absorbed, and rediscover a moment when educational media trusted viewers to sit with beauty, stillness, and uncertainty.

What is special to you about the medium of film?

As a moving image artist, I’m particularly drawn to the malleability of film and how it can be physically shaped, altered, created, and destroyed, yet still carry memory within its emulsion. There is something profoundly alive about it. I am fascinated by the way in which time can become texture and how the color behaves in ways no digital process can fully replicate.

I’m also deeply inspired by the experimental film community, where knowledge is treated as something to be shared rather than guarded. There’s a generosity in the way artists exchange techniques, recipes, and discoveries; it’s an open-source spirit that keeps the medium evolving. That sense of collective curiosity and care is part of what makes working with film feel not just meaningful, but vital.