A POTENTIALITY (2020, digital, 16mm film, 16 minutes)
​
Winner of the Alice Guy Prize Special Mention at FID Marseille 2020. Notes from the Jury: A film which meticulously reflects upon the materiality of time following specific histories. While focusing on details, the images prevent us from accessing the whole. This gesture reflects the subject where voice has been violently stripped from the people, left silenced. The Special Mention for Prix Alice Guy goes to “A POTENTIALITY” by Dana Berman Duff.
​
A POTENTIALITY is a continuation of my interest in using film to shoot printed material, as in the Catalogue series. I'm especially interested in the equivalence of the film grain to the halftone print dot at the base level of the construction of reproduced image and language.
​
This piece is built on a graphic project by Susan Silton in which she reprinted five pages of the New York Times from the 1930s. Her project has a disturbing resemblance to present day newspaper reports.
​
Opera "The Emperor of Atlantis" composed in 1944 by Viktor Ulmann, libretto by Peter Kien.
​
2-MINUTE TRAILER
WORK SAMPLES 2025
Video coverage of two installations: 1.The Universe Breathes Us, which takes breathing, the tides, and the Moon as motifs and 2. What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes, which riffs on the underground lava tube as poetically intestinal.
1. Video walk-through of The Universe Breathes Us (2025) installation by Dana Berman Duff and Shirley Tse at Kling & Bang, Reykjavik, Iceland. Featuring a song by Alan Duff Berman and Dana Berman Duff performed live by a choir from Reykjavik.
Works by Dana Berman Duff: Moonlight/Moonbeam (tinted window film with Moonbean hole), Facing the Sun, (Moon projection on wall) (digital video 2 hours 40 minutes), The Universe Breathes Us (song lyrics and choir). Back room: Sun and Moon, (16mm projector/paper ball).
2. Video projections by Dana Berman Duff for What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes (2019) with installation simulations of two opposite-facing screens. Exhibition collaboration with Sabina Ott: videos by Dana Berman Duff, haiku by Stephanie Barber, sound by A.J.McClenon. Shot in Icelandic lava tube and beach in Baja, Mexico.
Reading Aloud: What Is Power? by Fred Dewey (2023, digital video, 40 minutes). A film of the essay "What Is Power?" by Fred Dewey. Produced by the Fred Rogers Dewey Legacy Project.
Fred Dewey (1957-2021) was a democracy activist, writer, organizer, teacher, book editor, publisher, and designer. He organized public “table readings” around the world of Hannah Arendt’s writings on democracy and authoritarianism. Dewey wanted readers to realize their capacity for a different kind of politics, one in which people claim their power. This project draws on one of Dewey’s most penetrating texts and his belief in the transformative experience of people reading aloud to each other. It aims to capture those transformations on film.
With Will Alexander, Stephanie Bell, Dennis Cooper, Sandra Cruze, Dorit Cypis, Alexandra Epps, Laura Flanders, Simone Forti, Todd Gray, Dakota Higgins, Hedi El Kholti, Peter Kalisch, Chris Kraus, Suzanne Lacy, John Malpede, Eileen Myles, Russell Marling, Meena Nanji, Jeffrey Owens, Renée Petropoulos, Pilar Petropoulos-White, Linda Pollack, Rachel Grace Potts, Pamela Ramos, Manuel Ramos Ruiz, Trinidad Ruiz, Guy Santiago, Catherine Scott, Kyungmi Shin, Jack Skelley, A.K. Toney, Shirley Tse, Jody Zellen.
A POTENTIALITY (2020, 16:17, digital video)
Winner of the Alice Guy Special Mention prize at the FID Marseille film festival.
Note: The first 7.5 minutes are silent. Suggested video cue points for shorter sample: 06:36 to 8:40.
A short, structured film adding the elements of time and sound to five front pages of the New York Times from 1933 and 1934 and an opera from 1944. Reports from home mixed with the rise of disturbing events abroad have an uncanny echo in our current news. A close comparison of printing dots and film grain, breaking apart the elements of language that support meaning. Opera excerpt by Viktor Ullmann and Peter Kein, who were murdered at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.
Detail of Moonlight/Moonbeam (2025, full room-sized tinted window film with hole) in the exhibition The Universe Breathes Us in Reykjavik, Iceland
2023 Installation projection for group show "Swept Away: Love Letters to a Stranger" on the Santa Monica beach. I programmed small hand-held projectors with videos allowing viewers to "fly" the birds on the sand at night, to Frederick Rzewski's "Piano Piece No.4" played by Lisa Moore
Documentation of installation of Reading Aloud: What Is Power? by Fred Dewey at Mimesis Documentary Festival 2024
Video still of Lament for a Lost Bird (2022, CGI video, 3 minutes), part of Birdsong , a two-part installation proposed for a gallery and its adjoining park. Outside, visitors will hear the call of the extinct Santa Barbara Island Song Sparrow, re-created in collaboration with a Cornell ornithologist using 1925 beak morphology data. This simulated birdsong, played through a speaker into the park, teaches local mockingbirds to mimic the extinct bird’s call, bringing the bird back to life through the bodies of living birds.
Inside the gallery, a video projection features a realistic animation: a computer-generated mouse standing on a hill overlooking the sea singing a lament for the lost bird, composed by Garry Eister and performed by soprano Risa Larson. The three-minute CGI piece is a fabrication—fittingly artificial, as no recordings or photographs of the bird are known to survive.
The World Is Round: Sabina Goes (2021, digital video, video monitors, goose-neck stands, electrical cords )
This sculpture contemplates dying: not death, but the passage from life into death.
The video players are like pools that we gaze into. All of the videos are shot either looking down or looking up. The heavy cords emphasize the sculptural status of the machines, rather than as picture containers. The videos have been edited so that they all spin in the frame, an attempt to overcome the “cinema rectangle”—an inherited limitation from the Western European picture format that has long tyrannized moving image makers. This whirling motion is further echoed by the spiral staircase within the architecture.
The House Is Empty, 2020, 09:56, iPhone, Super 8mm and 16mm film
An environmental disaster film that portrays, to the ovations of a billion cicadas, a cockroach, a woman, and a dramatic encounter in a closet—from the roach's point of view. Inspired by The Passion According to G.H. (1964) by Clarice Lispector. The house is “played” like an instrument by A.J. McClenon.
Film still from Catalogue Volume 10, (2017, Digital video and 16mm film, color and B&W, sound, 05:40). Text from George Perec's "Things: a Novel of the Sixties"
Catalogue Vol.6 (2016, 16mm film on digital scan, 11:30)
Catalogue Vol.6 was filmed using a mainstream catalogue of designer furniture knock-offs while audio clips from the horror movie, The Haunting of Hill House, that mention the words "house" or particular rooms, or "upstairs" etc. were playing in the studio, so that each shot acquired a random diegetic "soundtrack". The film clips were then organized as a "tour" through the rooms of a house: foyer, living room, dining room, kitchen, study, bathroom, and ending with the bedroom.
Catalogue Vol. 4 (2016/2022, 16mm, sound, 04:34)
​Catalogue Vol. 4 takes the "Lighting" catalogue as its subject and uses a uniform pulse and the hum of electric light to accompany each fixture, which were shot in the order that they were found in the original catalogue. The intervals of black were determined subjectively: items that the filmmaker found less appealing were excised from the sequence, hence violating a rigorous Structuralist methodology and creating a random pattern.
The Universe Breathes Us Notebook downloadable pdf