A POTENTIALITY (2020, digital, 16mm film, 16 minutes)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Opera "The Emperor of Atlantis" composed in 1944 by Viktor Ulmann, libretto by Peter Kien.
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2-MINUTE TRAILER
WORK SAMPLES BOBBY ANSPACH FOUNDATION
Video walkthrough (03:26), of The Universe Breathes Us, 2025 collaborative exhibition with Shirley Tse, in Reykjavik, Iceland. This video highlights Dana Berman Duff’s artwork: Facing the Sun (2 hour-40-minute video), "The Universe Breathes Us" (song performed by live choir), Moonlight/Moonbeam (whole-gallery window film with one hole), Sun and Moon, (16mm film projector, 16mm film, paper ball, sound). The projector, representing the Sun, is continually running with its light illuminating the paper “Moon.” But the film has run out, so besides the whirr of the motor, it produces the familiar and alarming flapping sound of the ending of an actual film.
Video: Lament for a Lost Bird, CGI. 90-second clip from Birdsong project in progress.
Birdsong Project: a two-part installation proposed for a gallery and its adjoining park. Outside, visitors will hear the call of an extinct Song Sparrow, re-created by 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. Song by Garry Eister, sung by Risa Larson.
Inside the gallery, this video projection features a computer-generated mouse singing a lament for the lost bird.
Catalogue Vol.3 (2017, digital, CGI, 02:47)
Catalogue Vol.3 was made using the RH "Small Spaces" volume of the 2014 retail catalogue with an Arne Jacobsen 1955 Series 7 chair as a protagonist. This is a computer-generated rendering of the original chair, which was the inspiration for the knock-off version in the catalogue. Since this chair design is omnipresent in the realm of knock-off furniture, one imagines that these offspring will be among the last remaining items at the end of the world, popping up everywhere—making this chair perhaps the most successful object in history.
Catalogue Volume 10 (2022, digital and 16mm film, 05:40)
​The tenth entry in the Catalogue series: a dystopia of moving text and moving image: Modernist chairs, Georges Perec’s novel Things: A Novel of the Sixties, and underwater photography using 16mm, GoPro, and DSLR.
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Reading Aloud: What Is Power? by Fred Dewey (2023, 5-minute excerpt; full version 38 minutes)​
A film of the essay "What Is Power?" by Fred Dewey, original music by Alan Duff Berman
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. This project employs one of Dewey’s most penetrating texts and his belief in the transformative experience of people reading out loud to each other. It aims to capture those transformations on film.
Alternative 3-channel presentation realized at the Mimesis Documentary Festival. of Reading Aloud: What Is Power? by Fred Dewey.
The World Is Round: Sabina Goes (2021, continuous digital video, video monitors, goose-neck stands, electrical cords)
This sculpture contemplates dying: not death, but the passage from life into death. For my late best friend, Sabina Ott.
The video players are like pools that we gaze into. All of the videos are shot either looking down or looking up. The videos have been edited so that they all spin in the frame, an attempt to overcome the “picture rectangle.” This whirling motion is further echoed by the spiral staircase in the architecture.
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: watch 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. Opera excerpt by Viktor Ullmann and Peter Kein, who were murdered at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.
Catalogue Vol.1 (2014, 09:00) is a silent 16mm film that consider the time it takes to look at desirable objects for sale in a mainstream catalogue of designer furniture knock-offs.