Brakhage Symposium 2026
Saturday, February 21, 2026
ATLAS 102
12:00-2:00 PM — Stephanie Barber
2:15-4:15 PM — A.S.M. Kobayashi
4:30-6:30 PM— Deborah Stratman
Sunday, February 22, 2026
ATLAS 102
12:00-2:00 PM— Group program and conversation
2:15-4:15PM — 1990s Experimental Film in Japan: Women’s Anarchic Visions of the Everyday
4:30-5:30PM — Celebrating Stan
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21ST
Stephanie Barber
12:00-2:00 PM
ATLAS 102
Presentation
Between June 25th and August 7th, 2011, Stephanie Barber moved her studio into the Baltimore Museum of Art where she created a new video each day in a central gallery open to museum visitors. The goal of this project, entitled Jhana and the rats of James Olds or 31 days/31 videos, was to create a series of short, poetic videos in the playful and serious footprints of Oulipo games and daily meditations––creating one new video each day. The exhibit was both a constantly changing installation as well as a collaborative performance in which museum visitors were present as spectator and often creative partner.
The works, now removed from the course of production, compile a known fascination with the philosophical implications of photographic images; a grappling with memory and the way it shapes our sense of time; an enduring interest in non-human animals, an acute awareness of our mortality and a desire to engage the formal concepts of 'narrative' in unexpected ways. They consider these concepts with humor, pathos and imagination.
Barber will be sharing a selection of these videos and talking about the process and the individual pieces in celebration of the release of these new compilations.
Biography
Stephanie Barber is a writer and artist who has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media, often literary/visual hybrids that dissolve boundaries between narrative, essay and dialectic. Her work considers the basic philosophical questions of human and non-human existence (its morbidity, profundity and banality) with play and humor. Barber’s films and videos have screened nationally and internationally in solo and group shows at MOMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for Art, OH, among other galleries, museums and festivals. Her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank and her films can be found at Canyon Cinema. Barber is Department Head of Film and Digital Cinema at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Pa.
A.S.M. Kobayashi
2:15-4:15 PM
ATLAS 102
Presentation
Alison S. M. Kobayashi’s critically acclaimed performance Say Something Bunny!is a one-woman show based on an amateur audio recording made more than sixty years ago. The origins of this recording were a mystery: two spools of thin steel wire discovered inside an obsolete sound device purchased by a collector at an estate sale. Through obsessive research, active imagination, and hundreds of hours of listening, Kobayashi decoded the rich dialogue embedded in the recording and uncovered the detailed history of an unforgettable Jewish family from New York, bursting with humor, surprise, and drama. Participants will experience an excerpt from the performance and be guided through Kobayashi’s process of transforming this enigmatic artifact into an immersive theatrical work.
The session will also include an excerpt and deep dive into Kobayashi’s multidisciplinary project Electric Neon Clock. Drawing from her family’s WWII-era Custodial File, Kobayashi examines her family’s forced dispossession and relocation in Canada during the Second World War. Electric Neon Clock asks: how can an artist liberate forensic practices and state records from their original intent, and use them instead to reconstruct the families and communities they were designed to dismantle? By focusing on these two works, participants will explore innovative approaches to forensic and archival research as creative tools, methods for uncovering rich family histories that intertwine complex interpersonal dynamics with pivotal moments of social history.
Biography
A.S.M. Kobayashi is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid, interactive work mixes documentary and fiction through videos, performances, installations and illustrations. Her performance Say Something Bunny! received critical acclaim heralded as "The best new theater experience in town" by Vogue, was a NYTimes critics’ pick and received nominations from the Drama Desk and United Solo award. Kobayashi’s videos have been exhibited internationally at museums and festivals. She is a 2024 Creative Capital Awardee, a Yaddo and MacDowell Colony fellow, and was a guest artist at the Flaherty Seminar. She is currently based in Toronto and NYC producing special projects at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art.
Deborah Stratman
4:30-6:30 PM
ATLAS 102
Presentation
In Last Things(2023, 50min, 16mm digital transfer), evolution and extinction are examined from the point of view of rocks and various future others. The geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures. The project originated from two novellas of J.-H. Rosny, the joint pseudonym of the Belgian brothers Boex who wrote on natural, prehistoric and speculative subjects—sci-fi before it was a genre. Passages from Rosny and interviews with Bjørnerud form the film's science-fictional/science-factual spine. Stones are its anchor. To touch stone is to meet alien duration. We trust stone as archive, but we may as well write on water. In the end, it’s particles that remain.
Last Thingswill be paired with some thoughts on geological listening, critical debates around the Anthropocene, monumentality, and the politics of audibility by turning to geology as an experimental pedagogy and an archive.
Biography
Deborah Stratman makes work about power, experience, history and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society intertwine. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool and linearity to be a trap. Her forty+ films and multiple artworks have been exhibited and awarded internationally and have addressed freedom, surveillance, public speech, levitation, musical insects, raptors, comets, street drag racing, tightrope walking, evolution, extinction, exodus, sisterhood and faith. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 22ND
Group Program & Conversation
12:00-2:00 PM
ATLAS 102
Presentation
Music is Magic, A.S.M. Kobayashi, 2017, 14:00
Laika, Deborah Stratman, 2021, 4:33
Pressing, Stephanie Barber, 2025, 3:19
Otherhood, Deborah Stratman, 2023, 3 :00
The Enlightenment, Stephanie Barber, 2023, 12:00
Hungry Kitty, A.S.M. Kobayashi, 2011, :28
1990s Experimental Film in Japan:
Women’s Anarchic Visions of the Everyday
Curated by Wakae Nakane and Miryam Sas
2:15-4:15 PM
ATLAS 102
Presentation
Emerging from Japan’s independent film culture of the 1990s, these five works by women filmmakers mark a quiet but decisive shift within experimental cinema. Enabled by the growing accessibility of small-gauge film and alternative exhibition spaces, the filmmakers move away from strict formal abstraction toward the textures of everyday life, bodies, rituals, and intimacies.
The Life of Ants(Ari no seikatsu) / Yūko Asano, Japan, 1994, 14:00
Benighted but Not Begun(Yukikuredo machiakazu) / Yukie Saitō, Japan, 1994, 22:00
The Place Which Isn’t Necessarily Wrong(Anagachi machigatteru tomo ienai kū) / Hiromi Saiki, Japan, 1996, 18:00
Night Park/White Roses(Yoruno kōen / shiroi bara) / Mari Terashima, Japan, 1997, 11:00
A Dandelion, Rosaceae(Bara-ka tanpopo) / Utako Koguchi, Japan, 1990, 8:00
Biographies
Wakae Nakane is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Her research interests include documentary film and video, experimental cinema, postwar Japanese history and cinematic culture, and feminist theory and historiography. Her dissertation project centered on the essayistic mode of expression in Japanese documentary and experimental film practices since the 1970s. She has published in both English and Japanese, including “Politicizing Familial Space: Women’s Post-Fukushima Documentaries as the Creation of Counterpublics” in Women and Global Documentary (Bloomsbury, 2025); “Constructing an Intimate Sphere Through Her Own Female Body: Naomi Kawase’s Documentary Films” in Female Authorship and the Documentary Image (Edinburgh University Press, 2018); and “Female Performers as Authors: Documentary Film Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 and the Women’s Liberation Movement” in JunCture (Japanese, 2016).
Miryam Sas (Ph.D, Yale) is Professor of Comparative Literature and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of She is the author of Feeling Media: Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art (Duke University Press, 2022), Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Press, 2010) and Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford UP, released in 2001). She has written numerous articles in English, French, and Japanese on subjects such as Japanese futurism, intermedia art, experimental animation, pink film, cross-cultural performance, and butoh dance. She is currently working on a book on media theory and contemporary art in Japan, Media Acts: Infrastructure, Potentiality, and the Afterlife of Art in Japan.
Celebrating Stan
4:30-5:30 PM
ATLAS 102
Presentation
Curated by Suranjan Ganguly
Celebrating Stanpays homage to the filmmaker’s extraordinary creativity (nearly 400 films) as well as his profound impact on the history of cinema.
The Wold Shadow,1972, 3:00
Fire of Waters, 1965, 7:00
Visions in Meditation, #3, Plato's Cave, 1989, Sound, 17:00
Films by Stan Brakhage: An Avant-Garde Home Movie, 1961, 5:00
Trip to Door, 1971, 14:00
Biography
Suranjan Ganguly created the Stan Brakhage Film Series--Celebrating Stan--in 2003 in memory of his close friend, colleague, and mentor. Heserved as the director of the Brakhage Center from 2015-2020 and has beenactively involved in presenting the filmmaker’s work in the US andabroad. He was invited to curate the three-part Unknown Brakhageshow at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris in 2010 and again in 2018 to present Brakhage’s work. He has also spoken on Brakhage and curated shows at major venues in London, Rome, Lisbon, Berlin, Dublin, Vienna, and Mexico City. He is a Professor Emeritus of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder.
