Take Off: Kota Ezawa and Kenneth Goldsmith

In collaboration with the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS) Kadist will present Kota Ezawa’s latest project Take Off, a watercolor-based rotoscope-style animation based on footage taken from a C-SPAN news broadcast. The television feed presents George W. Bush leaving the White House in a Marine One helicopter and fading into the distance of a Washington skyline, the surreal scene translated into vibrant color through Ezawa’s animation process. In addition to his latest work, Ezawa will also present a program of his rarely-seen videos.
In response to this new piece and Ezawa’s overall body of work, poet (and UbuWeb founder and curator) Kenneth Goldsmith will read from his forthcoming book Seven American Deaths and Disasters, which is comprised of a series of writings that are essentially transcriptions of communications proximal to terrible events in American history.
Goldsmith first came across Ezawa when he was in residence at Stanford University where Ezawa was an MFA student. While there, Goldsmith saw Ezawa’s profound short The Simpson Verdict (2002), a transcription of the delivery of the verdict in the OJ Simpson trial as it happened on television in 1995 into animation. Goldsmith had already been experimenting with transcriptions of found material as poetry, such as his work Fidget, a transcription of every movement Goldsmith made during a thirteen hour period on June 16, 1997. Goldsmith has subsequently archived Ezawa’s work on UbuWeb. This will be their first time Goldsmith and Ezawa are presented together.