Artist Bio

"I see each film/video project as a 'first film' with its own cinematic language, one that the viewer learns and engages with as the piece unfolds. This language is shaped by the particular mechanics of each medium, in the same way verbal language is shaped by the mechanics of the human mouth. Thus each film charts the possibility of a pre-cinema experience, one that might have evolved had not narrative and commerce been cinema's prevailing motivational forces." -- SS

Scott Stark has produced more than 75 films and videos since 1980. Additionally, he has created a number of gallery and non-gallery installations using film and video, and elaborate photographic collages using large grids of images. Born and educated in the midwest, he has always been interested in aggressively pushing his work beyond the threshold of traditional viewing expectations, challenging the audience to question its relationship to the cinematic process; yet he also tries to build into the work elements of humor and incongruity that allow the viewer an entryway into the work while maintaining a critical distance. Both a passionate purist and a cynical skeptic, he likes to emphasize the physicality of film while cross-referencing it to the world outside the theater, attempting to lay bare the paradoxes of modern culture and the magical nature of the perceptual experience.

Scott's films and videos have shown locally, nationally and internationally, including one person shows at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Pacific Film Archive, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Redcat (Los Angeles), Filmforum (Los Angeles), and many others. His work was the subject of a three part retrospective at Anthology Film Archives in 2014 and a three part rerospective at the San Francisco Cinematheque in 2001.

Scott's film Angel Beach was invited into the 2002 Whitney Biennial. In 2007 Scott received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He has taught art classes at the San Francisco Art Institute (where he also received his MFA), interweaving non-traditional uses of film and video with a variety of art disciplines. Stark served for seven years on the board of the San Francisco Cinematheque, during which time, among many other things, he co-founded the Cinematheque's journal of film and media art, Cinematograph.

Scott has worked in a variety of motion picture media, including 8mm, super-8mm, 16mm, video and digital video. Several of his films introduced a novel technique where he ran movie film through a still camera, which, when projected, produces collage-like barrages of images and odd optically-generated soundtracks. He calls this series of films the Chromesthetic Response Series.

In February 2012 Scott initiated an avant garde film screening series in Austin, Texas called Experimental Response Cinema.

Scott makes his living as a computer programmer and support specialist for a large multi-national corporation. He currently lives in Austin, Texas. He is the author of the Flicker pages.

Screenings

Selected One Person Film/Video Shows: Museum of Modern Art/Cineprobe (New York), Lux Film Centre (London), Anthology Film Archives, Austria Filmmakers Cooperative (Vienna), Sight Unseen (Baltimore), Chicago Filmmakers, Image Forum (Tokyo, Japan), El Independiente (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Filmforum (Los Angeles), San Francisco Cinematheque (San Francisco), Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, California), First Person Cinema (Boulder, Colorado), Robert Beck Memorial Cinema (New York), Millennium (New York), Collective for Living Cinema (New York); Eiga Arts (Saga City, Japan); S.F. Camerawork Gallery (San Francisco), and many others.

Selected Festivals, Group Shows: London Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Whitney Museum of American Art, Rotterdam Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Oberhausen Film Festival (Berlin), Toronto International Film Festival; Chicago Underground Film Festival; Antimatter Film Festival, Crossroads Film Festival (San Francisco), Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux (Paris), Florida Experimental Film Festival (FLEX); Cinematexas (Austin, TX); Museum of the Moving Image (NY); Jeonju International Film Festival (Seoul, South Korea); Viper Film Festival (Switzerland), San Francisco International Film Festival, Stuch (Belgium), film+architecture Festival (Austria), Telluride International Experimental Cinema Expo (Telluride, Colorado), Onion City Film Festival (Chicago), Film Arts Festival (USA), Black Maria Film Festival (USA), Utah Film & Video Festival (USA), New American Makers (San Francisco), Exploratorium (San Francisco), Other Cinema (San Francisco), Conspiracies (New York), El Paso Museum of Art (El Paso, Texas), Media Gallery (San Francisco), Intersection Gallery (San Francisco), SFAI Film Festival (San Francisco), Eye Gallery (San Francisco), many others.