Field Studies 2025
With A.SM. Kobayashi & David Sherman / Rebecca Barten
Free for Cosmic Rays pass-holders, or by suggested donation.
Saturday
March 22, 2PM
1:30 PM – Doors Open
2:00 PM – Program Begins with ASM Kobayashi
315 PM – Break
345 PM – Total Mobile Home MICROcinema LiveCine Essay
5:15 PM – Wrap up and head out for evening programs
Passholders, practitioners, and enthusiasts alike, join us for an afternoon of FIELD STUDIES over at Fatwood Studios— it’s a chance for in-depth presentation from two of the artists featured at this year’s Cosmic Rays Film Festival.
Fatwood will host two sessions on artist practice and the world of experimental film: one with A.S.M Kobayashi and another with Rebecca Barten / David Sherman, offering a chance to get to know the artist’s work in greater depth, explore the context, intentions and methodologies a bit more and have a conversation about making.
First up at 2PM, A.S.M Kobayashi, an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid, interactive work mixes documentary and fiction through video, performance, installation and illustration will share a bit about her extensive research process and experience working with found material and bringing hidden narratives to life. She will discuss her film FILE NO. 2304 featured in Festival Program 1, and also will share her earlier video work alongside a short excerpt of her critically acclaimed performance, Say Something Bunny!, which is based on found audio recordings, and was heralded as “The best new theater experience in town” by Vogue in 2017 and ran sold-out off-broadway for three years.
Alison’s video work has been exhibited internationally at museums and film festivals. She was a fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell, and a guest artist at the 2008 Flaherty Film Seminar. Currently, she is based in Brooklyn and Toronto and is the Director of Special Projects at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art where she collaborated on Living Los Sures, described as “one of the most comprehensive, incredible and in-depth interactive projects that we at the film society have ever seen” by New York Film Festival.
Following her talk, we’ll take a little break, have some refreshments, meet and greet, and perhaps take a little stroll, or soak up the sun at Fatwood.
Then at 3:45PM, Rebecca Barten, whose film is featured in Program 5, will be joined by her longtime partner and collaborator David Sherman to share how the microcinema as we know it today began (and was named by them in 1994!), when these filmmakers and “accidental neologists,” started operating the legendary Total Mobile Home microCINEMA illegally out of the basement of their rented San Francisco apartment.
Their legacy has shaped independent artistic and experimental cinema distribution and exhibition worldwide. Of course, small informal cinematheques and film clubs had always existed since days of early cinema, but what Barten and Sherman brought was not only a practice, but also an ethaos that stressed the values and benefits of the smaller-scale, and spoke to a generation dissatisfied with the impersonal limitations of older, top-down models.
They shared an extended live cine-essay last year on tour to some of the mainstay spaces influenced by Total Mobile Home including at Light Industry in New York, at Pittsburgh Sound & Image, Other Cinema in San Francisco, at Experiments in Cinema in Albuquerque and now at Fatwood / Cosmic Rays here in North Carolina. They have shared that, “as filmmakers reliant upon our own funds, functioning totally out of the mainstream, we wanted to create an intimate non-institutional space right in our basement, where the distance between film and audience and artist and audience might be activated and transformed.”
Come through for an afternoon that hopes to take that possibility and intention to heart, and learn a bit more about this legacy that has allowed the kinds of films that Cosmic Rays’ celebrates to continue to thrive, transform and activate audiences big and small.
Presented With
