CINEPLOSION Productions originated from one fateful night on July 20, 2009, following the 1st Arkansas Underground Film Festival in Hot Springs National Park.
Scorchingly hot, and after three inebriating, whirlwind days of avant-garde film and performances, festival organizer, Dan Anderson, and industrial soundsmith, Shane English, took to the loft above Low Key Arts where a hodgepodge pile of analog video gear lay melting in the thick Southern heat.
Armed with a tattered VHS of Space Camp (1986), along with English’s vast collection of experimental industrial, darkwave and underground German synth, the team blurred through an evening of analog mashups and projections, successfully capturing an hour-long performance on VHS tape.
The performance was re-created as an installation that premiered during the 2nd Arkansas Underground Film Festival in 2010, and two short clips are now available on the Internet for the first time.
The first clip documents a section of the installation in which a real-life BLACK HOLE formulated in the upper northwest corner of the performance space:
The second clip is taken from the tail end of the installation, at a point where the original Space Camp footage is almost entirely unrecognizable and mutates into a 1970s episode of Sid and Marty Krofft’s Land of the Lost.
This clip also appears to channel the supernatural vortex of Park/Whittington, a particularly haunting intersection in Hot Springs that is overlooked by the Low Key Arts building:
A full version of Space Camp is available for gallery installations (one TV/VCR, two screens, two projectors), while a VHS copy of the actual 60-minute source tape is also available upon request.
