Tuning Room
2023 | 40 min | Video
Our present landscapes experience such a free-flowing torrent of mass media that our very psyches are seemingly fused with the sounds and images we consume. In this psychological headlock, they have the power to ‘manufacture’ our collective and individual longings, anxieties and desires. Through a mediumistic channeling of sound and image, filmmaker Michael Bucuzzo explores the spell. In this expanded cinema performance, he unravels a collection of archival media – traveling from luxury american hotels to contemporary internet data centers to challenge the way we encounter sonic and visual culture. Using experience forged in the US commercial film industry, he unfolds the emotional, almost mystical powers embedded within the sounds and images that face us.
Tuning Room is a mixture of sound performance, artist talk and film screening – presenting our growing media archives as a kind of materialist spirit world. Through spoken text developed by artist and collaborator Klara Waara, the filmmaker charts a diaristic journey through the media that has ‘possessed’ him, and by way of live sound, invites the audience to conjure their own links between media and memory.
Developed within the Master of Film Programme, Netherlands Film Academy
