Come enjoy thought-provoking films at the Center for Arts and Media!  

Each screening will be followed by a discussion with SLCC faculty.  

Free and open to the public | No tickets required

Screenings begin at 6 PM

SLCC South City Campus Screening Room

1575 S. State Street, Salt Lake City 

Free parking after 5:00 PM on the east side of South City Campus using code SPRINGFILM at the kiosk.

Standby for Failure: A Documentary about Negativland

Synopsis:
Since 1959 at the age of five, David "The Weatherman" Wills has been
recording and broadcasting his life, self, and anything he likes (the
weather, toilets flushing, intercepted cell phone conversations) to
anyone listening. He found like minds in Richard Lyons and Mark Hosler
and together they formed Negativland in 1978. What started as an
experimental band quickly became an absurd and noisy metamedia art
world about boundaries, culture, ownership, perception and truth.
Negativland's complex chaos of plunderphonics poses both serious and
silly questions about the nature of culture, media, technology, power
and perception in the United States of America. Is what you're hearing
and seeing real or simply familiar? The medium reveals that any
message is all in our heads.

About the film:
Stand By For Failure presents Negativland’s approach as a Negativland
assemblage. Sound as sound itself, and recontextualized imagery that
inverts the familiar and true. The footage is almost entirely made by
the people who are in it. It's the Who and the Why and some of the How
as told by the What was made When it was made: album tracks, home
movies, Over The Edge live radio broadcasts, and news footage and
occasional interviews from the era. The format follows the footage: a
continuous loop of time backward and forward, sometimes repeating. It
shows 40 years of media: celluloid and tape to Zoom meetings and
machine-generated voices.