Craig Baldwin
San Francisco, CA
Underground filmmaker Craig Baldwin is well known both as a filmmaker and a curator. His films have screened all over the world, including at The Roxie (San Francisco), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Rotterdam, Deep Dish TV, Film Forum (New York), William Paterson College (New Jersey), Austin Film Society, London Filmmakers Co-op, Marin County Film Festival and Coolidge Corner Cinema in Boston. He received his Master of Arts from San Francisco State University. His interest in the recontextualization of appropriated imagery led him to the theories of the Situationist International, and to various practices of mail art, ‘zines, altered billboards and other creative initiatives beyond the fringe of the traditional fine-arts curriculum.
Spectres of the Spectrum
Craig Baldwin
Artist BioSpectres of the Spectrum is a feature-length film that uses old “kinescopes”—filmed records of early TV broadcasts before the advent of videotape, mostly from the late Fifties’ educational show called Science in Action—to create an eerie science fiction time-travel tale, in which the characters save the planet from a futuristic war-machine, inspired by HAARP, the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. Although HAARP seems to be a data-gathering tool to explore the Aurora Borealis in detail, it is in fact one of the most sophisticated components of the Star Wars weapons arsenal. Through an increasingly abstract montage of live-action, archival film, broadcast video and interviews, the narrative becomes disjointed, suggesting the breakdown of personal ego, memory and historical representation.