V I D E O
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Five Songs of Magic, Milk, Space (2024) A dream-like collection of vignettes evoking feelings of desire, fear, wonder, and disorientation. The film was made during the seven months filmmaker & composer Michael Trigilio underwent chemotherapy for late-stage cancer. The film’s structure underscores themes of connection, mortality, and mystery, as each “song” plays into the next. Bodies morph into machines, and into other bodies, just as globules and foam underscore the strange and beautiful qualities of skin, flesh, and disease. |
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Spring x starvelab (2024) Short animated "B-side" derived from ideas in my film Five Songs of Magic, Milk, Space. Animation & music by me, made during the 6-months I was receiving chemotherapy. Thanks to the @madrona-labs Aalto synth for major inspiration on so much music I made during that time. |
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Verse One for the Ten Grounded Stacks (2022) Verse One for the Ten Grounded Stacks is the first short-film in a suite of new films currently in various stages of production. This first film is a speculation on the distance between condemnation and witnessing. A blend of live-action & CGI elements with an original string-quartet score, “Verse One” asks how we listen to stories of rage, pain, and resistance by interrogating the subjects and sites of our empathy. * installed for Antibody exhibit (February 2- March 17, 2022) with wave field synthesis sound-design by Bobby McElver |
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A Glimmer Exodus Sketchbook (2019) Permission is an illusion and resisting power is proactive not purchased. The Glimmer of this Exodus Overture are a loosely-knit cohort of visionaries, radicals, and creators. They have leveraged their gifts and their work to connect with a cosmic intelligence, enabling their organization and departure from Earth, vowing to make a new world. The work of the Glimmer is a process of trial-and-error: mistakes are made, the future is built, and transcendence is possible. * Exhibit at Gallery Qi, January 11 - March 15, 2019 |
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Twelve Transmissions from the Occupied States Orbiting the Sun (2017) The Occupied States have long sent messages to the galaxy - - these are some of the transmissions received and translated. Questions of occupation, questions of communication, and questions of "which sun?" rise from the grainy visions of unknown worlds. Made from scratch in Photoshop and After Effects, this experiment in scifi-abstraction wrestles with the visual language of unknown millennia. * screenings: "WordHack Installed" at Babycastles Gallery 2017; Portland Unknown Film Festival 2017; San Diego Underground Film Festival 2017; Swedenborg Film Festival 2017; Other Cinema's "Avant to LIVE" 2017; San Diego Art Institute's "Video Marathon" 2017 |
Growing Up Death Star (2015) Growing Up Death Star is Michael Trigilio’s short lo-fi-mumblecore film, made with a budget under $200 in about five months - in contrast to the ultra-slick sci-fi spectacular at its center. The story centers on a Star Wars super-fan/podcaster faced with unexpected information about a special person from his past. As he confronts his discomfort with mortality, he must also deal with the way nostalgia has taken over his daily life. * screenings: Anotholgy Film Archives 2016; Other Cinema's "Low-Fi Sci-Fi" 2015; San Diego Underground Film Festival 2015 |
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| T2ERU: Making New Friends (2013-14) Originally shot at Calit2/Qualcomm Institute with support from a Calit2 Strategic Research Opportunity grant. This short was captured with a prototype JVC 4K camera and features the legendary San Diego band Gloomsday. * screenings: "Tell Them Everything / Remember Us (T2ERU)' at Qualcomm Institute; Filmmatic Festival; "Teach-In" at Cypress College Gallery |
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T2ERU: Falling Asleep (2013-14) Another 4K piece made as part of the T2ERU suite of collaborations. Artist Xander Sligh designed the miniature model homes for a series of photos as well as this short film. * screenings: "Tell Them Everything / Remember Us (T2ERU)' at Qualcomm Institute; Filmmatic Festival; "Teach-In" at Cypress College Gallery |
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Bodhisattva, Superstar (2010) Bodhisattva, Superstar is a documentary insofar as it features Buddhist authors, chaplains, monks, and scholars speaking about the nature of Buddhism in America. However, the film also relies on an apparently scripted character (played by actress Deanna Erdmann) who navigates her own emotional landscape of wonder, wandering, and contemplation. Filmmaker and artist Michael Trigilio refers to this form as "allegorical documentary." As pop-cultural myths about Buddhism are deconstructed in the film, so, too, is the nature of authority and authorship within the film itself. * installed at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, for "Here Not There" exhibit |
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THE ENDS (2009) A collection of six short videos meandering through understandings of conclusion, impermanence, and unraveling. As a collection, THE ENDS plays like an EP record, a chapbook, a sad meal of small portions. * installed for "Repeat Until." at CompactSpace Gallery"; "The Ends" at Rubber Rose Gallery |
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Breaking Glass: My David Bowie Movie (2008) Breaking Glass is a short video that examines the surfaces of fear and desire, using as its subject my fantasy encounter with David Bowie. Alternating between confession and fantasy, I employ music, animation, and personal narrative to interweave notions of queer affection, pop fandom, and authentic self-doubt. Musical gestures (glam-rock, death-metal, etc.) complement the images and stories of frivolity, worry, and daydreaming. Overall, Breaking Glass is an experiment in autobiographical counterpoint and wish-making. * screenings: Videoex Experimental Film & Video Festival ; Southwest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival; T-10 Video Festival |
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Thanks For Giving My Number Back (2007) Filmmaker Michael Trigilio has nightmares that he is a Christian rock-star. Plus, he's receiving phone calls from beyond the grave. Worse yet, some guy got out of prison and wants his phone number back. An innovative experimental documentary-style digital film, Thanks for Giving My Number Back is packed with great humor and thought-provoking moments of personal anxiety and grief. Featuring a cast of non-actors (mostly family and friends of Trigilio), Thanks blurs the lines between fiction and documentary, keeping the audience guessing and laughing throughout. Thanks for Giving My Number Back explores the thin lines between love and death, fantasy and reality, hope and helplessness. Equal parts self-portraiture and science fiction, the story shapes itself into a tangle of chuckles, heartache, and anxiety. * screenings: Artist's Television Access; 21 Grand Gallery in Oakland; "SoCal Animators" at Museum of Photographic Arts; "Bay Area Music and Dance Video Art" at The Lab; P.O.V. Animation Festival; "Stranger Than Fiction," Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki; |
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Metastatic (2024) A new album of music made during (and just after) I was receiving chemotherapy treatments. Entirely produced on laptop with MIDI keys and the occasional live bass or modular rig. Shout out to Aalto synth for big inspiration on all these tracks. String arrangements composed using pencil & paper or using Dorico, then rendered out w Spitfire Sacconi Strings soundbank. |
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| Antibody (2021) After more than a year in quarantine during the pandemic, I was relieved to finally receive the two-dose vaccine. Made between March 15 and 27, Antibody is a 7-track EP I made waiting between the first and second dose, and the period thereafter as my body absorbed the biological and psychological transformation(s). |
| Starvelab (live at Radio Axiom, November 2020) Intro with Yetta Howard - begins here actual performance begins here |
Every Pulse a Riot (2020) For the "Cultured Data Symposium" - - Working from a score derived from police-shooting fatalities, “Every Pulse a Riot” is a modular-synthesizer, guitar, and electronics work which rewrites the evidence of lethal state power into an unsteady sonic glitch. Performance on February 7, 2020 at Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego. |
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Oort Cloud Convalesence (2018) After an unpleasant medical emergency and surgery, I was told I couldn't move around too much or lift objects (like guitars). For a month or so in June 2018 I made this EP. |
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| SUGAR (2014) SUGAR is a collection of analog modular synthesis music, made of sounds that are dreamy, druggy, sweet, gnawing and served with doses of noise to run down the edges of each patch. SUGAR is available as digital download and on cassette from San Diego's Rita Records. |
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| EVERYTHING IS UP (2010-2011) Sounds generated from unknown worries, public interventions, and ecstasy. Beginning with experiments in 2008, I started this project as a way to integrate my work with hand-made electronics, synthesizers, public-spaces and experimental scores. The sounds themselves are derived from electronic sources but conjured from external conditions. Some of these works are performances of musical scores, others are site-specific sonic interventions. Sometimes the outcome is extraordinarily complex, other times deceptively simple. The Resonant Pavilion track was part of a commission from the LA County Museum of Art as part of a group of artists comissioned to make work celebrating the opening of their new Resnick Pavilion in 2010. |
| Death Metal David Bowie (2008)
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| Save As. . . (2007) Download MP3s |
| C O L L A B O R A T I O N | |
| Deep Field (2016) Sound design and score for choreographer Katie Faulkner. Premiered May 2016 at CounterPulse (San Francisco) as part of the little seismic dance company 10th Anniversary Home Season. Made possible by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation and numerous individual donors. Little Seismic Dance’s anniversary gift to audience
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| Socially Engaged Speculative Media Initiative [SESMI] (2012-2015) The Socially Engaged Speculative Media Initiative was begun in November 2012 with the support of a Calit2 Strategic Research Opportunity Award from Calit2 Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego. This initiative seeks to engage students and community-members in the tactical imaginary of a constantly changing social and technological present. This project is working with Calit2 artists, scientists, and technologists to develop media works and strategic interventions uncovering the emotional, psychological, and social potential inherent in speculative media. The inaugural project of SESMI is a multi-media suite of works made for presentation at Qualcomm Institute's bleeding-edge visualization systems. The project, called Tell Them Everything / Remember Us (T2ERU), revolves around the central theme of "memory" as a critical resource to be better understood in the distant future. |
| Project Planetaria (2011-2013) Expanded media and performance project with artist Tara Knight and physicist Adam Burgasser. Project Planetaria was founded in 2011 by UCSD faculty Adam Burgasser (Physics), Tara Knight (Theatre & Dance) and Michael Trigilio (Visual Arts), with the goal of investigating astronomical phenomena outside traditional modes. We seek to engage multiple senses, embody experience, explore social analogs, break down time and space barriers, and incorporate participatory behaviors. Our work is funded by the UCSD Center for Humanities and an Open Classroom grant from the UC Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA). Project Planetaria presented Our Star Will Die Alone, in two performances at the La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls Festival, October 4-5, 2013. The site-specific piece will explore what it means to live the life of a star through a participatory performance, integrating data-driven elements that our rooted in our scientific understanding of stellar astrophysics. Audience members will witness the birth of our star, explore its fusion through hand-held custom electronic devices (“Project Planetaria Devices”) and listen to its chaotic, post-main sequence death throes with a heavy metal score based on stellar evolutionary calculations. Through sound, light, projection, and a death metal band, this performance will articulate the productive and destructive aspects of our primary source of light and energy. |
| We Don't Belong Here (2011) Collaborators Katie Faulkner, choreographer and Artistic Director of little seismic dance company, and multimedia artist Michael Trigilio, create a dance and media response to these questions by way of an impromptu, renegade, DIY, sideshow. Commissioned by the San Francisco-based organization, Dancers' Group as part of their ONSITE series, this work, featuring 20 outstanding Bay Area dancers, was performed in multiple sites throughout downtown San Francisco. Relishing in the sometimes awkward collisions of art and commerce, media and the body, and the placement of theatrical performance in non-traditional spaces, this work will expose the many questions we carry about our own belonging in the world. We Don't Belong Here was performed over eight nights between September 29th and October 9th, 2011. |
| BRINK (2010, video 2012) Co-directed and produced with choreographer Katie Faulkner and performers Janet Das and Christy Funsch. Originally developed during a residency at the Maggie Allesse National Center for Choreography in December 2010.
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In The Air from MOCA on June 7, 2011
IN YOUR CAR - Neighborhood Public Radio from MOCA on May 5, 2011
In Your Ear - Neighborhood Public Radio from MOCA on April 7, 2011 | Neighborhood Public Radio (2004 - 2012) Experiments with radio transmission, public-access, and illuminated airwaves. LeE Montgomery brought me and Jon Brumit in to help produce this thing in an attempt to create an alternative to the hyper-exclusive, precious mainstream voices/sounds on the air. It's nearly 8 years and a wild ride. The videos here are from the Engagement Party Residency at MOCA, Los Angeles in 2011. At MOCA, we produced three wild nights of sound, radio, and electricity. Other NPR WORKS: AMERICAN LIFE (at the 2008 Whitney Biennial) Radio Cartography:
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