Craig Baldwin

Performer, filmmaker, curator and archivist all-in-one, Craig Baldwin has produced films since the 1980's made (almost) exclusively with, stolen, cannibalized and expropriated images in dense, hybrid and polymorphous works where dense documentary, verisimilitude, and fiction mix and mash-up. "from Dada to Beat, from Beat to Punk, from Punk to Cyber-Meme." "What I want to do is to grate against the nervous system. Noise is the contemporary environment, and I think true art is a headlong embrace of this reality and an attempt to redeem it, to create an aesthetic of noise — rather than some kind of escapist, elitist, privileged retreat from our real environment." THESE FILMS CALL FOR A QUESTIONING OF THE FACTS AND DOCUMENTARY TRUTH. Warning: any consumption of these films can cause side effects of skepticism.

cinema povera "This is perhaps the promise of an electronic folk culture that Bay Area found-footage makers hold forth: Concomitant with a cautionary acknowledgment of—and negotiation with—image overload, ours is a refreshing affirmation of relative autonomy, personal ingenuity, and creative agency to discover and share our own uses for things. The radical imagination can still find its way through this bewildering forest of signs. THIS is what is Beat-ific, what is supremely ironic, and what is powerfully redemptive about this activity."

playfull bri-collage Master Virtuoso of montage, C. Baldwin recomposes and recombines an alternative, perverted, and demented History of American myths and culture: critical towards colonialist policies, corporate cultural hegemony, anti-government, construction of social stereotyped identities through advertisement, paranoia, and alien conspiracy...  But also the AFFIRMATION of the inalienable rights to free and autonomous creation and individual ingenuity; It is an APPEAL to free thinking, to discussion, and to ACTIVE PARTICIPATION.