About Tuesday Night. 3rd march 2009 at phlight with simon tyszko
Mark Boswell presents NOVA-KINO 2001-2009 in the form of 5 assymetrical motion picture detournements followed by a discussion of the films, media art strategies, Nova-Kino theory, and other topics at Phlight…..

Mark Boswell studied film & film theory at various institutions in Switzerland, France, Germany, and the U.S. from 1986-1992. His experimental media art works have been screened internationally in over 25 countries in museums, biennials, and film festivals, including The Transmediale Berlin, The 10th Biennial of The Moving Image, Geneva, National Center of Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia, Artists and Arms Show, Moscow, The Avanto Media Arts Festival, Helsinki, The Los Angeles Freewaves Biennial, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, The Image Forum Festival Tokyo,  and the Chechnya Emergency Bienniale. In 2004, He was awarded the “International Media Art Award” from the ZKM Museum of Karlsruhe, Germany. He is currently in post-production of his latest film “The United Nations is Decadent and Depraved” and preparing a project comparing a remote KGB training facility to Disneyworld’s EPCOT   Center for the  upcoming “Art & Espionage” conference in London at the Courtauld Institute. (www.socialeast.org)

About Nova-Kino
Nova-Kino is a digitally active, 21st century cinematic theory that has its' departure point in various 1920’s artistic movements including Dada, Surrealism, and the theorists and practitioners of early Russian cinema, Vertov, Eisenstein, et al. (all roads lead to Moscow.) Hurtling forward from this point, with Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility” prophesizing the future impact of cinema on contemporary culture as well as certain aspects of Bertoldt Brecht’s “distancing” effects; Nova-Kino traverses through film noir, the French new wave, international avant-garde film movements, Situationsim, and then wholeheartedly springs to life by Bruce Conner's maverick found footage masterpieces.

1). USSA: Secret Manual of the Soviet Politburger. 6:30 mins. 2001

The History of the mythical hamburger is investigated here in this political crypto-documentary. Starting from the origins of the hamburger, then the rise of McDonalds led by Ray Kroc (an unscrupulous milkshake salesman)
Who acquires a bootleg copy of the seminal soviet food manual – “The Acme of ground Bovinity” and trans forms a humble L.A. burger outlet into one of the world’s most sinister meta-corporations.

2). Agent Orange 5:00 mins. 2002

"The effects are only superficial" - Agent Orange is a toxic pesticide
used during the Viet Nam War by the U.S. Army for the purpose of destroying the vast foliage covering Vietnamese jungles in order toprevent the enemy from hiding. The end result was that both Vietnamese andAmerican soldiers and civilians were permanently exposed to this lethal agent causing death and/or lifelong sickness. Agent Orange (the film) uses the political backdrop of the sixties as well as the cinematic avant-garde
of the same period that have effectively "sprayed" us with what Paul Sharits referred to in his seminal structuralist film as a "Ray GunVirus." The corollary results of this cinematic spraying (Conner,Brahkage, Kubelka, et. al.) is the mass appropriation of experimental style by the agents of celluloidic sellout a.k.a. "The M.T.V. Generation,"
Agent Orange is thus the toxic consequence of the digital conversion of avant-garde cinema that not only addresses the problems of the canon, butthe current political crisis brought to head by the liquidation of the twin towers.

4). The End of Copenhagen. 8.30 mins. 2004
A disillusioned intelligence officer (Frank Sinatra) from a 1960's classic
American conspiracy film wakes up in the year 2004 to find himself on the
edge of an upcoming apocalypse. On a train he meets a woman who is an
expert on Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle." This uncertainty gives him the cold sweats as he can barely light a cigarette. The End of Copenhagen finds the meaning of its own title in two forms: Heisenberg's original trip toCopenhagen to discuss the possibility of NAZI nuclear capability with his mentor, Niels Bohr; and also from the Situationist art book by Asger Jornand Guy Debord entitled- "Fin de Copenhague." The end result is a crypto-documentary that re-routes the utter madness of American foreign policy and the ability of its citizens tosupport apresident who was not legally elected. "We got to stop these fascists" are the last words he (the intelligence officer) mutters.

5). The St. Petersburg Paradox. 7:50 mins. 2007.
The St. Petersburg Paradox was invented by the Swiss Mathematician Nicolas Bernoulli in 1713. The SPP describes a particular casino game (in a hypothetical St. Petersburg, Russia casino) that features a random variable with an infinite expected value. The game involves the flipping of a coin of which two things can happen: a) the coin lands on heads and the game is over rewarding the player with  a small sum of money; or b) the coin lands on tails and the sum is doubled while the game continues until the coin lands on heads. The catch  is to enter this game, a player must pay the Casino an unreasonably large amount of money to start. The SPP is a classical situation where a gambler makes a naive decision theory (which takes only the expected value of winning into account) - a gamble that no rational person would take.  SPP-the film-utilizes footage from Night of the Living Dead, One Plus One, & Casino by M. Scorsese and through a hallucinatory re-montage draws a grim portrait of a Texas Wastrel’s interpretation of l’Etranger with a gut punch Dadaistic finale.

6). Unknown Unknown(s) 13.27 mins. 2009.
Unknown Unknown(s) is a dialogue between film history and the concept of art as an activistic practice that reaches outside the cinematic screen/space. Iconic characters from classic films including: “Breathless,” “The Killing,” and “Sunset Boulevard” engage in a discourse between themselves, the spectator, and post-modern theory through various linguistic devices “imbedded” in the work that confront critical issues of global warming and other subjects. The crucial device in this process is the overt usage of subtitles that are at times similar, slightly altered, or completely different from the original dialogue. Unknown Unknown(s) is a post-modern comédie tragique featuring a soundtrack by the electronic experimental duo Matmos. This project was specifically produced for Transmediale’s 2009 “Deep North” thematic.