The Changeover System

Known for their performances transforming films into captivating sculptures of light, New York City-based artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder present The Changeover System. During this singular live performance, Gibson + Recoder will work from within our projection booth to transform the film projector’s light. They will use rotating, hand-blown glass objects and other diffracting elements to bend, scatter, and distort the film’s image, redefining what cinematic film projection can be. ​​(USA, 2023, approximately 70 minutes, 35mm; soundtrack by Richard Garet)​

Gibson + Recoder have exhibited their expanded cinema installations and performances at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Mad. Sq. Art, REDCAT, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ballroom Marfa, The Kitchen, Light Industry, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Cinematheque, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Conversations at the Edge, Walter and McBean Galleries, Memorial Art Gallery, Young Projects Gallery, Robischon Gallery, Microscope Gallery, I-Park Foundation, Exploratorium, Sundance Film Festival, National Gallery of Art, Artefact Festival, Palais des Beaux-Arts, M HKA, HMKV, Viennale, Austrian Film Museum, Metro Kinokulturhaus, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, International Film Festival Rotterdam, La Casa Encendida, Serralves Foundation, Museu do Chiado, Solar Galeria de Arte Cinemática, and EYE Film Museum. They live and work in New York.    

​​​Presented as part of “Failing Media,” the 20​​th​​ Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Conference, hosted April 25–26, 2025. Buffering videos, glitching apps, lagging games, outdated GPS maps, spotty Wi-Fi, AI hallucinations, mistaken autocorrections, frayed cables, and broken projectors: we are constantly confronted with media that fail. Beyond these banal encounters, there are more sinister media failures: widespread digital misinformation, discriminatory algorithms, and facial recognition tools that are unable to see darker faces. More than just frustrating disruptions, failing media reveal something about our expectations, habits, engagement with, and participation in a world that has become saturated and increasingly defined by media technologies. Failing media force us to confront our reliance and dependence on these technologies and infrastructures, prompting us to rethink their material, environmental, and phenomenological residues. This conference, taking up the topic of “failing media,” considers how media history is a landscape littered with malfunctions and mistakes.

Presented with support from the Film Studies Center, the Departments of Cinema and Media Studies, Germanic Studies, and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Graduate Council, and the Open Practice Committee of the Department of Visual Arts.