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Conversations at the Edge – Kioto Aoki: Findings
Gene Siskel Film Center
February 26, 2026
In the finely attuned 16mm films of Chicago-based filmmaker, photographer, and musician Kioto Aoki, everyday phenomena—sunlight pooling on a wooden floor, blades of grass shifting in a lawn—become the material for exquisite compositions of sensorial and perceptual play. Grounded in an improvisatory sensibility and the embodied physicality of analog filmmaking, Aoki often edits her works in-camera and hand-processes them in her own basement studio. For this special evening, she presents a selection of 16mm films and debuts a new 35mm slide work that draws from her photographic practice and turns more explicitly toward the archive and the relations between perception, history, and cultural predispositions. Musicians Robbie Lynn Hunsinger and Jamie Kempkers accompany the program with a live score, extending Aoki’s improvisatory approach to the event itself—one that opens onto larger questions about how we come to see and understand ourselves in the world around us. - Amy Beste
PROGRAM
On the Grand Scale of Things (2014, 6 min)
A playful look at the relation between words, implied actions, and potential consequences through light, hands, and shadow.
Mornings in Orange (2017, 3 min)
An early morning fishing excursion.
Findings (2017, 3 min)
An environmental exploration of space through bodies of light, with nods to Uta Barth, John Smith, and Maya Deren.
For Mt. Shamao (2018, 3 min)
A film adaptation of Milad Mozari and Mitsu Salmon’s site-responsive performance Mt. Shamao, commissioned for Experimental Sound Studio’s Florasonic series at the Lincoln Park Conservatory.
だんだん ( 2024, 3 min)
Details on the ground and in the sky.
For Bucky Fuller (2019, 3 min)
An homage to Buckminster Fuller, drawing on his belief that the Earth’s rotation could be felt by a body aligned with the North Star, with Maggie Wong.
Aperture (2013, 9 min)
A quiet investigation of the camera’s aperture that draws attention to how we see, connecting the aperture of the still camera, the moving image camera and the human eye.
35mm Slide Performance Piece (2026, 10 min)
A new 35mm slide piece made specifically for the CATE screening, filmed at the Siskel Film Center theater and projected back into the space. A multi-layered expanding the cinema screen with images of the artist on the screen mirroring in real time the artist projecting the piece into the space.
逆立ち逆立ち: If Pinholes Were Right Side Up, I Would Be Doing Handstands (2024, 3 min)
A play between the filmmaker and a matte box, drawing a parallel between handstands (逆立ち / sakadachi) and the camera obscura, where inversion becomes an essential orientation.
Tamago Stories One (2026, 3 min)
The first in a series about mechanisms, economies, and ecologies of production through the confluence of eggs, photography, and the sun.
Double Run Eight (2022, 2 min)
Sidewalks, trees, and sky run forward and backward across four frames of unslit double 8mm, reflecting embodied perception through the film’s very structure. Shot on a Bell & Howell Filmo Double Run Eight camera from the Rod Slemmons Camera Archive.
Lightly Heeled (2024, 3 min)
The artist’s feet frame quivering flames in this hand-processed play of light.
Of What I Can See (2014, 3 min)
A self-portrait through the artist’s eyes and her cinematic instrument.