Mike Gibisser

An interconnected look at tradition, colonialism, property, faith, and science, as seen through labor practices that link an endangered salamander, mass-produced apples, and the evolving fields of genomics and machine learning.

An interconnected look at tradition, colonialism, property, faith, and science, as seen through labor practices that link an endangered salamander, mass-produced apples, and the evolving fields of genomics and machine learning.

An interconnected look at tradition, colonialism, property, faith, and science, as seen through labor practices that link an endangered salamander, mass-produced apples, and the evolving fields of genomics and machine learning.

An interconnected look at tradition, colonialism, property, faith, and science, as seen through labor practices that link an endangered salamander, mass-produced apples, and the evolving fields of genomics and machine learning.

Shot using a custom-built 35mm camera, Mike Gibisser’s film pushes familiar spaces into abstraction in a Michael Snow-esque experiment that bends cinematic space and time.

Maureen is trailing her boyfriend on the highway when his car drifts off to the shoulder. Out of nowhere, she finds herself holding vigil amid a cluster of beeping machines, trapped in the particular purgatory of hospital walls. Loss and reunion are complexly intertwined in this richly textured, precisely designed, emotionally haunting film.

Shot at the World's Largest Truckstop in Walcott, Iowa, the film contemplates the interiors of a Midwestern highway rest stop, creating an essayistic portrait of a familiar site of travel and transience. With attention fixed on the ideological overtones pressed to the surface in the objects for sale, Travel Stop examines how identity is called upon, regressed, emptied, overburdened, or parceled when traversing the non-places along the US interstate. "That the world of things can open itself to reveal a secret life-indeed to reveal a set of actions and hence a narrativity and history outside the given field of perception-is a constant daydream that the miniature presents. This is the daydream of the microscope: the daydream of life inside life, of significance multiplied infinitely within significance." - Susan Stewart, On Longing

An eight-year-old girl living on the west side of Chicago finds a neglected toddler and decides to take her home.

Chicago's summertime blazes, unanchored. Skywriting out of time. Part of a series of nighttime long exposures, Blue Loop, July creates an odd document of a long-standing celebratory tradition in one of Chicago's lower west side neighborhoods. By leaving the camera's shutter open for seconds at a time, the film transforms a summertime spectacle into a light-trace animation that unseats reliability of spatial and temporal direction.

A young married couple, Christopher & Melody, work opposite schedules to remain financially afloat as Chris bangs out his first novel while working as a waiter. Never seeing each other is taking it's toll, as the two rarely get a chance to engage one another. Chris finds the attention he craves in Brandy, a saucy co-worker.

An experimental essay regarding alterations in the progression of time. Space shrinks by collapsing the duration it takes for a body to traverse it - or a mind. A railroad redesigns the temporal system of a nation. A man photographs a horse. A woman hallucinates the past.

The first of a four part series pairing one of the laws of thermodynamics with a close study of a discrete domestic space. The first law of thermodynamics suggests energy can neither be created nor destroyed—the film a meditation on this axiom. The lines between religion, science, morning exercise, and breakfast cereal blur as an old man carries on with diurnal routines after his wife has passed.

The third of a four-part series. The third law of thermodynamics describes the parallel decline of temperature and entropy within a closed system—both continuous processes approaching an impossible limit. With open windows, seasons change in a home as memory persists. Death is a snowstorm in summer.

The second of a four part series. The second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, states order tends toward disorder. An old woman passes time in her home. The dust in the air sometimes floats skyward.

FINALLY, LILLIAN AND DAN is a meditation on young love and its delicacy its hope and exhilaration, as well as its loneliness and naivete. Lillian lives in a quiet yet comfortable isolation, sharing an apartment with her grandmother, an aging widow. Their dependence on one another is mutual, simultaneously making them whole and holding them back. Dan's dependence is more tactile. Living in more tortured solitude, his attempts at human connection are carried out in the only way he can manage: in compulsive fits and starts. After a chance meeting, Lillian and Dan bump and misstep their way towards one another in a love story that is awkward and small, that stutters and spits, with its worry lines on its face and its heart on its sleeve.