Zoe Beloff grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. She studied painting and Art History at Edinburgh University and College of Art. In 1980 she moved to New York where she received an MFA in Film from Columbia University.
She has directed many independent films which have been screened internationally at festivals and museums including, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Pacific Film Archives, Sundance, Berlin, and New York Film Festivals.
In the last few years Zoe's work has centered on a desire that has been to get beneath the skin of everyday life by "dreaming" her way back into the past. Her interest in early cinema led her to uncover links between nineteenth century technologies and the digital realm. She began producing BEYOND, an interactive film on CD-ROM. In a playful spirit of philosophical inquiry, it explores the paradoxes of technologies, desire and the paranormal posed since the birth of mechanical reproduction. This work won first prize in a national QuickTime VR competition sponsored by Apple, and has been exhibited at many places including the1997 Whitney Museum Biennial.
Zoe has also worked with artists from other disciplines. She collaborated with Composer John Cale on LIFE UNDERWATER which combined film, stereo slides and live music performance. Cellist and composer Tom Cora scored the soundtrack to her film LOST, a poetic document of life on New York's Lower East Side. She was invited by the Wooster Group theater company, to create the CD-ROM WHERE THERE THERE THERE WHERE, inspired by Gertrude Stein's play DOCTOR FAUSTUS LIGHTS THE LIGHTS.
Currently still fascinated by phantoms, by images that, "are not there", Zoe has been working with sound artist Ken Montgomery on A MECHANICAL MEDIUM, a projection performance inspired by Thomas Edison's search for an apparatus to communicate with the dead. The show premiered at the San Francisco Cinemateque in February.
Zoe teaches digital media at The City College in New York.
To order CD-ROM's or for more information: www.users.interport.net/~zoe
Contact: Zoe@interport.net
Tel. (212) 674-4360
Conceptual Description
WHERE WHERE THERE THERE WHERE was produced in collaboration with the Wooster Group theater company. Inspired by Gertrude Stein's 1938 play DOCTOR FAUSTUS LIGHTS THE LIGHTS it is an exploration, in the form of an interactive film that asks; can machines think, are minds nothing but machines shot through by the forces of electromagnetism, language and logical torment? Thus opening up the play to contemporary radical perspectives in the work of I.P. Pavlov, Alan Turing and Ludwig Wittgenstein.