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featured projects

Taking in the Tailors
short film 
Spring 2027
Taking in the Tailors is a 16mm film capturing the sounds, textures and stories of a disappearing generation of skilled tailors surrounding Baldwin Fine Leather and Fabric on 4th Street in Philadephia.

The film will be exhibited at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art from April 4-September 12, 2027.


> RUNTIME: 10 mins.
> FORMAT: 16mm Film
> WEBSITE: Taking in the Tailors


Studies for American Idle public art 
Summer 2026
Studies for American Idle is a public work made with Maia Chao featuring individual pediastrians alongside identically-dressed doppelgangers. The performers carry out choreography drawn from two sources: the everyday movements of tourists in Times Square and the looping gestures of 3D figures animated in crowd-simulation software, a tool used to predict and regulate how people move through public space. 

This piece was simultaneously all over Times Square every night at midnight during the month of August 2026.

> RUNTIME: 3 mins.
> FORMAT: 92 Absurd Digital Screens
> WEBSITE: Times Square Arts
> VIDEO: August 2026 Studies for American Idle

Paper Moon Palace
short film 
Summer 2026
Paper Moon Palace

As European settlers in America revolt against the British Empire, three aristocrats maintain a sense of normalcy at their estate.

> RUNTIME: 10 mins.
> FORMAT: 4K Digital


BTS from filming on location, summer of 2025
American Idle  (Performance Film) public art 
Summer 2025
American Idle is a 17-minute film distilling an hour-long, live performance of the same name created by Maia Chao that examines public behavior in one of the world’s most iconic, and most photographed, urban spaces—Times Square. 

It draws its choreography from the everyday movements of NYC tourists and the looping gestures of 3D figures animated in crowd simulation software, which is used to model, manage, and control the flow of human movement through public space. Presenting a world of loops and copies, the performance explores how this spectacle-driven environment homogenizes collective behavior, and compels the constant performance of the self for the ever-present camera. American Idle meditates on the beauty and suffering of our contemporary condition—fractured attention, techno-mediation, sensory overload, and excess—magnified by the hyperreality of Times Square.

> RUNTIME: 17 mins.
> FORMAT: Digital
> WEBSITE: Times Square Arts
> VIDEO: American Idle
Roof film installation 
Summer 2025
Roof is a 10-minute looped 16mm film installation commissioned by The Clay Studio with Maia Chao. We shot Roof moving between incredibly accomplished clay-makers and new learners, focusing on the shared sensation of time dilation when their hands are deep in clay.

> RUNTIME: 10 mins.
> FORMAT: 16mm Film

Agents of Deterioration
short 
Fall 2024
Agents of Deterioration

This film is a for-camera adaptation of a live choral performance commissioned by the Hirshhorn Museum. It serves as a surreal guided tour of the permanent collection by the Children’s Chorus of Washington DC, sampling the language of art conservation in a meditation on permanence, loss, and the fragility of the future in times of ecological and political crisis.

> RUNTIME: 15 mins.
> FORMAT: 4K Digital


BTS from filming on location, fall of 2024

Those Who Wait
experimental feature film
Spring 2024
Those Who Wait is a poetic retelling of the Millerite doomsday movement that swept across America in the 1840s. The film follows the town of Portland, Maine as its residents navigate waves of apocalyptic prophecy and disappointment. Mixing the genres of historic re-enactment with fantastic parable, this queer gaze into the colonial past explores the powers and perils of "believing it's over." 

> RUNTIME: 73 mins.
> FORMAT: 4K Digital
> WEBSITE: Those Who Wait Film
>PRESS: Philadelphia Inquirer, Portland Herald, Portland Museum of Art, Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art
 
Chani Bockwinkel & Ty Burdenski present Those Who Wait at the Portland Museum of Art Jan. 19, 2024


Waste Scenes multichannel film
Spring 2024
Waste Scenes is a two channel video installation created at RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency) in Philadelphia with Fred Shmidt-Arenales and Maia Chao. The work juxtaposes original footage of performances based on found texts, observational footage shot onsite, and digitized found media sourced from the waste stream at RAIR (including books, VHS tapes, Audio Cassettes, Vinyl, and Super 8 film). Composed from the material and ideological detritus of the post-industrial northern U.S., the film reckons with failed neoliberal visions of the good life set against the waste it has produced. 


EXHIBITIONS:
→ Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia curated by
  • Hallie Ringle &
  • Cecilia González Godino
    • → Smack Mellon, Remains to be Seen curated by Pallavi Surana
    → Boston Center for the Arts, Waste Scenes curated by Laurel McLaughlin
    → Oregon Contemporary, Waste Scenes curated by Laurel McLaughlin
    → Bronx Museum, Bronx Calling curated by Eileen Jeng Lynch
    → Vox Populi Gallery, Waste Scenes

    > RUNTIME: 41 mins.
    > FORMAT: Two-Channel Video
    > VIDEO: Waste Scenes (various scene excerpts)
    >PRESS: Hyperallergic, Oregon Arts Watch, Portland Museum of Art, Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art
     


    muddled media, 2025philadelphia, pa