Barry Doupé: Distracted Blueberry

“I find the work enormously compelling, yet I can’t quite articulate why. Although it feels entirely Doupé, it also feels prescient. Prescient like dynamite about to blow up the dam and leave us flooded with new possibilities, drowning happily.”
—Steve Reinke on Distracted Blueberry

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Saturday, April 1 at 5pm for the New York premiere of Barry Doupé’s Distracted Blueberry—a four-and-half-hour computer animated experience that dodges the logic-seeking-missile of desire for narrative comprehension. In a world where cheap small talk is supplanted by physiognomically defying sexual acts, we are taken through sequences that hum with a magnetic existentialism that subverts what we take for granted as experimental, sense making, feeling good, or finding interesting.

The screening is part of Barry Doupé: VERY BIG SHORTS and Distracted Blueberry, programmed by Steff Hui Ci Ling.

The exchanges of dialogue in Distracted Blueberry tread between personal affirmation, shower thought, and ontological ideation, like “I am sex like an eyelid that lowers itself as an object appears” or “Microwave my life.” These straightforward statements accompanied with images that are congruently straightforward in execution yet confounding in content, are the social and physical environment where the obliterating affect of pleasure is the pedestrian rapport between the denizens of Distracted Blueberry’s universe. However, if everything is sex, so nothing is sex; then what is pleasure? Distracted Blueberry is a film that inspires chains of contradiction that spill into the boring cracks of life that get filled later when we’re in the shower trying to figure it out. As Steve Reinke writes of the opening scene, “Is this funny? Well, not exactly. Horrifying? No, not horrifying. Sexy? Maybe a little. Transgressive? After Distracted Blueberry, I no longer know what transgression is.” 

Barry Doupe, Distracted Blueberry (2019, 273 minutes)
This film contains animated scenes of a graphic sexual and violent nature. No intermission. 

Accessibility               
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.    
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.             
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.