This past Sunday, the FilmBar hosted Amnesia TV’s 10-Minute Film Festival, an invigorating display of the works of some of Phoenix’s groundbreaking visual artists.  

The film festival featured a handful of up to 10-minute masterpieces from different visual artists in the area, all utilizing a variety of different visual media. 

The event was hosted by FilmBar, an intimate, modern-age filmlover’s community space in Phoenix — who have had a relationship with Amnesia TV for a few years now. 

“The way that [the film festival] was presented was [simply], all art encouraged,” Adam says Lovelady, one-half of the duo behind Amnesia TV. “[There] didn’t have to be a narrative to it, I didn’t want to put any restrictions on anything.” 

The lack of prompt was fully intentional — no limitations on creativity, just time to fill (or not). 

“The only [rule] was, it had to be 10 minutes or less,” Lovelady says. “So it was also kind of interesting to see how many people filled the whole 10 minutes, and then how many people put up a two-minute or three-minute [film], [they] just ended up what they were. And that’s what the artists wanted to say.”

Adam Lovelady, along with his brother Nathan, first came together as Amnesia TV out of a shared affinity for VHS. Nathan, a CD DJ (CD-J?), would pitch down and alter CD audio and try to mesh them with the VHS videos they’d reshape. 

“The main idea of why [it] was called Amnesia TV was [that] we had thought about trying to make a television show based on our childhood, and [also in] this like, melted circuit-bent kind of thing,” he says. 

To figure out what he means by “melted circuit-bent kind of thing,” you’ll just have to see their work with your own two eyes.

The initial mission of Amnesia TV was to place music and video in unison, playing off one another to create a unique experience. That central goal has carried on, and the air of that goal certainly permeated throughout the FilmBar screening room on Sunday. 

From a fun side-project between two brothers, to hosting a film festival — the identity and practice of Amnesia TV has undeniably shifted and evolved over the past few years. 

“Yeah, it really has morphed,” Lovelady muses. “It’s definitely a creative effort, I think it’s a collaborative effort at its heart too. I think the whole point is to show people that what they’re doing is important — whether that’s making a short film, whether that’s making a documentary about roller skating, whether that’s about making weirdo, glitchy abrasive stuff that you want people to sit 10 minutes through.” 

“Whatever it is that you want it to be, we want to make sure that we’re providing a platform for it, because it’s cool.”

The heart and soul of Amnesia TV, along with the 10-Minute Film Festival, breathes into life an unequivocal embrace of the abnormal, of the strange. Adam claims that has a lot to do with the area — and how the physical landscape and the cultural landscape are in constant conversation and collaboration. 

“The Sonoran Desert is this beautiful, beautiful place [that’s] got these weird spiky things that grow here and grow nowhere else,” Andrew says. “I think that our community is also weirdly representative of that, like, only things that are made [here] can come out of here because it’s melted and it’s weird. But you can appreciate it — just like the sorrel cactus.”

And this proclamation of weirdness, and a vernacular intimately focused on “melting” isn’t just reserved for Adam and Nathan Lovelady. Other trailblazing creatives in the area are cut from a similar cloth — and Lovelady’s eyes glowed with excitement in telling me about them. 

“There’s just a lot of talent in the festival,” he beams. “Benjamin Braman, whose Instagram account @amethystseer has one of the videos, also did the flyer for the show. He’s an extremely talented artist, and he’s in this group called Glob who’s a trio of M. Dean Bridges, KENAIM and Benjamin. They’re seriously a supergroup, they’ve been doing really cool stuff in Phoenix for a long time. It’s cool to have them be a part of this. They’re definitely a driving force in the audio-video art world here.”

Lovelady is excited and hopeful about the future of Amnesia TV, as well as the 10-Minute Film Festival. He hopes it can continue to expand, to confuse and to inspire. 

“I think it’s a creative effort that allows people to feel confident in the art that they’re doing. Whatever it is that you want it to be, we want to make sure that we’re providing a platform for it, because it’s cool. And the more that’s out there, the more people that are going to be a part of it.”

FilmBar: 815 N 2nd St. Phoenix, AZ; thefilmbarphx.com // @thefilmbarphx