About
Racer Trash was an avant-garde, new media artist collective of over 50 members specializing in experimental remixes of feature films. The Verge called them ‘The Future of Cinema’ and before their dissolution they screened projects over three nights of the Toronto Film Festival and Cucalorus Film Festival.
During its existence, Racer Trash re-edited over 30 feature films and hundreds of smaller shorts, generally streaming new material monthly.
Process
The collective generally used the exquisite corpse method to create its projects. The source media is broken down into segments and each artist builds upon their piece, after which the media is reassembled and shown as a single film.
Artists in the collective use various techniques to distress the footage, using both analog glitch art and digital methods and often inserting unrelated clips or shooting additional material to add to segments.
Notable Projects
As part of the 2021 Toronto Film Festival, a special underground program was created by the organizers called “Midnight Dankness” which featured three nights of projects by the collective: a re-edit of David Lynch’s Dune, coinciding with the night of the premiere of the Denis Villanueve film, Candyman, and Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy.
In November 2021, the group was the featured artist at the Cucalorus Film Festival, re-editing the film Blue Velvet as well as creating a large-scale interactive art installation.
Notable Members
Contributors to Racer Trash projects included Adam Wingard, Jonah Ray, and Freddy Wong.
Filmography
All Racer Trash feature length projects have been uploaded to Archive.org.