Telematic Media Arts
presents

Raindrops on Roses

Favorite Things Mix for Telematic

Tommy Becker

November 14th, 2026 - January 23rd, 2027

Opening Reception: Saturday,  November 14th, 2026, 6 – 9
Closing Reception: Saturday, January 23rd, 2027, 2 – 4

Artist Statement

Favorite things: learning, mix tapes, found footage, collage, connections, hand signals, failure, intersections, play, plants, rocks, poets, birds, mounds of dirt, trading cards, Sloth, Big Bird, flowers, aliens, records, the sun, ponds, beetles, lady bugs, ocean waves at night, power outages, dancing in the dark, seeds, the earth, strangeness, animals, masks, laughter, differences, similarities, Charlie Chaplin, playground swings, Jean-Luc Goddard, Robin Hood, old movies, humor, pretending, creating, film-making, poetry, music.  

“My Favorite Things” was the first melody I learned to play on the piano, back in elementary school. It's a song about finding comfort in the things you love when times are hard. This 20-minute mixtape asks a simple question in a moment that's made it strange again: how do we tell each other we are alive? Threaded through the videos are borrowed voices - a science lecture on animal signaling, a child's primer on what counts as living, a plea to return to "the love that is embedded in the earth," a litany of identities that resist being pinned down. A driver waves at intersections and writes "thank you" on their palm when no one waves back. A song imagines a utopic moment after the grid finally goes dark. A plea to make a movie together, to run for the ocean bluffs and leave the routines behind. Underneath it all is an old idea I keep coming back to: that communication, between species, between strangers, between the mind and the body, is a survival instinct, not a luxury. Our systems of profit and politics and screens have made it harder to practice. There is grief, there is absurd play, but what I am struggling to communicate, underneath both, is this: it’s time to remember the seed we share and get back to it before everything else gets too loud.

Artist Bio

A self-described "poet trapped in a camcorder," Tommy Becker's visual song cycles take a collagist approach to thematic investigation by combining original songwriting, spoken word, performance, costuming, animation, 16mm direct, glitch and in-computer design. Educational preludes, historical footage, and thematic lyrics lend a documentary component to his work that balances meaning with personal, often humorous, poetic expression.

His films have been shared nationally and internationally including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, SFCinematheque Crossroads, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Wexner Center for the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Currents New Media , Perth International Film Festival, The Black Maria Film Festival, Sydney Underground Film Festival, Zebra Poetry Film Festival (Berlin), Kassel Documentary Film Festival, Experiments in Cinema (Albuquerque), Swedenborg Film Festival (London), Alchemy Film Festival (Hawick), Milwaukee Underground Film Festival and Athens International Film and Video Festival (Ohio). Selected works are distributed by Canyon Cinema.

Becker often performs work from his tape as expanded cinema where live vocals and sound elements are synced to projected image. He taught visual arts at Gateway High School between 2003-2023 in San Francisco, CA. His publications combine film stills, text and QR codes for viewing work online.