Telematic Media Arts
presents

Raindrops on Roses

A Mixtape 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

As a love letter and a gift, composed with Tommy Becker’s unique blend of poetry, music, and expanded cinema, Raindrops on Roses explores how we sustain ourselves and our relationships with one another by collectively cultivating and creatively sharing our “favorite things.”

Exhibition Statement

Raindrops on Roses: A Mixtape for Telematic is an intermedia video installation by experimental filmmaker Tommy Becker, comprised of collections of his “favorite things.” Halloween masks and human faces, dance moves and trading cards, handmade props and paintings, film and television clips. As a love letter and a gift, composed with Becker’s unique blend of poetry, music, and expanded cinema, the show explores how we sustain ourselves and our relationships with one another by collectively cultivating and creatively communicating the things we love.

At stake in the show is the social nature of media, the ways in which “social media” paradoxically undermines this congeniality, and how a hands on, DIY approach to creative practice - and experimental filmmaking in particular - might contribute to restoring our capacity for compassionate connection. 

Modern media have provided people around the world with the means of actively communicating with one another, sharing images and ideas across great geographical and cultural divides. Owned and operated by a handful of corporate conglomerates, however, they simultaneously have captured and instrumentalized the loving attention that inspires and sustains this social exchange, coercively manipulating our anxious need for connection - largely for the sake of selling advertising - by harnessing and promoting our most anti-social tendencies: fear, anger, hate. 

In his work, Becker develops and imparts an antidote to this dilemma, presenting a media practice aimed at fostering rather than exploiting our capacity for meaningful social connection, rooted in the conviction that articulating our hopes and dreams and sharing them with one another is essential to sustaining our life together. As a High School art teacher for twenty years, his work is an education in the edifying power of aesthetic play and its essential role in cultivating community. Rather than coercing his audience’s attention, he engages them in an open-ended dialogue, inviting their reflections on the odd juxtaposition of images and artifacts that comprise his films and empowering them - through his transparently primitive art practice - to conjure their own creative juxtapositions. He presents experimental filmmaking as the exploration of diverse, alternative forms of socializing, sharing likes and dislikes in and in response to new and unexpected creations. In so doing, he simultaneously foregrounds the embodied, material nature of meaningful social connections with particular attention in this show to the role of the hand in self-expression and social commerce. 

In response to the nihilism of modern media, Becker summons his audience with a call to action, “Let’s make a movie together!,” challenging us to unplug from systems that hold us enthralled to coercive ends, to actively resist the stultifying conditions of the status quo, and to refuse the reduction of identity to alienating bureaucratic categories. Instead, as a quiet but nonetheless potent politics, he calls us to recognize the need for meaningful connection as fundamental to our being, rooted in the universal fragility of the body, and to cultivate an openness to the genuine fluid diversity born of this vulnerability through the playful exchange of love and desire - our favorite things.

• Clark Buckner

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.