Jazzy “Boho” Benson
About Jazzy “Boho” Benson
A queer independent filmmaker, creative director, multimedia artist, producer, and 2024 Rocky Mountain Southwest EMMY® RECIPIENT.
Jazzy is known for directing the feature-length web culture documentary EarthBound, USA, experimental short film animations utilizing technological obsolescence such as Battle of the Millennial Mind, and the immersive live multimedia satirical musical virus Cyberf*#%!
Their projects are grounded in collaboration between artists and audiences, shaped by a childhood enriched by Silicon Valley public-access television and early internet subcultures. Their community-driven films strike an uncanny metatextual balance, interplaying humanistic narratives with dry wit, and the existential familiarity of modern life observed through networked communications technology within a broader geopolitical context.
https://www.JazzyBoho.com
Immersive Live Multimedia Musical
Cyberf*#%!
Made in collaboration with members of Tucson’s underground queer arts community, this experimental documentary-musical featured live performances and re-edited instructional VHS tapes about the internet’s early history and the colonization of cyberspace. Through the use of generative-AI as a conceptual tool to highlight the underlying network of systems that spawned its own creation, the show takes a furiously satirical stance as it tears back the curated nostalgic memory of the Y2K era. The immersive experience opened a space to metabolize individuals’ alienation from the technological forces used to deny human dignity–turning this grief towards a humanistic and shared liberation.
Feature-length Documentary
EarthBound, USA
American teenagers connect on the early internet to crusade for their favorite video game of all time, pitting their fan site against a corporate goliath and their own looming adulthoods. EarthBound USA is a movie about discovering the power of online community set in the burgeoning Wild West of Web 1.0, butting heads with corporate goliaths and your own looming adulthood, and your fan site becoming the cult behind one of the most infamous cult classic video games of all time. Recipient of the 2024 Rocky Mountain Southwest EMMY® for Cultural / Topical / Historical Documentary, Writer/Director Jazzy Benson aimed to create a documentary that evokes the atmosphere and environments of a passionate fan community growing up online from one decade to the next.
Experimental Animated Short Documentary
Battle of the Millennial Mind
Jazzy crashes a party with a Fisher-Price tape recorder and interviews millennials about America at the end of 2017. Audio from the analog cassette was animated digitally, by stylistically combining the technological obsolescence of the 1994 video game Mario Paint with various backgrounds of time-lapse video and photography sourced from the internet. In 2018 the film won the grand prize at Loft Cinema's First Friday Year-End Showdown and was an official selection at Loft Film Fest, later it went on to be featured in the Gaming Historian Documentary The Story of Mario Paint produced by Norman Caruso.
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