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August 6, 2016 In

The Music Video Show

Video killed the radio star and MTV killed itself. Using a loose definition of the genre, The Music Video Show offers a playlist of artist-made music-driven projects from past to present and across different media.

ARTISTS PETER GLANTZ AND HAYLEY MORRIS IN PERSON!

Artists: Max Almy, Sadie Benning, Bruce Conner, Carrie Gates, Peter Glantz, Ada Karczmarczyk, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Jodie Mack, Norman McLaren, Hayley Morris, RAFiA, Hirad Sab, Yoshi Sodeoka

Tracks by: Bikini Kill, Devo, David Byrne & Brian Eno, Yung Pharaoh, USA is a Monster, Ada Karczmarczyk, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Jodie Mack/The Shirelles, Hilary Hahn and Hauschka, RAFiA, Ash Koosha, Yoshi Sodeoka and Daron Murphy

Perfect Leader, Max Almy, 1983, video to digital video, 4:11 min
Produced to coincide with the 1984 Presidential Campaign, Perfect Leader is a cautionary tale that brings to life a prototypical politician, as packaged by Madison Avenue. With a driving soundtrack and bold visuals, Almy satirically presents this dynamic simulation of media politics as a fast-paced music clip. The narrator is a disembodied Big Brother, an Orwellian computer program who creates candidate images—dictator, evangelist, moderate—as models for a mass-marketed leader. The image of the potential president is overlaid with graphic symbols of multinational power: technology; economics; warfare. As a woman hysterically intones, “We’ve got to have a perfect leader,” the bland, telegenic candidate is brought into two dimensions on the TV screen. Concise as a commercial, insistent as a pop song, Perfect Leader is Almy’s most effective use of television techniques to critique the impact of the media on contemporary life.

Girl Power, Sadie Benning, 1992, pixelvision to digital video, 15 min
Set to music by Bikini Kill (an all-girl band from Washington), Girl Power is a raucous vision of what it means to be a radical girl in the 1990s. Benning relates her personal rebellion against school, family, and female stereotypes as a story of personal freedom, telling how she used to model like Matt Dillon and skip school to have adventures alone. Informed by the underground “riot grrrl” movement, this tape transforms the image politics of female youth, rejecting traditional passivity and polite compliance in favor of radical independence and a self-determined sexual identity.

America is Waiting, Bruce Conner, 1981, 16mm to digital video, 3:53 min
Mongoloid, Bruce Conner, 1977, 16 mm to digital video, 3:41
Bruce Conner’s music videos are credited as prefiguring MTV, which was founded in 1981. As an avant-garde filmmaker and artist, Conner’s videos bring experimental tactics such as found footage and flicker to the new mainstream of televised music videos. Marked by fast cutting to the beat, bold colors, and surrealist juxtapositions, Conner’s aesthetic legacy helped to define the early 80’s moment and continues to influence today.

Chlorophillinhale, Carrie Gates, audio by Yung Pharaoh (aka Kevin Carey), 2014, digital video, 2:13 min
In Chlorophillinhale, Carrie Gates alternately builds up layers and travels through them in step with Yung Pharaoh’s track. The imagery is reminiscent of being too close to an object in a three-dimensional game like Second Life in which the pattern of that object is stretched over the entire screen. Chlorophillinhale moves through an abstract landscape formed by distinctly digital distortions of natural elements.

No More Forever, Peter Glantz, 2009, digital video, 8:10 min
No More Forever tells the tale of the band USA Is A Monster performing at a gathering in the forest. They are recorded by filmmaking lemurs who broadcast the results to the entire forest community and finally beyond time and space.

Illustrated by Kevin Hooyman. Animated and Directed by Peter Glantz. Lyrics inspired by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe. Produced by The Imaginary Company. Supported in part by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.

Niszcz szatana Łaską Pana (Smash satan’s Face with God’s Grace), Ada Karczmarczyk, 2014, digital video, 3:28 min
Smash satan’s Face with God’s Grace is one of the evangelical pieces created by multimedia artist Ada Karczmarczyk in order to promote religious messages via YouTube. The music puts the viewer into a dark mood and creates anxiety with its electro-gothic style while the lyrics suggest that the tools to fight the devil are good deeds, virtues and uplifting values. Video of a heart-encrusted hammer hitting whack-a-devil in an arcade emphasizes the message.

SHARING IS CARING, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, 2012, digital video, 2:33 min
Referring to the anonymous communities built through social media networks (such as Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter), SHARING IS CARING remixes found-gifs highlighting the circulation of individual stories and questioning the relationships within the digital net space.

Unsubscribe #4: The Saddest Song in the World, Jodie Mack, 2010, 16mm to digital video, 2:45 min
In the Unsubscribe series, Jodie Mack takes apart and reassembles junk mail into playful formalist compositions. The Saddest Song in the World is paired with the artist’s own re-recorded version of The Shirelle’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” Junk mail hearts are formed and break just as easily.

Synchromy, Norman McLaren, 1971, 16mm to digital video, 7:27 min
This animated short by Norman McLaren features synchronization of image and sound in the truest sense of the word. To make this film, McLaren employed novel optical techniques to compose the piano rhythms of the sound track, which he then moved, in multicolor, onto the picture area of the screen so that, in effect, you see what you hear.

Bounce Bounce, Hayley Morris, 2012, digital video, 2:50 min
The official music video for “Bounce Bounce” by grammy award winning violinist Hilary Hahn and experimental pianist Hauschka. “Bounce Bounce” is a stop-motion animated video inspired by the vibrant life found within tide pools. The video was made completely by hand using found objects, fabric, paper, yarn drift wood and clay to create a world brought to life by music.

DEAR DiARY, RAFiA, 2015, digital video, 4:47 min
DEAR DiARY is a musical journal entry that details the cyclical symptoms of RAFiA’s depression. It develops into an unrequited love note turned shouting match toward toxic masculinity under which she is persistently gaslit, underestimated, and ignored.

GUUD, Hirad Sab, 2015, digital video, 2:24 min
In Hirad Sab’s video for Ash Koosha’s song “Guud,” trees without leaves sway to the music and impossible liquid and vapor structures subtly pulsate. As we slowly rotate through a zero gravity environment, a human figure emerges from the liquid making body and beat indistinguishable.

Devils Reign, Yoshi Sodeoka, audio remixed by Daron Murphy, 2011, digital video, 4:41 min
Devils Reign is part of the music-video album Distortion III, a quartet of psychedelic visions paired with music. Sodeoka’s visuals are aggressive—pulsating colors and images coming towards the viewer—while also managing to be hypnotic. Like a striped rotating spiral, the video ripples out towards the viewer like grooves on a record only to be shattered by appropriated actors distorted beyond recognition.

August 6, 2016 In

GIFs to Have Sex By

‘GIFs to Have Sex By’ is a visual mixtape brought to you by the naughty minds of more than 40 artists.

From the abstract to the explicit, the soft curves to the hard lines, these artists up some imagery for sexual encounters of all kinds with oneself, lovers, and your favorite devices.

Artists in order of appearance: Adam Ferriss, Talia Shulze, Adriana Minoliti, Antonio Roberts, Eva Papamargariti, Michael Mallis, Claudia Hart, Nicole Killian, Lorna Mills, Emilie Gervais, Katie Torn, Carla Gannis, Michelle Leftheris, Rollin Leonard, Giselle Zatonyl, Andrew Benson, Tycho Horan, Rosa Menkman, V5MT, Yoshi Sodeoka, Rea McNamara, Paula Nacif, Rafia Santana, Dafna Ganani, Miyö Van Stenis, Christian Petersen, Oliver David, Erin Gee, Daniel Johnson, Anthony Antonellis, Tristan Stevens, Georges Jacotey, Angela Washko, Morehshin Allahyari, A Bill Miller, Gaby Cepeda, Jeremy Haik, Sam Rolfes, Alma Alloro, Carrie Gates, Mark Dorf

For a good time, loop the video. 😉

GHSB was originally presented as part of Faith Holland’s solo exhibition Technophilia at TRANSFER in Brooklyn, NY, then traveled to Digital Sweat Gallery on The Internet, and was shown at Print Screen Festival in Tel Aviv, Israel.

December 3, 2014 In

Providence & Friends

This past summer, Magic Lantern put out a call for its first submission-based program. We were interested in seeing contemporary work by local artists in the vicinity of Providence, Boston, and New Haven, and in bringing this work to the attention of others in a timely celebration of regional filmmaking. All of the artists featured in Providence & Friends are, or were until very recently, based in the area. We were impressed by the diversity of artistic practices and styles to be found in these submissions. Rather than trying to craft a coherent, thematic program, we found it more interesting to simply highlight this heterogeneity and let these works speak for themselves.Providence & Friends ranges from small, unpretentious 8mm love letters to the most advanced digital manipulations, from beautiful abstractions to politicized travelogues, and from the finished form of recorded media to the contingencies of live performance. Its scope is as big as Providence is small.

Artists: Sarah Abu Abdallah, Alexander Dupuis, Dave Fischer, Tara & Gordon Nelson, Mariya Nikiforova, Adrian Randall, Deirde Sargent, Asha Tamirisa, Derek Taylor, Arvid Tomayko-Peters, Matthew Underwood, Freddie Wiss

Alexander Dupuis, That Which Pulls, digital video, 2013, 10 min.
That Which Pulls applies John Whitney’s principles of differential motion to resynthesize sound and image data into new audiovisual material. The resulting sounds and video are cut up, layered, and recombined to create a piece that explores the dynamic interplay between the emergent auditory and visual gestures, focusing on the counterpoint between their patterns of chaos and resolution.

Dave Fischer, Aura Display, digital video, 2014, 5 min.
Aura Display is a short bit of abstract dancing geometry, in tribute to the device in the film Akira that shows people’s psychic powers. It was written in 100% hand-coded Postscript.

Tara and Gordon Nelson, Sad Mall, super 8, 2013, 3:52 min.
A late winter, long-distance Super 8 love letter between Boston (shot by Gordon) and Ithaca (shot by Tara). All edits are in-camera. Original soundtrack by Shades of Fawn (Gordon and Tara Nelson).
Shot on Ektachrome 100D.

Adrian Randall, The Bourgeois Agony of Travel, digital video, 2014, 12:02 min.
The Bourgeois Agony of Travel is an experimental travelogue which reflects on the images, spaces, screens, and pixels of travel. Recorded over four years, the film explores how we relate to screens as both the virtual reality of cosmopolitanism, and as a form of deep, personal connection.

Deirdre Sargent, Sea Screen, digital video, 2014, 2:32 min.
A digitized citizen with her aquatic fantasies is only able to digest experience through screen imagery. The “screen” becomes anything with an clear, flat surface, such as an aquarium – the aquarium becomes a television and the TV a tank. With an interest in the lo-fi and and situating a cranium in between a screen and camera, this video explores our imagined experiences through screen relationships.

Asha Tamirisa, OX, digital video, 2014, 6:43 min.
sonic and visual pulse

Derek Taylor, Someone to Ride the River With, digital video, 2008, 4:47 min.
A map of recollection, the film consists of 286 35mm Kodachrome stills of varying landscapes, which mine the depths of memory. The film also pays homage to a patient photographer, whose lyrical impressions of the world evoke a feeling of genuine perception.

Arvid Tomayko-Peters, Spontaneous Pigeon Vortex, digital video, 2014, 7:29 min.
Spontaneous Pigeon Vortex is an exploration of improvisation with realtime audio and video manipulation using custom software. What can I do in 7 minutes with a bunch of video clips while responding to music? The music was recorded in four takes of trumpet and drums (sometimes simultaneously) and realtime manipulation those recordings. The video manipulation was recorded in realtime using original footage from Arches National Park, Colorado National Monument, Narragansett Bay, Providence and highways in Colorado, Utah and Ontario, with only a few small tweaks in post production.

Freddie Wiss, Black or White, digital video, 2007, 3:05 min.
Black or White is a film that explores the ambiguity of identity and perception with psychological vignettes that are fluid, tense and enigmatic… culminating in a bit of anxiety and despair.

Mariya Nikiforova, Rewards, 16mm, 2014, 4:35 min.
A destructive physical and chemical process reveals hidden energies in a forgotten Boston green space. The resulting debris alternately evoke graffiti, stained glass, natural decomposition, and the effects of heatstroke on a tired brain. The minimally sourced soundtrack, composed in collaboration with Stefan Grabowski, explores the way in which we sometimes “hear” what we see and vice versa.

Sarah Abu Abdallah, The Salad Zone, digital video, 2013, 21 min.
Disarrayed glimpses of multiple narratives such as that of familial domestic tensions, a juvenile dream of going to Japan, the tendency to smash TVs in moments of anger and eating fish. While using scenes from the artist’s surroundings and life in Saudi Arabia like streets or malls, it never attempts to provide the whole picture but taking a rhizomatic approach to tell a story of the everyday life.

Matthew Underwood, Live synesthetic performance, multi-media, 2014
An array of analog electronics, folk noise gear, and scientific instruments create harsh and strange sounds. Custom computer software will generate visuals in real-time in response to these sounds. Enjoy the show.

Curated with Seth Watter.

The Local Show was presented by Magic Lantern Cinema (Providence).

October 3, 2014 In

Digital Oracles

Digital Oracles is a collection of videos that reflect the relationship of the psychedelic and the digital. It was curated as part of Spaced Out: Migration to the Interior at Red Bull Studios (New York).

Artists: Alexander Dupuis, Faith Holland, Michael Mallis and Mikey McParlane, Brenna Murphy, Eva Papamargariti, Yoshi Sodeoka

September 2, 2014 In

Click Click Click

Click. Click. Click. Copy. Paste. Drag. Drop. These are the new gestures of digital image making. Click Click Click is a survey of contemporary digital moving image practices that span GIFs, augmented performances, green screen keying, collage, appropriation, Processing, 3D renders and more.

Artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Claudia Bitran, Hannah Black, Gaby Cepeda and Adriana Minoliti, Jennifer Chan, Jennie Cole, Claire Evans, Dafna Ganani, Geraldine Juárez, Nicole Killian, Rachel Maclean, Claudia Maté, Jillian Mayer, Raquel Meyers, Lorna Mills, Eva Papamargariti, Sabrina Ratté, Erica Scourti, Tessa Siddle, V5MT, Giselle Zatonyl

Nicole Killian, Move It, 2013, 30 sec.

Move It is an excerpt from an ongoing investigation into getting the crowd pumped up and moving.

Lorna Mills, Jump Rope, 2011, GIF

Lorna Mills channels and trolls the internet through her assemblage GIFs. Searching the far reaching corners of the world wide web, Mills pulls out the most peculiar, inane, and baffling imagery and then recontextualizes it into her own carefully crafted compositions.

Claudia Bitran, The Zone: Action, 2013, 3:17 min

The Zone is a series of three trailers for movies that do not exist: a Korean horror film, a Latino action film, and a French drama film. In the Latino action trailer, I perform as Macarena de las Heras, a strong and determined woman who has to go through different adventures in order to enter “The Zone.” She rides motorcycles, fights gangsters, tries to get information from the gatas, and shoots guns while running through the desert and making out with hot guys.

Gaby Cepeda and Adriana Minoliti, Conspirativas (series), 2013, GIF

These collaborative images capture an intersection between the artists’ loving interrogations of celebrity culture (Cepeda) and pornography (Minoliti). The result is an image that tackles female sexuality in its vicissitudes.

Claudia Maté, Fill Shapes, 2012, 1:54 min.

Fill Shapes uses Processing and After Effects to make squares and circles dance across the screen in this brightly colored geometric fantasy.

V5MT, ARXITEKTON (series), 2013, GIFs

ARXITEKTON is inspired by architectural design and old school computer graphics and games design. The concept is to mix together the two opposing styles: 8-bit graphics aesthetic with 3D design, and retro computer graphics with contemporary techniques and trends. The result is a series of graphic, yet three-dimensional forms, resembling architectural blueprints, 80s computer games and children’s books illustrations—animated and presented in the mesh background.

Eva Papamargariti, RandomAccessData, 2014, 4:50 min.

RandomAccessData is a parallel visual and verbal narration between references; it is a stream of information that creates a tag cloud based on random thoughts about post- internet art, radical utopian groups of the ’60s, today’s virtual field, the definitive role of searching and tagging inside the cyberspace, terms like distribution and reproduction of image, constant data flow, internet immersion, real ID vs cyber ID and the notion of auto generated content.

Dafna Ganani, I Dream of I Dream of Jennie, 2013, 3:42 min.

I Dream of I Dream of Jennie is a mediated performance by the artist Dafna Ganani. It references the 70’s American TV series I Dream of Jeannie and uses glitched images of copyrights licenses, biopunked Barbara Eden in her Jeannie costume, dolphins, BIOS homepage to propose a cybernetics fantasy: beings with both organic and cybernetic parts.

Gaby Cepeda and Adriana Minoliti, Conspirativas (series), 2013, GIFs

Hannah Black, Intensive Care/Hot New Track, 2013, 5:36 min

Remixed fragments of what’s allowed to appear on the surface of the world: Rihanna/Chris Brown, US/Iraq, blackness/whiteness, pain/pleasure, money/body. “Love and shame are the theory and the practice.”

Lorna Mills, Garden Variety (series), 2013, GIF

Geraldine Juárez, Love Not Money, 2009, 1:06 min

In 2009, months after the stock market meltdown, i created a personal stock market to track my assets: desires, work, routines, expectations and emotions – and how the way i valued them felt closer to death, money or love.

The video is the output of four weeks of emotional capitalism, where my assets were collected in a notebook and mapped and visualized originally in Processing.

Claire Evans, Digital Decay: Meditation/Disintegration, 2011, 1:50 min

Meditation/Disintegration is an animation of individual video frames saved in incrementally lower file formats hundreds and hundreds of times. Where is the line at which compression ceases to preserve information entirely? The digital image washes away on the tide of its own preservation. The beach ball is the third eye.

Jillian Mayer, MakeUp Tutorial HOW TO HIDE FROM CAMERAS, 2013, 3:36 min

Mayer guides YouTuber users with a makeup tutorial that teaches viewers how to hide from cameras and facial recognizing algorithms. “We all know that cameras are watching our every step,” warns Mayer. The implementation of this makeup tutorial in your everyday life will be key to existing track free.

V5MT, ARXITEKTON (series), 2013, GIFs

Lorna Mills, Garden Variety (series), 2013, GIFs

Morehshin Allahyari, The Romantic Self-Exiles I, 2012, 5:06 min.

To build a land; an imaginary home. To push the limits of real and unreal, memory and imagination, locality and universality. To put together my most vivid memories on flat planes or 3D cubes. Inside and outside the empty rooms, rooms without bodies, rooms left behind. A reflection and presentation of emotional attachments. Collective and personal.

Erica Scourti, Body Scan, 2014, 3:36 min.

Body Scan by Erica Scourti makes visible the awkwardness of our fleshy, curved bodies being forced into the rectangular shapes of visual media. Both through a self-objectifying gaze of her own body with a cell phone camera that recalls sexting and reverse Google Image searches that make bodies and products nearly interchangable, Scourti confronts the way that media makes the body a thing.

Jennie Cole, a device of a special type, 2012, 3:32 min.

a device of special type investigates encounters with text in electronic media, in response to Donna Haraway’s assertion that writing is ‘pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs’. Exploring ideas of transhumanist possibility alongside the manipulations of identity suggested by the internet’s corporate ‘like’, the language in this video is at once page-based, screen-based, illuminated and infiltrated by symbols and logos.

V5MT, ARXITEKTON (series), 2013, GIFs

Lorna Mills, Garden Variety (series), 2013, GIFs

Tessa Siddle, Hexenhaus, 2010, 2:47 min.

Hexenhaus is a video fragment from a series of work about domestic ritual and relations between humans, houseplants, and animals. Following the collapse of a relationship a failed banishing ritual is performed with my pet houseplants/familiars. An attempt to convert loneliness into solitude results in only more loneliness.

Nicole Killian, Attention, 2013, 2:53 min.

Attention is a video exploring mall madness and meditation.

Gaby Cepeda and Adriana Minoliti, Conspirativas (series), 2013, GIFs

Giselle Zatonyl, The Harm of Coming into Existence, 2014, 1:57 min.

Zatonyl’s 3D rendered video juxtaposes glittery, soft colors with hard lines forming an imaginative factoy-like space that produces unknown, but assuredly delightful things.

Jennifer Chan, Boyfriend 男友 [Nanyou], 2014, 6:27 min.

BOYFRIEND combines YouTube-captured webcam videos with images of dominant East Asian masculinity. Headlined by a Mandarin cover of Justin Bieber’s pop hit Boyfriend, K-pop stars, J-pop stars, Taiwanese diaspora, and Canto-pop icons, are recut against confessional Asian American “dudes” to deliberate the superficial aspects of performing the archetypal romantic straight male partner in Asian culture.

Rachel Maclean, Germs, 2013, 3 min

Germs is a green-screen video, which follows a glamorous female protagonist through series of advertising tropes. Moving from a perfume to a bathroom cleaner commercial, she converses with a persuasive masked woman and becomes increasingly paranoid about the omnipresence of microscopic germs. Rachel plays every character in the piece.

Lorna Mills, Linguine Primavera, 2013, GIF

Lorna Mills, Kitty Fire, 2011, GIF

Raquel Meyers, 2SLEEP1 ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ 002. MATSAMÖT, 2013, 3:23 min.

Matsamöt is part of 2SLEEP1, a playlist of audiovisual performances in text mode, designed to make you fall asleep. The music interface and the graphics are built up from text symbols (PETSCII). Made by Raquel Meyers and Goto80 using c-64.

Sabrina Ratté, The Land Behind, 2013, 4:56 min.

Traveling on an undefined territory where the illusion of a continuous tracking shot emphasizes an unreachable destination. Through the syncopated editing and multiple transitions, images of the area themselves become traveling entities, creating confusion on the level of the depicted space as much as with the level of its temporality.

Curated with Nora O’ Murchú.

Click Click Click has been presented by Whitebox Art Center (New York), Magic Lantern Cinema (Providence), Hannah Macclure Centre (Dundee), and Gray Area Art + Technology (San Francisco). Please note that each program has been slightly different.

August 2, 2014 In

Coded After Lovelace (New York)

“Artists have always been among the first to reflect on the culture and technology of their time, and decades before the digital revolution had been officially proclaimed, they were experimenting with the digital medium”

– Dr. Christiane Paul, Digital Art (2003) Thames & Hudson.

Coded After Lovelace offers a survey of art that critically reflects on the creative use of technology: its developments and limitations. From the room-sized computers of the Bell Labs era to the tablet-based work of today, these seven artists question the boundary between art and technology. Coded After Lovelace creates a new lineage across artists of different generations.

Artists: Carla Gannis, Claudia Hart, Olia Lialina, Jillian Mayer, Rosa Menkman, Arleen Schloss, Lillian F Schwartz

Long before digital art became a popularized form, Lillian Schwartz used the computer as a tool to create abstract prints and films. An early artist-in-residence at Bell Laboratories, her experiments laid the foundation for future generations of digital artists and practitioners.

In contrast, Arleen Schloss drew from her experience as an active member of the Downtown New York scene. An energetic explorer of new media, Schloss’s work poetically examines language (and more specifically, the alphabet) as a technology, which she performs and materializes using laser projections.

A pioneering net artist and theorist, Olia Lialina was early to recognize the World Wide Web’s potential as a medium for artistic experimentation. Informed by her background in filmmaking, Lialina used what was then a novel format, the GIF, to reflect an emerging web vernacular.

The role of the computer in shifting representational values is key to Claudia Hart’s work on identity and virtuality. Her innovative 3D work subverts the typical iconography adopted by the commercial computer graphics industry and defies expectations with its slow-paced, contemplative, and emotional qualities.

Carla Gannis’s Non-Facial Recognition project challenges surveillance softwares through a playful digital manipulation of social media profile images. Remixing photos sent to her by friends and followers, Gannis transforms photographic portraits into digital assemblages that are no longer merely visual data for military-industrial algorithms.

Through experiments with video compression, feedback, and other forms of noise, Rosa Menkman creates works specific to digital media. Beyond the intentional corruption of various file formats, Menkman’s works, constantly in a state of flux, deconstruct culture, politics, and the history of technology to create unique glitched audio-visuals.

Jillian Mayer’s You’ll Be Okay offers comfort to the viewer faced with a myriad of digital anxieties. Whether it be the impending Singularity-the uploading of our material selves into a nebulous digital cloud–or simply too many push notifications, Mayer paradoxically uses digitally generated images to allay the fears associated with that very technology.

Curated with Nora O’ Murchú.

Coded After Lovelace was presented at Whitebox Art Center (New York).

February 2, 2014 In

Technolust

Technolust is not whispering sweet nothings to your OS all night. Technolust is the stir in your body when you run your fingers along a perfectly smooth metal curve. Technolust is the sensation of softly tapping rounded plastic buttons with your fingers. Technolust is battery-powered pleasure. Technolust is the thrill of viewing beautiful sets of pixels. Come with your laptop, smart phone, personal device, thumbdrive, or significant other to a special program of technoeroticism this Valentine’s Day Eve.

Artists: Bobby Abate, Kenneth Anger, LaTurbo Avedon, Abigail Child, Martha Colburn, Dafna Ganani, Barbara Hammer, Faith Holland, Georges Jacotey, Susan Mogul, Jon Rafman, Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse, Matthew Underwood, Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia

If I Had a Hammer from Real Video Trilogy by Bobby Abate, 2001, DVD, color and b&w, sound
Come Softly, 1999, video, 11 min
The breakdown of identity, communication, and human relationships via the internet. An electronic reality of porn, beer, sex, cash, and drugs. Crafted from softly pixilated QuickTime, NetMeeting sessions, emotive vintage pop, airplane disaster footage, online porn, streaming Hollywood trailers, and the curious hypnotic qualities of taping off computer monitors, Bobby Abate’s internet-sex-n-death thrillogy explores new anxieties made possible by technology, and the profoundly intimate places that tiny images and lonely piano chords burrow deep within the soul. Real Videos is like a tender and tumultuous visual virus, created to infect a world where humans live through movies, die through malfunctions and, in between, email their love. – Ed Halter, The New York Underground Film Festival 2001

Kustom Kar Kommandos by Kenneth Anger, 1965, 16mm, color, sound, 3:30 minutes
To the soundtrack of “Dream Lover” a young man strokes his customized car with a powder puff. – Canyon Cinema

Soc Net Vogue by LaTurbo Avedon, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 5:23 minutes
LaTurbo Avedon is an avatar with an art practice who also likes to party. In Soc Net Vogue, she imaginatively occupies her social media environment by seductively dancing in a 3D-rendered Facebook club to Madonna’s “Vogue.”

(If I can sing a song of) Ligatures by Abigail Child, 2009, DVD, b&w, sound, 5:22 minutes
Third in my series of Foreign Films exploring relations of text and image, how text turns the image. In (If I Can Sing A Song About) Ligatures, words taken from lines of Nada Gordon’s unrequited love poems, whose sentences are taken, in their turn, from anonymous web poems, reveal a history of sexuality. Ligatures pronounces the poignancy of desire; its power and its vulnerability. The women are visions, girls, desirous, delicate, illusory. The illusionary nature is made manifest-transversing boundries, expectations and physical limits-by the close. We in the audience, creating our own identities in the moments, remain trans-fixed. – AC

Lift Off by Martha Colburn, 1998, 16mm, color, sound, 3 minutes
An interstellar Sex Capade of Astro-Porno-O-Naughts strobing and sucking through the Outer Limits. Nasty NASA Nymphets float through the Galaxies … insinuating rocket blow jobs and releasing their Planetary Pleasures, ending in the dispersion of a capsule/parachute. Originally a double-projection of 16mm color space footage and animated, hand-colored collage animation Super 8. With an incredibly Spaced-Out-Dementia-Dirty-Tech soundtrack by Jad Fair and Jason Willett. Man’s desire to fornicate with the entire Universe is finally fully realized. “Her orgiastic collages of found footage and animation pirate the images from the unceasing onslaught of our mass media era and turn them inside out, revealing the perversity we all expect is there.” – The Austin Chronicle

Oh Sussana by Dafna Ganani, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 3:02 minutes
A domestic dance performance in the bedroom: a woman dances to the confederate song of “Oh Sussana,” as digital animations cover her image, her residence alters around her through affect and alterations in spatial continuity. – DG

No No Nooky TV by Barbara Hammer, 1987, 16mm, color, sound, 17 minutes
NO NO NOOKY TV posits sexuality to be a social construct in a “sex-text” of satiric graphic representation of “dirty pictures.” Made on an Amiga Computer and shot in 16mm film, NO NO NOOKY TV confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electronic language, pixels and interface. Even the monitor is eroticized in this film/video hybrid that points fun at romance, sexuality, and love in our post-industrial age. – Film-maker’s Coop

Light Petting and Heavy Petting by Faith Holland, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 3:13 minutes
Light Petting and Heavy Petting are a video couplet about our bodily relation to images we see on the screen. The videos suggest a different relationship to the virtual image, one that is both affective and physical. Heavy Petting, in particular, complicates the viewer’s relationship to pornographic images in multiple ways. There is an appropriation of heterosexual male-targeted porn for a female audience and rather than identify with the penis, the viewer relates with the woman’s actions. But this identification is incomplete and instead a triadic relationship is formed between the couple on screen and the viewer in meatspace.

Big Mouthed Sissy by Georges Jacotey, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 3:49 minutes
In this video, George Jacotey performs for a webcam by opening his mouth in different places in front of the static camera. Each pose his mouth strikes suggests a different sexual scenario. His lips are digitally traced in fire, conflating pleasure and danger.

Take Off by Susan Mogul, 1974, DVD, b&w, sound, 10:30 minutes
“I made Take Off in my studio apartment on Myra Avenue during my second year living in Los Angeles. As a member of the Feminist Studio Workshop, I was writing an essay at the time comparing male artists’ representations of their sexuality with female artists’. Vito Acconci was my model for a male perspective. I had been captivated by his videotapes; particularly Undertone, where he was supposed to be masturbating while seated at a table. The videotape was my ultimate response and commentary on Acconci as well as an expression of my own sexuality.” —SM

Still Life (Betamale) by Jon Rafman, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 4:55 minutes
Made as a music video for Oneohtrix Point Never, Still Life (Betamale) remixes found imagery of basement computers, anime, furries, and more to explore the Internet’s deepest, darkest sexual desires.

Afternoon Delight, Dreaming of Machines, and Queering Pluto from Laborers of Love/LOL by Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 6:02 minutes
Laborers of Love/LOL is a crowdsourcing project that explores how sexuality and desire are mediated through new technologies, specifically new models of global, outsourced labor. The project takes the form of an Internet service that uses anonymous online workers to create “customers” video fantasies. Utilizing Mechanical Turk, an online job engine created by Amazon.com (mturk.com), LOL leverages a global online workforce of workers that are not specific to the sex industry but rather a diverse group of home/computer based workers. In an assembly-line fashion, Mechanical Turk workers collect images and video related to the fantasy from a variety of websites. A real time data visualization is then presented on the website consisting of worker locations (Waco, Texas; Bangalore, India; etc) and IP addresses of the mined content (images and video). This visualization maps the process and “production” of the video fantasy. The final product is a short video mashup, more funny than sexy, where 1970’s experimental cinema meets canned Photoshop filters, and ultimately reflects on how desire and pleasure are represented, fragmented and abstracted through the consumption of online digital media. – SR & JC

Filmography by Matthew Underwood, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 7:53 minutes
I was asked to contribute to Ivan Lozano’s inaugural issue of Image File Press, dealing with the suicide of porn actor Arpad Miklos. ‘Filmography’ is a textual and spatial study utilizing strategies of appropriation. – MU

Webcam Venus by Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia, 2013, digital video, color, sound,
In Webcam Venus, we asked online sexcam performers to replicate iconic works of art. This piece is an experimental homage to both fine art and the lowbrow internet phenomenon of cams. Sexcams use webcams and chat interfaces to connect amateur adult performers with an audience. Users log on to see men, women, transsexuals, couples and groups broadcast their bodies and sexuality live for the public, often performing for money. To create this experiment in high and low brow media, we assumed anonymous handles and spent a few hours each day for a month asking performers: “Would you like to pose for me?” – AW & PG

Technolust was presented by Magic Lantern Cinema (Providence).

April 2, 2012 In

From the Cloud

In February 2005, YouTube was launched and forever changed our relationship to moving images, both as viewers and producers. But even well before then, the web had made a large variety of new materials accessible to see and to download, as well as upload. “From the Cloud” is a video program that looks at found footage “films” in the Internet Age. The proliferation of archived photographs, digital images, and videos made available to everyone online as well as an exponential increase in production has changed the way artists interact with pre-existing material. The artists in this program both pull material from the cloud and implicitly comment on the cloud by doing so.

Artists: Cory Arcangel, Hilary Basing, John Michael Boling, Jennifer Chan, Jacob Ciocci, Jesse Darling, Feminist Frequency/Anita Sarkeesian, Mike Goldby, Faith Holland, Daniel Johnson, Franco and Eva Mattes, Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva, Lorna Mills and Yoshi Sodeoka, Gracie Nesin, and Hennesy Youngman

New American Classic, Jennifer Chan, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 1:44 min.

Is it sculpture or furniture?

A Total Jizzfest, Jennifer Chan, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 3:22 min.

A sample of the richest and sexiest men in computer and Internet history.

Baby, Daniel Johnson, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 5:10 min.

Excerpted and looped from Justin Bieber’s music video “Baby,” in “Bieber Fever,” Bieber encircles us in all his glory while a symphonic slowed-down version of his song plays. As he spins, more and more about his gestures, posturing, and the environment emerges.

Electric Sweat, John Michael Boling, 2007, digital video, color, sound, 54 sec.

This video is a valentine to hardware that raises technolust to the level of technoromance.

Am I Evil?, Jacob Ciocci, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 4:14 min.

In her essay, “Mirror Horror”, Trinie Dalton describes, “In early times, since mirrors were rare commodities, only qualified shamans had mirrors. But in 1438, when Guttenberg started a mirror-making business, anyone untrained in magic could use and be tempted by one. This proliferation of mirrors perpetuated myths of witchcraft, since some theorized that mirrors were being used for maleficence by those corruptible, vain and immoral enough to admire their own reflections.”

The good witch (Harry Potter?) tries to understand his reflection but the mirror shatters as soon as he touches it. The evil witch (Wicked Witch of the West?) tries the same thing but the mirror again shatters. The mirror always shatters just before a fixed identity can be sustained. A mirror is magic in much the same way many newer image-making tools are magic: for a brief moment you are put under a spell, you believe in it. But the longer and the closer you look, everything begins to fall apart. That is the real magic. This is the 3rd piece in Ciocci’s ongoing series “Trapped and Frozen Forever,” an investigation into the relationships between online and off-line images: images trapped (not tangible) on-screen and images frozen (not moving) in the physical world. In this iteration Ciocci has scanned section by section each of the 2 large collages on the wall, using them as the basis for the animated projection.

Arnold Schoenberg, op. 11 – I – Cute Kittens, Cory Arcangel, 2009, digital video, color, sound, 4:21

Arnold Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11-I played by cats on pianos.

Apocalypse Now, Jesse Darling, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 1:06 min.

A roundup of the year 2012, made especially for the end of the world.

No Fun, Eva and Franco Mattes, 2010, online performance, color, sound, 15:46 min.

For No Fun Franco Mattes simulated committing suicide in a public webcam-based chat room. Thousands of random people, unwillingly recorded, watched while he was hanging from the ceiling, swinging slowly, for hours. The video documentation of the performance is an unpredictable, at times disturbing, sequence of reactions: some laugh, some are completely unmoved, some insult the supposed corpse, some take pictures with their mobiles.

Money2, Lorna Mills and Yoshi Sodeoka, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 1:16 min.

Money2 by Lorna Mills and Yoshi Sodeoka is a brief, merciless video assembled from Lorna Mills’s found and altered animated gif collages. These looping animations play against a soundtrack by Plink Flojd, a super audiovideo collective started by David Quiles Guillo with co-founders Yoshi Sodeoka and Eric Mast. The video is the cacophonous, dysfunctional, absurd, idiotic sequel to Pink Floyd’s classic “Money.” The band’s original version from the 70’s exhorted their audience to reject wealth and conspicuous consumption, while at the same time launching them into the stratosphere of commercial success. Pink Floyd’s “Money” remains an enormously popular song, despite the fact that all of the ideas about capitalism embedded in the song are now four decades out of date. Money2 expands the original imagery to include the darkness, desperation, folly and anxiety that surrounds wealth and the lack of it. By pairing a mashed, mangled musical version with found, then re-arranged, animated gifs, Pink Floyd’s “Money” is revived and buried alive at the same time.

Erased de Kooning, Mike Goldby, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 2:58 min.

In this video, Goldby brings an image of a de Kooning drawing into Photoshop and, as Robert Rauschenberg did 60 years ago, erases all the markings. But what is at stake when this is just a digital file, with another exact copy of the image available again to download or one can simply undo using ⌘Z?

Only Girl, Hilary Basing, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 3:53 min.

My performances on camera aim to equalize identities through the adoption of their different characteristics and gestures. Only Girl explores the gestures of femininity and the breakdown of information through mimicry as I imitate drag queen Raja’s imitation of Rihanna’s Only Girl (In the World).

Search by Image, Recursively Starting with a Transparent PNG, Sebastian Schmieg, 2011, digital video, color, silent, 4:04 min.

With near-scientific method, Schmieg begins with a transparent PNG image file and allows Google’s Search by Image to visually free associate. The result is an insight into how Google’s algorithm “sees.”

Analog Internet, Faith Holland, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 5:12 min.

Analog Internet is a video-sculpture that reveals a pyramid of three-dimensional rendered CRT televisions, each with a different cat video appropriated from YouTube playing. This is the core of the Internet: an Egyptian site of worship for cats. Considering the Internet’s obsession with cats, Analog Internet re-imagines having the same relationship to cat videos in physical, not digital, space.

All Y’all, Gracie Nesin, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 4:51 min.

All Y’all is one of a cycle of nine commemorative ‘songs’ called White Witch/Bluff City—a diaristic narrative about codeine, boarding school, the Athenian courtesan Phryne—dreams, shreds, parts. It’s impressionistic, creepy-trill, a drunk/dull/sleepy recollection of prostitution both low and courtly, reenacted and past-life-ephemeral, a punchy Southern Gothic poem about After Empire sung somewhat underwater, smoked and muffled by a blue, New Age cloud, all collapsed and hilarious: yesterday today and tomorrow.

Too Many Dicks, Feminist Frequency/Anita Sarkeesian, 2010, digital video, color, sound, 1:19 min.

It is no secret that the majority of video games these days star overly muscular men often carrying big swords, guns, baseball bats, chainsaws or other phallic weaponry. Many games normalize this extremely macho form of masculinity while uncritically glorifying war or military intervention. Sadly too many games tend to celebrate grotesque displays of violence instead of providing opportunities for creative, less violent, innovative forms of conflict resolution. Today with the growing dominance of the first person shooter genre players are encouraged to really participate in the destruction, testosterone and gore up close and personal.
Not only are these games dominated by male characters but even the few women characters who do get staring roles are often made to replicate overly patriarchal, violent, macho behavior (but inside of a hyper sexualized female body). Not surprisingly the vast majority of game producers, designers and writers in the industry are still men.

On Beauty, Hennessy Youngman, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 5:11 min.

Is beauty still relevant in our future age where information is mad valuable and neoliberalism is the number one pop tune that seems like it will always be playing every time you turn on the radio forever into infinity? Well I don’t got answers to these questions, but that don’t stop me from enwisening y’all to this shit!

#Postmodem, Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 14:37

#PostModem is a comedic, satirical sci-fi musical based on the theories of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists. It’s the story of two Miami girls and how they deal with the technological singularity, as told through a series of cinematic tweets.

From the Cloud has been presented by Magic Lantern Cinema (Providence), Spectacle Theater (New York), and DAM Gallery (Berlin).

Trailer by LJ Frezza.