On Anda Korsts…
Posted by | George William Price | Posted on | October 29, 2014
SAIC printmedia graduate student Amanda Sukenic takes the time to describe Anda Korsts as a feminist visionary who, along with many others, shaped the alternative media landscape of the USA on both a local and national level. Please join us this Thursday October 30th for a special survey of Korsts’s prolific career presented in collaboration with Media Burn Independent Video Archive.
Anda Korsts Polaroid. Courtesy of Media Burn Archive.
Before I had the oppourtunity to take the Chicago Media Arts course being taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the name of Anda Korsts was entirely unfamiliar to me. When it came time to pick an artist to focus on for our final projects, I carefully researched all options, and finally decided on Korsts. I was intrigued by not just her incredibly visionary stance on the importance of video as a tool for the masses, nor simply for her own prolific and multi disciplined practice, but as an archivist and the founder of Videopolis.
As a young DIY archivist myself, Korsts was someone who worked hard to uphold the work, the people and the ideas she thought were valuable and important to not simply her own life and work, but society as a whole. Korsts also worked to archive and preserve them in the hopes that others would also come to see their great value. As I researched Korsts more, I became increasingly aware that my interest in her was more than just as a cold subject for a paper, it was a wresting with ones own Dorian Gray style portrait in a sense—Korsts’s personal life tragedies, and the mystery of the later parts of her existence, haunt me each day it seems.
I am ecstatic to finally have a chance to see more of the amazing work from this extraordinary individual, as there is still so much of her work that remains unseen. This is why I am so very excited that Anda Korsts’s Video Metropolis will be the subject of this Thursday’s Conversations at the Edge.
Amanda Sukenick, is a fat, bipolar, learning disabled tranny with a huge toy collection… She is a monster. Graduating as an undergraduate from SAIC in 2007, she is currently back at SAIC, working towards an MFA in Printmedia. Primarily now a video artist, Amanda started making Youtube videos in 2009 doing Dragonball Toy reviews, and now focuses on DIY video archive building, music, Antinatalism, and the production of Vloggerdome, a public access Philosophy/Variety show created by Youtubers from around the world.
Tags: 2014 > Chicago > Early Video Art > Experimental Documentary > Midwest > Non-Fiction > Political > Retrospective > SAIC Student Writing > U.S.
About
Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
