. Conversations at the Edge (CATE)

November 5-Ming Wong

Thursday, November 5 | This week Berlin based artist Ming Wong joins us for a screening and discussion!  Berlin-based, Singapore-born artist Ming Wong repurposes global cinema to explore issues of race, gender, and performance. He deliberately miscasts himself in iconic scenes from films by directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai, Alain Resnais, and Roman Polanski, often in settings […]

On Heinz Emigholz

This week I am thrilled to welcome SAIC student Sidney Tilghman to the blog! Sidney highlights the ways Heinz Emigholz’s film The Airstrip explores modernity through a wide array of structures ranging from airports to shopping malls from Wrocław, Poland to Mexico City, Mexico.  Like many of Heinz Emigholz’s films, The Airstrip (2013) unspools in a specific juncture of time and […]

October 29-Heinz Emigholz: The Airstrip

Thursday, October 29 | This week German director Heinz Emigholz joins us for a screening of The Airstrip and a discussion!  German director Heinz Emigholz is renowned for a series of films on the buildings of Louis Sullivan, Adolf Loos, and Rudolf Schindler. With The Airstrip (2013), he weaves architectural study into a wide-ranging examination of the […]

On Lorna Mills

Tomorrow Lorna Mills will join us for a screening and discussion with artists featured in Ways of Something, a four-part update of John Berger’s BBC documentary Ways of Seeing!  I’m excited to welcome SAIC undergraduate Paula Pinho Martins Nacif to blog about Mills and her work. Nacif perceptively analyzes Mills’s ambitious series as a whole and sheds light on […]

October 22-Lorna Mills: Ways of Something

Thursday, October 22 | This week new media based artist Lorna Mills will join us for a screening and discussion!  Ways of Something is Lorna Mills’s astonishing update of John Berger’s seminal BBC program Ways of Seeing (1972). Featuring the work of 114 digital and web artists from around the world, the project consists of a series of […]

On Suzan Pitt

This week we are thrilled to present the animated films of Suzan Pitt! I am excited to welcome SAIC art history graduate student Lara Schoorl to the blog.  Schoorl reflects on the psychosexual nature of Pitt’s films while describing their visually stunning style. Suzan Pitt’s films from the 1970s through the 2010s show us dream worlds, female […]

October 15-The Animated Films of Suzan Pitt

Thursday, October 15 | Suzan Pitt will discuss her films via Skype. She will not be able to appear in person, as previously announced (we hope you still join us!).  Since the 1970s, Suzan Pitt has created some of the most acclaimed and influential independent animations of her generation. Best known for Asparagus (1979)—which screened with David […]

On Louis Henderson

Tomorrow English filmmaker Louis Henderson will join us for his first Chicago appearance!   Video Data Bank‘s Lindsay Bosch blogs about Henderson’s references to the Internet and computing in his complex meditations on neo-colonalism and contemporary Ghana.   Most of video art I watch, I watch on my laptop.  I dream of creating a perfect screening space—uninterrupted hours, big […]

October 8- Louis Henderson: Melts Into Air

Thursday, October 8 | Paris-based filmmaker Louis Henderson in person! In his first Chicago appearance, award-winning director Louis Henderson presents a pair of films on the networked links between colonialism, computing, and capitalism in contemporary Ghana. In Lettres du Voyant (2013), a series of mysterious letters describe the practice of “Sakawa”—e-scams fortified by Western African religious rituals—and the possibilities […]