Interview with Christiane Paul
Posted by | George William Price | Posted on | March 29, 2014
Curator and academic Christiane Paul sat down with CATE Program Assistant George William Price to discuss her research and curatorial practice centered around New Media. Paul presented a multimedia talk “Genealogies of the New Aesthetic” at CATE on March 27, 2014.
Christiane Paul (b. 1961, Attendorn, Germany) is Associate Professor at the School of Media Studies, The New School, and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has written extensively on new media arts and lectured internationally on art and technology.
George William Price: So Christiane how did you become interested in tracing the genealogy of the New Aesthetic? What was so intriguing to you about this particular project?
Christiane Paul: I’ve been thinking and writing about the aesthetics of digital media for quite some time. To me it is one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the reception of new media. I’m working at the Whitney Museum and one of the problems I encounter constantly, occasionally with my colleagues at the museum and often with mainstream audiences, is a lack of understanding of the aesthetics of the medium. I’m very invested in changing that and when the New Aesthetic appeared and took off I was just struck by the fact of how blurry an image of aesthetics it represents.
The New Aesthetic is a ghost of an image. It is a degradation but at the same time very valuable because it says something about its own condition. To me the achievement of the New Aesthetic and perhaps the reason why it became such a meme is that it really captures something important about aesthetics right now. But it fails and is not very helpful when it comes to actually creating a framework for an in-depth understanding of aesthetics. That is one of the reasons why Malcolm Levy and I decided to look at genealogies of that New Aesthetic; many aspects of the New Aesthetic of course have a fifty-year history.
To me the current discussions surrounding post-digital, post-Internet, post-medium work are really closely related to the New Aesthetic because they struggle with some of the same issues, particularly the relationship between networked technologies and the object. All of these terms ultimately describe projects that are deeply influenced by digital technologies on various levels but do not necessarily take a digital form, existing as software and hardware. They manifest as paintings or as sculptures but could not be understood without a deeper level of knowledge of digital technologies and their aesthetics.
Image from Clement Valla’s Postcards from Google Earth. http://www.postcards-from-google-earth.com/
Tags: 2014 > Curatorial Practice > Interview > Net Art > Post-Internet > The New Aesthetic
April 3 – Sven Augustijnen: Spectres
Posted by | George William Price | Posted on | March 27, 2014
Thursday, April 3 | Sven Augustijnen in person!
Still from Spectres (2011, Sven Augustijnen). Courtesy of the artist and Auguste Orts.
Confronting the authorized version of an atrocity committed during the early days of post-colonial African rule, Sven Augustijnen’s Spectres (2011) focuses a critical eye on the official account of the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first elected Prime Minister. The film begins a half-century later as the filmmaker sets off in the company of an amiable former Belgian civil servant-turned-historian on a journey in which the political soon becomes personal and standard notions of historical evidence begin to veer into Errol Morris terrain.Spectres vividly demonstrates that reconciliation always begins by uncovering the truth.
2011, Belgium, HDCAM, 104 minutes + discussion
Sven Augustijnen (b. 1970, Mechelen, Belgium) studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the Hoger Sint-Lukas Instituut in Brussels, and at theJan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. His work concentrates mainly on the tradition of portraiture and the porous boundaries between fiction and reality, using a hybrid of genres and techniques to disorienting effect. His films have been included in exhibitions and festivals in Athens, Basel, Fribourg, San Sebastián, Siegen, Rotterdam, Tunis, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, and Vilnius, among others. In 2011 he received the Evens Prize for Visual Arts. Augustijnen lives and works in Brussels.
Tags: 2011 > 2014 > Africa > Belgium > Experimental Documentary > Monographic Shows > Patrice Lumumba > Political > Sven Augustijnen
March 27 – Christiane Paul: Genealogies of the New Aesthetic
Posted by | George William Price | Posted on | March 24, 2014
Thursday, March 27, 6 p.m. | Christiane Paul in person!
Image from Clement Valla’s Postcards from Google Earth. http://www.postcards-from-google-earth.com/
Curator and scholar Christiane Paul presents a multimedia talk on the“Genealogies of the New Aesthetic.” Identified as such by the British artist and programmer James Bridle, the New Aesthetic began as a Tumblr devoted to new modes of technologically enabled imaging and exploded into a meme dissected by critics from Wired, The Atlantic, and Vanity Fair. Taking Bridle’s Tumblr as her starting point — a collage of corruption artifacts, 8-bit imagery, information visualization, and more — Paul (using research conducted in collaboration with Malcolm Levy) traces the histories of each to create a lineage for practices, artifacts, and their aesthetics.
1968-2014, multiple countries, multiple formats, ca 60 minutes + discussion
Christiane Paul (b. 1961, Attendorn, Germany) is Associate Professor at theSchool of Media Studies, The New School, and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has written extensively on new media arts and lectured internationally on art and technology. As Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she curated several exhibitions — including Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools (2011),Profiling (2007), Data Dynamics (2001) and artport, the Whitney Museum’s website devoted to Internet art.
Tags: 2014 > Christiane Paul > Curators & Programmers > James Bridle > Media History > The New Aesthetic
CATE Spring 2014 Season
Posted by | George William Price | Posted on | January 21, 2014
Still from Reconversão (Thom Andersen, 2012). Courtesy of the artist.
We are thrilled to announce the Spring 2014 Season of Conversations at the Edge (CATE). This season will be opening with a multimedia talk on the “Genealogies of the New Aesthetic” by Christiane Paul on March 27th
Also lined up this season is Sven Augustijnen‘s Spectres (4/3) a film essay that presents a controversial view of Belgium’s colonial past and questions how a country or individual engages with their colonial past.
On April 10th CATE welcomes Everything is Terrible! to the Gene Siskel Film Center. This anonymous video collective mine thrift stores and bargain bins to unearth the best and worst ever committed to VHS. The collective will be presenting several short found footage works along with the feature length work Doggie Woggiez! Poochie Woochiez!
Thom Andersen (4/17) will be presenting Reconversão a film that considers the built, unrealized, and abandoned projects of Pritzker Prize-winning Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura.
Finally Basma Alsharif returns to CATE (4/24) with a collection of recent films that explore bilocation—the act of being in multiple places at once—a state of being she uses to describe Palestinian identity, as well as cinema itself.
We look forward to seeing you at CATE this season. In the meantime you can check out the line up, read more about the artists and their works and join the Facebook events here.
Interview with Tirtza Even
Posted by | Raven Munsell | Posted on | November 12, 2013
Still from Natural Life (Tirtza Even, 2013). Courtesy of the artist.
Could you tell us a little bit about the piece you’ll be screening for Conversations at the Edge this fall?
Natural Life is a project I began working on in the winter of 2011, a few months after I arrived to Chicago. The piece focuses on the stories of five individuals who were sentenced to life without parole (natural life) for crimes they committed as youth. The degree of responsibility for the crimes they were charged with varies from merely being in a room with an adult who committed a murder, to being accused of partaking in a premeditated act of killing. None of them, however, will ever be evaluated for change, difference, or growth. They will remain in prison till they die.
I tell the stories from multiple angles, from that of the legal experts and law enforcement officials, through family members of the inmates and relatives of victims of similar crimes. My goal is to examine context as activating and revealing change and difference – synchronically, through simultaneous yet incongruent views on similar acts or events, and diachronically, by allowing positions and phrases to mutate and flip meaning, as in a pun, when transitioning between stories.
This is done first and foremost through the literal device of a split screen. The voices, thus, are always interpreted through more than one view: older and younger, black and white, victim and perpetrator, police and convict, inside prison and outside it. The meaning of each of the two sides of the screen, however, mutates and alters. Difference is the only constant.
My hope is to depict change as inevitable, and difference as structural. And in that way, challenge the underlying presumption of permanence and sameness that the sentence of life-without-parole for juveniles claims and imposes.
Still from Natural Life (Tirtza Even, 2013). Courtesy of the artist.
Tags: 2013 > Experimental Documentary > Interviews > Midwest > Non-Fiction > SAIC Faculty > Tirtza Even
November 14 – Tirtza Even: Natural Life
Posted by | Raven Munsell | Posted on | November 8, 2013
Thursday, November 14, 6 p.m. | Special preview screening | Tirtza Even in person!
Still from Natural Life (Tirtza Even, 2013). Courtesy of the artist.
For more than 15 years, video artist and documentary filmmaker Tirtza Even has created a body of work that addresses an array of complex social and political issues in Palestine, Turkey, Spain, Germany, and the US. She presents a special preview of her latest project, Natural Life, a feature-length documentary about six individuals who, as youths, received the most severe sentence given to convicted adults—“natural life” or life without parole. Pairing interviews with inmates and those involved in their cases (family members, attorneys, police officers, and victims) with documented and staged scenes, Even’s film is an elegant and unflinching challenge to the inequities of the juvenile justice system.
2013, USA, digital file, 85 min + discussion
TIRTZA EVEN (b.1963, Jerusalem) is a video artist and documentary filmmaker based in Chicago. Her work has appeared widely at international festivals, galleries and museums including the Whitney Biennial and the Johannesburg Biennial, and is in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Jewish Museum, New York; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; among others. She is an Associate Professor in SAIC’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department.
Natural Life was produced alongside and with the support of the legal efforts of the Law Offices of Deborah LaBelle.
Tags: 2013 > Chicago > Experimental Documentary > Political > SAIC Faculty > Titza Even > USA
November 7 – Now: The Body and the Screen
Posted by | Raven Munsell | Posted on | November 1, 2013
Thursday, November 7, 6 p.m. | Presented by curator Jennifer Chan
Artists Janet Lin in person and Georges Jacotey present via Google Hangout!
Still from Now (1973, Lynda Benglis). Courtesy of the artist and the Video Data Bank.
In video’s early days, artists explored the camera’s influence on the way we understand ourselves by mixing performance and the medium’s capacity for instantaneous playback. In a seminal example, Lynda Benglis directed, questioned, and even kissed a screen image of her own self in the 1973 video Now. Forty years later, video art has become a hybrid practice that spans from performance-for-the-webcam to online remixes. Curated by new media artist Jennifer Chan, this program extends Now’s concerns into the era after the internet, showcasing politicized, carnal videos by artists Alexandra Gorczynski, Georges Jacotey, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Faith Holland, Eduardo Menz, Ei Jane Janet Lin, and more.
1973–2013, multiple countries, multiple formats, ca 60 min + discussion
JENNIFER CHAN (b. 1988, Ottawa, Canada) works with video, performance, and web-based media. She makes deliberately kitsch remix videos as a form of social commentary on art and gender after the Internet. Recent solo exhibitions include the Marshall McLuhan Salon in the Embassy of Canada in Berlin for Transmediale 2013 and Vox Populi, Philadelphia. Her curatorial projects have appeared at Trinity Square Video, VTape, and InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Center. Her writing on the histories and trends of Internet culture have been published in West Space Journal, Rhizome, Networked_Performance, Art F City, and Junk Jet. She is a recipient of the 2008 Mississauga Art Awards for Emerging Visual Talent.
Tags: 2013 > Alexandra Gorczynski > Early Video Art > Eduardo Menz > Ei Jane Janet Lin > Experimental > Faith Holland > Georges Jacotey > Jaakko Pallasvuo > Jennifer Chan > Lynda Benglis > New Media
Interview with Jodie Mack
Posted by | Raven Munsell | Posted on | October 29, 2013
Still from Undertone Overture (Jodie Mack, 2013). Courtesy of the artist.
Could you tell us a little bit about the program you’ll be screening for Conversations at the Edge this fall?
Sure. The formal description:
Let Your Light Shine investigates the formal principles of abstract cinema while maturing an interest in found materials; evolving modes of production and labor; and the role of decoration in daily life. Prodding at hierarchies of aesthetic value and the tension between high and low, these works question the role of abstract animation in a post-psychedelic climate. Merch tables meet museum gift stores. The sublime meets Sublime the band. Ebullient spectacles surface from resurrected dead capital and banal everyday objects. Stroboscopic eulogies celebrate the spectrum of abstraction from transcendent visual experiences to science kit optical fascinations, forcing a proscenium collision of the arena rock show, the planetarium light performance, and the cinema.
The casual description:
One piece is a rock opera documentary about a dying pop-culture merch business. I will narrate this live via song. Another piece requires viewing through prismatic glasses that turn each image into seven rainbows. There may or may not be a special surprise and/or a costume contest.
What inspires you in the world?
Mostly I’m inspired by why the majority of normal people despise contemporary art and how imagery oscillates between worlds of obscurist and mainstream consumption. I’m also inspired by how technology simultaneously enhances and ruins the world.
Still from Glistening Thrills (Jodie Mack, 2013). Courtesy of the artist.
October 31- Jodie Mack: Let Your Light Shine
Posted by | Raven Munsell | Posted on | October 25, 2013
Thursday, October 31, 6 p.m. | Jodie Mack in person!
Still from Dusty Stacks of Mom (Jodie Mack, 2013). Courtesy of the artist.
Jodie Mack’s handmade films are vibrant examinations of the decorative detritus that accumulates around us. With cast-off bits of wrapping paper, calico fabrics, and magazine clippings, she crafts exquisite stroboscopic abstractions and poignant fables of the pitfalls of modern materiality. The SAIC alumna returns to Chicago with a special show featuring four brand-new shorts, live songs, and the city’s premiere of Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project (2013). An animated-personal-essay-cum-rock-opera, the film adapts the music of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon to meditate on the demise of her mother’s mail order poster business in the face of e-commerce’s rise, the changing role of physical objects and virtual data in transaction, and the division (or lack thereof) between abstraction in fine art and psychedelic kitsch.
JODIE MACK (b. 1983, London, UK) is an experimental animator whose work combines the formal technique and structures of abstract animation and genre filmmaking to explore the tension between form and meaning. Her films have screened at Anthology Film Archives, Los Angeles Filmforum, and the Rotterdam and New York Film Festivals, among others. In 2011 Mack was a featured filmmaker at the Flaherty Seminar, and in 2013 received the Marion McMahan Award at the Images Festival in Toronto. She received her MFA from SAIC in 2007 and teaches at Dartmouth College.
::PROGRAM::
New Fancy Foils (2013, USA, 16mm, Color, Silent, 12.5 min.)
Undertone Overture (2013, USA, 16mm, Color, Sound, 10.5 min.)
Dusty Stacks of Mom (2013, USA, 16mm, Color, Live Sound, 41 min.)
Glistening Thrills (2013, USA, 16mm, Color, Silent, 8 min.)
Let Your Light Shine (2013, USA, 16mm, Color/B&W, Sound, 3 min.)
Tags: 2013 > Artist's Film > Experimental > Jodie Mack > Personal Essay > SAIC Alumni > USA
Interview with Brett Kashmere
Posted by | Raven Munsell | Posted on | October 21, 2013
Still from From Deep (Brett Kashmere, 2013). Courtesy of the artist.
Could you tell us a little bit about the project you’ll be screening for Conversations at the Edge this fall?
From Deep is a 90-minute experimental documentary about the game of basketball and its shifting place within 20th century American history and culture. It toggles between essay and mixtape, and draws its material from a wide range of sources, including, popular cinema, archival footage, music videos, hip hop music, highlight reels, newscasts, interposed with self-shot footage of pick-up ball from across the Midwest, the Northeast, and down into Kentucky.
There are two main threads that weave throughout the piece. The first traces the merger of hip hop and basketball in the mid-80s, coinciding with Michael Jordan’s rise as a cultural icon and the emergence of the corporate branded athlete. The second thread is more ethnographic in nature and highlights the social dimensions of the game. Playground basketball is represented in contrast to the professional game (as spectator sport), emphasizing the participatory, inclusive aspects of pick-up ball. In these sections the camera becomes part of the action.
What inspires you in the world?
Sincerity, social justice, perseverance, the DIY ethos, optimism, fresh style, intelligence without arrogance, experimentation with form, people whose work takes risks and speaks truth to power…
Still from From Deep (Brett Kashmere, 2013). Courtesy of the artist.
Tell us a bit about your process: how do you start a piece, and how do you know when it’s finished?
My process is research intensive and fairly circuitous. I often start broadly, with a subject that I feel passionate about and personally invested in, which provides a frame of reference. In this case, I knew I wanted to make a project about basketball because it was an important part of my adolescence, and I’ve always maintained an interest in it. I also wanted to continue my investigation into the skein of sports, identity, nationality, and fandom that I started with a previous project titled Valery’s Ankle, a piece about hockey violence and Canadian identity. The genesis of From Deep was in moving to the U.S. and suddenly being surrounded by basketball, and basketball culture, in a much more consuming and daily way than as a teenager playing out of passion and later, as part of a high school team. I was interested in how the game fit into a larger conversation about politics, style, and race in this country.
Once I determine what the subject is, I start to read extensively and I make a lot of notes, collect footage and parse clips. I don’t follow a preconceived plan or script instead, I try to find a form within the material itself. The initial assembly takes a long time as I churn through different possibilities for organizing and structuring the material, determine what I still need, and start to find the connective threads. The narration usually comes together toward the end; it is written in response to the shape and flow that the images have taken, and drawn from the research and notation that I’ve been conducting throughout the process. With From Deep, I decided to incorporate two voices into the piece, because I felt it needed at least two different perspectives. The last step was selecting the underscore music, which I worked with DJ /rupture (Jace Clayton) on.
Still from From Deep (Brett Kashmere, 2013). Courtesy of the artist.
What have you been watching lately?
I saw Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus’ twohundredfiftysixcolors a few nights ago and that was a treat. It’s the sort of film that appeals to me a lot – research-based, curatorial, typological, collaged, intertextual, and which says something about the current state of our world and culture. The other kind of work that I’m intrigued by right now situates the moving image within a sculptured installation or highly constructed or specified viewing environment. I’m thinking specifically of recent projects by Sharon Hayes, Kerry Tribe, Harun Farocki, Wu Tsang, Neïl Beloufa, and Elisabeth Subrin, among others, that feature a fragmentary, spatialized mix of narrative and nonfiction elements, often with layers of historical reference.
What are you most looking forward to about presenting this new work?
Seeing it projected large with good sound and an audience. This will be the first public preview of From Deep, so I’m excited to have the chance share it with others, to let it out into the world and hear the response. I think Conversations at the Edge is an ideal context for From Deep. It’s designed to be both informative and entertaining, and to create dialogue. The concept of edu-tainment, which I first became familiar with via the music and writing of KRS-One, is something that has underpinned the project from the very beginning.
Brett Kashmere will be presenting a special preview of From Deep at CATE on Thursday, October 24 at 6PM
Tags: 2013 > Brett Kashmere > Experimental Documentary > From Deep > Interviews > 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.
