February 28 – Archives in Progress: An Evening with Darko Fritz

Posted by | Raven Munsell | Posted on | February 22, 2013

Thursday, February 28, 6 p.m. | Darko Fritz in person!

“Darko Fritz is like a one-man tech-art history machine.”– Bruce Sterling, author and Wired columnist

Since the late 1980s, the work of Amsterdam-based curator and researcher Darko Fritz has revolved around a significant investigation into the use of technology in culture. Renowned for his groundbreaking exhibitions of video and computer art, his own artwork takes up glitch, error, and surveillance. For this program, Fritz presents selections from his ‘Archives in Progress,’ which draws upon his own past projects—photos, videos, fax actions, net art, audiovisual performances, gallery installations and public art–to explore the possibility of the archive and “pure information” as mediums for art. Organized with the support of the Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam.

DARKO FRITZ (b. 1966, Split, Croatia) is a multimedia artist, curator, researcher, and graphic designer. An architect by training, he has worked with video and computers since the late 1980s and the web since the mid 1990s. Fritz has curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary and media art  including “’Angles and Intersections’–Third Biennale of Quadrilateral,” Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka (with Christiane Paul, Nina Czegledy, Peter Tomaž Dobrila and Elena Rossi, 2009) and “Bit International–Computers and Visual Research, [New] Tendencies, Zagreb 1961—1973,” Neue Galerie, Graz (2007) and ZKM, Karlsruhe (2008). Fritz’s artworks are in the collections of Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Skopje City Museum; World Bank, Washington D.C.; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; among others. He is currently based in Amsterdam, Korčula, and Zagreb.

February 21 – Fire is a Fact: An Evening with Karen Yasinsky

Posted by | Raven Munsell | Posted on | February 15, 2013

Thursday, February 21, 6 p.m. | Karen Yasinsky in person!

In the strange and seductive animated films of Baltimore-based artist Karen Yasinsky, an eyeless woman is abandoned in a landscape of wolves, boys writhe restlessly in a cowboy-papered room, and characters from Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934) and Robert Bresson’s Au Hazard Balthazar (1966) act out sublime new scenes for each film. Telescoping themes of anxiety and desire, Yasinsky crafts her suggestive half-narratives through hand-made clay puppets and the painstaking process of hand-drawn rotoscoping. For this program, she presents a survey of films from across her career, including the US premiere of her latest, Life is an Opinion, Fire a Fact (2012).

 

KAREN YASINSKY (b. 1965, Pittsburgh, PA) is an artist working primarily with animation and drawing. Her video installations and drawings have been exhibited in numerous international venues, including the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; P.S. 1 Contemporary Art, NY; UCLA Hammer Museum, L.A; Kunst Werke, Berlin and the Wexner Center, Columbus. Her animations have screened worldwide at various venues and film festivals including Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant Garde and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Baker Award and is a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and the American Academy in Rome. She teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Film and Media Studies.

February 14 – Fern Silva: Concrete Parlay

Posted by | Raven Munsell | Posted on | February 8, 2013

 

Thursday, February 14, 6p.m. | Fern Silva in person!

 

Fern Silva’s invigorating, geographically-sweeping films bring together sounds and images of nature, ritual, and pop culture from Europe, South America, the Middle East and the United States to explore ideas of travel and cross-cultural movement. “The disorienting whirl of the compass,” suggests curator Aily Nash “connotes the kinetic nature of existence.”  For this program Silva presents five films made since 2010, including Passage Upon the Plume (2011), In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails (2010) and the Chicago premiere of his latest, Concrete Parlay (2012).

FERN SILVA (b. 1982, Hartford, CT) is an independent filmmaker and video artist based in New York and Chicago where he teaches in the film/video department at University of Illinois—Chicago. Silva’s work has been exhibited at numerous festivals, galleries, and museums including the Toronto, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, New York, Edinburgh, and Ann Arbor film festivals, Anthology Film Archive, Wexner Center for the Arts, and the San Francisco Cinematheque, among others. Silva was named one of the “Top 25 avant-garde filmmakers for the 21st century” in Film Comment magazine, is the recipient of the Gus Van Sant Award from the 49th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and was nominated for best international short film at the 2012 Edinburgh International Film Festival. He received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and MFA from Bard College.

::Program::
Concrete Parlay – 2012 – 18mins (16MM)
Passage Upon the Plume – 2011 – 7mins (16MM)
Peril of the Antilles – 2011 – 6mins (16MM transferred to DV)
In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails – 2010-14mins (16mm)
Servants of Mercy – 2010 – 14mins. (16mm transferred to DV)

CATE on Vimeo

Posted by | Amy Beste | Posted on | January 31, 2013

Now you can view a selection of CATE’s archive on Vimeo! Check out presentations by artists like Cory Arcangel, Laure Prouvost, and David Gatten, as well as performances by I Love Presets and Jeff Parker and Frank Rosaly’s live soundtrack to Bruce Bickford’s 16mm pencil tests, among many, many more.

CATE Spring 2013 Season Starts Feb 14!

Posted by | Amy Beste | Posted on | January 25, 2013

Conversations at the Edge begins its Spring 2013 season on Valentine’s Day!  We’ll be celebrating with a program of short, geographically-sweeping films by Fern Silva, named one of the “top 25 avant-garde filmmakers for the 21st century” in Film Comment magazine.

Additional highlights will include appearances by Karen Yasinsky (2/21), Darko Fritz (2/28), Hannes Schüpbach (4/4), Rosa Barba (4/11), and Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus with the world premiere of their 2013 film twohundredfiftysixcolors (4/18).  We’ll also take a new look at the work of pioneering Chicago video artist Phil Morton through the eyes of contemporary new media artists (REMIX IT RIGHT, 3/7), catch up on work featured at the Toronto International Film Festival’s celebrated Wavelengths sidebar with curator Andréa Picard (WAVELENGTHS, 3/21), and explore some of the visionary short films produced by the L.A. Rebellion with scholar Jacqueline Stewart (L.A. Rebellion, 3/28).

Check out the full line-up here!

Interview with Vincent Grenier

Posted by | Robyn Farrell | Posted on | January 9, 2013

From color studies to lyrical explorations of associative montage, Vincent Grenier’s work inspires the viewer to watch and wait, newly attentive to the quiet surprises of daily life. On the occasion of his program with CATE, Grenier spoke with Ross Jordan spoke about the innovation and sensuous nature of his work.

In my interview with Vincent Grenier we discuss his imaginative experimental videos and his early influences.  Grenier’s career is distinguished by a creative sensitivity that makes light, shadow, color, and sound powerful and playful metaphors. His career reflects an artist seeking to challenge himself and his audience to look closely and slowly. Grenier had been fortunate to see the technical possibilities of film change over the course of forty years, through which he has stayed true to the creative risks that give him and his films a vibrate nature.

Ross: How did you come to work in experimental film? Were there any inspirations?

I came slowly to what I’m doing now. In school I saw myself first more as a painter, then a sculptor.  I also did theater, photography and some animation and suddenly that seemed to lead to this idea that cinema might be the thing. I think the biggest moment for me was programing films at Canyon Cinema (now San Francisco Cinematheque). For a year after finishing school there (San Francisco Art Institute) I had to organize screenings every week, and at the time there was only one screening a week. The challenge of researching and thinking about what I would screen at this experimental film showcase became a very formative experience for me. But I think works like Wavelength (by Michael Snow, 1967) struck me. I had a difficult viewing of it, when I saw it for the first time, I was still a student at the Art Institute, basically the room emptied. [But] there was something fascinating, it was like permission. This idea that someone could do a film that was so slow.  This film had everything in it, there was a plot, someone even dies. But it was really as much about the surface of the image than it was about the space or event it represented. In fact I think it is one of the most eloquent films ever made that highlights and examine the centrality of the flat screen in cinematic representation. It introduced an interesting way of thinking about time as well. I knew that [Michael Snow] was a painter and it is interesting to note that in the art world the surface of the painting and the materiality of the paint has always been a big issue.  This idea that it is a canvas, it is a texture. To me it was kind of a revelatory moment about what could be possible in film.  Everything was possible.

What interests you about working with film in this way?

I’m very interested in this idea that when you are making a film there are many different sets of meanings at work. How the camera works, and what it can do. There is the context of where I am, the filming context, the editing stage, and then there is the context of the projection.  We are looking at a screen, an enlarged image.   And that is something that fascinates me. We are in a little room with a projection.  It’s just a flat screen, people, and a source of light behind us. It’s a little awkward, when you come right down to it. Throughout the years I have been interested and fascinated by some of these things.  Like the screen as a flat space. Cinema is not very good at reproducing three dimensionality. Traditional cinema has to go to great lengths to give us that illusion. Why go there?

Interieur interiors (TO AK) (1978) is a good example of the flatness of cinema that you are talking about.  Could you describe that film?

Interieur interiors which is a film I did in the late 70s, describes a space where there is little information. The information is proposed by changes in light modulations textures and quality of edges, and can appear quite abstract. You don’t see anything, but you still project the space. The film gives you some hints, some information that informs you on the scale of things, but they are constantly being played against. After awhile you don’t trust anything. It’s also very much about the rectangle and the suggestions of space, but also the flatness.

Your films appear as flat images like paintings except you’ve added time to the mixture. Could you talk about time and the role it plays in your films?

Reality is largely in our minds and people making films are supposed to produce something having to do with reality. So there is the outside space, there is the space of the screen, and our own space, it takes time to appreciate that. So that is why I like to film things that last a certain amount of time. Small movements can reveal extraordinary things, unsuspecting things.

In Back View (2011) we see shadows moving across an empty courtyard with sounds emanating from the surrounding apartments. The image appears very flat. Then, near the end of the film, you introduce a woman smoking and everything seems to change.

In Back View the appearance of this person smoking out the back of a window is an image that was so different from everything else in that film. It felt like it was appropriate, but maybe not appropriate, and it became an issue. We have heard everyone, all this sound coming from the  apartments. And she was, in a strange way, somewhere in between because her arm was outside holding the cigarette.  So she is coming out from inside and of course the fragility of her arm, it’s clear that it’s trembling. It’s hard to hold a cigarette for long periods of time with an extended arm.  So I felt there was a connection there with the fragility of the space in the courtyard.  That was a risk in the sense that I was not sure it was appropriate. But I really like the possibility given to the viewer to revisit the film and interrogate it further.

As you mentioned audiences walked out during your screening of Michael Snow’s Wavelength.  It occurs to me that this is risky filmmaking. Can you talk more about risk taking?

I should say first that in the creative stage of initiating a work, for every decision I make, it is not always self evident that it is something that will work. Sometimes you have to reconsider, but it is important to maintain a mind space where anything can be considered.  When you edit something there is always the need to really shape something to get further into what you are examining.  But also finding other ways to snap out of it and provide opportunities for reframing. It is about allowing opportunities to reach the many less obvious or more hidden areas or meanings that surrounds experiences and if possible, to let them participate in the conversation.  I consider that an essential part of my creative work. So risk is by nature what I do.

Ross Jordan is a masters candidate in the dual degree art history and arts administration program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ross has worked at SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries servicing as a Graduate  Curatorial Assistant for 2010’s Touch and Go: Ray Yoshida and his Influences and 2011’s CartoonInk: Emerging Comics in Context. His most recent curatorial project was In/visible (2012) at Co-prosperity Sphere in Chicago.

Interview with Brenna Murphy

Posted by | Robyn Farrell | Posted on | December 14, 2012

Ian Ostrowski in conversation with Brenna Murphy on the occasion of her program created especially for CATE with Lampo on September 27, 2012.  Murphy’s performance explores a brand new virtual space and is accompanied by textured soundscapes generated from a home-made analog synthesizer and her own voice.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Brenna Murphy on September 28th, 2012.  Having interest in virtual spaces, games, and electronic media I thought it was an incredible opportunity for me to be able to interview such a prolific new media artist.  This was really exciting.  In this interview Brenna and I discuss her performance for CATE and how this performance relates to her practice.  We discuss her uses of time and repetition and how her digital images mimic 90’s computer games like MYST.  We also touch upon her love for Indian music and how it relates to her work, and also how her practice is evolving into several different performance collaborations.  

Ian: Could you begin by talking about your performance last night?

Brenna: I structured the night so it would go back and forth between videos and video games–four sections of videos and three sections of video game walk-throughs.  I made the game spaces with the Chicago performance in mind—they were made to be performed, but not to be played.

The first game / virtual space consisted of an arrangement of boxes on the ground.  The boxes were textured with images and I controlled my avatar to walk along, looking down at them. It sort of functioned like an animation that I was making live.

If I was going to make a game for other people to play, I don’t know if I would make this particular kind of game, because you have to think about people and where they want go and explore.  I just wanted to set up something that I could show people in a very specific way.  I attached sound to different parts of the game and different objects within each space.  As I would move through the space, the sound would change depending on my location. This enabled me to improvise in such a way, but also have a sort of structure I set up before so I knew where I was going to walk.

Have you ever designed a game for other people to play?

Yeah, I have a few on my website that can be downloaded and played.  I made those games with other people in mind, so they are fun to navigate wherever you go hopefully.

Are you only interested in creating that virtual space for people to walk around in or do you wish to attach a set of rules to what people do within the space?

I have never thought about the possibility of attaching rules.  But I think that because of the way I structure the architecture within the virtual spaces I create that those sorts of rules are inherent.

Well, come to think of it, one thing I would like to explore is experimenting more with the sound aspect in these virtual spaces.  For example, figuring out how to make it where people can turn the sound on and off by hitting a certain object.  This would enable people to play music by moving around.  It’s sort of that way right now, because as you get closer to something it makes a sound.  I like the idea of the user being able to jump on one object to turn on sound and hitting another object to turn it off.  That would be a cool way to make it more interactive.

It is obvious that music is a component of your work, but I also notice that time and repetition are inherent to your creations as well.  So I was wondering if time and repetition are reflected within your method/practice?

Well, I think you are referring to my videos.  A lot of times my videos can be really repetitive.  I will take a clip and repeat it twice and then the next clip is repeated twice and it sort of creates this rhythm.  And that does come out of just experimenting within the programs; it is sort of natural for me to copy and paste things.  It is an easy way to create a rhythm and as soon as you start repeating it, then it becomes this weird like song instead of just these video clips.

Are you working on any other things at this point?

Yeah, I have a group called MSHR.  We do a lot of things including building analog synthesizers.  They are very sculptural and have fun interfaces like gloves that control the sound by moving your hands around light sensors and it makes different sounds.  We use touch sensors to make sound too.  We make sculptural installations with interactive sounds in them so that visitors can play with them.  The art is sort of a surreal environment that’s kind of like a virtual reality realm, but physical.

What are your influences?  Are there any artists you pay attention to?

Definitely!  I get influence from other artists all the time.  I find a lot of inspiration from music.

What sort of music?

Raga music. I have been taking Raga music lessons for a couple of years.  I listen to Raga influenced music or Raga all the time. The structure of Raga music has influenced my work a lot.  There’s a framework but improvisation within the framework.  The harmonies feel very elemental and natural to me.  For me, my work reflects the Raga structure.

This is very evident in your videos with the trance, psychedelic imagery.

I was also reading that when you begin a piece, you like to take walks and take pictures of nature.  Do you just work from nature at the beginning and move on from that?

I like to go on walks as much as possible and pay attention to the way things are arranged and the surface qualities of the textures.  I like to pay attention to houses, trees, plants, and the sidewalks and how everything is arranged and looks.  I think it reflects the human mind a lot.  I’m not really IN nature as much as I am in neighborhoods and the way nature is arranged in a neighborhood.  You get a feeling of nature but you also get a feeling of how people have planted these things, these certain configurations.  And how the houses are shaped next to those things.  I like to try to just focus on the form and texture of all of that.  And let that shape influence me and when I go home and start working I try to let those shapes come through in my designs.

Ian Ostrowki is an MA candidate in Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an interest in virtual spaces, games, and electronic media.

November 15- John Akomfrah: The Nine Muses

Posted by | Robyn Farrell | Posted on | November 11, 2012

Thursday, November 15, 6 p.m. | John Akomfrah in person!

The Nine Muses, the 2011 feature by British filmmaker, artist, and co-founder of the 1980s Black Audio Film Collective John Akomfrah, journeys through the history of African and Caribbean migration to post-war Britain through the lens of Homer’s revered epic poem The Odyssey. Structured as an allegorical fable set between 1949 and 1970, The Nine Muses is comprised of nine overlapping musical chapters exploring migration, exile, alienation, and the nature of home. Through archival imagery, desolate shots of the Alaskan wilderness, readings from sources as varied as Emily Dickinson and Rabindranath Tagore, and the music of Arvo Pärt and the Gundecha Brothers, The Nine Muses weaves a haunting path through myth, landscape, and history.

JOHN AKOMFRAH (b. 1957, Accra, Ghana) is a leading British filmmaker, moving-image installation artist, and cofounder in the early 1980s of the Black Audio Film Collective. Akomfrah’s work has been shown in galleries and museums including Documenta (Germany), the De Balie (Holland), Centre George Pompidou (France), the Serpentine and Whitechapel Galleries (UK); and The Museum of Modern Art (USA). A major new retrospective of Akomfrah’s gallery-based work with the Black Audio Film Collective premiered at the FACT and Arnolfini galleries (UK), and is now making a tour of galleries and museums throughout Europe. In 2000 Akomfrah was awarded the Gold Digital Award at the Cheonju International Film Festival, South Korea, for his innovative use of digital technology. John Akomfrah is currently a Governor of Film London, a visiting professor of film at the University Of Westminster (United Kingdom), and an officer of the Order of the British Empire.

 

November 8- Lawrence Jordan: Beyond Enchantment

Posted by | Robyn Farrell | Posted on | November 5, 2012

Thursday, November 8, 6 p.m. | Lawrence Jordan in person!

Best known for his singular cutout animation style, the films of avant-garde great Lawrence Jordan channel the unconscious through surreal compositions of found graphics, drawings, and engravings. Jordan co-founded Canyon Cinema, collaborated with the likes of Stan Brakhage and Joseph Cornell, and continues to make groundbreaking work to this day. This program includes the celebrated classic, Our Lady of the Sphere (1969), the poetic documentary Visions of a City (1978), and recent college films Beyond Enchantment and Cosmic Alchemy (2010), among others.

Presented in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center, which screens a second program of Jordan’s work November 9.

LAWRENCE JORDAN (b. 1934, Denver, CO) is an independent filmmaker who has been working in the Bay Area in California since 1955, and making films since 1952. He has produced some 40 experimental and animation films, and three feature-length dramatic films. He is most widely known for his animated collage films. In 1970 he received a Guggenheim award to make Sacred Art of Tibet, and his animation has shown by invitation at the Cannes Film Festival. Jordan is one of the founding directors of Canyon Cinema Cooperative, and he has shown films and lectured throughout the country.

 

November 1- Vincent Grenier: Tabula Rasa

Posted by | Robyn Farrell | Posted on | October 29, 2012

Thursday, November 1, 6 p.m. | Vincent Grenier in person!

For nearly four decades, Vincent Grenier has sought to capture what he describes as “the ineffable, untranslatable, revelations of light, color, form, and composition.” The result is a sensuous, meditative, yet energized body of work across a range of approaches and formats. This program brings together films and videos from across his career, including 16mm films like While Revolved (1976), which immerses the viewer in a subtly shifting sea of color, to videos like Les Chaises (2008), a patient backyard portrait of two red chairs textured by light. From color studies to lyrical explorations of associative montage, Grenier’s work inspires the viewer to watch and wait, newly attentive to the quiet surprises of daily life.

VINCENT GRENIER (b.1948, Quebec City, Canada) has made experimental films since the early seventies when he received an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in California. Grenier’s work has been showcased at Views from the Avant Garde, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Onion City Film Festival, Chicago, and Media City Film and Video Festival, MOMA, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archives, Whitney Museum of American Art, Collective for Living Cinema and Cinéma Parallel in Montréal. Grenier’s films and videos were the subjects of retrospectives at Media City, Windsor, Ontario and Images Film & Video Festival’s Canadian Images Spotlight, Toronto. His films and videos have earned him nine production grants from the Canada Council in the period between 1974 and 1992, and in New York State, from CAPS (1979), NYFA (1995), ETC (1992 & 1994), NYSCA (2007–08) and John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2010–11).

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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.






 

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