October 25- TVTV: FOUR MORE YEARS
Posted by | Robyn Farrell | Posted on | October 22, 2012
Thursday, October 25, 6 p.m. | Allen Rucker and Tom Weinberg in person!
Image from Four More Years (TVTV, 1972). Courtesy of TVTV and the Video Data Bank.
Video collective TVTV defined the radical video documentary movement of the 1970s. Four More Years (1972) is an iconoclastic view of the American electoral process, captured through TVTV’s irreverent, candid coverage of Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign and the Republican Convention in Miami. While network cameras focused on the orchestrated re-nomination of Richard Nixon, TVTV turned their lightweight, portable cameras on the cocktail parties, anti-war demonstrations, hype and hoopla that accompanied the show. TVTV co-founder Allen Rucker introduces this classic work of guerrilla television and is joined afterward by former TVTV member Tom Weinberg for an audience Q&A.
Presented in collaboration with the Video Data Bank
TVTV (Top Value Television) formed in 1972, and enlisted the support of media collectives including Raindance, Ant Farm, and the Videofreex to provide alternative coverage of the 1972 Presidential nominating conventions. The Democratic tape, The World’s Largest TV Studio (1972), and its Republican companion piece, Four More Years (1972) aired on national TV combined in a 90 minute special on Conventions ‘72. The convention tapes provided candid interviews with delegates and protestors alike, while exposing the foibles of the media, showing viewers “the underbelly of broadcast TV.” TVTV subverted conventions of television news and documentary reportage with its alternative journalistic techniques, countercultural principles and pioneering use of portable, low-tech video equipment. TVTV disbanded in 1979.
Tags: 2012 > Documentary > Early Video Art > Experimental > Non-Fiction > Political > USA
October 18- LAIDA LERTXUNDI
Posted by | Robyn Farrell | Posted on | October 15, 2012
Thursday, October 18, 6 p.m. | Laida Lertxundi in person!
Image from My Tears Are Dry (Laida Lertxundi, 2009). Image courtesy of the artist.
Shot within and around Los Angeles, Laida Lertxundi’s seductively enigmatic films mix soul music and art punk as non-actors lounge within sublime beachscapes, cheap motels, and light-flooded apartments. My Tears Are Dry (2009) is a luscious and melodic composition that lures the viewer into and out of a warm afternoon nap. Outmoded technologies like boomboxes and SD video monitors become compositional props set amidst breathtaking landscapes in Cry When It Happens (2010). Footnotes to a House of Love (2007) intimately captures the day-to-day activities that fill and surround a dilapidated desert house. For this program, Lertxundi weaves together her own pieces with works by filmmakers who have influenced her practice, including Hollis Frampton, Bruce Baillie, and Morgan Fisher.
LAIDA LERTXUNDI’S (b. 1981, Bilbao, Spain) work has shown at the 2012 Whitney Biennial, MoMA, LACMA, Viennale, “Views from the Avant Garde” at the New York Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. She received the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival and was named in CinemaScope’s “Best of the Decade” reviews and as one of the “25 Filmmakers for the 21st Century” in Film Comment’s Avant-Garde Poll. She is a film and video programmer in the U.S. and Spain, and has published various articles on film, most recently in the anthology La risa oblicua and Bostezo magazine. She teaches film at the University of California San Diego and lives in Los Angeles, California.
October 11- JEAN-MARIE STRAUB and DANIÈLE HUILLET
Posted by | Robyn Farrell | Posted on | October 7, 2012
Thursday, October 11, 6 p.m. | Introduced by Daniel Eisenberg, Professor of Film, Video, New Media and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Image from Le Streghe: Femmes entre ells (Jean-Marie Straub, 2009). Courtesy of Straub-Huillet Films.
For more than four decades Jean-Marie Straub and the late Danièle Huillet influenced generations of filmmakers, artists, and thinkers with their personal and politically engaged films based on plays, novels, and political writings. When Huillet died in 2006, Straub completed their final project, The Itinerary of Jean Bricard (L’Itinéraire de Jean Bricard, 2008), a haunting short that uses Jean-Yves Petiteau’s non-fiction account of a French resistance fighter to evoke the destruction of historical and geographical memory. Also screening are Straub’s subsequent adaptations of Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò: Artemis’ Knee (Le genou d’Artemide, 2008), a meditation on love and distance, and The Witches: Women Among Themselves (Le Streghe: Femmes entre ells, 2009), a consideration of nature and mortality. In French and Italian with English subtitles.
Presented in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago
JEAN-MARIE STRAUB (b. 1933, Metz, France) and DANIÈLE HUILLET(1936 –2006), Cholet, France) created more than two-dozen films together from 1963 up until Huillet’s death in 2006. Working mainly in Germany, the two became leading figures in New German Cinema. Their films have shown at acclaimed festivals worldwide, including Cinéma du réel International Documentary Film Festival at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., Cannes Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and the Kunsthal Antwerpen in Belgium. Their films have earned nominations for the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival and awards at the British Film Institute and German Film Critics Association. Straub continues to make work on his own, including the 2011 shorts Schakale und Araber, Un hèritier, and L’Inconsolable.
October 4- HITO STEYERL
Posted by | Robyn Farrell | Posted on | September 30, 2012
Thursday, October 4, 6 p.m. | Introduced by Lisa Dorin, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago
Image from In Free Fall (Hito Steyerl, 2010). Courtesy the artist Wilifried Lentz Gallery, Rotterdam.
Hito Steyerl’s masterfully orchestrated video essays chart the lives of images, objects, and places to arrive at provocative new conclusions about their meaning.This program features two of these works, Lovely Andrea (2007) and In Free Fall (2010). Through interviews, appropriated footage, and her own personal Super-8 and photographic archive, she imaginatively explores the shifting social, political,and economic implications of her subjects.
Presented in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Contemporary Art, which presents “focus: Hito
Steyerl” November 1 2012 -January 27, 2013.
HITO STEYERL (b. 1966, Munich, Germany) is a video artist, filmmaker, theorist, author, and journalist. Her work has been featured at big exhibitions such as the 2004 Berlin Biennial, Manifesta 5, 37th International Film Festival Rotterdam, documenta 12, and the 2008 Shanghai Biennial. She holds a PhD in philosophy and works on the borderline between cinema and visual art, combining elements of experimental film, auteur cinema, documentary, and video art to undertake cutting post-colonial and feminist critiques of representation. She is a professor for media art at the University of Arts Berlin and has taught film and theory at (amongst other institutions) Goldsmiths College and Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies.
Tags: 2012 > Artist's Film > Essay > Europe > Experimental > Monographic Shows > Non-Fiction > Political
September 27- BRENNA MURPHY
Posted by | Robyn Farrell | Posted on | September 24, 2012
Thursday, September 27, 6 p.m. | Brenna Murphy in person!
Image from Visitors (Brenna Murphy, 2012). Courtesy of the artist.
Mixing raw footage with sophisticated 3D graphics, Portland-based artist Brenna Murphy creates videos, soundscapes, and downloadable virtual realms in an on-going exploration of psychedelia across physical and virtual realities. For her premiere Chicago appearance, she presents a collection of her videos “structured to function as a temporal mandala” and a performance entitled SkyFace~TextureMappr (2012). Created especially for CATE and Lampo, 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.
BRENNA MURPHY (b. 1986, Edmonds, WA) works with video, interactive games, sound, performance, and installation. Her work has been featured at Arratia Beer (Berlin), Philadelphia Art Museum (Philadelphia), Bitforms Gallery (New York), and Green Gallery at MDW Fair in Chicago. Solo exhibitions in 2012 include Future Gallery (Berlin) and Gloria Maria Gallery (Milan). Murphy graduated from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2009, She also collaboratively creates sculptural analog synthesizers, interactive sound installations, and ritualistic performances with her art collectives MSHR and Oregon Painting Society.
Sept 20 & 22 — SPECIAL WARNING: FILMS BY ROBERT NELSON
Posted by | Amy Beste | Posted on | September 14, 2012
September 20, 6:00 pm
September 22, 12:30 pm
Introduced by curators Lori Felker and Mark Toscano!
Image from Bleu Shut (Robert Nelson, 1970)
Renowned for their exuberance and inventive cinematic wit, Robert Nelson’s films established him as a leading member of the West Coast avant-garde and post-Beat culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s. These two programs of different works pair recently restored prints of best-known films with rarer works to provide a new perspective on the artist’s output and influence. Films like The Great Blondino (1967), which features an anachronistically attired man navigating inspired setups, and Hauling Toto Big (1997), a sprawling opus of dream states and transformed verité, are presented alongside Nelson’s inventive collaborations with artists and musicians, including artists William T. Wiley and William Allan, and the Grateful Dead.
ROBERT NELSON (1930–2012, San Francisco, CA) studied painting at San Francisco State University and the California School of Fine Arts, where he was introduced to a circle of Bay Area artists that converged into the California Funk Art movement of the 1960s. Nelson taught at various institutions, including the San Francisco Art Institute, Sacramento State and CalArts, before landing a teaching job at UW Milwaukee in 1979 until his retirement in the mid-1990s. He then retreated in self-imposed isolation to a remote house in the mountains of Northern California, returning to painting and photography. Nelson has influenced a number of major filmmakers, such as Peter Hutton, Fred Worden, and Curt McDowell. He was the main force in co-founding the independent distribution company Canyon Cinema in 1966, hiring his former student Edith Kramer (later the head of the Pacific Film Archive) as its first director. He died in January 2012.
Tags: 2012 > Curators and Programmers > Experimental > Retrospective > SAIC Faculty > USA
Thursday – WU TSANG & WILDNESS!!
Posted by | Amy Beste | Posted on | September 11, 2012
September 13, 6:00 p.m
Due to unforeseen circumstances, artist Wu Tsang will be joining us live via Skype instead of in person. We apologize for any inconvenience (but hope you will still join us!)
- Image from Wildness (Wu Tsang, 2012). Courtesy of the artist.
Rooted in the tropical underground of Los Angeles nightlife, magical realism meets documentary in Wu Tsang’s Wildness (2012), a portrait of LA’s Silver Platter, a landmark bar that has been home to Latin/LGBT immigrant communities since the 60s. Narrated from the perspective of the bar itself, the film meditates on the new relationships and conflicts that materialize as a group of young artists (DJs Total Freedom & NGUZUNGUZU) begins a weekly performance and dance party at Silver Platter. Tsang illuminates how difference can be a catalyst for both strife and growth as the party’s growing popularity raises issues of safety and belonging for all of its members. (JB) 2012, Wu Tsang, USA, HDCAM, 75 minutes + discussion
WU TSANG (b. 1982, Worcester, MA) is an SAIC alumnus, artist, filmmaker, and performer based in Los Angeles. His work has been shown at the 2012 Whitney Biennial and “Ungovernables” Triennial at the New Museum in New York, the ICA Philadelphia, MOCA Los Angeles, and upcoming at the 2012 Gwanju Biennial in South Korea. His first feature film Wildness (2012) premiered this year at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight in New York, SXSW (South by Southwest) in Austin and HOT DOCS in Toronto, with support from Good Works Foundation, Frameline, Wexner Center for the Arts, IFP Labs, Art Matters, Tiffany Foundation, and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Tags: 2012 > Essay > Experimental > Non-Fiction > Performance > Political > SAIC Alumni > USA
CATE Returns September 13!
Posted by | Amy Beste | Posted on | August 28, 2012
Conversations at the Edge returns to the big screen Thursday, September 13 with the Chicago premiere of artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang’s documentary feature Wildness.
Additional highlights include appearances by Brenna Murphy, Laida Lertxundi, Vincent Grenier, Lawrence Jordan, John Akomfrah, and former TVTV members Allen Rucker and Tom Weinberg. Other highlights include films by the Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Hito Steyerl, and the late Robert Nelson.
Check out our full Fall 2012 schedule for more info!
Image from Wildness (2012, Wu Tsang). Courtesy of the artist.
An Interview with Tomonari Nishikawa by Tom McCormack
Posted by | Jessica Bardsley | Posted on | May 11, 2012
April 12, 2012
- Tomonari Nishikawa, Tokyo-Ebisu (2010). Courtesy the artist.
Tom McCormack in conversation with Tomonari Nishikawa on the occasion of the screening “Tomonari Nishikawa & Small-Gauge Japan,” a program of Super 8 film.
Tom: Many of your films take advantage of a specific formal technique or a set of specific formal techniques. How do you discover these techniques? Is it through playing around or do you derive them in a more abstract way?
Tomonari: I learned some of these techniques from other artists’ works and I found some from my own experiments. For part of Apollo, I shot 16mm filmstrips using a 35mm SLR camera. I first heard about this technique from my teacher Ariana Gerstein at Binghamton University. And Julie Murray, who was my senior thesis adviser, showed me Scott Stark’s Satrapy, one of his The Chromesthetic Response Series, which gave me ideas to work on creating images on the optical soundtrack area. Later, I played more with mismatched formats, which lead me to make 16-18-4, a 35mm film made by a toy camera with 16 lenses, and an installation, A Pinhole Behind Fences, for which I shot a series of 16mm filmstrips with a pinhole camera, so that a single picture would spread onto numerous frames on 16mm films.
Tom: Many of your movies explore a specific place and could be thought of as landscape films or city symphonies. Do you have attachments to these places? Emotional attachments? Things you would like to say about them? Or are they more abstract spaces?
Tomonari: Most of my works show the environments where I have been, and, for some projects, I have emotional attachments to these places. Into the Mass is shot in San Francisco, and I made it because I wanted to make something about my experience of going to and from my studio at the Headlands Center for the Arts, which took about 60 minutes by bicycle, along with my experience of riding the bicycle in the city for about three years. The idea of Tokyo – Ebisu and Shibuya –Tokyo came to my mind when I was living in Tokyo in 2007-08, when I often used the JR Yamanote Line, where I shot these films.
Tom: A lot of your work can be seen as taking an abstract or geometric language and using things in the real world to build it up or flesh it out. Why use natural objects in this way? Or, conversely, why geometry and abstraction?
Tomonari: I am interested in abstracting representational images, especially by shooting methods or in-camera editing. It may sound similar to how a painter makes an abstract painting from direct-observation, and it is true for Clear Blue Sky, but for the single-framed films, I try to produce abstract time and space from real time and space, letting the viewers be aware of human visual perception and the cinema apparatus. I am also interested in shooting in the real world, documenting the environments at the time when I am there, even though it is getting more difficult to shoot in the public space.
Tom: How have you found different audiences experience your work?
Tomonari: Some audiences seemed to have found my works interesting because of the visual appearances, while others seemed to have not enjoyed them, maybe because there was no narrative. I often have questions about filming and editing techniques after a screening.
Tom: Are there contemporary filmmakers or artists using other mediums who you feel connected to?
Tomonari: Thinking of my interests in medium, format, visual perception and cinema apparatus, I feel connected to James Benning, Steve Cossman, Kelly Egan, Chris Kennedy, Kerry Laitala, Bruce McClure, Katherin McInnis, Ben Russell, Daichi Saito, and Scott Stark. There are works by contemporary artists in other fields, especially photography, who share similar interests, but I do not feel connected to them.
Tom: In the earliest work of yours I’ve seen, you used a pinhole camera to expose a roll of film all at once, creating a sort of mosaic across different strips of 16mm. This work was obviously very connected to film as a physical object: do you see your other work connected to this materiality in the same way?
Tomonari: Yes, I do, for some other works. The work you have mentioned is an installation, and showing the filmstrips along with the moving image is one of the main concepts of the project. Sketch Film #1, #2, #3, and #5 were hand-processed, and thus there are many scratches on the emulsion, so that the films would show materiality. The length of each shot in Tokyo – Ebisu and Shibuya- Tokyo is determined by the length that a spring-motor Bolex camera can shoot on a full-wind. When the camera stops filming, the shutter sometimes stops at an open position, and, as a result, it makes a flash frame, an over-exposed frame, which would also show materiality of the medium.
Daniel Eisenberg’s THE UNSTABLE OBJECT at the Gene Siskel Film Center
Posted by | Jessica Bardsley | Posted on | April 25, 2012
May 1, 6:00 p.m. |Daniel Eisenberg in person!
- The Unstable Object (Daniel Eisenberg, 2010). Image courtesy the artist.
Daniel Eisenberg’s The Unstable Object, which premiered at Conversations at the Edge, will be screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center on May 1st.
What do a luxury automobile, a wall clock, and a cymbal have in common? Daniel Eisenberg’s latest film, The Unstable Object is an elegant and visually sensual essay on contemporary models of production. Interested in the ways “things” affect both producer and consumer, Eisenberg travels to a state-of-the-art Volkswagen factory in Dresden, Germany, where shoppers look on as their individualized cars are hand-built by high-tech specialists; to Chicago Lighthouse Industries, where blind workers produce wall clocks for federal government offices; and to a deafening cymbal factory in Istanbul, Turkey, where today’s most sought-after cymbals are cast and hammered by hand, exactly as they were 400 years ago. Through a series of sequences sympathetic to each site and subject, The Unstable Object probes the relationships our global economy creates between individuals around the world. 2010, Daniel Eisenberg, Germany/Turkey/USA, 83 min., HD Video. (Kelly Shindler)
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.
