VIDEO & SOUND FROM TAKESHI MURATA & ROBERT BEATTY
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | March 1, 2010
Thursday, March 3, 2010 at 6pm | Takeshi Murata and Robert Beatty in person!
- Still from “Melter 2” (Takeshi Murata, 2003). Courtesy the artist.
For the last six years, artist Takeshi Murata and musician Robert Beatty (Hair Police, Three Legged Race) have collaborated on a series of visceral glitch-based animations, setting Murata’s psychedelic imagery to Beatty’s hypnotic compositions. Murata’s videos range from hand-drawn animations of fluidly morphing shapes to painterly abstractions of meticulously hijacked digital code. Beatty employs hacked electronics and thrift store cast-offs to craft otherworldly sonic narratives. Together, the duo’s electronic alchemy transforms the detritus of consumer culture into dazzling tapestries of sound and color. This evening, CATE teams up with experimental music and intermedia series Lampo to bring you Murata and Beatty in a special screening and performance. The two will present their work in three sets: a solo performance by Beatty, a screening of videos by Murata, and a new audio-visual performance, created especially for this program, by both. Visit www.lampo.org. Takeshi Murata and Robert Beatty, 2003-10, USA, multiple formats, ca. 90 min.
TAKESHI MURATA (b.1974, Chicago, IL) graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a BFA in Film/Video/Animation. In 2007, Murata was the subject of a solo exhibition, Black Box: Takeshi Murata, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. His work has been included in solo and group shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Peres Projects, Los Angeles; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Eyebeam, New York; FACT Centre, Liverpool, UK; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; New York Underground Film Festival; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Foxy Production, New York, and Deitch Projects, New York, among others.
ROBERT BEATTY (b.1981, Lexington, KY) is an artist and electronic musician who performs solo under the name Three Legged Race. He is a long-running member of the bands Hair Police, Eyes and Arms of Smoke, and C. Spencer Yeh’s Burning Star Core. Through Beatty’s collaboration with Takeshi Murata, Three Legged Race has performed at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China; Deitch Projects, New York; the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh), and the New Museum, New York. Beatty’s performances and recordings explore the repetition and decay of simple musical themes. With each tier of abstraction, they discover a new world of rhythmic and harmonic possibilities while also evoking minimalist sci-fi soundtracks and clouded hypnotic landscapes. He lives in Lexington, where he runs the Mountaain record label.
DUST: VIDEOS BY MOYRA DAVEY
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 22, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 6pm | Moyra Davey in person!
- Still from “Fifty Minutes” (Moyra Davey, 2006). Courtesy the artist.
New York-based photographer and writer Moyra Davey is known for her finely observed photographs of domestic interiors. Her graceful, straightforward images catalog life’s in-between moments and overlooked objects–still lifes of crowded bookshelves, empty whiskey bottles, and dust. In recent years, Davey has turned to video, combining her eye for the everyday with a literary voice. This evening, she will present two of these works. In Fifty Minutes (2006), Davey uses the standard length of a therapy session to examine her own history with psychoanalysis while also raising questions about autobiography, nostalgia, and the ways we all come to know and invent ourselves. In My Necropolis (2009), she explores notions of history, biography, and the memorial, by pairing images of Parisian gravesites (Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, and others) with a lively, open-ended interpretation of an enigmatic letter written by Walter Benjamin from 1931. Davey, writes admirer John Waters, “will catch you off guard with her smudged, elegant, low-tech intelligence.” Moyra Davey, 2006-09, USA, Beta SP video and DVD, ca. 90 min (plus discussion).
MOYRA DAVEY (b. 1958, Toronto, Canada) is an artist and writer. In 2008, she was the subject of an expansive survey at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. Recent group exhibitions include Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium since 1960 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2008); and Calendar of flowers, gin bottles, steak bones (with James Welling and Claire Pentecost), Orchard, New York (2007). Davey is the author of Long Life Cool White (Harvard/Yale, 2008) and The Problem of Reading (Documents Books, 2003), and is the editor of Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood (Seven Stories Press, 2001). She was a founding member of the collaborative gallery Orchard in New York; with Jason Simon, she co-hosts the annual One Minute Film and Video Festival in Narrowsburg, NY. In 2008-9, Davey participated in the International Residencies Program at The Cité des Arts in Paris. She is a recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman award, and is represented by Murray Guy in New York.
More on Moyra Davey:
- Long Life Cool White: Photographs & Essays by Moyra Davey (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2008)
- Jess T. Dugan, A Conversation with Moyra Davey in Big, RED, & Shiny (April 1, 2008)
LONG LIVE THE AMORPHOUS LAW: VIDEOS BY STERLING RUBY
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 15, 2010
Thursday, February 18 at 6pm | Sterling Ruby in person!
- Sterling Ruby, still from Transient Trilogy, 2005-9
Hailed as “one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century” by Roberta Smith of the New York Times, Los Angeles-based artist and SAIC alumnus Sterling Ruby is known for his aggressive biomorphic sculptures, defaced minimalist forms, and large spray-painted canvases. His videos are similarly charged, referencing pornography, abstract painting, and evoking states of transience, entropy, and transgression. In Hole (2002), workers in the back room of a chain store surreptitiously and suggestively stuff merchandise into a hole in a plaster wall. Transient Trilogy (2005-09) finds Ruby playing both a drifter, who fashions talismans from the detritus of an overgrown urban wasteland, and a diva director, who belittles his beleaguered star. For Triviality (2009), Ruby trains his lens on adult movie star Tom Colt, stripped from porn’s traditional tropes and trappings, as he tries unsuccessfully to get himself off. Also on the program: Dihedral (2006) and Cartographic Yard Work: Dog Behavior (2009). Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. Sterling Ruby, 2002-09, USA, Beta SP video and DVD, ca. 65 min (plus discussion).
STERLING RUBY (b.1972, Bitburg, Germany) lives and works in Los Angeles. He holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Ruby takes his subject matter from a wide range of sources, including marginalized societies, maximum security prisons, modernist architecture, artifacts and antiquities, graffiti, bodybuilders, the mechanisms of warfare, cults and cult members, and urban gangs. His work invokes minimalism as a means to expose underlying systems and social power structures. Selected exhibitions include: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (both 2009); GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (solo) (2008-09); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (solo); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; The Drawing Center, New York (solo) (all 2008); The Moscow Biennale for Contemporary Art (2007); The California Biennial, Newport Beach (2006); The Renaissance Society, Chicago; The Turin Triennial (both 2005-06); Aspen Art Museum (2005); Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo, Amsterdam (both 2005). Ruby is represented by PaceWildenstein and Foxy Production in New York. His videos are distributed by the Video Data Bank.
DARA BIRNBAUM
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 11, 2010
Due to the weather Dara Birnbaum will be unable to attend this evening’s program. The show will proceed with a screening of 11 of her videos from 1978-1990.
AN EVENING WITH DARA BIRNBAUM
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 5, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 6pm | Dara Birnbaum in person!
- Still from Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (Dara Birnbaum, 1978-79). Courtesy the Video Data Bank.
Thirty years before the ubiquitous YouTube mash-up, artist Dara Birnbaum hijacked television imagery in a series of coolly ironic videos that recontextualized pop cultural icons (Wonder Woman, Kojak, Laverne & Shirley), TV grammar (inserts, two-shots, wipes), and genres (soap operas, sitcoms, game shows) to reveal their ideological subtexts. Birnbaum described her videos as late 20th century “ready-mades”–works that “manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative.” Now renowned as a pioneer in televisual appropriation, she is currently the subject of a major retrospective that began at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium, and will tour to Museu Fundação Serralves in Porto, Portugal, later in the spring. This evening, Birnbaum will present an overview of her practice, with examples from her seminal early videos (Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79; Pop Pop Video: General Hospital/Olympic Speed Skating, 1980), music videos and commercial spots (Airbreak, MTV Inc., 1987), gallery installations (Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission, 1989-90), large-scale, interactive outdoor pieces (Rio Videowall, 1989), as well as her latest works. Dara Birnbaum, 1978-2010, USA, multiple formats, ca. 90 min (plus discussion).
DARA BIRNBAUM (b. 1946, New York, NY) lives and works in New York, NY. Previous major solo exhibitions, career overviews, and retrospective screenings include: Kunsthalle Wien and the Norrtälje Konsthall (Sweden); The American Film Institute, Los Angeles and Washington; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Kunstmuseum, Bern; The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Jewish Museum, New York; IVAM Centre de Carme, Valencia; and the Musee d’Art Contemporain, Montreal, in addition to numerous international group shows and museum collections. She has also exhibited in Documenta VII, VIII, and IX, as well as at numerous Venice Biennales. Birnbaum has received myriad awards, including the Special Jury Prize, Deutscher Videokunstpreis, Südwestfunk, Baden-Baden, and Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, 1992; TV Picture Prize, XII Festival International de la Vidéo et des Arts Electroniques, Locarno, Switzerland, 1991; Certificate in Recognition of Service and Contribution to the Arts, Harvard University, 1988; The Maya Deren, American Film Institute Award for Independent Film and Video, 1987; and First Prize for Video, San Sebastian Film Festival, 1983. Birnbaum is represented by the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. Her work is distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Video Data Bank.
SPRING 2010 SEASON ANNOUNCED!
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | January 12, 2010
Happy New Year!
Conversations at the Edge kicks off its Spring 2010 season on Thursday, February 4 with the world premiere of Thomas Comerford’s The Indian Boundary Line. Additional highlights include appearances by Dara Birnbaum, Sterling Ruby, Moyra Davey, Tran, T. Kim-Trang, Naomi Uman, Emily Wardill, Ryan Trecartin, the films of Pavel Medvedev, and a live AV performance by glitch animator Takeshi Murata and musician Robert Beatty. Click here for the full lineup.
- Still from The Indian Boundary Line (Thomas Comerford, 2010). Image courtesy the artist.
WORLD PREMIERE: THE INDIAN BOUNDARY LINE
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | January 12, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 6pm | Thomas Comerford in person!
- Still from “The Indian Boundary Line,” 2010. Courtesy the Artist.
Over the last eight years, local musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford has been at work on a series of quietly-observed films that contemplate the entwined social, political, and environmental histories of Chicago (Figures in the Landscape, 2002; Land Marked/Marquette, 2005). This evening, Comerford will present the world premiere of The Indian Boundary Line (2010). The film follows, as Comerford notes, “a road very close to my home in Chicago, Rogers Avenue,” that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and “Indian Territory.” In doing so, it examines the collision between “the vernacular landscape, with its storefronts, short-cut footpaths and picnic tables, and the symbolic one, replete with historical markers, statues, and fences.” Through its observations and audio-visual juxtapositions, The Indian Boundary Line meditates on history and its relationship to the landscape, with its own shifting boundaries, designs, uses and inhabitants across two centuries. With Land Marked/Marquette. Thomas Comerford, 2010, USA, DigiBeta video and 16mm, ca. 75 min (plus discussion).
THOMAS COMERFORD (b. 1970, Richmond, VA) is a media artist, musician, and educator residing in Chicago. Trained in sculpture, performance, and the classics, he began making films in the early 1990s. In 1997, he embarked on an influential series of films, made with a handmade pinhole motion picture camera and microphone, under the title, Cinema Obscura (1997-2002). His recent films are site-specific to Chicago and explore the evidence, revision, and erasure of histories in the landscape. His work has screened at festivals and venues, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Cinematheque, and the London Film Festival. Comerford has also toured the United States with his films, screening in spaces ranging from church basements and backyards to regular old movie theatres. As songwriter, singer, and producer for the rock band Kaspar Hauser, Comerford has performed his music around the Midwest and eastern U.S. and released three LP records. He currently teaches film production, DIY exhibition, and punk rock history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
An Interview with Laura Heit
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | December 18, 2009
School of the Art Institute Animation Professor Chris Sullivan speaks with Laura Heit about her practice.
Chris Sullivan: What options or answers does animation offer you that are different than other medium?
Laura Heit: My work is visual first, and my background is drawing and printmaking—image making—so this is the way I think, the way I form ideas. Animation is a highly constructed medium, intensely so. There is an innate intimacy in a drawn line or a cut piece of paper and I use that as my voice in my work. The evidence of my hand is the film’s quiddity. The addition of time to drawing and collage is what allows me to tell stories. Live action video and photography feels very raw to me; for myself, my films require another layer of translation.
CS: Your films usually have a female protagonist. Why do you think this is so rare?
LH: I have always chosen a woman as the heroine because that’s what I know, and at the very base level, my work always speaks from personal experience.
CS: Who are some of your art heroes, heroines—in animation, writing, filmmaking, whatever?
LH: David Hockney, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Ingmar Bergman, Guy Madden, Haruki Murakami, Royal Deluxe (giant French Puppets), Hotel Modern (small Dutch puppets), Jim Henson, Hannah Hoch, Italo Calvino, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Janie Geiser, Prince.
CS: What kind of creative relationship do you have with the people who make music for your films?
LH: Music has always been an important part of my process. I haven’t thought about it much other than that I feel I write stories visually, so music complements it organically—where I feel words or text often explain things when I want ideas to be discovered or examined, rather than told. I was working in theater when I first started making films, and the theater work always had a musical element, so I learned to listen and see in this way. I met musicians through the theater and though a love of live music. Most of my earlier films have Chicago musicians I met at the Empty Bottles Free Jazz Tuesdays. I’ve built relationships this way, and when developing a film, I consider the composer/musician early in the process. Then throughout the filmmaking process, it’s a constant dialogue.
CS: Can you talk a bit about the difference between the independent animators world in the U.S. vs. Great Britain?
LH: I went to grad school in London at the Royal College of Art, and stayed on after I graduated to work on a short film commissioned by Channel 4 films and produced by Slinky Pictures. I stayed and worked as an animation director for Slinky for a while after that. London is an amazing place for an animation artist. For twenty years, Channel 4 television was funding independent animation on a very regular basis, so there was a real system of support for new work to be made (a book by Clare Kitson just came out about this). Because of this, there are many small studios of 3-5 people (usually classmates from Royal College of Art). These studios have a great camaraderie—while they are in competition with each other, they are all in favor of keeping the world of independent animation alive. There is a closer relationship with filmmaking than with commercial work. These smaller studios produce short films by their directors whenever they get the chance. Also, the British have a greater appreciation for this kind of work—agencies and television want and expect a more art-based approach to the work when they ask for pitches from animation studios. Here in the States, we are (mostly) run by HUGE studios with a huge reliance on consumer research and fear of the bottom line; the studios here are far less likely to take a risk.
CS: What do you have on the burner these days?
LH: I’m working very slowly on a few projects at the moment. One is a graphic novel based on a true story–it’s about a Succubus and the boy whose soul she must steal. Another is a short film and performance that features a series of cycles, of a woman and a wolf. The animation is done in silhouette using cutouts under the camera and layered with drawings and a collection of long exposure sequences of light through trees at dusk. The loops repeat and change speed altering the translation of the action. A visual dichotomy of fear and desire. This piece works with a singer whose beautiful and eerie voice emulates distant howls.
CS: What’s with the tigers?
LH: I was born in the year of the tiger. Is that what you mean?
LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | December 4, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 6pm | Ben Russell in person!
Fresh from its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Chicago-based filmmaker and SAIC alumnus Ben Russell’s stunning feature debut is an epic road movie that draws from documentary and ethnography to imbue its images with a sense of mystery and enchantment. Set in contemporary Suriname (in northeastern South America) and unfolding in 13 extended takes, the film follows two unidentified brothers as they trek from the capital of Paramaribo to the rainforest villages of the Maroons, descendants of African slaves who rebelled against their Dutch captors 300 years ago. Retracing these ancestors’ footsteps, in the opposite direction villagers now take to pursue the global enterprise of the city, Let Each One Go Where He May charts a reverse course through urban congestion, illegal gold mines, Maroon communities, and trance ceremonies to capture a place where history, the supernatural, and modernity collide. 2009, Suriname/USA, 16mm, 135 min.
BEN RUSSELL is an itinerant photographer, curator, and experimental film/video artist whose works have screened in spaces ranging from 14th Century Belgian monasteries to 17th Century East India Trading Co. buildings, police station basements to outdoor punk squats, Japanese cinematheques to Parisian storefronts, and the Sundance Film Festival to the Museum of Modern Art (solo). Russell received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. In addition to his filmmaking, he founded the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island in 2004 and the Chicago gallery BEN RUSSELL in 2009. A 2008 Guggenheim award recipient, Russell currently teaches at the University of Illinois–Chicago.
“The Unbroken Path: Ben Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May” by Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope
Let Each One Go Where He May (EXCERPT) from Ben Russell on Vimeo.
An Interview with Joost Rekveld
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | December 4, 2009
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s F Newsmagazine sits down with Joost Rekveld, Dutch filmmaker and current head of the ArtScience Interfaculty in The Hague. Read the full story in the October edition of F News.
- Joost Rekveld, #23.2 Book of Mirrors, 2007.
F News: In terms of the film work, who would you credit as your influences?
Joost Rekveld: I was triggered to make abstract films by Oskar Fischinger. Also, post-war American abstract films like James Whitney, Jordan Belson, Stan Brahkage. The whole tradition of visual music was very important to me. But the idea of visual music has become less the focus in recent years.
F News: I’m curious about the role that music plays in your work. Are the visuals stimulated by the music, or is the music typically written after the film is completed?
JR: I’m not primarily interested in combining images and sounds, but there are many connections on a higher level, since I see myself as a composer of moving images. My approach is to make a score, and then based on the score I make the imagery. For a while, my dream was to make my own films and my own electronic music. At some point I realized I like electronic music, but I didn’t necessarily like to make it.
Now, I often ask a composer I know to score a film, or I get asked by a composer or theater director to collaborate in a project.
F News: How much direction do you give the composers you work with, and how much artistic liberty do you give them?
JR: We always tend to find common ground in the sense that in the sound, they address the same concepts which inform the images. This method is more about finding a common approach. I choose to work with people I can relate to.
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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.
