More Details on Hollis Frampton’s SOLARIUMAGELANI and Book Signing
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 13, 2009
- Images from Frampton’s Solarumagelani.
Program Details
Summer Solstice (Solariumagelani) (1974, 16mm, color, silent, 32 min.)
“…the operations that dislocate a film like Summer Solstice–I hope irreparably–from being a movie about the locomotion and eating habits of cows, a dairy farm document, or what have you, are finally of a whole lot less concern to me than the following things: how it looks, the sense that probably it was done deliberately, the pleasure or displeasure–the intrigue, possibly–of attempting to retrieve the manner in which it was done while one is watching.”— H.F.
Autumnal Equinox (Solariumagelani) (1974, 16mm, color, silent, 27 min.)
“…filmed in a slaughterhouse in South St. Paul, MN…Frampton utilizes a shooting strategy that flattens and pictorializes a palpable space of action that includes not only cattle (now seen hanging from huge meathooks), but even on occasion, figures. The abattoir is seen in the fleeting movements of Frampton’s hand-held camera. The shots generally begin and end with swift panning movements which effectively flatten and abstract the objects of this work environment. And although a brief passage of green leader is used to mark each cut, the smearing effect of the rapid camera movements tends to elide the shots, to make the flattened color planes run together.”— Bruce Jenkins
Winter Solstice (Solariumagelani) (1974, 16mm, color, silent, 33 min.)
“Shot at U.S. Steel’s Homestead Works in Pittsburgh,…Winter Solstice is full of outpourings of fire, of smoke, of sparks, of molten metal–all erupting against an otherwise black background in an activated pictorial space. . . .While Winter Solstice pays homage to the work of a number of New York school painters, its steel mill setting represents, as Frampton noted, ‘A pretextual locus dearly beloved by our Soviet predecessors.'”— Bruce Jenkins
Wine and Cheese Reception / Book Signing
Please join us for a wine and cheese reception from 5:00-6:00 pm as Bruce Jenkins signs copies of his latest book. Copies of On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters will be available for purchase on site.
Bruce Jenkins is Professor of Film, Video and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago having served from 2004-08 as the Dean of Undergraduate Studies. Prior to coming to SAIC, he was the Stanley Cavell Curator at the Harvard Film Archive, where he directed a film archive and a year-round cinematheque program. Dr. Jenkins served as Curator of Film and Video from 1985 to 1999 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where he initiated a dialogues program with major filmmakers, organized traveling film retrospectives, and curated gallery exhibitions. Dr. Jenkins has written catalogue essays for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; and the Guggenheim Museum, among others. His writings have appeared in such publications as Artforum, October, and Millennium Film Journal. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Minnesota, Macalester College, Harvard University, and the University of Cincinnati. In 1999, he was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.
Hollis Frampton: SOLARIUMAGELANI
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 9, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 6pm | Frampton scholar Bruce Jenkins in person!
- Image: Hollis Frampton filming Winter Solstice. Image courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.
Filmmaker, photographer, and theorist Hollis Frampton (1936–84) is a major figure in the American avant-garde. Ambitious in scope, his films wittily engage with philosophy, mathematics, and science. CATE presents a rare screening of three exquisite yet lesser-known works from 1974: Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, and Winter Solstice. Part of Magellan, Frampton’s unfinished epic film cycle intended to screen over 369 days, these works take on the primordial rhythms and energies of life and death within a pasture, slaughterhouse, and steel mill. Introduced by SAIC professor and Frampton scholar Bruce Jenkins and preceded by a book signing of Jenkins’s On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (MIT Press, 2009) and wine and cheese reception from 5:00-6:00pm. This program is part of “Critical Mass: Re-Viewing Hollis Frampton,” a multi-institutional retrospective through January 2010. 1974, USA, 16mm, ca. 95 min.
HOLLIS FRAMPTON (1936-84, USA) was an American avant-garde filmmaker, photographer, writer and theoretician, and pioneer of digital art. He produced some 60 films in his short career and contributed to numerous journals and magazines. “Frampton is generally understood, in his words, as an artist ‘of the modernist persuasion,’ not only for his aesthetics, but for his close personal association with such figures as Ezra Pound, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, and Stan Brakhage… Much of Frampton’s artistic practice was committed to the modernist quest to define a medium’s limits and possibilities. But Frampton was devoted to those he saw as modernism’s “heresiarchs” – figures like Duchamp, Cage, and Joyce – who sought to reinvigorate modernism with “that thing . . . which goes by the ancient name of wit.”(Michael Zryd, York University, Toronto)
Program details for Book of Mirrors: Films by Joost Rekveld
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 7, 2009
- Still from Joost Rekveld, #11, Marey <-> Moiré (1999). Image courtesy of the artist.
Program Details
#3 (1994, 16mm, color, silent, 4 min.))
“#3 is a film with pure light, in which the images were created by recording the movements of a tiny light source with extremely long exposures, so that it draws traces on the emulsion. The light is part of a simple mechanical system that exhibits chaotic behaviour.” (JR)
#11, Marey <->Moiré (1999, 35mm scope, color, sound, 21 min.))
In the award-winning #11, Marey <->Moiré , Rekveld creates stroboscopic patterns from filaments of intersecting lights. “#11 is a film in which all images were generated by intermittently recording the movement of a line. It is a film about the discontinuity that lies at the heart of the film medium…#11 premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2000. It won the Grand Prix for non-narrative animation at the Holland Animation festival in Utrecht in 2000. Also I’ve been told it was the first ever Dutch film to be shown at Sundance (also in 2000).” (JR)
#23.2, Book of Mirrors (2002, 35mm academy, color, sound, 12 min.))
Made in close collaboration with the composer Rozalie Hirs, the composition of #23 is based on symmetries and inversions. “The film was made with a set-up in which I use elementary optical principles to generate images. These images are caused by the interplay of light waves directly onto the emulsion, not using lenses as they are used normally to reproduce a scene outside of the camera. In that way I try to explore alternative forms of spatiality not related to traditional pictorial perspective.” (JR)
#37 (2009, 35mm scope, color, sound, 31 min.)
Rekveld’s latest film generates swarming tessellations from software exploring the organic symmetries of crystals. “Many pre-modern theories consider crystals as an intermediate form between the mineral, vegetative and animal kingdoms, an idea that acquires new resonances in the light of recent developments in the fields of artificial chemistry and artificial life. These new fields, with their hypothetical universes and ‘what-if’ scenarios, explore a kind of simulation that is far beyond the kind of photo-realistic simulations seen in many industrial computer animations. They have aspects in common with the way early abstract painters, filmmakers and light artists were developing a language to express hitherto unexpressable aspects of the universe through direct sensual experience.” (JR)
BOOK OF MIRRORS: FILMS BY JOOST REKVELD
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 6, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 6pm | Joost Rekveld in person!
- Image: Joost Rekveld, #37 (2009). Image courtesy of the artist.
Joost Rekveld’s films are spectacular treatises on the nature of light. They have screened around the world, including at Sundance, Rotterdam, Media City, and the Dutch Filmmuseum. Inspired by Medieval and Renaissance theories of optics, proto-cinematic technologies, X-ray photography, and visual music, Rekveld produces immersive cinematic experiences from optical experiments with his own handmade equipment. In the award-winning #11, Marey <-> Moiré (1999), Rekveld creates stroboscopic patterns from filaments of intersecting lights; in #23.2, Book of Mirrors (2002) he uses kaleidoscopes to refract light onto the film’s emulsion. His latest film, #37 (2009), generates swarming tessellations from software exploring the organic symmetries of crystals. Also featured is Rekveld’s 1994 short, #3. 1994-2009, Netherlands, multiple formats, ca. 75 min.
JOOST REKVELD (1970, Netherlands) makes abstract films and kinetic installations, designs projections and light for various dance and theatre productions, and works as a curator and teacher. His films have screened around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Media City and the Dutch Filmmuseum. He is currently the head of the ArtScience Interfaculty of the Royal Conservatory /Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, and teaches on the faculty of the Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science at Leiden University. Visit www.lumen.nu/rekveld.
WBEZ on Vision in Motion
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 2, 2009
Listen to Jonathan Miller’s review here.
VISION IN MOTION: FILMMAKING AT THE INSTITUTE OF DESIGN, 1944-70
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | September 29, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009 and Friday, October 2, 2009 at 6pm
Guests in person!
- Image: László Moholy-Nagy & ID students, Design Workshops (1944).
“The illiterates of the future,” the pioneering Hungarian artist and educator László Moholy-Nagy once famously proclaimed, “will be ignorant of the camera and pen alike.” Founded in Chicago in 1937 and modeled after the German Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy’s groundbreaking Institute of Design [ID], now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, was one of the first American schools to develop an art-film program. Its influence on photography, art, and design was unparalleled at the time and still resonates today.
This two-evening program brings together a remarkable collection of experimental, documentary, and design-focused films by ID faculty and students, dating from the school’s beginnings through 1970. Featured are works by Moholy-Nagy, Nathan Lerner, Marvin Newman, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Ken Josephson, and Millie Goldsholl, including a number of rarely-screened prints from the Chicago History Museum.
Presented in collaboration with the Chicago History Museum. This series is part of the “Learning Modern” exhibition at SAIC Sullivan Galleries, and a program of Living Modern Chicago, organized by SAIC and the Mies van der Rohe Society/Illinois Institute of Technology. Visit www.livingmodernchicago.org.
Vision in Motion, Program 1
Thursday, October 1
(1944-1970, USA, various artists, various formats, ca 75 min)
Do Not Disturb (László Moholy-Nagy & students, 1945, 16mm on DVD, color, sound, 19 min.)
Outtakes “Light Machine” (László Moholy-Nagy & Nathan Lerner, 1944, 16mm, color, silent, 4 min.)
Motions (Harry Callahan, 1948-49, 16mm, b/w, silent, 10 min.)
Licht Spiel Nur 1 (Robert Stielger, 1966, 16mm on HDV, color, silent, 6 min.)
DL #2 (Larry Janiak, 1970, 16mm, color, sound, 11 min.)
George & Martha Revisited (Wayne Boyer, 1967, 16mm, b/w, silent, 8 min.)
Followed by a discussion with Hattula Moholy-Nagy, scholar and daughter of Moholy-Nagy; Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago; and Wayne Boyer, filmmaker and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Vision in Motion, Program 2
Friday, October 2
(1950-1968, USA, various artists, various formats, ca 75 min)
Chicago Morning (Boris Yakovleff & students, 1952, 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 min.)
A Motion Control Drawing (Len Gittleman & Faythe Nelson, 1953, 16mm, color, silent, 5 min.)
Night Driving (Millie Goldsholl, 1957, 16mm, color, sound, 9 min.)
The Church on Maxwell Street (Yasuhiro Ishimoto & Marvin Newman, 1951, 16mm on BetaSP, b/w, sound, 8 min.);
Nebula 2 (Robert Frerck, 1969, 16mm on HDV, color, sound, 6 min.)
33rd and LaSalle (Ken Josephson, 1962, 16mm, b/w, silent, 8 min.)
Adam’s Film (Larry Janiak, 1963, 16mm, color, sound, 12 min.)
Chick Strand: SOFT FICTION
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | September 22, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009, 6pm
- Chick Strand, circa 1970. Photo by Neon Park.
Celebrated West Coast filmmaker Chick Strand passed away this past summer, leaving behind a body of sensual and smart work significant for its radical exploration of the space between documentary and poetry, truth and fiction, and the politics and pleasure of representation. A key figure in American independent and avant-garde film movements, she co-founded the film exhibition and distribution collective Canyon Cinema in the mid-1960s. She began her own filmmaking career at the age of 34, combining a background in photographic collage and academic training in anthropology into a series of poetic documentaries shot in Mexico while an ethnography student at UCLA. “Ethnographic films,” Strand once wrote, “should be works of art, symphonies about the fabric of a people.”
This evening, CATE pays tribute to Strand’s legacy with a rare screening of her 1979 film, Soft Fiction (16mm, b/w, sound, 54 min) which uses the ethnographic tool of the informant interview as a jumping-off point for a provocative and sensuous exploration of female sexuality and spirit, while raising questions about storytelling, memory, and the performance and preservation of self. For the critic Marsha Kinder, the Strand’s title “evokes the soft line between truth and fiction and suggests the idea of softcore fiction, which is appropriate to the film’s erotic content and style. It’s rare to find an erotic film with a female perspective dominating both the narrative discourse and the visual and aural rhythm with which the film is structured. Strand continues to celebrate in her brilliant, innovative personal documentaries her theme, the reaffirmation of the tough resilience of the human spirit.” Accompanied by the exquisite Kristallnacht (1979, 16mm, b/w, sound 7 min), an homage to Anne Frank and the resilience of the human spirit.
Born Mildred in northern California and nicknamed Chick by her father, CHICK STRAND studied anthropology at Berkeley in the 1960s, joined the free speech movement, and experimented with photographic collage. She joined the filmmaker Bruce Baillie and editor Ernest Callenbach to found Canyon Cinema, a screening and workshop collective that evolved into the San Francisco Cinematheque and the independent distributor, Canyon Cinema. She enrolled in the ethnography program at UCLA, and after graduating in 1971 taught for 24 years at Occidental College. She made nineteen films, many shot in Mexico, while traveling with her life and artistic partner, the pop-surrealist artist Neon Park (Martin Muller, 1940-93). Her work is held in the collection of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and continues to be distributed by Canyon Cinema.
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Golan Levin this Thursday, September 17!
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | September 16, 2009
September 17, 2009, 6pm | Golan Levin in person!
- Golan Levin, Opto-Isolator (2007). Image courtesy of the artist.
Whimsical, provocative, and sublime, the work of new media artist Golan Levin explores the possibilities of code, screens, interactivity, and our relationship with machines. Levin creates collaborative digital systems, resulting in performances like Dialtones (A Telesymphony) (2001), a musical composition with sounds generated through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones; software art such as The Dumpster: A Visualization of Romantic Breakups (2005), which offers novel perspectives on online communications; and Eyecode (2007), an installation with imagery generated from its viewer’s eyes. Levin will discuss these works and more in an interactive screening and lecture. Co-presented by the Department of Interactive Arts & Media, Columbia College Chicago. 1997-2009, USA, multiple formats, ca. 90 min.
GOLAN LEVIN is an artist and engineer whose work focuses on the language of interactivity-verbal, vocal and visual. He has spent half his life as an artist embedded within technological research environments, including the MIT Media Laboratory, the Ars Electronica Futurelab, and the former Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto. His work has exhibited widely across North America, Europe, Asia, including at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kitchen, and the Neuberger Museum, all in New York; the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan; the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo, Japan; and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, among other venues. Levin is currently the director of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Associate Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also holds Courtesy Appointments in the School of Computer Science and the School of Design. His work is represented by bitforms gallery, New York City.
CATE Announces Fall 2009 Season
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | August 29, 2009
Conversations at the Edge kicks off its fall 2009 season on Thursday, September 17 with a screening and talk by new media artist Golan Levin. Check out the full schedule under Current Season.
- Golan Levin, Opto-Isolator (2007). Image courtesy of the artist.
Additional highlights include appearances by Joost Rekveld (10/8); Mike Hoolboom (10/22); Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn (11/5); Laura Heit (11/19); and Ben Russell (12/10) as well as a two-night showcase of films from László Moholy-Nagy’s Institute of Design (10/1 & 2); a screening of Hollis Frampton’s “Solariumagelani” and book-signing for SAIC professor Bruce Jenkins’ On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (MIT Press, 2009) (10/15); a collection of films exploring the relationship between sound an image as part of the Outer Ear Festival of Sound (11/12); and a program of new films and videos from Japan (12/3).
The Films of Bruce Conner
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | April 13, 2009
Thursday, April 16 & Friday, April 17, 6pm | Guests in person!
- Bruce Conner, A Movie (1958). Image courtesy of the Conner Family Trust.
Explosive, elegiac, and ecstatic, the films of Bruce Conner (1933-2008) have had an enormous impact on film and pop culture, echoing through the rhythms of MTV, on-line remixes, and the use of found footage in art and cinema around the globe. Conner began making films in the late 1950s by piecing together scraps of newsreels, stag movies, and Castle novelty films into viscerally edited fever dreams that illuminated the shadow-world of America’s subconscious such as A Movie (1958) and Report (1967), and later, into lyrical assemblages of mystery and nostalgic longing, such as Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1977) and Valse Triste (1979). He extended his propulsive approach to editing into innovative collaborations with numerous pop musicians, including the singer Toni Basil (Breakaway, 1966), David Byrne and Brian Eno (Mea Culpa, 1981 and America Is Waiting, 1981), and DEVO (Mongoloid, 1978), as well as with minimalist composer Terry Riley in Looking for Mushrooms (1996) and the monumental Crossroads (1976).
These two programs survey Conner’s 50-year career and include a rare public screening of SAIC’s own print of Marilyn Times Three (1972), an early version of what would eventually become Marilyn Times Five (1973), which is also included in the tribute, affording an extraordinary opportunity to view Conner’s working style.
Filmmaker Michelle Silva, representative of the Conner Family Trust will be present for an audience discussion after Thursday’s screening. Silva and Bruce Jenkins, co-curator for the Walker Art Center’s exhibition, 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II, will be present for an audience discussion after Friday’s screening. Special thanks to Jean Conner, Michelle Silva of the Conner Estate, and Bruce Jenkins, Henrietta Zielinski and Thomas Hodge of SAIC.
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The Films of Bruce Conner, Program 1
Thursday, April 16, 6pm
TRT ca. 70 min. Program notes courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.
Mea Culpa
1981, 16mm, b/w, 5 min.
In his first collaboration with David Byrne and Brian Eno, Conner used footage from educational films to create a rhythmically austere imagetrack for music from their pioneering “sampling” album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981).
A Movie
1958, 16mm, b/w, 12 min.
The ultimate found footage film, A Movie summarizes—and critiques— the history of modern cinema in just twelve minutes.
The White Rose
1967, 16mm, b/w, 7 min.
An elegiac musical documentary capturing the slow removal of Jay DeFeo’s iconic “painting” The Rose from the San Francisco loft from which she had been evicted.
Marilyn Times Three
1972, 16mm, b/w, 8 min.
An early version of what would eventually become Marilyn Times Five.
Take the 5:10 to Dreamland
1977, 16mm, color, 5 min.
An oneiric, autobiographic chapter in Conner’s cinema with a mysterious, evocative soundtrack by Patrick Gleeson.
Valse Triste
1979, 16mm, color, 5 min.
A lyrical companion piece to 5:10, this poetic found-footage memoir counts as one of Conner’s most intimate films.
Looking For Mushrooms
1996, 16mm, color, 15 min.
Conner returned to his first color footage of travels in Mexico and his early years in San Francisco, radically slowing down the original material—by adding five frames per shot—to craft a spellbinding and hypnotic superimposition of two worlds.
Easter Morning
2008, DigiBeta video, color, 10 min.
Conner’s exquisite final work is a step-printed reinterpretation of footage from his 1966 unreleased film, Easter Morning Raga, that further reveals his abiding interest in the psychedelic as an alternate way of seeing.
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The Films of Bruce Conner, Program 2
Friday, April 17, 6pm
TRT: ca 80 min. Program notes courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.
Breakaway
1966, 16mm, b/w, 5 min.
Shot at multiple speeds (and forwards and backwards), Conner’s dance film uses incredible rapid-fire montage to deliver a beautifully frenzied response to Maya Deren’s motion studies.
Marilyn Times Five
1968-73, 16mm, b/w, 14 min.
Conner’s response to structural cinema is at turns hilarious and sad, appropriating the strained performance of Marilyn Monroe imitator Arline Hunter.
Vivian
1964, 16mm, b/w, 4 min.
An ecstatic portrait of actress Vivian Kurtz that features footage of a 1964 Conner exhibition and couches a humorous critique of the art market.
Ten Second Film
1965, 16mm, b/w, silent, 10 sec.
Conner created a ten second scandal with this very short film, commissioned by the New York Film Festival as a “trailer” and promptly rejected for being simply “too fast.”
Mongoloid
1978, 16mm, b/w, 4 min.
A hilarious “educational” film that features a pulsing Devo soundtrack.
America is Waiting
1981, 16mm, b/w, 4 min.
Working again with Byrne and Eno, Conner’s early music video offers a satire of patriotism and national security.
Report
1967, 16mm, b/w, 13 min.
Haunted by JFK’s assassination, Conner obsessively filmed television coverage of the killing, funeral and miscellaneous contemporary programming, repurposing the footage into both a sorrowful portrait of a lost hero and a blistering critique of postwar consumerism.
Crossroads
1976, 35mm, b/w, 36 min.
Conner followed his fascination with the atomic bomb to an absolutely brilliant furthest extreme, “expanding” 27 different shots of the 1946 Bikini Atoll a-bomb test footage into a mesmerizing two-part epic that juxtaposes the enhanced “realism” of Patrick Gleeson’s sound track in the first half against the hallucinatory trance music of Terry Riley that closes the film.
——
Known for assemblage, drawing, painting, collage, photographs and conceptual events, Bruce Conner first attracted public attention in the 1950s with his nylon-shrouded assemblages—complex sculptures of found objects such as women’s stockings, costume jewelry, bicycle wheels, and broken dolls, often combined with collaged or painted surfaces. He turned to short filmmaking in the late 1950s, pioneering a fast-paced collage style that established him as an important figure in postwar independent filmmaking. In the mid 1960s, he collaborated on a number of light shows for the legendary Family Dog at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. During the 1970s, he became a fixture on the West Coast punk scene, documenting much of it in a series of photographs from the era. His films and artwork are represented in the collections of major museums and archives in Europe and North America, including the Harvard Film Archives, la Cinémathèque Francaise, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Centre Pompidou Museum in Paris. A Movie (1958) was selected for the U.S. National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.
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2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II (Walker Art Center Archive)
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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.
