Wendy Clarke, One On One: Ken and Louise, 1994. Courtesy of the artist and the Video Data Bank.

Since the early 1970s, artist Wendy Clarke’s visionary body of work has used the video camera as a revelatory tool for communion and self-reflection. While she’s best known for the Love Tapes (1977–2011), an unprecedented, decades-long series in which she recorded more than 2,500 people around the globe reflecting on their feelings about love, she produced a smaller but more logistically complex project in the early 1990s. Titled One on One, this work took shape as a series of video dialogues between inmates at the California Institute for Men in Chino, members of the Church In Ocean Park in Santa Monica, and a group of Crenshaw residents in Los Angeles. Throughout 1992, 15 pairs of people exchanged video letters facilitated by Clarke, never meeting in person or otherwise communicating. The resulting year-long conversations offer profound observations on relationships, race, vulnerability, and the psychic and social effects of incarceration, while forging new bonds of support between people in and outside prison.

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RELATED EVENT

Wendy Clarke in Conversation
February 12, 2:00 p.m. CT
Gene Siskel Film Center Virtual Cinema
Live captions available

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Alison O’Daniel, The Tuba Thieves (2013 – ongoing). Courtesy of the artist

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sound—its sensory qualities and its social role—is at the center of Alison O’Daniel’s multidisciplinary practice.  Spanning film, performance, sculpture, and installation, and also informed by frequent collaborations with hearing, Deaf, and hard-of-hearing artists and composers, O’Daniel’s body of work explores sensory experience, legibility, and access. Writing that “the intersection between poetics and activism is where I’m most interested and inspired,“ O’Daniel uses her work to produce a more expansive visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary while inviting viewers to reconsider their relationships with the sensual world.

O’Daniel has screened and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Centro Centro, Madrid; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Art in General, New York; Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles; and the Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest.

O’Daniel is a recipient of the 2019 Louis Comfort Tiffany prize. She has also received grants from Creative Capital; the Rema Hort Mann Foundation; the Center for Cultural Innovation; and the Franklin Furnace Fund. Her film, The Tuba Thieves, was supported by the 2019 Sundance Creative Producing Lab. She was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 2019 25 New Faces of Independent Film. She is an assistant professor of film at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

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If you’d like to play in The Endless Forest during the event, please download the game in advance. Instructions below.

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, The Endless Forest, 2005-ongoing. Courtesy of the artists.

Since 1999, pioneering digital artists Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn have created a body of enormously influential games and internet art. Best known for works like The Endless Forest (2005/2020), The Path (2009), The Graveyard (2008), Luxuria Superbia (2013), and Sunset (2015), among others, Harvey and Samyn’s sensuous, multi-layered games, all produced under the name Tale of Tales, explore complex themes of agency, trauma, and connection, often through the avatars of women, girls, and people of color. The two began their joint career producing vanguard internet and networked art as Entropy8Zuper! In recent years, they have turned to mixed reality and immersive software under the moniker Song of Songs. With their immersive and responsive environments, Harvey and Samyn aim to produce emotionally rich experiences unique to the digital realm.

Harvey and Samyn have released eight video game titles, all available to the public through major game portals. In addition to being experienced by thousands on home computers around the globe, their digital art works have been included in significant international festivals and exhibitions such as the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Tinguely Museum, Basel; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Furtherfield, London; NEoN Digital Art Festival, Dundee; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Argos Festival, Brussels; and numerous editions of IndieCade; among many others. They have received numerous awards for their work, including a Nuovo award from the Independent Game Festival for Luxuria Superbia; design and sound awards from hoPLAY International Video Game Festival for The Path; and a Webby for their early site Entropy8Zuper!.org, among others. In addition to her collaborative partnership with Samyn, Harvey is professor of Games as Artistic Practice at Kunsthochschule Kassel.

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RELATED EVENTS

The Path (2009)
Monday, October 5, 5:00–7:00 pm CT
Livestream hosted by Arianna Gass (PhD Candidate, English and Theater & Performance Studies, University of Chicago)
University of Chicago’s Weston Game Labs on Twitch

Bientôt l’été (2012)
Monday, October 12, 5:00–7:00 pm CT
Livestream, hosted by Arianna Gass (PhD Candidate, English and Theater & Performance Studies, University of Chicago) and Jas Brooks (PhD Student, Computer Science, University of Chicago).
University of Chicago’s Weston Game Labs on Twitch

Luxuria Superbia (2013)
The Graveyard (2008)
Monday, October 19, 5:00–7:00 pm CT
Livestream, hosted by Ashlyn Sparrow (Assistant Director, Weston Game Lab, University of Chicago) and Kent Lambert (Assistant Director, Hack Arts Lab, University of Chicago).
University of Chicago’s Weston Game Labs on Twitch

Sunset (2015)
Monday, October 26, 5:00–7:00 pm CT
Livestream, hosted by Arianna Gass (PhD Candidate, English and Theater & Performance Studies, University of Chicago) and Ashlyn Sparrow (Assistant Director, Weston Game Lab, University of Chicago).
University of Chicago’s Weston Game Labs on Twitch

Join us for a talk with Swiss artist, author, and video essayist Ursula Biemann whose visionary practice focuses on the planet’s changing climate and its ecological impact. Her videos Deep Weather (2013), Forest Law (2014), Subatlantic (2015), and Acoustic Ocean (2018) are on view in the Gene Siskel Film Center’s virtual cinema from October 18 – 24. Presented in partnership with SAIC’s Video Data Bank.

Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares, Forest Law, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and SAIC’s Video Data Bank

Grounded in a research-based practice, Ursula Biemann’s videos, installations, and essays consider the relationship between politics and the environment across local, global, and planetary contexts. In recent years, her fieldwork has taken her from the Amazon, where indigenous people like the Inga are struggling to preserve their ecosystems and cosmovision, to the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean, where even deep sea creatures must navigate human-induced environmental change. Underscoring how people, flora, and fauna are intimately connected, Biemann’s projects challenge globalist models of resource extraction and exploitation while inviting viewers to rethink their relationships with the Earth.

Biemann has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Bildmuseet Umea, Sweden; Nikolaj Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Helmhaus Zurich, Switzerland; Lentos Museum Linz, Austria; and at film festivals like FIDMarseille. Her work has been included in major exhibitions at the Arnolfini Bristol; Tapies Foundation Barcelona; Museum of Fine Arts Bern; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; San Francisco Art Institute; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Steirischer Herbst, Graz; Kunstverein Hamburg; and many others. Additionally, she has participated in the International Art Biennials in Sao Paulo, Gwangju, Shanghai, Taipei, Sharjah, Liverpool, Bamako, Istanbul, Montreal, Venice, Thessaloniki, and Sevilla.

In 2009, Biemann received the Prix Meret Oppenheim, the Swiss Grand Prize for Art, and in 2018, she was the recipient of the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics. She was awarded an honorary Ph.D. in Humanities by Umeå University (Sweden) and is on the board of the academic journal GeoHumanities.

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Julian Jonker and Ralph Borland, performance view of Song of Solomon (2006). Courtesy of the artists.

ABOUT

Delinda Collier is Associate Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism and Interim Dean of Graduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research interests are in old and new media in Africa, Luso-African Art, and Cold War modernisms. She is the author of Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art (University of Minnesota, 2016) and Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa (Duke, 2020), among many articles, essays, and reviews.

Leslie Wilson is Curatorial Fellow for Diversity in the Art at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art and Assistant Professor of Art History at Purchase College, the State University of New York. Her research focuses on the global history of photography, modern and contemporary arts of Africa, the African diaspora, and America, and museum and curatorial studies. Her writing has been featured in Manual, FOAM Magazine, and African Arts, among others.

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RELATED SCREENING

Blue Life Seminar
October 4–October 10
Gene Siskel Film Center Virtual Cinema

Originally installed as the centerpiece of the exhibition I’m Blue (If I Was █████ I Would Die), Blue Life Seminar is a chilling lecture on policing and state violence. Delivered by a blue figure whose features are drawn from the Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan and the Black, former Los Angeles Police Officer Christopher Dorner, the piece turns on the nature of “Blue Life,” an identity constructed by members of law enforcement in response to Black Lives Matter. Artist draws parallels between Doctor Manhattan, who self-exiled after becoming weaponized by the United States government, and Dorner, who shot and killed four people, including two cops, after publishing a manifesto on the LAPD’s racist culture and excessive use of force. “I am a man who has lost complete faith in the system,” the disillusioned figure declares, cautioning, “many of you who identify as blue are Black.”

American Artist, USA, 2019, 19:31 minutes