Welcome to the 2016 BFA and MFA Media Arts Festival and screenings! Here you will encounter the next generation of film, video, new media, animation, and sound artists as SAIC students present their thesis projects. In this festival, you will experience innovative live-action shorts, all kinds of animation, feature-length narrative and nonfiction works, video essays, and experimental digital and audio pieces that will provoke, pleasure, instigate, and surprise you.
In FVNMA and at SAIC, we embrace radicalities of different shapes, sizes and forms in our experimental Media Arts. We encourage and are committed to a fluidity of ideas, theories, and practices. FVNMA students move far beyond traditional approaches, often working in interdisciplinary ways. The works here cross and intermix technologies, genres, and approaches, manifesting new and hybrid forms of expression.
We salute all these graduating students in celebrating the work that they will now share with us. We appreciate your time, labor, love, and the community that you have built together with us these last few years as you worked hard to compose, write, shoot, record, re-enact, direct, perform, edit, sample, digitize, experiment, generate, render, draw, model, design, photograph, chroma-key, interact, loop, re-mix, re-author, re-form, collaborate, improvise, craft, and hone your materials, ideas, sounds, and visions.
We congratulate you all, and wish you the best in your continuing lives as artists!
Mary Patten
chair, FVNMA
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
May, 2016
Presented by the Department of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies in collaboration with the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation
Department, and the Gene Siskel Film Center.
Special thanks to Chris Sullivan, Daniel Eisenberg, Eric Fleischauer, and Claudia Hart for their work programming the 2016 Festival. And an extra-special shout-out to Brandon Doherty of the Gene Siskel Film Center, and to Mickey Mahoney, Emily Kuehn, Andrew Zoleta, and Dan Holmes in FVNMA for technical support.
FVNMAS 2016 program eight (download)
May 13
Program 8
5:30 – 7:30 p.m.
Zoe Sulkes
Fen Chen
Nicole Swardenski
Nicki Day
Becky Aguirre
Taylor Cleveland
Stephen Goza
Eleanor Schichtel
ZOE SULKES
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Charity, 2015 digital video sound, color
3:19
Charity is based on the suffering and eventual death the artist’s sister, Charity Sacco, endured in a mental hospital.
FEN CHEN
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Typhoon, 2016 digital video sound, color
17:08
Typhoon is a short documentary that follows the day-to-day mediocre tasks of workers in a local factory in southeast China. The story not only focuses on their roles as modern factory workers of a labor-intensive industry, but also as representatives of the vast majority of Chinese citizens who choose to seek a better life in larger cities on the east coast. This film is quintessentially Chinese and rooted in modern Chinese ideology.
NICOLE SWARDENSKI
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Oh YEEEEEEEEeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh, 2015 photocopy animation
sound, color
2:20
.
Oskar Fischinger-inspired visual music, through process of photocopy animation. Music by Patrenzo Kennedy.
NICKI DAY
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Side Effects, 2015 digital video sound, color
5:56
Side Effects interprets the effects of pharmaceutical medication through use of costume and dance. The dancers become representations of generalized “side effects” acquired through use of medication. The viewer is taken through a loose narrative of the gruesome battle one is forced to go through when taking medications.
BECKY AGUIRRE
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Fur Coat, 2016
hand-drawn animation sound, color
6:51
She has a special fur coat that follows her wherever she goes. Sometimes she hates it because she gets teased for it, but even on the coldest nights, it has always been there to keep her warm.
NICOLE SWARDENSKI
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Little Ripples, 2015 photocopy animation sound, b/w
0:45
Little Ripples uses various techniques in photocopy animation synced with sounds of backwoods camping.
Bloop, 2015 paint animation sound, b/w
1:08
Bloop is an animation using oil paint on glass, with the sound of a bloop.
TAYLOR CLEVELAND
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
#Reify Your.Self, 2016 video
sound, color
23:47
Taylor Effin Cleveland is a satirical response to self-glorification through digital technologies.
#Reify Your.Self is the final piece created by Effin’ before his death (03-16-2016). The video explores the different environments that govern the identity’s enigmatic presence.
NICOLE SWARDENSKI
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
The Specimen, 2014 animation
sound, color
2:54
The Specimen is an experimental narrative exploring the relationship between experimental science and rats.
STEVEN GOZA
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Psychodiagnostik Sunsets, 2014 experimental 3D animation sound, color
4:05
16mm film and experimental photos are emulsified across multiple platforms before exploding forth into an experimental 3D animation serving as a visual exploration of apophenia and pareidolia.
A Barroom Scene, 2015 stop motion animation sound, color
3:05
This piece is built around found audio recorded in a Chicago bar. Complete strangers whose paths happened to cross that night are brought back together with some additional characterization via puppets.
ZOE SULKES
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Buzzard Airways, 2015 digital video
sound, color
1:28
A commercial for a fake airline called Buzzard Airways which is meant to subtly reveal Buzzard Airway’s sleaziness. Inspired by Spirit Airlines.
STEPHEN GOZA
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
The Choke Artist, 2016 stop-motion animation sound, color
7:00
An open-mic stand-up comic hung up on saying something meaningful turns on himself, eventually learning to reach deep inside to find his connection to the audience.
ELEANOR SCHICHTEL
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
WING, 2016 digital video sound, color
10:49
The six 3D animations in this collection each represent a work of art in a virtual gallery space, shown temporally as if walking through a collection of traditional paintings and sculptures. (An homage to the Art Institute of Chicago.)
ZOE SULKES
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Every Time We Touch, 2014 digital video
sound, color
2:19
A video in which a lonely princess dances in a castle, pining for his lover, set to a flashy, tacky pop song.
FVNMAS 2016 program nine (download)
May 13
Program 9
8:15 – 10:00 p.m.
Liang-Hsuan Chen
Laura Harrison
Pablo Monterrubio-Benet
Pearl Marie Salas
Carolina González Valencia
LIANG-HSUAN CHEN
MFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
TAIPEI HOURS, 2016 digital video
sound, color
22:33
Hours pass in Taipei. Shu-Chuan, a middle-aged woman, goes about her day. She has beliefs, goals, and affections as she moves between her life in the small island of Taiwan and the global cities of tomorrow.
Taipei Hours is part documentary, part portrait, and part dream. Shu-Chuan re-enacts the hours that construct the experience of Taiwanese society and culture, and the way people are educated and socially shaped. We fight to live in a state of peace, in suspense.
LAURA HARRISON
MFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Little Red Giant, 2016 video
sound, color
15:00
Story-telling as a way to ground unstable identity, sexuality, and meaning is the basis of transformation and healing in this animated narrative about a mentally unstable artist, Anna, who assaults an academic at a Somerville barbecue. Told in fragments by the histrionic, unreliable narrator, language shifts out of the performative into a more empathetic mode as Anna reveals the core of her distress to a sympathetic cellmate in jail.
PABLO MONTERRUBIO-BENET
MFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
El Vaivén, 2016 (work in-progress)
video
sound, color
30:00
A woman, a fish, and a city suspended in time. A moment condemned to repeat itself time and again. Work in-progress. Written, shot, directed, and edited by Pablo Monterrubio.
PEARL MARIE SALAS
MFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Susto, 2016 digital video sound, color
7:45
Susto is a short experimental narrative film that explores past, memory, and present simultaneously through storytelling and personal narration. The story centers on the Coco Man, a ghostly and monstrous entity that haunts misbehaving children. Is this a cautionary tale or does this monster have more terrifyingly real roots in the life of a child?
CAROLINA GONZÁLEZ VALENCIA
MFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
In Search of the Best Cyclist in the World, 2016 digital video
sound, color
24:49
Carolina goes back and forth between time, objects, home movies, the news, a house, a country, and a particular day, in search of a place, some stories, the best cyclist in the world, and other things she lost. (Work in-progress).