European Media Art Festival: Identity :: April 23 - 27, 2008 :: Osnabrueck, Germany.

The motto of this year’s European Media Art Festival is IDENTITY. Besides focusing on the issue of one’s own identity in a globalised world, the general changes associated with the expansion of digital technologies into all areas of private and public life will also be under discussion.

The festival shows film as a contemporary work of art in cinemas and exhibitions, both performed and multimedia. As an important forum for international Media Art, films, videos, performances, multimedia installations and digital media, such as DVD and internet, will be presented. Continue reading

Light Industry is a new venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York. Developed and overseen by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the project will begin as a series of weekly events in Sunset Park this spring and summer, each organized by a different artist, critic, or curator, including Peggy Ahwesh, Cory Arcangel, Rebecca Cleman, Ben Coonley and Michael Smith, Bradley Eros and Brian Frye, eteam, Kendra Gaeta and Laris Kreslins, David Gatten, Lia Gangitano, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Nick Hallett, K8 Hardy, William E. Jones, Andrew Lampert, Dennis Lim, Mark McElhatten, MTAA, Marisa Olson, Jacob Perlin, Seth Price, Jennifer Reeves, Eddo Stern, and Dan Streible, among others. Continue reading

InterSECT - Angie Eng, Zeena Parkins, and Kyoko Kitamura :: February 28, 2008; 8:30 pm :: Roulette, 20 Greene Street in SoHo, New York.

“Suffering from video block, I realized we get to make the rules as we go. Who says we have to finish the script first! In the middle of editing this project … which started out as a video HD short … I missed the magic of accidents and spontaneity in making cinema in reel time. Hence…” - Angie Eng

Video, installation, and time-based performance artist Angie Eng presents InterSECT, a digital live mix of a cinepoem originally produced as a video short (Play Here / Schpilin Aqui) with a Voom HD Labs Residency in 2006. With live electric harp and electronics by Zeena Parkins and narration by Kyoko Kitamura, InterSect explores the collision of 2 traditional worlds (Hassidim and the Puerto Ricans) in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

ANEMICodeCINEMA by Andy Deck - Media Player Haters Unite :: ANEMICodeCINEMA is a free interpretation of privatized data streams, digital encryption and encoding mired in secrecy and exclusivity. It’s a premonition of future histories lost in translation. Already video and audio are often unusable and scrambled for people who do not use the dominant operating system. As time passes and data encryption secrets are forgotten, this fractured experience of today’s audio and video may become the norm rather than the exception. Continue reading

No Shape Stays Innocent: Two Film Projects by Carlo Zanni :: December 25, 2007 :: Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), 10 Hussein Hassab Street, Flat 6, Azarita, Alexandria, Egypt - curated by Bassam El Baroni :: Talk by Hans Ulrich Obrist on December 26.

Ever since the late nineties - and after a long period of experimentation - art based on a strong connection with computer interface technology has been gaining viability on the international art arena. For many reasons, net based art projects are currently almost non-existent in North Africa and the Middle East, except for some projects which use the internet as an archival space. One of the main aims of this project is to shed new light on the position of so called internet art and its relationship with its direct socio-political context. Continue reading

When I heard several months ago that some of my MIT colleagues and students were helping to stage a performance of Live Action Anime, I knew I had to be there. I anticipated the experience with a kind of “only at MIT” amusement — not sure what to expect but knowing that the results would be dazzling.

The performance, Madness at Mokuba, opened with a spectacular battle between two giant robots (see the image above) staged against the backdrop of projected anime images and accompanied by an awe-inspiring soundtrack of metallic clanks and engine sounds which instantly reminded me of my first experience watching RoboTech and Star Blazers several decades ago. Continue reading

Flat Earth is a desktop documentary, which takes the viewer on a seven minute trip around the world so that we encounter a series of fragments taken from real peoples’ blogs. These fragments are knitted together to form a kind of story or singular narrative. The visual effect is not unlike that of Google Earth, although significantly here, nearly all of the visual material for Flat Earth is taken from satellite imagery freely available on the web. This is with the exception of the close-up imagery from outside USA, which had to be paid for non-commercial use and a series of images taken from Flickr under Creative Commons attribution license.

Flat Earth is an Animate Projects commission with Arts Council England and Channel Four Television; it will be shown on Channel Four (UK) in December and will be screening in the following UK locations in the coming weeks before traveling to Europe and America: Continue reading

nocinema.org: Travelling without Moving :: Oboro Center, Montreal (CAN - QC) :: curated by Suzanne Jaschko :: November 3 - December 8, 2007 :: Works by Heman Chong (SP), Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain (BR), Jérôme Joy (FR), radioqualia (NZ/GB), Sascha Pohflepp / Jakob Schillinger (DE), Marius Watz (NO).

Nocinema.org (1999-2007) is an automatic process, drawing upon strings of live streaming webcams across the world, transmitting live scenes collected from different locations with added panoramic movements and temporized on-line editing, into which some black shots are inserted (listening without visual). The sound, each time offering a different sequenced overlay, comes from a shared sound files database which is fed and updated by a team of sound artists / partners, including Continue reading

The Registry of Culture of NRW, Guetersloh presents: My Temporary Visiting Position From The Sunset Terrace Bar a new work by Carlo Zanni. Set in the city of Ahlen, Germany, The Sunset Terrace Bar, imitates an amateur’s film of the landscape framed at sunset. While the city strip is prerecorded the sky is captured in real time from a webcam shooting the sky of Naples (Italy) at sunset and as such, always changing.

The work, confronting themes such as exile, migration and border control, is enhanced by a poem by the esteemed author Ghada Samman and music by the international band Gotan Project and legendary composer Gabriel Yared. People visiting the website can choose upon two ways to experience the work: a live mode, available only in a specific time frame during the sunset in Naples or browsing through the archive where a time accelerated HD version of the movie is rendered every day and archived online. Continue reading

Skoltz Kolgen: Silence in the rooms - Article / Interview by Claudia D’Alonzo, Digimag 27 International / September 2007.

The recent release of a wonderful DVD (presented during the Elektra Festival 2007 in Montreal and now distributed worldwide) represents the newest chapter of Silent Room, a work by Canadian artists Skotz Kolgen, started in 2003 and presented in different ways over the years, from video installations to AV live cinema. Each one of these forms has been a different approach to re-think the original flux of audiovisual poetry, and to experiment various ways of narration. Continue reading