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.

Akino Kondoh, “Ladybirds’ Requiem,” 2005-6. Courtesy the Artist and Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo.

In a nation that is geographically isolated yet always looking outward, rooted in ancient tradition while existing at the forefront of technological innovation, the complexion of contemporary Japanese moving image is like no other. This evening’s program brings together work by some of Japan’s brightest emerging film and video artists. From digital filmmaking and award-winning shorts to works that draw from the country’s rich experimental film and hand-drawn animation traditions—“flip book” paintings, diary films, and time-based collaborations between avant-garde artists and musicians—”New Nippon” explores the inventive and otherworldly work of Tomonari Nishikawa, Wada Atsushi, Maya Yonesho, Hiroshi Kondo, Stom Sogo, and many others. Curated by SAIC graduate student Kelly Shindler. 2002–09, various artists, Japan, multiple formats, ca. 80 min.

Program

Maya YONESHO, Daumenreise 6: Kyoto Mix (2008, Beta SP, 5 mins)
With Ken Shinno, Maya Tsujimura, Keiji Aiuchi, Jerome Boulbes. Music: Akira Morita
A collaboration between the artist and four of her students, this snapshot of the famous city of Kyoto was first composed as hundreds of still images and then transformed into an animated flip book. “Daumenreise is an animation workshop project with the same method of “Wiener Wuast”—shooting small drawings in our hands in the real view, over the world with students, children and friends. Films have been made in Taiwan, Norway, Croatia, Israel, Kyoto, and Poland since 2007.” (MY)

Tomonari NISHIKAWA, Sketch Films #3-5 (2006-7, Super-8 shown on mini-DV, silent, 3 mins each)
#3: “It starts with series of a pair of frames, a blurred image by camera movement followed by its steady image. Later, it shows my challenge on creating apparent depth on the screen.”
#4: “My first Sketch Film in color, trying to see the mingle of colors through projector. I used Kodachrome, and sent it to Dwayne Photo to process.”
#5: Nominated for a Tiger Award at the 2008 International Film Festival Rotterdam. “All images had been shot in Marin, California, when I had a studio space at the Headlands Center for the Arts for a year. The footage shows the nature in the area, as well as historic buildings, including batteries and the Nike Missile Site.” (TN)

Naoyuki TSUJI, Zephyr (2009, 16mm on DVD, 6 mins)
This newest work by Tsuji, who was featured in CATE’s Spring 2009 season, continues the artist’s fascination with the wind and family. “Zephyr refers to the Greek god of the west wind. Zephyr in Tsuji’s work comes to a baby and takes the baby into inside of the sun. What kind of experience is waiting for the baby?” (Tomio Koyama Gallery, Kyoto)

Atsushi WADA, Well That’s Glasses (2007, DVCam, 5:40 mins)
Hand-drawn cell animation about the veracity of vision, illustrating what happens when work, sleep, chemistry, and the human, animal, and dream worlds collide. Wada’s magic realist approach deftly incorporates repetition and a sparse color palette to illustrate the most curious of stories. (KS)

Joji KOYAMA, From Nose to Mouth (2006, 16mm and video on Beta SP, 18.5 mins)
Commissioned by Animate Projects, UK. “A solitary figure emerges out of seclusion to learn an ice-skating dance sequence. Set in a disorientating arena of shifting boundaries, structures and languages, the lessons are not going well… From Nose to Mouth portrays the unsuccessful efforts of a character trying to make sense of the demands and tasks of a strangely disjointed and fragmented world. Lost in the gaps and ‘in-betweens,’ the film is a kind of homage to awkwardness and inexactitude.” (JK)

Hiroshi KONDO, Live Material 001 and Live Material 002 (2008, DVCam, 1 min each)
Short “documentations” of live VJ performances by this Sapporo-born video artist. Composed with contemporary technologies (AfterEffects and Inferno), both shorts simulate the dated technicolor palate and tone of 90s rave culture. (KS)

Akino KONDOH, Ladybirds’ Requiem (2006, DVD, 6 mins)
Henry Darger meets ladies’ manga in this innovative video by young multimedia artist Kondoh. “Recently, [Kondoh] has been drawing on a special surface treated with gesso so that the pencil lines appear indented from pressure, like soft embroidery. In [Ladybirds’ Requiem], it is as if the world of her drawings is sewn piece by piece into the sequence of images on screen. The drawings of little girls will continue hatching without end, and the pursuit of images will result in a proliferation of variety, until these memories leave the imprint of their stitches throughout the world.” (Sayaka Nishiki)

Ryusuke ITO, Plate #43-44 (The Forked Tongues) (2008, 16mm, 4 mins) 2008
“I make “plates” consisting of film strips cut; it is a kind of transparent collage on a small plastic board. I put this on raw stock and contact print several times (usually 20 times). Most sounds come from the results of the optical-sound-head of a projector reading the images on the film. When the soundtrack of the original stock occasionally gets in a “right” place, we hear segments of some music or human voice. My source material is [found] footage gathered [from my] travels. For this film, I use some images of Czech film, which I got there. I bought tons of abandoned films at a small camera store in Prague.” (RI) Ito, who teaches at the Hokkaido University of Education in Sapporo, holds an MFA in Filmmaking (1992) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Stom SOGO, Try (2002, mini-DV, 9 mins)
A loop of two lovers is slowed to quasi-stillness as the dub soundtrack crackles with static and noise, which is central to much of the artist’s work. “Try was originally shot on Super-8mm film and then re-shot on video. The idea was to have the image of young kids kissing forever. Ecstasy here is so wasted.” (SS) “The films of Stom Sogo are incantatory and self-combustible. An erratic master of low tech do-it-yourself sortilege, he puts his works through seemingly perpetual remakes.” (Mark McElhatten)

Takashi MAKINO, Still in Cosmos (2009, 35mm on HDCam, 19 mins). Music: Jim O’Rourke
“A product purposed of an installation project held at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Recomposed as completed film work in 2009. This film visually demonstrates the fact that human has ability to change Chaos [into] Cosmos. A transcendent Free Jazz soundtrack is presented by band Osorezan, commanded by Jim O’Rourke. Now images and sound break the wall of the universe and plunge in the new world.” (TM)

TRT: 80 mins.

Still from The Gypsy Cried (Chris Langdon, 1972). Courtesy the artist.

Experimental Sound Studio’s Outer Ear Festival of Sound and CATE team up once again to present a program of films that investigate the visual and aural possibilities of 16mm optical audio, as sounds perform images and images become sonic scores. Sound functions both as a sonic and visual element in these 6 films. Collectively they propose a new model for listening and seeing – a listening that happens with the eyes, and a seeing that happens with the ears. Curated by SAIC faculty member Michelle Puetz. Co-presented by Experimental Sound Studio. 1966–78, various artists, USA, multiple formats, ca. 65 min.

The OUTER EAR FESTIVAL OF SOUND (November 3–22, 2009) is the only comprehensive interdisciplinary sonic arts festival in the Midwest. Visit www.exsost.org.

Program details
Chris Langdon, The Gypsy Cried (1972, 16mm, 3 minutes, b/w, sound)
“When one likes something very much, or someone, it is hard to do anything but like it.  I didn’t want to take anything away or add anything to this song because I like it a lot.” (Chris Langdon)

Paul Sharits, Ray Gun Virus (1966, 14 minutes, 16mm, color, synchronous sprocket hole sound)
Ray Gun Virus consists of a series of rapidly and intermittently flickering fields of color that are accompanied by an “open system” soundtrack made possible by double perf 16mm film. Sharits wrote that Ray Gun Virus was an attempt to “allow vision to function in ways usually particular to hearing . . . rapidly alternating color frames can generate, in vision, horizontal-temporal chords . . . Just as the film’s consciousness becomes infected, so does the viewer’s consciousness: the projector is an audio-visual pistol; the screen looks at the audience; and the viewer’s normative consciousness. The film’s final ‘image’ is a faint blue; the viewer is left to his own reconstruction of self, left with a screen upon which his retina can project its own patterns.”

Robert Russett, Primary Stimulus (1977, 13 minutes, 16mm, b/w, sound)
In Primary Stimulus, the soundtrack printing process was kept completely photographic so that “the sound emitted is the sound the projector interprets from the lines which are the film’s image. What comprises the film are sixteen different ‘grates’ of varying amplitudes (sixteen compositions of black and white horizontal lines): onto each frame of film one of these patterns is printed. The sequence varies. The compositions are similar enough to one another so that the afterimage of one relates compositionally to the next.”  (Laurence Kardish)

Peter Kubelka, Pausa! (1977, 12 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
Peter Kubelka’s first and only sync-sound film, Pausa! captures a rare glimpse of the Austrian artist (and namesake of Kubelka’s famous 1960 film) Arnulf Rainer engaged in a full-body performance with a microphone. The vibrations of Rainer’s breath and highly gestural movements form a visceral sonic and visual portrait of his body.

Barry Spinello, Soundtrack (1969, 10 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
“During the first half of Soundtrack, the “sound painting” – drawn on the soundtrack – is magnified and redrawn, frame by frame, on the image track so that the viewer literally sees what he hears . . . The closing section of Soundtrack makes use of acetate self-adhesive screens and tapes. These screens and tapes, cut to fit the soundtrack, yield controlled pitch for any duration in as many different timbres as there are patterns.” (Barry Spinello)

Richard Lerman, Sections for Screen, Performers and Audience (1974, 6minutes, 16mm, color, live accompaniment by Art Lange, Guillermo Gregorio, and Brian Labycz)
“I was always fascinated by music scores and often imagined how concerts might be changed if performers were not hidden behind music on stands. In the 1960’s, I made several films that used oscilloscope imagery and, in doing so, learned to ‘play’ various synthesizers to generate images. For this film, I used colored gels while filming and chose to optically print a few visual phrases, allowing for repeated sections. I also super-imposed hi-contrast notation over the film. So, Sections became a kind of feedback piece: sound generated the images for the score and performers created new sounds and a new piece from these images.” (Richard Lerman)

About the artists
Guillermo Gregorio is a composer, improviser, and visual artist in Chicago. Trained in architecture and music, he was associated with the Madi movement in Argentina in the 1960’s, and the spirit of experimentation across forms continues. He is especially noted for his compositions that combine improvisation and composed elements through graphic notation.

Peter Kubelka was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1934 and is an “artist and theoretician who has worked in the art forms of film, cuisine, music, architecture, speaking and writing.  In 1964, Kubelka co-founded the Austrian Film Museum and has been its curator ever since. In 1978, he became professor in film at the Art Academy in Frankfurt, where he also served as Rector in the period of 1985-88.  Kubelka’s theoretical work in cooking began in 1967, and in 1980 his teaching position was expanded to include ‘Film and Cooking as Art.’  He is a co-founder of the Anthology Film Archives in New York.” (Hong Kong International Film Festival)

Brian Labycz is a Chicago improviser primarily performing with electronics.  He draws from a variety of sources including analog systhesizers, acoustic instruments, digital manipulations, field recordings, and self-made devices to produce and explore various expressive forms.

Chris Langdon is from the middle of the country somewhere. He studied art (and a little film) at the California Institute of the Arts roughly between 1972 and 1976, during which time he made somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 films. He collaborated with Fred Worden and worked with Jack Goldstein and John Baldessari on several of their early films.

Art Lange has produced more than two dozen recordings for artists like Matthew Shipp, Ellery Eskelin, Ran Blake, and Guillermo Gregorio, and he has directed ensembles in the music of Cornelius Cardew and Anthony Braxton. His writings on music have been published across the U.S., England, and Europe. He teaches at Columbia College, Chicago.

Richard Lerman has been creating electronic music and interdisciplinary art since the 1960’s and has performed and exhibited his artwork and film in North and South America, Asia, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. For the last 30 years, he has been designing and building microphones using piezo disks. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the NEA, the Asian Cultural Council, among many others. A 2-CD set of his early audio work, including “Travelon Gamelon” and a performance of “Sections for Screen, Performers and Audience,” is available on EM Records. For more information please visit http://www.sonicjourneys.com

Robert Russett holds degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design and Cranbrook Academy of Art. Following his graduate work at Cranbrook, Russett continued his studies in Paris at Atelier17. His films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Whitney Museum (NYC), the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, as well as on PBS, The Learning Channel, and Spanish National Television. His tapes and video installations have been shown at SIGGRAPH, the American Museum of the Moving Image (NYC) and the International Symposium on Electronic Art in the Netherlands. Awards include 3 MacDowell Colony fellowships, a Media Fellowship from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and a production grant from the American Film Institute. John Libbey and Co. has published his new book, HYPERANIMATION: Digital Images and Virtual Worlds (2009), in association with the University of Indiana Press. Formally an Honors Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Russett is now Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts and a full-time artist and writer.

Paul Sharits is widely considered to be the first American filmmaker to make “pure-color” flicker films. He was involved with Fluxus in the 1960’s and worked in a variety of different mediums including film, sound, sculpture, drawing, performance art, typography, and printmaking. His film work investigated visual and aural modes of perception by examining the intersections between shifting fields of color and sound, the mechanics of film projection and optical sound reproduction, and what he referred to as “the operational analogues constructed between ways of seeing and ways of hearing.”

Barry Spinello came to animation from painting, and completed a number of films in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s (Soundtrack, Sonata for Pen, Brush and Ruler, and Six Loop-Paintings) that explored various techniques of painting and drawing images and soundtracks directly onto 16mm film.  His films have been shown at the Whitney Museum and at various international film festivals, and he taught animation at the University of California at Berkeley.

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.)

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.

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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.

More
2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II (Walker Art Center Archive)

In 1995, the Video Data Bank published “Surveying the First Decade,” a massive, 16-hour anthology of nearly 70 titles from artists and media-makerswho defined the first decade of video art. Curated by Chris Hill, then curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, the anthology is widely acclaimed for an expansive and revelatory vision that positions works by grassroots activists alongside those by established artists. This evening, to celebrate the VDB’s re-release of “Survey” on DVD, Hill illuminates the medium’s roots in the tumultuous artistic, cultural, and political practices of the 1970s and her efforts to capture the scene twenty years later. The program includes rare public screenings of the collection’s most revealing videos, including: Switch! Monitor! Drift! (Steina Vasulka, 1976); Queen Mother Moore Speech at Greenhaven Prison (People’s Communications Network, 1973); Boomerang (Richard Serra & Nancy Holt, 1974); The Red Tapes, Part II (Vito Acconci, 1976). Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. TRT: ca 75 min.

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Boomerang
Richard Serra with Nancy Holt, US, 1974, Beta SP video, 11 min., excerpt
This is a tape which analyzes its own discourse and processes as it is being formulated. The language of Boomerang, and the relation between the description and what is being described, is not arbitrary. Language and image are being formed and revealed as they are organized. (VDB)

Switch! Monitor! Drift!
Steina Vasulka, US, 1976, Beta SP video 4 min.
Switch! Monitor! Drift! is one of a series of “machine visions” constructed by Steina in the ’70s. In this documentation of a studio landscape, two cameras’ signals are combined through a luminance keyer. One camera is mounted on a turntable; the second camera is pointed at the first. The image from the stationary camera is time-base adjusted so that it appears to drift horizontally across the monitor, exposing the horizontal framing interval, a black (low voltage) area that is normally hidden from view. The signal of the revolving camera is keyed into this area. The revolving second camera continuously pans the studio, occasionally revealing Steina walking around and flipping a directional switch at the turntable. As the tape progresses the luminance key is adjusted to include a broader tonal range through which the signal from the revolving camera is increasingly visible. (VDB)

The Red Tapes Part II
Vito Acconci, US, 1976, Beta SP video, 60 min., excerpt
The Red Tapes is a three-part epic that features the diary musings of a committed outsider: revolutionary, prisoner, artist. The series offers a fragmented mythic narrative and a poetic reassessment of the radical social and aesthetic aspirations of the previous decade. Acconci maps a “topography of the self,” constructing scenes that suggest both the intimate video space of close-up and the panoramic landscape of film space. The production of The Red Tapes involved painters and filmmakers Erika Beckman, Ilona Granet, Richie O’Halloran, Kathy Rusch, David Salle, and Michael Zwack. (VDB)

Queen Mother Moore Speech at Greenhaven Prison
People’s Communications Network, US, 1973, Beta SP video, 18 min., excerpt
Two years after the riots and deaths at Attica, New York, a community day was organized at Greenhaven, a federal prison in Connecticut. Think Tank, a prisoners’ group, coordinated efforts with African-American community members outside the prison walls to fight racism and poverty. The event was documented by People’s Communication Network, a community video group founded by Bill Stephens, for cablecast in New York City, marking the first time an alternative video collective was allowed to document an event inside prison walls. Seventy-five-year-old Queen Mother Moore speaks of her support of Marcus Garvey in New Orleans and her involvement with African-American education in Brooklyn. Her powerful delivery of lessons in black history, first-person accounts of resistance in the South, and finally her own a cappella performance of “This country ’tis to me, a land of misery…,” is a testament to the importance of people using media to document their own communities and tell their own histories. This tape was found in the Antioch College (Yellow Springs, Ohio) Free Library, a media access resource project organized in late 1966 by students interested in networking with social movements and media activists around the country. (VDB)

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Chris Hill is a media curator and educator. She served on the Media Arts faculty at Antioch College from 1997 through its close in 2008. Prior to Antioch, she served as Video Curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY where she also presided over the Board of BCAM, the city’s public access cable TV facility. She is currently on the faculty and Executive Collective of the Nonstop Institute, a liberal arts educational project started in the wake of Antioch’s closure. Her recent curatorial work examines documentary media on US prisons, including the lecture/screening “Habeas Corpus: You Have the Body” (2005-07) and a suite of media art projects exploring the information-gathering strategies of honey bees, including “Sweetness and Labor”(2006). Recent publications include an interview with curator/educator Keiko Sei about her work on the Thai-Burma border in RISK (2008) and an essay on artist Barbara Lattanzi’s “idiomorphic” software projects that appropriate the editing strategies of 1970s experimental films, published in Millennium Film Journal (2003) and Performance Research (2004).

Read the Chicago Reader capsule by Andrea Gronvall here.

Miranda Pennell, Tattoo (2001). Image courtesy of the artist.

In an effort to dispel the notion that the dance film is largely a decorative and apolitical genre, The Dance Camera: Locked & Loaded is an international collection of films and videos that confront the camera’s power to manipulate identity, create celebrity, and automate the viewer’s gaze. Curated by filmmaker and SAIC faculty member Danièle Wilmouth, these charged works serve as compelling activist documents against a range of global injustices, including sexism, xenophobia, and colonialism. Works include: Je Suis Une Bombe (Elodie Pong, Switzerland, 2006), You Made Me Love You (Miranda Pennell & John Smith, UK, 2005), Dansons (Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Algeria/France, 2003), Element (Amy Greenfield, USA, 1973), Tattoo (Miranda Pennell, UK, 2001), Black Spring (Heddy Maalem, Algeria/France/Nigeria, 2002), Familie Tezcan (Nevin Aladag, Turkey/Germany, 2001), Elegy (Douglas Wright & Chris Graves, New Zealand, 1993). Special thanks to Kali Heitholt, who assisted with this program. 1973–2006, multiple artists, multiple countries, multiple formats, ca 80 min.

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You Made Me Love You
Miranda Pennell & John Smith UK, 2005, 3.5 min
Twenty-one dancers are held by your gaze. Losing contact can be traumatic.
“…On the one hand, this is like looking at a group of aliens who have never seen anything like the camera (or you) before. The concentration of the faces on what is before them takes away their self-consciousness, and like a series of Thomas Ruff portraits, they have an unsettling air of insouciance. But ultimately, the thought one is drawn to, and the allegory the title suggests, concern the contemporary obsession with becoming visible through some sort of brush with celebrity, however brief, demeaning or meaningless that might be.”  — Dr. Stephen Riley

Je Suis Une Bombe
Elodie Pong, Switzerland, 2006, 6:12 min.
A figure in a panda bear costume performs an erotic pole dance. On removing the panda’s head, a woman is revealed, and she addresses the camera. She delivers her own praises of a complex image of woman, simultaneously strong and vulnerable—a potential powder keg. Performer: Carine Charaire. Music: Michael Hilton

Element
Dir: Hilary Harris, Choreography/Performer: Amy Greenfield, USA, 1973, 12 min
“Element raises issues of the active image of a woman’s body on film. Greenfield’s body is covered, like a moving sculpture, entirely with black, wet, clay-like mud in an environment of this element. She falls into and rises out of this glistening substance, over and over, until she is seen against the sky and falls one last time, ending with her black body sliding along the mud glittering in the jewel-like sun. The whole film is a human cycle, which is both birthlike and deathlike, and summons up through visceral imagery a very primal concept of female sensuality.” — Canyon Cinema

Elegy
Dir: Chris Graves, Choreography/Performer: Douglas Wright, New Zealand, 1993, 10 min
Douglas Wright is an openly gay dancer and choreographer from New Zealand. He danced with Limbs Dance Company of New Zealand (1980-1983), the Paul Taylor Company of New York (1983-87) and DV8 Physical Theatre of London (1988) before forming the Douglas Wright Dance Company in Auckland in 1989. In 2004, his first book Ghost Dance was released, part love story, part memoir, a deeply felt meditation on the art of performance. The 2006 season of his stage work Black Milk was accompanied by the publication of his second book Terra Incognito. In October 2007 a poetry collection, Laughing Mirror was published, at which time Wright announced his retirement from dance.

“The self-confident innovator, the prime mover with an incredible athletic ability, Douglas Wright, in the late 1980s and early 90s established himself as possibly the best—the most profound—choreographer New Zealand has ever produced. Certainly, he is the most visceral, the most gutsy, creating dance works that combined a kind of unstoppable callisthenic zest with philosophical ideas done out as images: dance as an articulation of the human condition.” — David Eggleton

“Anger is not just mine, anger is like petrol if somebody gets angry someone nearby will catch fire. It’s about exploring the way energy can be transformed through art. I’m lucky, I’ve been given more than my share of anger, so I’ve got a lot of it to transform.” — Douglas Wright

Tattoo
Miranda Pennell, UK, 2001, 9 min
Trees, insects and birds look-on as the countryside is invaded by a lost regiment of soldiers engaged in a repetitive display. The senseless beauty of a military drill dwarfed by the landscape, is by turns absurd and disturbing. The choreography of military drill here is entirely drawn from the tradition of the Light Division of the British Army. Soldiers and band of the Light Division filmed on Salisbury Plane. Music for military-band scored for the film by Graeme Miller.

Dansons (Let Us Dance)
Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Algeria/France, 2003, 5:35 min
The brilliantly concise Dansons shows in a single take the midriff of a woman belly-dancing to La Marseillaise. It is a startlingly clear image of the clash of colonialism with indigenous culture. The military relentlessness of the anthem is in deep contrast to the sensuousness of the body wrapped in the colours of the French tricolour.

Familie Tezcan (The Tezcan Family)
Nevin Aladag, Turkey/Germany, 2001, 6:40 min
A video portrait of a German family with Turkish heritage, practicing breakdance and singing in four different languages.

“Aladag, born in 1972 in Van in eastern Turkey and now living in Berlin, often focuses on foreignness and self-determination as they are experienced by young people of Turkish origin in Germany today. Demarcation and amalgamation, the search for cultural roots and social connection: Aladag is trying to create individual meaning within the larger context of the production of identity.”  — Harald Fricke, Artforum

Black Spring
Dir: Benoit Dervaux, Choreographer: Heddy Maalem, Algeria/France/Nigeria, 2002, 26 min
“Born in Algiers to a French mother and Algerian father, now living in Toulouse and creating tribal-infused contemporary choreography for dancers from Francophone African countries, Heddy Maalem creates stark investigations of race and identity. — Sharon Hoyer

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Danièle Wilmouth creates hybrids of performance art, dance, installation and cinema, which exploit the shifting hierarchies between live and screen space. Her works—Curtain of Eyes (1997), Tracing a Vein (2001), Round (2002), Hula Lou (2007), and A Heretic’s Primer on Love and Exertion (2007), have screened in festivals, museums, galleries, and on television worldwide. In 1990 she began a six-year residency in the Kansai region of Japan, where she cofounded “Hairless Films,” an independent filmmaking collective. While in Japan, she also studied the Japanese contemporary dance form Butoh under Katsura Kan, and performed with his troupe “The Saltimbanques.” She is currently on faculty in the film and video departments of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College. More info at Hairless Films.

Flingco Sound System releases “textures in the shape of sound.”–Dublab

Since its 2007 launch, Chicago’s Flingco Sound System label has played host to a slate of musicians who work collaboratively with visual artists to create darkly mesmerizing videos and richly textured live performances. Tonight, CATE teams up with FSS to present not-to-be-missed live collaborations by the drone-based Chicago trio Haptic (Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Adam Sonderberg) and real-time video artist Lisa Slodki; the end-of-days strings and digital soundscapes of Interbellum (Brendan Burke), with multi-media artist Annie Feldmeier Adams; as well as the short video Avici (2008), by SAIC alum Clayton Flynn and the experimental Richmond, VA trio Cristal (Jimmy Anthony, Greg Darden and Bobby Donne). 2005–09, multiple artists, Austria/USA, multiple formats, 90 min.

Flingco Sound System was started by Bruce Adams, the co-founder of kranky, an independent record label that Pitchfork recently lauded for its “hard earned niche” and “uncompromising spirit.” The new label is equally innovative, supporting and releasing its musicians’ audio-visual collaborations—FSS’s forthcoming Haptic LP will include a DVD of rotating fourth member Lisa Slodki’s album-length video; FSS’s Interbellum release features media produced by Brendan Burke, the man behind Interbellum, and Annie Feldmeier Adams using Burke’s handheld video footage from a transatlantic sailing voyage; among others. The label is designed to adapt to and take advantage of new digital distribution streams and tap into the rejuvenated market for vinyl. FSS releases DRM-free high sample rate downloads, limited edition LPs on 180 gram vinyl with download coupons, and a subscription service.

Since the early 1960s, legendary multimedia artist Carolee Schneemann has blazed a groundbreaking, taboo-busting path through the art world. Expressive, exuberant and intelligent, her work ranges from hand-made diary films and politically charged performances to painting, poetry, and installation, all the while exploring and overturning preconceived notions of sexuality, gender, and the body. Tonight, Schneemann will present a collection of recently restored films, performance videos, and new work, including the first two installments of her landmark Autobiographical Trilogy: Fuses (1964—67), in which she painted, scratched, and collaged self-shot footage of herself and then-partner James Tenney’s erotic explorations, and Plumb Line (1971), along with the influential performance pieces Body Collage (1967) and Americana I Ching Apple Pie (1978—2007) and her latest video Infinity Kisses—The Movie (2008). Co-presented by SAIC’s Visiting Artists Program and Department of Performance and the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center, which will present a second program of Schneemann’s work on Friday, November 7. 1964—2008, Carolee Schneemann, USA, multiple formats, ca 80 min.

Mutidisciplinary feminist artist Carolee Schneemann is known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. Her work is primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relationship to social bodies. Her works have been exhibited internationally, including a full retrospective at the New Museum of Contermporary Art, and retrospective screenings at the the Centre Georges Pompidou, MoMA, and Whitney. Schneemann has taught at several universities, including the California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunter College, and Rutgers University, where she was the first female art professor hired. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including: a 1999 Art Pace International Artist Residency, San Antonio, Texas; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1997, 1998); 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship; Gottlieb Foundation Grant; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts, Maine College of Art, Portland, ME. Lifetime Achievement Award, College Art Association, 2000. Additionally, she has published widely, including, Cezanne, She Was A Great Painter (1976), More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979, 1997), Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (2003). A selection of her letters edited by Kristine Stiles is forthcoming.

More
CaroleeSchneemann.com
New York Times: Carolee Schneemann

Joanie 4 Jackie knows that the best lady-made film and video art belongs not only in a gallery, but also in the bedrooms of girls all over America. — J4J

In 1995, multimedia artist Miranda July began inviting DIY women filmmakers to submit work in return for a “chainletter,” or a compilation tape with the filmmaker’s work plus that of nine others. Thirteen years and hundreds of movies later, the Joanie 4 Jackie lo-fi feminist experiment in alternative film distribution is still going strong, now under the care of video artist Jacqueline Goss and Bard College. Tonight’s program surveys J4J’s history, with works by July, Tammy Rae Carland, Naomi Uman, Dulcie Clarkson, Eileen Maxson, C. Ryder Cooley, Zoey Kroll, Sativa Peterson, Vanessa Renwick and Sarah Hanssen, along with a new documentary about the project by July and Shauna McGarry, who also curated this evening’s program. 1983–2003, various directors, USA, multiple formats, ca 90 min.

More
Joanie4Jackie.com
MirandaJuly.com