LA Freewaves & Rhizome.LA event

LA Freewaves & Rhizome.LA Present
The Poetics of Bandwith In Two Parts:
Fast and Lite, Hot and Heavy
Hosted at the American Film Institute

Sunday, November 10, 2002, 7pm
Frankovich Barnes screening room
in the Mayor Library Building, AFI
2021 N. Western Avenue, Hollywood
map & directions: http://www.afi.com/about/directions.asp
parking: next to building
admission: FREE


The Poetics of Bandwith In Two Parts

This program presents a selection of short experimental videos that exploit
the something characteristics of new media-making tools. The first part of
the program, subtitled Fast and Lite, includes works that embrace the lo-fi
aesthetic brought about by the internet's low bandwith demands. These works
employ compression schemes that have recently reinvigorated the basic
principles of geometric abstraction and minimalism: reduction of form to its
essential elements, absence of a polemic message, simplification of visual
information. As a result, these works often rely on the graphic impact of
bold, geometric forms, recalling–or in many extremes fetishizing–late
modernist design motifs. The second part, Hot and Heavy, includes works that
eschew compression and subscribe to formal experimental filmaking principles
of sensory immersion.


Part I: Fast and Lite
The economy, efficiency, and retrosploitation of low bandwith environments

Tony Cokes/Seth Price, Manifesto A, 3:50, 2001
The piece presents a bold textual critique of the pop music industry,
complimented by geometrically patterned, animated interstitials and Seth
Price's interpretation of an early Kraftwerk electonica composition.

Lynn Chan, JJ Chinois, Approx 5 min
This fictional music video combines appropriated live action footage with
Flash animation modeled after celebrity fan sites found on the web. Chan's
skillful utilization of design motifs inspired by cinematic set and costume
design from 1970s Bruce Lee films lend it a vinyliciously retro appeal.

Preeti A.K. Mistry,Junk Box Warrior, 5:00, 2002
Starring the Trans Slam Poet Marcus Rene Van, this video explores the
alienation, frustration and fear of a "gender misfit." It is a gritty spoken
word performance which uses grainy black and white still photography in a
manner resembling low frame-rate streaming video.

Carol Martori & Wolfgang Hastert, Cybervixen, 2:20, 2002
Cybervixen presents a lyrical montage of explicit webcam footage captured
from streaming video sex chat communities. It is part of a larger
documentary feature project, Click Me, about online dating
(http://www.wolfganghastert.com/click.htm).

Michelle Handelman, DJ Spooky vs Webspinstress, 2:30
Handelman crafts a technologically-informed critique of the contemporary art
scene using comic book action hero-style Flash animation. The heroine, an
eight-legged vinyl-spinning "webspinstress," does battle with a bug-eyed DJ
Spooky in a struggle to rule over the artworld.

Peggy Ahwesh, She Puppet, 15:00, 2001
Ahwesh deftly developed She Puppet from months' worth
of captured footage from the video game Tombraider. Simultaneously an
absurdist montage of repetitious actions and a feminist critique of male
gaming culture, this video is also a study of the hyper-efficient
aesthetization of computer generated (CG) virtual environments.


Part II: Hot and Heavy
The definition, fidelity, and hypermontage of full-framerate video

Mark O'Connell, Jump Out the Window, 3:00
In simple terms, this piece is a video manipulation of a man jumping out of
a top-story window. O'Connell digitally reworks video generated by analog
feedback to create gorgeous, immersive washes of semi-abstracted, pulsating
imagery.

Charlene Boehne, Homemade Movies (broom, duster, sink, toilet, dryer), 5 min
Exploiting a mundane subject, domestic chores, Boehne documents everyday
actions in a manner which takes the medium of video to its extremes. The
real-life actions are too fast, the sounds too explicit, to be accurately
contained within standard means of mechanical or digital reproduction,
resulting in works that appear to lie somewhere between live-action and
digital manipulation.

Brooke Sauer, It's A Palindrome, 3:00
Recalling Nam June Paik's early experimentation with video signals, this
piece presents an electrifying interpretation of the race track, reminding
us of video's origins as an electronic transmission of light. Sauer's
visuals are complemented by a soundtrack solely generated by the human
voice.

Shalom Gorewitz, The Ambiguous Coil 5:00, 2001
The Ambiguous Coil is part of a collection of collaborative works, Before,
During, After, that reference the devastating event of 9/11 in New York.
Using extremely quick-cutting, strobing imagery interspersed with a vague
visual narrative, Gorewitz creates an introspective reflection on the
tragedy of 9/11.

Tyler Jacobson, Rolls of Information, 6:45
This faux industrial marketing video brilliantly comments on our information
age-induced sensory overload. It bombards the viewer with sometimes
exasperating repetition of simple messages then uses video scrambling
technology to remove any significant meaning from these same messages.

Donigan Cummings, A Short Lesson, 1:30, 2001
This brutally candid portrait exposes video's ability to reproduce more than
we want to see. The viewer becomes uncomfortable as the invasive camera
pervades the subject's persona; multiple aural narratives complement the
tragedy of the image.

Daniel Martinico, Portrait of Fred Astair in Water, 3:50, 2002
In this elegant video, one piece of visual information is virtually expanded
into an audio-visual monologue. Using an appropriated video frame as the
foundation, successive layers of water imagery are composited and
continually rendered to apparently immerse Fred Astaire in an ethereal
shower of sight and sound.