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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Dear friends -</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">The 9th annual Not Still Art Festival was a great success!</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Twenty two international video/animation works were
screened.</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Eleven attending artists were interviewed during afternoon
previews.  (Links to the artists websites are on the Not Still
Art homepage: http://www.improvart.com/nsa/)</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">The NSA fest was curated by Carol Goss who founded Not
Still Art in 1996 to create a forum for artists working with
abstract and non-narrative electronic motion imaging and
music/sound design.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">A full house viewed the festival on a beautiful 12 foot
projection screen with large audio speakers.  The Micro
Museum in Brooklyn New York, which houses a permanent
display of video inventions by William Laziza, has hosted the
Not Still Art Festival since 1999.  Museum director, Kathleen
Laziza, provided an eclectic and supportive environment for
the festival events.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">The 9th annual Not Still Art International Screening began
with a fanfare animation from Chris Casady, with music by
John Dentino.  "Lost and Found," with it's tight, hard-edged,
abstract geometry and bouyant movement set us up for a
spectacular show.  This was our version of the MGM lion's
roar!  Of course, these guys are from L.A.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">The next piece was "Ten-Long-Lives," by Jae Yoon Park who
is attending the School of Visual Arts in NYC from South
Korea.  This computer drawn, 2-D, black and white animation,
with a wistful musical score by Edgar Grana, mystified us with
it's symbolism.  Jae Yoon explained that all the images
represent codes in Korean culture: sun, water, clouds, deer,
moutain, etc.  The images had the look of oriental wood block
prints come to life.  And they were definitely inbued with an
intense respect for nature.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Stephan Larson's black and white 3-D geometric particle
animation followed.  We have screened Larson's work before
and those who attend each year see an evolution in his work
and music.  "(re)cognition" begins as a babel of cubes that fall
into a jumble of rambling and bouncing blocks.  We became so
engrossed in the movement and changing material of the
shapes that they took on anthropomorphic qualties.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">William Brown, who traveled from Atlanta to be with us, has
also been screened a number of times at the Not Still Art
Festival.  His piece "Holi Celebration" is a slow-motion
recording of a medieval Spring festival in Jaipur and Barsana,
India.  The images are riveting in their composition and color
palette, which is magically created by the tradition of tossing
red and purple colored powders into the air and onto the
participants crowding through the narrow stone alleys.  Brown
told us that he sees as a still photographer - but wants to keep
all of the frames on the tape.  By slowing down the motion, he
accomplishes both.  We become accutely aware of details we
would otherwise not notice and we are overwhelmed by the
abstraction of the forms and their random movement.  The
movement of the Indians in many ways echoed that of Larson's
cubes.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Tod Pardon's "Undercover" began with a trenchcoated man
dashing through scratched and smeared surfaces, which might
be exotic places or a woman's body.  His layered music of
spoken word over Indian rhythms segued perfectly from
Brown's piece.  Pardon, who is a very talented jewelry
designer, proves his aesthetic taste is transferrable to motion
mediums.  "Undercover" is jewel-like in its scintillating
reflections and mercurial movement.  There is also more than a
hint of mystery in his mix of images.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">"On Smoking," a collaboration from Italy by video artist
Francesco Leprino and musicians Arrigo Cappelletti and Giulio
Visibelli, is not in the least bit mysterious.  The couple we see
very up close, with lots of heavy breathing, are definitely going
to get together.  The moustacheoed man and the lipsticked
woman are joined with their mutually exhaled smoke, which
creates form, movement and a bridge between the two.  The
improvised jazz score by Cattelletti is sensuous and
provocative, leading us to an appreciation of the European
live-for-the-moment lifestyle of cigars and filterless cigarettes.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Mark Zaki and Annie Loui collaborated long distance between
NYC and LA on "Absense Presence."  This ghostly dance
inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's poem on the legend of
Orpheus descending to the underworld, was initiated by Loui
as a reconcilliation with her husband's death.  In fact, Zaki
created the score from sample's of Loui's husband's Baroque
music.  Loui and Zaki attended the screening and told us that
they don't recommend working remotely the way they did.
And yet, they did admit, that the duration of the process
lended itself to many discoveries they both hope to use in the
future.  The ethereal, dreamlike piece they created does indeed
give you the sense you are traveling to the realm of Pluto.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">"Particle Valentine" snapped us out of our reverie and into a
"lucid dream" of profound happiness.  Christine Dunn had a
dream one night of an "orgy of butterflies" and then she
proceeded to work for months to realize this experience in
animation.  She told us that the abstract images were created
often from found objects, including tapioca (which in case you
didn't know is a kind of pudding).  The piece thoroughly
succeeded.  We were brought into her ecstatic experience -
made up of outrageous if unidentifiable images - processed in
2-D animation software.  And even her audio - which was
industrial light, was created from a huge number of minute
audio samples, then layered and scrambled so as to appear as
hazy as her dream.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">"What I Want," by Ido Fluk - a video artist from Israel,
brought us back down to earth.  His open, questioning hand
traversed an ever disappearing landscape as he bombarded us
with his rant on contemporary Western cultures's expectations
of young people.  Ultimately, though, he abandoned all these
complaints with: "New York is all about sex."  This received a
few exclamatory affirmations from the audience.  </span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Bart Woodstrup came from Chicago to be with us.  His
"Cyberdate" was the perfect follow-up for Fluk's piece.  This
performance montage based on San Francisco online dating
services, including faces, voices and "personals" text, was a
survey of what most singles do want.  It turns out to be more
of the same.  What's disconcerting is the normality of these
people who are venturing out into this no-man's land of
mating.  Of course, Woodstrup and his collaborator Matt
Biederman, had a surprise for us at the end - which we won't
reveal so you can enjoy it for yourself.  Woodstrup confessed
that the final image, which brought a good laugh from the
audience, was an accident during the improvised performance
in Chicago - which they instantly recognized as a great ending.  </span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">"Byegones," opened with a couple holding hands to the tune of
the Boswell Sister's 1925 recording of "Nights When I Am
Lonely."  Carol Goss's piece was created from tape shot in
Paris in 2001.  After attempting period-like production in black
and white, she abandoned this recreation of the 1920s for
footage that conjured the spirit of the 1920s - which included
children playing patty-cake on the Champs Ellysee during the
double-time musical bridge of the piece.  After "Cyberdate,"
"Byegones" appeared to be the next stage in the mating game:
breaking up.  The piece ends with drawings, created in a
French cafe by Vanessa Bley, of a distraught women and a
very cute guy with shades and beret.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">After a brief intermission and general mixing, plus a relocation
of chairs closer to the front for late arrivals, the screening
continued.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Gerhard Mantz sent us his trance piece "Labyrinth No. 136"
from Berlin.  The translucent geometric abstraction moving
toward a central diminishing point was mesmerizing.  Mantz's
music aided the effect of floating though endless, slowly
evolving but never disturbingly different spaces.  Some found
this very relaxing and others were challenged.  This could go
on forever.  </span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">We then entered a very different kind of spatial geometry: Max
Gleason's "Sing To Me You Precious Wound."  The screen
was a composite grid of many small movies with simultaneous
audios.  A simulcast of an entire movie's scenes in five
minutes.  We found ourselves shifting our attention to a certain
motion here, a sexual gesture there.  For these were all staged
scenes between young couples in a black and white world.
The looping of these scenes and the revelation of what it was
you were attracted to had a kind of existential desperation to
it.  We felt that this behavior, as universal as it is, will go on
forever.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Animator Keum-Taek Jung then brought us into an intense
scrutiny of sinewy lines which tripped and spilled over each
other playfully and yet not without tension.  Christopher
Brakel did the music for "Free Line" which was so organic to
the piece, that it was impossible to think of the image and the
sound as being created separately.  Jung and Brakel are
students of Stephanie Maxwell, at Rochester Institiute of
Technology, and Allan Schindler, at Eastman School of Music.
There is a style of work that is being nurtured here which is
dynamic and identifiable.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Maxwell and Schindler's tour de force "Time Streams" was
screened next.  The intensity of the images and music were
bracing.  Maxwell created a 2 D world of saturated color and
constant movement.  The purely abstract images and music
ebbed and flowed together.  Schindler's musical composition
was romantic and melodic, while created from samples and
computer built sounds.  As usual their work was exhilerating.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Chris Ernst, an artist collaborating with himself on an
LA/Boston axis, treated us to a mix of fast moving, highly
colored abstraction, layered over landscapes of West and East
coast homes and the Watts Towers.  Then, just to see if we
could mutitask he added multiple lines of text, typed on the
screen that described the coordinates of the distances between
all these locations.  The pulsating rock rhythms belied the cool
text. Ernst told us that the abstraction represented his
emotional conflicts about all these geographies - not to
mention those of  Simon Rodia (check this guy out:
http://www.wattstowers.net/towers/learn/simon_rodia.htm),
who travelled from Italy to LA. to build the towers.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">The tempo picked up again with "Madcatter."  Robert Piretti
threw all his subconscious clips into this piece, but when Cy
Donovan created the panic-paced music, Piretti was forced to
speed up the montage, and as a result we got some nice
paranoid moments.  Not the least of which was of a large
insect repeatedly walking across the screen.  The 'woman-in-
jeopardy' is more in danger from the daddy-longleggs than any
other predator.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Walter Wright creates his video work on his self-programmed
Targa board in his PC.  The images, which are shot in advance,
are processed during live performance.  And this time it is with
the electronic jazz of the Jon Voight Ensemble.  Wright's
images are smeared and impressionistic, which is in sympathy
with the bowed electronic bass.  Very painterly indeed.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Back to paranoia.  John Knecht's "Crisis in Sapville" takes us
into a retro cartoon world of the present:  the era of "orange
alerts."  The saps, of course, are the manipulated population
which is bombarded with fear propaganda.  This was a great
piece to view in NYC a month before the presidential
elections.  The few lines of text that crawled across the screen
were so drawn out that their philosophical message seemed to
break up into sound bites of disinformation.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">Thanks to judsoN wright we blew off our political angst with
"Homocidal Maniac for a President" - which was a completely
abstract piece of progammed dots forming repetitive arches
with interactive industrial audio.  The 2084'ish dots got faster
and the sound got louder.  Is this how it will all end?  It's a
relief to know that this cTheory programmer from Cornell has
a sense of humour.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">We ended the screening with two digital pieces which were
created at the L.A. Abstract Film Workshop.  John Adamczyk
did the music and animation for "In The Moment" and Audri
Phillips did the animation for "Freeway Wind," while
Adamcyck did the music.  We can't do better than to quote the
artists themselves, Phillips: "a rush of inspired ecstasy that
occurs in an instant;" Adamczyk: "a video poem touching on
the temporary nature of life and the sadness that is one and the
same with the beauty all around us."</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">We weren't saddened by either of these pieces.  In fact, we
were uplifted.  They both carried us from the mundane to the
fantastic.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">And that's the wrap-up of the 9th Annual Not Still Art
Festival.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">We are hoping to do something different for the blow-off 10th
Annual next year.</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">If you have any ideas or suggestions, please let us know.  </span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">[email protected]</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt">P.S.  If you wish to be removed from this list (which only
sends out a few messages a year), please reply with <NSA8>
in the subject.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">N O T   S T I L L   A R T</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">http://www.improvart.com/nsa/</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">[email protected]   </span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">P.O. Box 496, Cherry Valley, NY 13320-0496   </span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt"><i>NSA is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the
Arts.</i></span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">N O T   S T I L L   A R T</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">http://www.improvart.com/nsa/</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">[email protected]   </span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">P.O. Box 496, Cherry Valley, NY 13320-0496   </span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt"><i>NSA is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the
Arts.</i></span></font></div>
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The Festival Review
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Type: discussion