Surveying the Limitless Field
When the staff of the New York Underground Film Festival decided to end the fifteen-year-old institution and start fresh, they named their new venture Migrating Forms. The title of the new festival, which debuted last week at Anthology Film Archives, resonates with the theories that heavyweight curators like Roger Brueghel and Nicolas Bourriaud have proposed to describe art-making in conditions of international interconnectedness, where a finite number of cultural models yield a seemingly infinite number of variations. The term “migrating forms” could also refer to the travel of moving-image art between gallery and cinema, or describe aspects of films in the festival program, from the content of documentaries like Lucy Raven’s China Town, a stop-motion photographic animation about the U.S.-China copper trade, to the form of shorts that repurposed found footage, like Jesse McLean’s Somewhere Only We Know, which included a montage of reality-show contestants’ faces as they are kicked off television.
Oksana Bulgakowa’s The Factory of Gestures, based on her book of the same name, explored how Russian and Soviet cinema manufactured and recalibrated codes of body language over eighty years of social upheaval. Running commentary explained gestures’ shifting meanings, and the replacement of the films’ sound with a spare, atonal score helped separate the actors’ motions from narrative. The subject matter of The Factory of Gestures had limited appeal for the experimental film crowd (I was the only viewer at the Saturday afternoon screening), but Bulgakowa’s work suggested an interesting direction for creative presentations of scholarly research.
The lecture format appeared again in Oliver Laric’s Versions, a pithy essay on the irrelevance of the notion of authenticity and the “animistic” attitude that has taken ...
The Wreck of the Dumaru (2004) - Jennifer Steinkamp
Jennifer Steinkamp's great uncle Ernest Hedinger was a seaman on the Dumaru during WWI, 1918. The ship carrying weapons and fuel was struck by lightning scarcely a couple hours outside of Guam. Powerful currents carried the helpless lifeboats out to sea. There were not enough provisions in the over crowded boat. Only 19 years old, Uncle Ernest died after 13 days. Out of desperation he had been drinking seawater, which caused him to imagine a nail stuck in his head. Soon after his death, two of the shipmates were cannibalized. The crew was trapped out at sea for 24 days total.
The installation consisted of 4 projections in sync to create a giant animated seascape panorama across 2 walls of the gallery. The imagery consisted of two ocean animations combined, one looking from a view high above the ocean, and the other from down in the water.
Migrating Forms Kicks Off Today!
Migrating Forms, an offshoot of the defunct New York Underground Film Festival, runs tonight through Sunday at Anthology Film Archives in lower Manhattan. The five-day program is book-ended with feature-length films -- a 1960s-flavored, episodic satire of religion, philosophy, and criticism (Owen Land’s Dialogues) and a documentary about creationist geologists who offer evidence that the world is 6,000 years old (Michael Gitlin’s The Earth Is Young). In between there are almost one hundred long and short works to suit every taste. If you can’t get enough YouTube appropriation, montage, and computer effects, try going Saturday at 7:15 for "Mixed and Maxed," a program featuring Animal Charm and Oliver Laric, or Sunday at 4:45 for "Mature Audiences," with works by Jesse McLean and Takeshi Murata. At Saturday night’s "Tube Time!" tournament, audience members will decide which contestant found the weirdest footage online. The full schedule is here. Single tickets cost $10, and a festival pass costs $50 -- or you can get one free by being the third person to email info[at]migratingforms.org with Rhizome in the subject line!
Splashback: Rhizome's Splash Pages, 1998-2002
Rhizome is pleased to announce the launch of “Splashback: Rhizome’s Splash Pages, 1998-2002,” an online exhibition featuring the 39 splash pages commissioned over a four-year period. “Splashback” offers a brief overview of online art and design practices from ten years ago through a nearly obsolete medium, the splash page.
Artists include: Annie Abrahams, Daniel Garcia Andujar, Ben Benjamin, heath bunting, Gregory Chatonsky, Shu Lea Cheang, Andrew Childs, Curt Cloninger, David Crawford, Mark Daggett, Joshua Davis, entropy8zuper, Andrew Forbes, Valery Grancher, Matthew Hoessli, Olia Lialina, David Lindeman, jimpunk, JODI, Yael Kanarek, Lucas Kuzma, Antonio Mendoza, Mouchette, MTAA, Robbin Murphy, Nettmedia, Scott Paterson, Pavu, Waldemar Pranckiewicz, Reinis, Satellite01, Sigma6, Starry Night, Eugene Thacker, Jake Tilson, Maciej Wisniewski, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
“Splashback” is organized by Brian Droitcour, Rhizome Curatorial Fellow.
Site built by Elise Roedenbeck, Technology Assistant.
Call for Submissions:
IEEE VISAP'15 / Data Improvisations / Call for Papers and Artworks
Posted by Angus Forbes
Edwin VanGorder