In psychology, anhedonia is an inability to experience satisfaction from normally pleasurable life events such as eating, exercise and social or sexual interaction. It was also supposed to be the original title of Annie Hall, but was considered unmarketable.
Mixology, the annual festival curated by the new music and new media organization Roulette, got off to a strong start last week with opening night performances by Pamela Z and Elliott Sharp, presented in collaboration with Harvestworks. Pamela Z demonstrated her use of gesture to control sound, which she produces with her own operatic voice as well as electronically. Elliott Sharp was a one-man noise band, playing both an amplified saxophone and a keyboard-based instrument while manipulating both on his laptop. The night ended with an improvised duet, in which Pamela Z played her iPhone like an ocarina.
Performances continued through the weekend and will resume tonight. Tomorrow’s program features Matthew Ostrowski, who will pick up themes of gesture and sampling with a new work titled “Patterns of Changing Light.” Mixology runs through May 30, concluding with a performance by downtown stalwart David Rosenbloom, whose piece Sound and Light I continues his thirty-year-long exploration of dense sonic textures with a more recent integration of video as the basis for an evolving score. The full program for the rest of Mixology can be found on Roulette’s calendar.
Long a destination for filmmakers to showcase their work, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen has expanded its program in recent years to incorporate experimental film and video art. Beginning in 2006 distributors, such as Lux, Electronic Arts Intermix, Netherlands Media Art Institute, and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center, were invited to spotlight works recently added to their catalogs. This portion of the festival was rounded out by “Unreal Asia”, a themed series of screenings of Southeast Asian film and video art, as well as a profiles on Japanese experimental filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio, Mexican filmmaker Nicolás Echevarría, German filmmaker Herbert Fritsch, the Sarajevo Documentary School and a retrospective on the Russian art group the Factory of Found Clothes. Annual segments, such as the MuVi award for music videos, an international competition, a competition including only German work, and films made by children, were scheduled alongside the thematic programs, resulting in a diverse and active six-day calendar. I had the opportunity to attend the festival for the first time a week ago, and caught a number of the screenings.
excerpts from a live mixing session performed on 8 VCR decks with some analog feedback/delay effects.
This coming Wednesday at The New School, German artist Christian Jankowski will give a talk on his career and work at 6:30pm in the Tishman Auditorium. (Students get in for free, so be sure to bring your student IDs!) Jankowski works in a variety of media, including video, installation, photography, performance, and sculpture, often engaging aspects of his personal life as his subject matter. In 1997, for a piece called Let's get physical/digital, Jankowski and his girlfriend Una, he in Stockholm and she in Milan, set up a chat room on the web where they met daily. These instant-message exchanges were then translated into German and Swedish, and given to seven pairs of actors, who played out the two roles in a series of vignettes that were videotaped, subtitled in English, and broadcast on the Web. Exhibiting the playful humor more typical of Jankowski’s pieces is Telemistica (1999), created for the 1999 Venice Biennale and now on view in the exhibition Broadcast at Pratt Manhattan Gallery. For this piece, the artist phoned Italian psychics on their live television shows and asked them questions about his artwork, such as how it would fare at the Biennale. Jankowski's stilted and awkward conversations with psychics in his non-native Italian jokingly mock artistic inspiration and success. Jankowski’s work is also currently on view at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, where a trio of life-sized, bronze figures, titled Living Sculptures: Caesar, Dali Woman, El Che are positioned just outside the Park’s entrance. The figures are modeled after three professional street performers the artist observed in Barcelona presenting themselves as ...
The date is February 9, 1972, and Chris Burden arrives at Channel 3 Cablevision’s studio in Irvine, California, for an interview with Phyllis Lutjeans. The TV station had approached Burden in January and asked him to do a piece for the channel, yet they censored several of his proposals, so he eventually agreed to an interview during which they would discuss the reasons for the station’s refusal of his ideas. Burden brings his own video crew so that he can have a copy of the interview. He requests that the interview be broadcast live, and during the course of the interview Lutjeans asks Burden to discuss a few pieces that he has thought of doing. The artist responds by demonstrating a TV hijack: he takes Lutjeans hostage, holding a knife to her throat and threatening her life if the station stops transmission, while verbally abusing her with threats. At the end of the recording, Burden destroys the station’s tape of the show by dousing it with acetone. He then offers an “irate” station manager his taped version of the show, which includes footage of the show and the destruction of the station’s tape, but the manager refuses. Burden explains in an interview, “T.V. Hijack was ultimately about who is in control over what's presented through the media.” This aggressive act against the restrictive and one-to-many structure of television is what curator Irene Hofmann cites as her original inspiration for the exhibition "Broadcast," now on view at Pratt Manhattan Gallery. The show presents a selection of works, dating from the 1960s to the present, that interrupt broadcasting systems in order to examine or challenge the structure, influence, and power of mainstream television and radio.
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.
Edwin VanGorder