17 Days Video Series

9/25/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

My films are experimental, I work very much with animation, but I often mix two-dimensional successions of drawings and three-dimensional settings (animated using the “stop motion” technique) with real life shots. I like crossing over layers of different bits of film that were created with these different techniques. A lot of time based images in my films are abstract. I do not use narrative, action or talking, and the narration is for me what happens through the succession of images and places that appear on the screen one after the other with their elements moving into and out of the frame. Very often, I include figurative elements to the scenes that I construct: they could be objects created with clay carefully put in the right pace to signify a particular concept, real human beings moving and conveying particular emotions, or falling plants and water to give to the viewer the sense that a change is in progress. I think the most important thing in a movie is the shape of objects or their colors that alone can express a mood or send a message without the needs for words.

It is useful for me to stop for some time working with the camera, and start dealing with materials like paper, water, glue, canvas and clay: my video work is very much connected to the making of art. I think more like a sculptor or a photographer; I am much more a marker of shapes that when interlaced with time and sound make things happen, than a story teller.

The Tower Trilogy, 2005 - 10:00 mins

Barbara Agreste was born in Pescara in 1971. She first approaches art-making i the Art Lyceum of her town, and after completing the course she goes to Milan to attend a scenography course in the Academy of Arts. Not happy with the cultural atmosphere that surrounds her in Italy, at the age of 23 she moves to London where she begins working as a performer for “Rawhead Dance Theatre”. In 1996 Barbara enrolls in Kent Institute of Arts & Design taking as her subject of study “Film & Video Production”. After graduating in July 2000 she has access to the MA course in “Fine Art” at Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in London where she is awarded the “Master of Arts” in September 2004. Since then Barbara has continued producing films and paintings, exhibiting and attending film festivals in UK, Italy and in the rest of the world. Barbara lives and works in London although her visits to Italy are very frequent.

Barbara Agreste - London United Kingdom | Pescara Italy

www.bambee.org

9/29/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

Generally speaking, I work in a variety of media including sculpture, animations and digital technologies focusing on postmodern thought related to the body - as a biological entity and a cultural idea. Through a combination of materials and methods, my installation environments undermine notions of a fixed, homogenous body/persona relationship. I present objects and other elements (projected and monitor-based animations, mixed media drawings, digital prints, etc.) that visually partition a body throughout a space, each element acting as a type of prosthesis; a series of artificial replacements that - as a whole - create an eccentric landscape. Currently, I’m exploring cyborg identity and issues related to disembodiment - a term often associated with the use and integration of technology into everyday life - within my creative practice. Using sources ranging from cybertheory, posthuman theory, cyberfeminism and science fiction, I’m investigating issues regarding the absence of the body within cyberspace and the impact of this absence on our understanding of the mind/body relationship. Most importantly, my work hypothesizes an expansion of gender and biology in light of these divergent modes of exploration.

Using digital and analog techniques, my animations typically depict twittering, jittering, microscopic bitmaps that evolve, transform and transgress over time. Although most often viewed independently, these animations serve to establish an interior life for the anatomically derived objects within my installations; abstract, full color parasites that seemingly adjust and optimize the larger organism (or object). Using its native programming language Actionscript, I code generative components in Flash that create the kinetic behaviors of these animations. In a recent residency at the Experimental Television Center in March 2007, I began using other customizable software programs - specifically MaxMSP+Jitter - the in the creation of these elements.

Your Adam’s apple is my synthetic port, 2007 - 3:12 mins

Krista Hoefle - South Bend Indiana

www.kristahoefle.com

9/30/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

It has been suggested that in dreams, every character represents the dreamer. In this short video loop the artist painstakingly chases himself, exuding much effort, with no reward. The sensation of struggle is in turn emphasized by the transformation of the landscape, audio distortion, as well as the continuous loop.

Dream,

My work’s strongest connection is through me and is fueled by my everyday experiences and an obsession with time. I feel the constant pressure to be productive/efficient, but have the desire for tranquility. The work goes back and forth between a sense of anxiety and a sense of peace, which is caused by an internal restlessness. I struggle to find balance.

My background in painting is very important to how I approach the content and execution of my art. In a painting, I find myself responding mostly to the physicality/manipulation of the medium, and the mysterious quality in the constancy of the image. I want to treat video in a manner that considers the physicality of the material, including pixels, camera handling, and movement. Simultaneously, I want to deconstruct the most integral aspect of video, the timeline. I hope to establish a connection with the viewer, in a metal space that is similar to the one I enter when experiencing a painting, which activates emotions and stimulates thoughts, but does not necessarily suggest a specific predetermined conclusion. My attraction to the loop and gestural editing is driven by repetition, and its inherently compelling nature. When rhythm is established, a viewer can connect, and the details become accessible. A Key interest in my work is transitional state. I speculate that when I am in transit, that is where I find calmness. The stresses of point A and point B disappear in the space/time in between the two. It is in those moments and places I find myself free to think about any and every thing, or nothing at all, while becoming a purely sensory being.

There are other things that really inspire me; my concerns and interests on a broader scale such as spirituality, quantum physics, interconnectivity, philosophy, history and the future. The reason these topics are important is because I think this is how my work becomes accessible to others. These are the same topics I wonder about when pressured to produce or while in the serene transitional state. Everyone deals with peace and anxiety on a personal level, I think this is where the connection between myself and the viewer exists.

Adam Cruces - Kansas City Missouri

www.adamcruces.com

10/1/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

Sky and Wires: At Home and Homeless is a response to a contemporary life of engaging with places not as a space to be, but as a space to chart a trajectory through. In two movements, still imagery from locations in New York, San Francisco, San Diego, Arizona, Indiana, Louisville, Austin, and Las Vegas is introduced and then destroyed in a hyper-rhythm of image and always-progressing serial sound. The aggressive pattern and flow of image and sound become predominant, as the importance of individual scenes and notes is blurred. One of the work’s central questions is in thinking about how we construct identity through the places we inhabit. Do we lose a bit of this core identity as we move from place to place, or are we at home wherever we are?

Sky and Wires: At Home and Homeless, 2007 - 9:30 mins

Blake Carrington is an artist exploring the intersection between geography, signal/noise theory and phenomenology. He has recently completed a residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts under Carsten Nicolai, and is currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University. He has received grants from the Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation and the Chancellor’s Office of Engagement Initiatives at Syracuse University for co-founding Urban Video Project, a public arts initiative that uses the post-industrial landscape of Syracuse as context for multimedia projections. He is also one-third of the artist group Avalanche Collective.

Blake Carrington - Syracuse New York

www.blakecarrington.com

10/2/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

Mountains, lakes, rivers an deserts become instruments of the DJ in this glitchy and poetic work about searching surfaces and touching sounds.

A Rough Mix, 2007 - 8:00 mins

Rick Silva (Brazil, 1977): Rick Silva’s artwork has been exhibited in festivals and museums in five continents including Transmediale (Germany), Sonar (Spain), Futuresonic (England), VideoBrasil, DOTMOV (Japan) and The Whitney Museum of American Art’s Artport. Silva has performed his work live in London, Tokyo, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and Houston’s Software Cinema Festival. His artwork has been written about in the New York Times, The Guardian UK, Liberation, El Pais, and featured on the CBS Evening News. He is currently a visiting professor of digital media at the University of Georgia (Athens).

Rick Silva - Athens Georgia

www.ricksilva.net

10/6/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

Individual sets of subtitles (shown in parenthesis) textually descriptive of specific sounds from everyday life are displayed subsequently throughout the full runtime of the installation. The video continues to run the subtitles entirely without accompanying imagery and/or audio. The piece prompts anticipation, puzzlement, and an imaginative automatic act of association through visual legibility. There is an additional sense of memory and vulnerability in relationship to cohesive experiences throughout day-to-day happenings; however, a consequential abstract narrative can be (variably) derived from the word-sound associations resulting in a contextual ambiguity.

Subtitles, 2007 - 5:32 mins, silent

American born, Andréa DeFelice, is an interdisciplinary artist who works in drawing, video installation, sound, and sculptural cinematic devices.

I am fascinated by the physical senses, behavioral psychology, and how things are affected by surrounding environments and forces. In many ways, my work focuses on human physicality and sometimes, by implication, mortality. The outcomes are seductive, intimate, narrative, and communicative. Through my work I attempt to conceptually reflect upon actual experiences in day-to-day life. My process is about experimenting with various media in order to create environments, objects, and images that may ultimately alter the utilization and/or feeling of the senses. Among my most important concerns in my artistic process is to inspire perceptiveness and bring about controversy over why and how surrounding influences affect our behavior and experiences in everyday life—primarily the experiences related to our bodies, emotions, communication, and our personal (mis)conceptions.

Andréa De Felice - New York New York

www.andreadefelice.com

10/7/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

THE WHITE WALL
Films (logical mind games) are based on different assumptions where the title contains a thesis and the contents of the film itself provides a proof of the assumption. They question the existing systems of values and point to the relations between the motivation for activity, the activity itself, and its result.

Films are a result of experiments, carried out on commonly accepted ideas. Ideas presented in a different context, questioned, and challenged, change their ascribed meaning. And then, absurd comes in. Absurd which is not a nonsense but rather is a meeting of two ore more true statements. Results in contradiction, which may become a new entity.

Igor Krenz lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. He is a co-founder of “Photo Service” and “Azorro” groups, art collectives that perform and circulate images. He has made over 60 films that have been presented at the Centre for Contemporary Art and Raster Gallery in Warsaw, GB Agency in Paris and Tate Modern in London.

Igor Krenz - Warsaw Poland

10/9/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

My work tends to investigate visual representations that evolve over time, using the metaphor of the journey. In a way, I see my video work as short experimental stories that represent emotion or a place, where pictures are rhythmically constructed upon several shapes and forms instead of words.

I am attracted to the brevity and exactitude of image compositions over sound; the flow and musical tonality of visual impressions. I enjoy the challenge posed by the creation of short video works; to me, precision of thought is a necessary motive for my art making process— the reduction of meaning to it purest and most beautiful form.

Pushpe, 2003 - 6:30 mins
Sound by Doron Ben Avraham
Created during a residency at the Experimental TV Center, Owego NY

Zohar Kfir is a video artist from Tel Aviv, currently based in Montréal. She is active in many fields ranging from experimental video, interactive art to poetry writing and net.art. Zohar has shown her video works in galleries and video festivals in Israel, Europe and USA, such as the Transmediale [2003-2004], Vad Festival, NYUFF, FACT Liverpool, ICA Center for the arts in Boston, Makor Gallery in NYC and most recently the Jerusalem Film Festival. She hold a BFA in Digital Media from Camera Obscura School of Arts in Tel Aviv, and a MPS Degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program [ITP].

Zohar Kfir - Montréal Canada | Tel Aviv Israel

http://zzee.net

Doron Ben Avraham - New York New York

www.transorma.com

10/14/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

I perform acts of invented, unnecessary physical labor. I create work. Looking back to a time before cubicles and factories - before the specialization of labor - I investigate the idea of respect toward and within manual work, often in the natural environment as pioneers and frontiersman might have done. I attempt to dispute the romanticized view of farming/rural life as a “simple” life by performing labor within the context of fine art. I embrace the irony in viewing art, which is perceived as a leisure activity in our culture, when the art itself examines work.

My own life working as a farmer and woodsman has enabled me to make use of personal experience in my art. The actions, repetitions, periods of rest, and possibility of failure within work are of particular interest to me. I challenge myself by translating these episodes of effort and rest into moving images, audible events, performances, or created environments. I believe it is important to reflect upon my routines and those of others within the realm of the everyday.

untitled [ca.the.dra], 2004/5, 4:48 mins

A. Jacob Galle - Bowdoinham Maine

10/15/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

While walking through a park after filming a dry riverbed in Tucson, Arizona I happened upon a single tumbleweed stranded on grass. This ubiquitous desert icon, shifting in the wind, seemed desperate to move from the idyllic environment of manicured lawn and return to the wilds of cottonwood, ocotillo, cactus and chaparral. The footage I captured documents the short journey of this tumbleweed back to the desert. My movement through the park is tempered by the movement of the tumbleweed, the wind and scrub - phenomena of nature - guide my footsteps.

Follow, footage captured 2005, footage edited 2007, 2:06 mins, silent

In much of my work I liken my creative habits to that of an early cartographer - looking, measuring, collecting, calculating and displaying the intersections of quotidian life and the natural world. As much as I am inspired by phenomena of the natural world and find great value in being outside, I focus on the observation that our everyday relationship with nature is predominantly one of mediation, physical distance and cognizant remove. In my work, which begins with photography and expands into performance, drawing, sculpture, video and installation, I am interested in qualifying my varied experiences in the natural environment as a set of relations between disparate cognitive and sensory events – where perception eclipses the ground underfoot.

In my work I make a habit of literally setting my camera aside and reaching into the world to physically interact with my subject matter. It is at that point beyond the mediation of the camera, when I place my body between the image and its referent that the photograph is porous and reveals its subjectivity. By working within that symbolic space I am able to better investigate a unique quality of the photographic image; that it can present fiction while representing truth. It is this synchronized mutation drifting between a descriptive reality and a constructed reality that resonates within my work.

Peter HappelChristian - Youngstown Ohio

www.peterhappelchristian.com

10/16/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

An exploration of rhythmic repetitions to access a state of freedom and primal potentiality. The work deals with the creation of memory and of recollection, time and sometimes language. We are interested in exploring the shape of our perception, the congruence of sensory experience and emotion, and its rational orders and disorders.

This work traveled back and forth between Super 8 film, analogue video, and digital video multiple times and was manipulated by hand and digitally repeatedly. Originally shot in 1998, it was completed in 2004.

Un-Rest: The Run, 2004 - 3:37 mins

Carola Dreidemie - Dallas Texas | Buenos Aires Argentina

www.caroladreidemie.com

Mónica Dreidemie, a dancer / choreographer, actress and instructor of Fedora Aberastury Movement Technique was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1970. She has been a member of the Argentinean theater company “La noche en Vela” since 1991 to the present. Creating collectively and directed by Paco Gimenez, the company participated in many international festivals and was awarded several times by Argentinean national and private institutions and foundations. Interested in video as another medium for expression, M. Dreidemie has created video works that interacted with the action onstage in the last two productions.

Mónica Dreidemie has worked as a solo improvisational dancer, performing since 1995 in Buenos Aires and New York, always collaborating with musicians such as Sami Abadi (electronic violins), Todd Reinolds (Steve Reich’s Ensemble) and members of the Argentine company, De La Guarda among many others. In New York, she has performed with Meredith Monk and Zendora Dance Company. Over the past 27 years, Dreidemie has studies various dance techniques including Ballet, Contempirary Dance (Graham, Cunningham, Folkwang technique), Contact Improvisation, Release Technique, Butoh Dance and Fedora Aberastury Movement Technique, a ground breaking, non traditional approach to the body, which he has taught since 1997.

Mónica Dreidemie - Buenos Aires Argentina | Brooklyn New York

www.aberastury.info

10/20/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

Superstructures (2006) was initially a twin-screen DVD piece that presented the input and output of a bespoke computer program which had been programmed to respond to levels of ambient light. The input footage, that of a neon tube nearing the end of its life, controls glimpses of a metal superstructure similar to that which underpinned the concrete walls of its original exhibition space. This version presents the output of the system in single screen format.

Superstructures, 2006 - 60:00 mins

Michael Day is an artist and curator based in Sheffield, UK. His artistic practice is interdisciplinary and improvisational in nature, using a wide range of media and technologies, including digital media, sound, installation and video. His work is characterised by a visual economy and sense of displaced distance from the viewer, often exploring the impact of new technologies on authorship, on art consumption, and on visual culture as a whole. Previously based in Cardiff, South Wales, he has exhibited work in venues in across the UK, most recently on the BBC Big Screen in Leeds, and has had his work screened at events in the Netherlands, France and China.

Until recently, he has focused his curatorial practice on his participation in the Sheffield-based HAG (Host Artist’s Group), co-developing and producing HAG exhibitions and screening programmes for four years until February 2008. During this time, he worked on HAG projects including Host 4: Cinema, a screening and DVD of short video works, Host 6: Beauty, a print project for the Sheffield Pavilion 2007, premiered at the Venice Biennale and Documenta XII, and Host 8: Observatory for the Art Sheffield 08: Yes / No / Other Options* citywide event. Since leaving HAG, he has been developing a curated publication project to be launched in Spring 2009.

Michael Day - Sheffield United Kingdom

www.michaelday.org.uk

10/21/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

I am a conceptual artist. My work ranges in form from straight photography to interactive media, sound, video installation and public works. I utilize place, time, the body and context as materials.

My process is like mixing and sampling. I take bits and pieces from life and rearrange or re-contextualize them in a personal way. I am decidedly attracted by newness. My work appropriates from fashion, commercial advertising, design and the Internet and most often incorporates digital technology. I look at all of these things as sources for ideas and theories of aesthetics.

I collaborate with other artists on a regular basis and consider it a way to challenge my own practice. It requires letting go of proprietorship and in an ideal situation, allows the work to become its own machine, driving toward fresh ideas. Collaboration always causes unforeseen problems to solve which is one of the aspects of artistic production that draws my interest in general. It is also very political in the sense that it sets up a community that relies on social, organizational models such as democracy, socialism, and even anarchy. It is a type of social sculpture.

I place the highest value on experimentation, scientific and philosophical research and trans-disciplinary practice as means toward the new renaissance.

FUTURISM IS BACK.

Rhythm March, 2007 - 3:00 mins, silent

Felecia Chizuko Carlisle - Pensacola Florida

http://feleciacarlisle.com

10/22/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

In 1989, after fifty years of occupation, Poland held its first free post-WWII elections and ushered in a democratic republic system of government. Good Faith Effort asks young Poles in the capital of Warsaw to remember that pivotal moment.

Good Faith Effort, 2006 - 12:00 mins
Produced and edited by Joanna Raczynska, Original music by Will Redman

Support for this project comes from CEC Artslink and the Experimental Television Center’s Finishing Funds, a program supported by the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts.

Joanna Raczynska earned her masters degree in documentary production from the University of London. She is a member of the video collective Termite TV and a founding member of the programming collective Stateless Cinema. Her short videos have shown internationally and across the US. Screening history includes: Festival of Women’s Film & Media Arts, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, September 2007 - The Takoma Park Film Festival, Takoma Park, MD, October 2007 Videopolis - The Metro Gallery, Baltimore, MD, May 2008

Joanna Raczynska - Baltimore Maryland

http://jraczynska.com

10/23/2008 - Western Michigan University
tba - University at Buffalo

Video film “The State of Mind” is personal reflection on social and existential survival. A self-portrait depicts two opposing states alternating between calm and agitated perspectives. This work represents the search for a balance between unwanted and desirable circumstances.

The State of Mind, 2003 - 1:30 mins

Toni Meštrović, born 1973 in Split, Croatia, graduated with a Graphic Arts degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1999, where he produced graphic arts, sculpture and installation. Due to his interest in electronic audiovisual media, he studied Video/Digital Imaging at the International Summer Academy for Contemporary Art in Salzburg in 1997, and completed a two-year postgraduate diploma in Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne in 2004. Video, sound and audiovisual installations produced during Meštrović’s postgraduate studies explore his personal perception of the sea, and the island where he grew up. Since 1992, he has taken part in group and solo shows, as well as video festivals. Lives in Kaštela and teaches at the Arts Academy University of Split.

Toni Meštrović - Split Croatia

www.macaknara.hr

1/10/2008 - Western Michigan University (artist in attendance)
9/5/2008 - Alfred State College
tba - University at Buffalo

It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.) Wittgenstein

My creative practice is driven by a radically skeptical relationship to language. I am not simply skeptical of certain concepts, discourses, or perspectives, but of the very means whereby we articulate all of our certainties and doubts, about ourselves and about our world.

Stemming from this ambivalent fascination with language, my work deals with different aspects of communication, from the simple, personal articulation of ideas and beliefs through action and utterance, to the more complex communal communication expressed through media and technology. I am also interested in the communication of the social, as in the ways we are conditioned by the laws, traditions and behavioral norms of state and cultural institutions. I am especially interested in the communication of power as it is exercised both symbolically and physically, from the soft power of a government’s theatrical authority, information controls and economic policies, to the hard power of its policing, punishment, and legitimate violence.

My artwork aims for a high degree of legibility but also emphasizes the many ambiguities and contradictions that assertive, didactic language can so readily obscure. Thus with my installations and sculptures I am creating something that is simultaneously intelligible and questionable. I want the terms of my aesthetic inquiry to be clear, but I deliberately make no assumptions about potential answers to either the questions raised or the implications suggested. These are the quandaries that I hope my viewers will be willing to take up and weigh between their own two hands. Much as my objects express ideas of absurdity, my video and performance work represents my struggle to make sense of my feelings of absurdity. By forcing myself to enact and endure difficult and repetitive metaphors for the mundane routines imposed upon all of us by the everyday requirements of living, I am able to make physically manifest my commitment to life and work despite their appearances of vanity and absurdity. I hope that the performances’ good-natured ridiculousness and earnest durations impart to viewers a tireless affirmation of living, even in the face of its sometimes-apparent meaninglessness and often-justifiable despair.

My evolving body of work is essentially a work of philosophy, but due to a deep-seated mistrust of language, rhetoric, and the ends to which they may lead us, it is an inquiry I can only maintain via the sculptural, the physical, and the performative. In all, my work seeks to create a dialogue where the questions posed must be posed as objects and the answers derived must be proven not in words, but by action.

Give and Take, 2007 - 57:49 mins

Dietmar Krumrey - Mt. Pleasant Michigan

artist website coming soon

1/14/2008 - Western Michigan University
9/8/2008 - Alfred State College
tba - University at Buffalo

The garden that is a mere scenario in five old black and white anonymous photographs, attempts to capture moments of leisure between a father(?) and his three children(?), becomes the core of all attentions, dominant in splendour and life. Space seems to expand freely releasing beauty and poetry contained within all the natural forms. The human issue reveals to be secondary, almost a background but strangely haunting and mysterious. Each individual photograph was scanned and several copies were printed out with a common printer, using four separate colour cartridges. The pages were than imbibed in water and ethylic alcohol to create reactions such as colour separation, blending and an oxidation effect. The altered copied images were rescanned and edited. The footage closing the film was shot in a garden I believe to be the same one where the photographs were taken decades ago.

The Beautiful Garden, 2007 - 4:15 mins

Johnathan Franco - Lisbon Portugal