Video Vortex Reader II :: Call for Contributions — DEADLINE: May 10, 2010.

In response to the increasing potential for video as a significant form of personal media on the Internet, the Video Vortex program examines key issues that are emerging around the independent production and distribution of online video content. With the rise of YouTube and alternative platforms, the moving image on the Internet has become expansively more prominent and popular. As a wide range of technologies is now broadly available, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has reached a totally new dimension. Continue reading

Cinema is dead; long live cinema (Peter Greenaway). How has the explosion of new media changed the ways we think about cinema, about questions of film aesthetics and film history? How can cinema studies contribute to the theory, analysis, and creative practice of new media? This two-day symposium seeks to stimulate a crossdisciplinary conversation on moving image culture that avoids both cinephile nostalgia and uncritical celebrations of media convergence.

The Material and the Code is a two-day symposium at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center. It features a screening on February 26, and a full day of presentations on February 27.

The Material and the Code is dedicated to the memory of Anne Friedberg (1952-2009).

DarkMatr :: December 17-19, 2009; 2:00 - 7:00 pm :: Opening: December 16; 6:00 -9:00 pm :: iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technology, 30 quai des Charbonnages, 1080 Brussels.

After 2 residencies at iMAL and one year of work, Tom Heene and his colleagues artists, developers and scientists show the results of the research project DarkMatr. DarkMatr investigates the way virtual and physical data can be merged and presented in a total user experience. The resulting installation uses meaningful representations of web data so that we can empathize with. Taking place within an immersive environment, the visualization is lived as an interactive sensory experience, combining body movements to elements from the internet. Continue reading

blown up! The Temporary Autonomous Classroom — an eventwork by Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson :: Dates Below :: Mains d’Oeuvres, 1, rue Charles Garnier, 93 400 Saint-Ouen, Paris.

blown up! is an eventwork, mapping an investigation at once philosophical, cinematic and relational. In a manner similar to Antonioni’s film Blow-Up which follows a photographer’s quest to locate a body in a London park from a blow-up of a snapshot he has taken, Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson explored 1970s video footage of Gilles Deleuze’s courses at the University of Vincennes to locate participants in the seminar who then became collaborators in their film, Facs of Life. Continue reading

Harun Farocki: Exhibition and Film Programme :: October 31, 2009 - March 7, 2010 :: Museum Ludwig
, Heinrich-Böll-Platz,
 50667 Köln
.

With this overview of the work of Harun Farocki (born 1944), Museum Ludwig continues its series highlighting important film makers whose work straddles both the exhibition space and the cinema. Selected video installations as well as the screening of his oeuvre in the museum cinema will give a new insight into the artist and film maker’s creative production. His cinematic enquiries into socio-political symptoms are coupled with questions about the circumstances in which cinematic images are produced and received. Continue reading

Encoding liveness: Performance and real-time rendering in machinima by Cameron David, Carroll John [September 2009 Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory]:

Machinima is the appropriation of software-generated 3D virtual environments, typically video games, for filmmaking and dramatic productions. The creation and distribution technology of machinima tends to hide the nature of the performer, provoking consideration of a definition of ‘liveness’ that can accommodate the real-time rendering of screen content by game software in response to human input, or – at the extreme – as if there is human input in accordance with performance parameters coded by humans. This paper considers the continuum of creative modes that machinima makers work on, and the differing aesthetic/technical decisions affecting the level of liveness in the finished production. Continue reading

e-flux journal - issue #9:

The aesthetics of political engagement has become common currency within artistic production and discourse, and the abundance of works and exhibitions now announcing themselves as politically charged are often criticized for their distance from actual social forces outside art. While institutional critique successfully identified certain parallels between these forces and the workings of art institutions, it seems that this has simply given way to a more nuanced (and however richer) discourse for understanding the way power operates within the micro-economy of art itself. Through this, a collective desire for some form of rupture within art has come to constitute an economy of precious theoretical objects all its own — judged and appraised by their capacity to symbolically dismantle the current regime. Continue reading

The Grand Credits of all human beings by Antoine Schmitt (2009):

Long credits slowly roll on the movie screen, from bottom to top. First name, last name. First name, last name…

It is the list of the names of all human beings.

Everyone is named, and all names are displayed with the same visual importance. The list is not alphabetical nor chronological. The font, the display size and the scrolling speed enable each name to be read.

The Grand Credits is an artwork that is designed to be displayed on a movie screen, a TV screen, a computer screen, or projected on a wall, depending on the exhibition context. The scenography always refers to the world of cinema. Continue reading

Brian Holmes wrote:

[In my previous post, in reply to Arnim Medosch, I developed some ideas about the historical interpretation of media forms, particularly in their aspect as commodities. Here I am hoping to launch a new discussion along somewhat similar lines, beginning this time from the aspect of production in the industrial economies. Hope there is some interest! - BH]

“How do you get capitalism into the psyche, and how do you get the psyche into capital?” asks the philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux. Drawing on key insights from Gramsci, Simmel and Benjamin — and radicalizing the work of film critic Christian Metz in the process — Jonathan Beller gives this quite astonishing reply:

“Materially speaking, industrialization enters the visual as follows: Early cinematic montage extended the logic of the assembly line (the sequencing of discreet, programmatic machine-orchestrated human operations) to the sensorium and brought the industrial revolution to the eye…. Continue reading

It’s Not a Lie if You Believe It :: July 29, 2009; 6:30 pm :: apexart, 291 Church Street, NYC.

Kelly Warman and Matthew Lyons discuss the translation of the written word into performative, mediated and cinematic space, focusing on contemporary literature and film that has evolved from the novel form. In addition, Kelly Warman will read excerpts from her residency diary.

Kelly Warman is a British born artist based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Before completing her MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Kelly graduated with a BA (Hons) from Dartington College of Arts, Dartington and a diploma from Chelsea College of Art, London, UK. Continue reading