[Image: Merry-go-Round by Lily & Honglei] Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds :: Call for Papers — Deadline: August 30, 2010.

Submissions are invited for an edited book with the working title Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds. Machinima - referring to “filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies” as well as works which use this animation technique, including videos recorded in computer games or virtual worlds - is challenging the notion of the moving image in numerous media contexts, such as video games, animation, digital cinema and virtual worlds. 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).

Goethe-Institut, Cairo presents ARABSHORTS.NET, a web-based project showcasing nine online, curated film programmes by nine curators from the Middle East and North Africa. The project makes use of the vast potential of the Internet as a powerful and alternative platform for the presentation and circulation of independent films beyond the festival circuit and beyond conventional distribution networks. For the first time, viewers can have unlimited access to a large pool of films, and information that they would otherwise not have had the chance to peruse.

Bringing together more than sixty short fictional films, documentaries, animations, video art, experimental films and everything in between, ARABSHORTS.NET presents a multiplicity of perspectives on independent filmmaking featured from the point of view of each curator. Continue reading

Claiming Its Space: Machinima by Michael Nitsche, Dichtung-Digital #37, 2007:

ABSTRACT: Although machinima has grown exponentially, it remains a largely undefined digital artistic practice in-between existing traditions. Machinima makers freely sample/ combine/ and break elements of traditional media. They “play” their references. This essay does not attempt to fix machinima to any single definition but will identify the intermedia relations to better position machinima into the digital media landscape. The argument will target three main influences: film, television, and theatrical performance. To exemplify these points the essay will discuss exemplary and relevant machinima pieces. It puts emphasis on the real-time aspects in production and play back to highlight the key specifics of this relatively new format.

Jesters and Gestures: Performing Yiddish Culture from Silent Cinema to Avant-Garde Film presents West and East: A Film-Translation, a performance by by Sala-Manca Group :: November 16, 2009; 7:30 pm :: PFA Theater, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA.

This live performance and video by Argentinian-born, Jerusalem-based artists the Sala-Manca Group is an homage to Sidney Goldin and Ivan Abramson’s East and West and a study in cultural and linguistic translation. It tells the story of Yaakov, an Orthodox Jewish graffiti writer who travels to Vienna. Suspected of subversive activities, he is pursued by Moly, an agent of the Israeli intelligence service, who disguises herself as a young Orthodox man. Continue reading

Cinema Arts Festival Houston — featuring The Yes Men, Cao Fei, and Lynn Hershman Leeson :: November 11-15, 2009 :: Houston, Texas.

The arts oriented Festival will host photographer Susan Meiselas, members of The Yes Men and the Ant Farm media collective, among many other outstanding presenters. The only U.S. festival devoted to films by and about artists of all stripes, the festival runs at various cultural locales throughout Houston. It is more than just a film festival; it is a vibrant multimedia arts event breaking out of the confines of the movie theater through live music and film performances, outdoor projections, interactive video installations and more. Continue reading

Bright Nights — with Burak Arikan, Motomichi Nakamura, Marius Watz, Lee Wells — is a curated program of digital artwork that celebrates the projected image, draws attention to the iconic architecture of the Manhattan Bridge, and electrifies the arts friendly DUMBO neighborhood. The program will be projected onto the Anchorage (Adams St & Front St. Brooklyn, NY), to coincide with the 100th birthday of the bridge and the 10th annual Walk21 conference in October 2009.

Four internationally renowned Brooklyn-based artists created new works that interpret the unique physical, spatial, and historical components of the bridge. The artists were chosen for their ability to energize a public space, in celebration of the major thoroughfare’s 100th birthday. Continue reading

Artists’ Television Access Film & Video Festival (ATA) — independent and underground film & video :: October 21-23, 2009 :: 992 Valencia (at 21st Street), San Francisco, CA.

On Wednesday, October 21, the ATA Film Festival begins with a free workshop on experimental film exhibition and distribution, hosted by local experimental filmmakers and distributors. Sign-up for this unique event.

On October 22 & 23, ATA will screen two programs of short works: “Specters & Machines” and “Stories we tell ourselves.” Both programs offer unique representations of the myriad facets of life and feature the work of local talents including Paul Clipson, Kerry Laitala, and Tommy Becker, and national and international filmmakers such as Maarit Suomi-Väänänen, Chris Kennedy, Laida Lertxundi and Martha Colburn. Continue reading

Plateaux Festival :: November 19 - 22, 2009 :: Poland.

A 4-day festival presenting the world’s leading groundbreaking multimedia artists, praised and prize-winning audiovisual and VJ art, experimental films, and live electronic and electroacoustic music. A fully interactive event, Plateaux will be spread across Poland’s two adjacent and culturally rich cities of Toruń and Bydgoszcz, combining a number of different venues to create the widest possible range of multimedia and audiovisual performances.

Plateaux is committed to providing an extra depth of experience beyond simple spectatorship. For this reason, artists performing during the festival will also act as guide and teachers in workshops, lectures and discussions, addressing the theoretical, practical and technical aspects of audiovisual domain. Continue reading

Altermodernism: The Age of the Stupid by Ellie Harrison, Furtherfield.org: “”Postmodernism is dead” declares Nicolas Bourriaud in the opening line of his manifesto for our new global cultural era - the ‘altermodern’. As a preface to the latest Tate Triennial exhibition of the same name, the French curator and theorist sets about defining what he sees as the parameters of our contemporary society and offering paradigms for artistic approaches to navigating and negotiating them.

This essay aims to identify what the birth of this new era tells us about our culture’s relationship to time. It will explore how we choose to define the periods in which we live and how our relationships with the past, present and future seem to constantly evolve. As a central focus, it brings together two examples of cultural events from 2009 which have both, in semi-revolutionary ways, attempted to define our current age. Continue reading