Artists' Television Access

ATA Film and Video Festival – installation shorts

Thursday, January 1, 1970, 12:00 am

buckner small

The ATA window installation includes a selection of shorts from the ATA Film and Video Festival

Happy Again
Gregg Biermann – Experimental, 2006, 5min, Hackensack, NJ

“Happy Again” is a digital age motion study inspired by the “chronophotographic” work of Etienne-Jules Marey. The signature scene from the Hollywood musical “Singin’ in the Rain” is split into seven layers. Each layer is moving at a different speed and is visible equally in superimposition. At the temporally central point all visual and audio elements coalesce in a single frame. The result uncovers a new cinema, music and dance that are buried within the familiar iconic sequence.

My work comes out of the avant-garde tradition of film as visual art. Avant-garde cinema is an important and relatively young artistic project. While it maintains its scrappy integrity, and while many significant works have been created in subsequent decades, current practitioners have not fully moved out of the shadow of the prodigious 1960’s and 70’s. Consequently I’ve looked to new technologies to discover as unspoiled frontiers no longer available to small gauge filmmakers. The development of new instruments has often determined the important aesthetic developments in artistic and musical composition. Its capacity to alter, mask, fragment, re-mix, super-impose, mutate, reflect, transmit and reframe are its prime currents. My recent work most often deals with the power of cinema to transform the familiar into the unfamiliar and unseal production and editing strategies. These strategies often reveal unexpected and obscure qualities of the subject matter, as well as the interchange between conceptual ideas, the production process and aural/visual sensations.

(Post-) Cold War Dreamscape
Clark Buckner – 2004, 11:20, San Francisco, CA

After cutting up the December “Best of 2003” issue of Art Forum, I found myself confronted with a set of images that seemed to recall the cold war, and to speak to our post-cold war condition – as not merely “beyond” the cold war, but defined by its legacy. This video explores these resonances as a historical truth unconsciously articulated by the magazine. Clark Buckner works as a video artist, curator, and educator. His videos have been exhibited most recently at ArtLA, Haley Martin Gallery, The Pigman Gallery, The ODC Gallery Project, and The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. He is the gallery director at MISSION 17 and has published writings on art in Art Review, Artweek, The San Francisco Bay Guardian and Bomb magazine. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, and recently edited a volume of essays with Mathew Statler, titled Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy After the Death of God (Fordham University Press, December 2005). He currently teaches both graduate and undergraduate seminars on art and philosophy at Mills College, and The San Francisco Art Institute.

InterState (part one)
Cortlund and Halperin – 8 mm and Video Experimental, 2006, 6 min, Austin, TX

INTERSTATE (part one) is the first in a triptych of short video experiments designed around original footage shot at a traveling circus animal encampment alongside a busy Texas highway.

This first segment documents the circadian rhythms of elephants and zebras at night through a constant, flashing stream of headlights.

The INTERSTATE project serves as a critique of popular media practices in the US— the fetishism of surveillance, the inhumane treatment of detained foreign bodies, and the detached compulsion of witnesses who stand by and watch.

Cortlund and Halperin have been collaborating on single multi-channel films and videos since 1996. Their work has shown at festivals and microcinemas across North America and Europe. Their honors include a James Michener Center for Writers Fellowship, a Liberace Foundation Grant, a Hershey Foundation grant, and awards from the Texas Council for the Arts and the Texas Filmmmakers’s Production Fund. They live in Austin, Texas.

You Are Not the Only One
Dan Gilsdorf – Experimental 2006, 0:39, Portland, OR

You Are Not the Only One is a video work which utilizes encountered text recorded during walks and bicycle rides through Portland, Oregon. The images in this work are comprised of works which are familiar to anyone who has spent time in an American city. There are cautions, warnings, appeals, demands, and enticements that gnaw at the corners of our attention as we navigate the American urban landscape. As a whole they create the visual din that we have learned to automatically filter from our consciousness. Yet, as individuals, we are both subject to and the subjects of their patter. These signs, placards and advertisements speak to us about us; telling stories of our desires, our trajectories, and the potential consequences of our actions. But the text does not address us collectively; its object is not “we” but “I.” To only a limited extent do I seem to be able to resist the flattery of my need for personal recognition; I generally avoid areas that are off limits, I do not stay longer than I am permitted, I buy unnecessary articles at a discounted price. And so do you.

In January 1973 I was born into a family of doctors and scientists in the desert of northern Nevada. I moved frequently to numerous strange and disparate locations. In 1991, drawn by the promise of a dramatic landscape, I arrived in Boulder, Colorado where I attended the University of Colorado earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture. Shortly after graduation, I began assisting professional artists in the design and fabrication of the installation work. The following year I moved to Portland, Oregon where I married and set up a permanent studio. Over the last nine years I have exhibited multimedia artwork in solo and group exhibitions in galleries around the United States, as well as sculptural work in Austria and Japan. Currently I live in Portland where I continue to create sculptures, installations, videos, as well as provide engineering and fabrication assistance to other artists internationally.

Sensoral Hack, Petting for Pleasure: FurReal S(t)imulation
Brenda Jean Grell – Experimental, 2006, 2:46 min, Providence, RI

Sensoral Hack: The hacking of “The Smoochie Pup” becomes a means for exploring the physical relationship between two toy dogs.

Petting for Pleasure: My appropriation of “The Smoochie Pup” pushes the boundaries of appropriate behavior between a female and mechanical dog by bringing out the sexual nature of toy’s hardwired actions.

Brenda Jean Grell, originally from Culver City, CA just completed her MFA in Digital Media from RISD. Through physical and contextual hacking, she uses robotics and video to uncover where gender and technology collide.

Authority Head Exorcism
Daniel J. King – Experimental Found Footage, 2006, 2:20 min, Tucson, AZ

Found footage, personal memories and handmade film-explosions manifest a psychological landscape of conflict where personal and political intersect. Themes of control, censorship and authority texture the filmmaker’s reaction to positions of unwarranted power.

Daniel King received his BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design, OH, in 2001. His photographs, paintings, and installations have been shown in various galleries, exhibition spaces, and publications in Ohio and Arizona. Daniel is a freelance graphic designer, with an interest in lo-budget film –art expressions. He currently works at the University of Arizona, Department of Media Arts in Tucson, and is in pre-production on an experimental short film/web project focused and the theme of peepshow culture.

Clouds
Mark O’Connell – Experimental, 2006, 8 min, Seattle, WA

Clouds meet, fall in love, move in. Eventually one gets bored, starts to mess around. The other finds out. Words are spoken, trouble erupts, the law is called. One is taken out in a box, the other in cuffs.

Mark O’Connell, a musician and digital media artist, creates short films whose fluid collages of imagery and sound draw on movies, memory, chance and sensuality. His work abandons traditional narrative in order to explore the possibilities that arise from the juxtaposition, as well as the rhythms and textures, of images and sound. Mirek Menci, the curator of Enter Multimediale, characterizes O’Connell as “a global digital star,“ Netslag curator Lars Printzen says, “There are many experiments in digital filmmaking. But few people can produce this level of work. It is exciting and also impeccably crafted.”


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