Portraits of two of today’s most provocative artists bring contemporary art to the big screen, in Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, and Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present. Cinematic media installations, multimedia performances, and transmedia experiences are found in the Festival’s New Frontier program. Presenting work of artists, journalists, game designers, and media scientists, New Frontier 2012 explores the integration of human forms with the techno-sphere and ushers in a media environment of the future that nourishes the cornerstones of our humanity — our social nature, vulnerability, and creativity.

New Frontier 2012 opens on January 20, 2012. The exhibit runs in Park City, Utah through January 28 and at the Salt Lake City Art Center through May 19.

New Frontier 2012 Artists and Projects

• Himalaya Song by Gingger Shankar, Mridu Chandra, The Shanghai Restoration Project
• Abacus by Paul Abacus, Early Morning Opera, Lars Jan
• Bear 71 by Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison
• The Cloud of Unknowing by Ho Tzu Nyen
• Evolution (Megaplex) by Marco Brambilla
• Hunger in Los Angeles by Nonny de la Peña
• My Generation by Eva and Fronco Mattes, a.k.a. 0100101110101101.org
• Radical Games Against the Tyranny of Entertainment by ARTIST Molleindustria
• To Many Men Strange Fates are Given by Brent Green
• Question Bridge: Black Males by Hank Willis Thomas, Chris Johnson, in collaboration with Bayete Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair
• whiteonwhite: algorhythmicnoir by Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation

Bivouac Projects acts as a transitory gallery, performance space, and screening series providing the community with an opportunity to see new media, experimental film and video works from local, national, and international artists. All types of video, film, and new media work will be accepted: experimental, documentary, animation, narrative, non-narrative, multimedia, bio art, digital imaging, locative media, net art, interactive media, sound art, etc.

Submissions: CD/DVD (NTSC). Include: Synopsis, Bio, CV and Contact Info.

SASE required for CD/DVD return.

Send email submissions to: frank [at] sumtergallery.org

Send mailed submissions to:
Frank McCauley, Curator
Bivouac Projects
PO Box 1316
Sumter, SC 29151

For info on earlier projects please visit:
http://www.sumtergallery.org/Bivouac_Projects.html

The program Urban Research, curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr for Directors Lounge 2012, reaches beyond the genre “city films”. Contemporary artists are engaged in local politics, they are concerned with specific urban problems and developments, and they are directly interacting with the public with performances and public interventions. Due to rapid changes of urban environment, place is no more a reliable urban structure connected with consistency and collective memory. Place must be reinvented and newly defined over and over, and this does not only apply for spaces of temporary use. Public space in the sense of social interchange and interaction — as well as just a space free to use — is not a given opportunity any more, which can be taken for granted. International artists address these themes and issues with a variety of forms, experimental, documentary, abstract, and narrative; they intervene directly or they show there visions of public space, and a new urban landscape. For the festival presentation all screening media (besides 35mm projection) and art-related projects are welcome.

Urban Research 2012 will be first presented at Directors Lounge 9–19 February 2012. The program has also been presented internationally in screenings in London, Mannheim, Hannover, Poznan, Freiburg, Essen, Dordrecht, Senigallia, St. Petersburg and Berlin.

We want your work! Please use the online submission form (required!)

And please send your work including 2 video stills to Klaus W. Eisenlohr, Urban Research, Osnabrücker Str. 25, D-10589 Berlin, Germany; klaus [at] richfilm.de

Urban Research 2012 will first be presented at the media art festival Directors Lounge in February 2012.

Endgame: A Cold War Love Story — for the web and Flash enabled touch screen devices (DROID) — is a puzzle whose pieces are culled from an archive of long forgotten propaganda. In it a story about art, exile and history takes shape from the fragmentary remains of one woman’s life.

Endgame: A Cold War Love Story is a 2011 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHY

Tal Halpern is a new media artist and electronic writer. His visual literary work includes Digital Nature the Case Collection, Le Nouveau Western, Archiving Nature: Preservation Practices for a Digital Age, and Chromosome 22. He has been a New York Foundation for the Arts Computer Arts fellow and been featured in numerous museums and festivals including Iowa Review Web, Turbulence.org, Sundance Film Festival Web 2006, File Electronic Language International Festival 2006, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Karlsruhe Germany.

Returning Fire: Interventions in Video Game Culture (Media Education Foundation, 2011, 45 min.), written and directed by Roger Stahl, examines the culture of war-themed video games through work of three pioneering artists and activists: Joseph Delappe, Anne-Marie Schleiner, and Wafaa Bilal.

Returning Fire documents how the three artists moved dissent from the streets to our screens, infiltrating war games in an attempt to break the hypnotic spell of “militainment,” and thereby forcing us to think critically about what it means when the clinical tools of real-world killing become forms of consumer play.

Film director Roger Stahl is associate professor in the Communication Studies Department at the University of Georgia. In 2010, he published a book Militainment, Inc and produced a documentary of the same title in 2007.

Joseph Delappe is a professor of art at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Game designer, writer and artist Anne-Marie Schleiner teaches game design in the Communication and New Media Program at the National University of Singapore.

Wafaa Bilal is assistant arts professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Co-sponsored by The Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, in collaboration with the Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film, TV and New Media and the NYU Game Center along with the Department of Art and Public Policy and NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge.

The Department of Photography & Imaging is an intensive four-year BFA program centered on the making and understanding of images. It is a diverse department embracing multiple perspectives. The students work in virtually all modes of analog, digital, and multimedia photo-based image making, exploring photo-based imagery as personal and cultural expression.

Forty years after the completion of the earthwork Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971) in Emmen, the film that land art artist Robert Smithson was never able to finish due to his untimely death, is now to be completed as a video with support from Dutch partners.

Breaking Ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971–2011) will be presented in the context of the Land Art Contemporary program, which also includes an exhibition program and an extensive publication.

In June 1971, the American artist Robert Smithson (1938–1973) completed the land art project Broken Circle/Spiral Hill in a sand quarry in Emmen. Smithson made the work at the invitation of the Sonsbeek buiten de perken (Beyond the Borders) exhibition. Forty years following its completion, and after a highly eventful history, the work in Emmen is once again in good condition, and is the regular destination for those interested in Smithson’s work from all over the world.

Broken Circle/Spiral Hill is the only ‘earthwork’ produced by Smithson still in existence outside the United States. As an integral part of these works, Smithson made films that reveal the spatial and environmental context of the work. Aerial shots in a symmetrical pattern were combined with close-ups, documentary footage of the construction of the work and views of the surrounding landscape. In this way, visitors to galleries and museums were introduced to the earthworks produced by Smithson in barely accessible, remote locations. As a result of a tragic aircraft accident during a reconnaissance flight in 1973, Smithson’s life and work came to a premature end. Smithson was never able to finish the film about Broken Circle/Spiral Hill.

Forty years later, a video incorporating the original film footage is now to be completed on behalf of the Land Art Contemporary program in a collaboration between artist Nancy Holt and curator Theo Tegelaers of SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain. Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson made several films together and were married for a decade until his death in 1973. Holt currently works with a Dutch team in editing the video Breaking Ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, including the original film footage she shot in 1971, and video recently shot recently in Emmen by a Dutch crew. The video will be made guided by Smithson’s film notes and drawings.

Land Art Contemporary

Several Dutch institutional and private partners are joining forces in the realization of a series of initiatives being developed in honor of the 40th anniversary of the creation of Broken Circle/Spiral Hill. All these elements are brought together by means of co-production, support and presentation in the multiyear program Land Art Contemporary.

In 2011, Land Art Contemporary will include the following program components:

• Production and premiere of the video Breaking Ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971–2011) (SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain. In cooperation with Nancy Holt)

• Launch of the project The Ultraperiferic—a series of assignments to contemporary artists, reconsidering the meaning of land art in the spirit of Robert Smithson (SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain. Curators: Nils van Beek and Theo Tegelaers)

• Exhibition ‘Robert Smithson in Emmen. Broken Circle/Spiral Hill Revisited’. (Centrum Beeldende Kunst (CBK) Emmen (Centre for Visual Arts). Curator: Roel Arkesteijn)

• The publication Robert Smithson. Art in Continual Movement (Ingrid Commandeur, Trudy van Riemsdijk-Zandee (ed.) /Alauda Publications)

Land Art Contemporary is an initiative of LACDA Foundation in Drenthe. The program has been made possible thanks to (content and financial) support from SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain, the Province of Drenthe, European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (LEADER), Municipality of Coevorden, Municipality of Emmen, Cultuurfonds BNG and the Sanders – ten Holte family.

Photo: The Estate of Robert Smithson is represented by the James Cohan Gallery in New York.

Out-of-Sync broaches the sweeping issue of the place taken up by the dimension of time in the visual arts from a specific angle: it is concerned with works in which several temporalities coexist, overlap, contradict one another, thus developing a paradoxical relationship to time. Through this interest in what the philosopher Elie During, in his recent book Faux Raccords, calls “times out-of-tune” ["les temps désaccordés"], the works brought together in the show are not meant to illustrate or define the notion of time. On the contrary, they offer us an experience of its elusive nature.

The time-related figures of non-synchrony, disjunction and delay play a significant part in works produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their development went hand-in-hand with the rise of the moving image in the visual arts, marked by the emergence of video and the growing use of film by artists, together with the busy dialogue struck up between the various art disciplines, focusing in particular on questions of time and process. Out-of-Sync brings together a series of key works from that period, linked, dialogue-like, with more recent works illustrating the topicality of this question in contemporary artistic practices.

The matter of recording is central to the show. By way of straightforward techniques, the works on view in Out-of-Sync highlight the way the recording of time and its recreation may give rise to unconventional temporal forms. The installation Present Continuous Past(s) (1974) by Dan Graham is emblematic of this approach: using a video system which retransmits a picture of the exhibition area with a lapse of a few seconds, it offers us a perception of an “extended present time”. A similar time-frame is conjured up by Laurent Montaron’s Melancholia (2005): taking the form of a Space-Echo a musical analogue device designed to produce echo and reverberation effects displayed like a bas-relief in a pierced niche at the base of a wall, the work presents our eye with the ever-changing loops produced by its magnetic tape.

Another important aspect of the exhibition, underscored by the title Out-of-Sync indicating a discrepancy or lapse between sound and image is the place taken up in it by the sonic and musical fields. Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham have regularly compared the dimension of time in their early works with the musical output of composers like Steve Reich, whose “phasing” technique, based on the superposition of several identical lines of sound played at slightly differing speeds, foreshadows the use of a time delay in pieces like Bruce Nauman’s Lip Sync (1969). This interest in complex forms of time possibly suggested by the musical fields occurs, in particular, in the activities of Manon de Boer, several of whose films take as their point of departure musical works such as John Cage’s 4′33″ and Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin Sz. 117, as well as in works by Anri Sala, whose video diptych After Three Minutes (2007) plays with the clash between the beat of a cymbal lit by a stroboscopic light and the frequencies peculiar to video recording.

Artists: Manon de Boer, David Claerbout, Tony Conrad, Valie Export, Dan Graham, David Lamelas, Marco Godinho, Laurent Montaron, Bruce Nauman, Anri Sala, Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Curators: Christophe Gallois, Marie-Noëlle Farcy, Clément Minighetti

Event in the context of the exhibition: Performance Time by David Lamelas on Sundays at 4pm, with the participation of the audience. (On the condition of a sufficient number of participants)

Image above: Laurent Montaron, “The Stream,” 2007. Photograph, 123 x 155,5 cm.Collection Frac Alsace, Sélestat © Laurent Montaron, courtesy galerie schleicher+lange, Paris.

Babel Fiche is an imaginary media for future anthropologists. It asks which behaviours, objects, traditions and conflicts we want to communicate to a future world. Today’s human cultures, physique and technology will inevitably develop out of all recognition. So how might a future species translate our current times?

Babel Fiche will ponder the problem by animating and remixing the microfiche contents as a series of new short films. This production stage is driven through Wreckamovie, an online platform to help organise participatory movie projects. Babel Fiche wonders if it will be possible to resolve coherent films under these social conditions.

In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936, the Guggenheim Museum is pleased to present the following suite of related programs.

Premiere Performance: Coup de Foudre, Based on The Blood of a Poet by Jean Cocteau — Paul Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky, Ballet Noir, and Melvin van Peebles :: October 9; 8:00 pm + October 10; 6:00 pm:

In a theatrical reinterpretation of Cocteau’s filmic masterpiece, three generations of groundbreaking African American artists connect through a je ne sais quoi of French culture. Paul Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid performs his own original music score, mixing live instruments and studio recordings with the Telos Ensemble, while Corey Baker, artistic codirector of Ballet Noir and current Fela! star, converts the extreme physicality of the lead film character into choreographic moments. Emmy award-winning Melvin Van Peebles, “the godfather of independent film and modern black cinema,” simultaneously reads Cocteau poems. Coup de Foudre explores the ambiguous relationship between modern compositional strategies, based on sampling and digital media, and the experience of tying cinematic history to contemporary times. A post-performance discussion with the artists follows moderated by Christoph Cox, professor of philosophy, Hampshire College.

Digital Workshop with DJ Spooky: The Secret Song II :: October 10; 2:30 – 4:30 pm:

In conjunction with Coup de Foudre, the Sackler Center for Arts Education is pleased to present The Secret Song II, a digital music workshop. Led by DJ Spooky himself, the workshop provides participants a unique opportunity to use their iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad to invent their own compositional mixes using sampling and custom sound effects, followed by a museum visit and the performance of Coup de Foudre. The Secret Song II will explore the connections between digital mixing and multimedia forms, mining the possibilities of mobile media to create art anytime, anywhere. For adults 18+; ages 14–17 can attend accompanied by an adult. No previous music or art-making experience necessary. Limited enrollment. To register and for more information guggenheim.org/publicprograms.

Film Screening: The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d’un poète), 1930 - Jean Cocteau :: October 9; 6:30 pm + October 10; 4:30 pm:

The first installment in the Orphic Trilogy — a series of three films by acclaimed French avant-garde director Jean Cocteau — the groundbreaking film The Blood of a Poet is one of cinema’s great experiments. A portrait of the plight of the artist, the film utilizes surrealist imagery to explore the poet’s obsessions with the relationships between art and dreams, metaphor and reality, and life and death. French with English subtitles. Free with museum admission.

*Image above: Courtesy Comité Jean Cocteau. © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Thursday, October 21, ATA will screen the first of two shorts programs. Titled “Human Nature,” the program explores the relationship between our natural environment and consciousness. The screening includes films and videos by Paul Clipson, Sam Barnett, Bill Brown, Patricia McInroy, Gina Carducci & Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Vera Brunner-Sung, Karl Lind, John Palmer, and Maite Abella. The shorts will be followed by the ceremonial smashing of a piñata.

On Friday, October 22, the second festival shorts program,“Lo-Fi Future,” explores futuristic landscapes and lo-fi culture. This program includes films and videos by Kathleen Quillian, Whitney Horn & Lev Kalman, Sylvia Schedelbauer, Jeff Guay, Zachary Epcar, Bryan Boyce, Jesse McLean, and Kerry Laitala. Chromadepth 3D glasses and chromatic jello shots will be provided.

Two hands-on workshops will be offered this year. Local filmmakers Kerry Laitala and Craig Baldwin will offer workshops on Tuesday, October 19 and Saturday the 23rd, respectively. Kerry’s workshop, Lightstruck, on hand processing 16mm film, will be held in SOMA, at the Rayko Photo Center, the festival’s Lab sponsor. The workshop will give participants the opportunity to create cinematic photograms by hand and see their creation as a festival trailer on screening nights.

On Saturday, October 23, Craig Baldwin will share his expertise in the use of archival 16mm film material through his “Flix Remix” show-and-tell session. The workshop will include technical instruction and must-see exemplary material. To sign up for these workshops go to http://festival.atasite.org.

Local artists will be providing two installations, which will be presented in ATA’s gallery. Sam Manera will exhibit “THE BOX, aka, The Multiplicity of Perception”, an interactive multimedia installation. And Shalo P will present “Liquid Light,” a piece that surveys the digital apocalypse and embellishes it with rainbows.

Also, during the month of October, the ATA Window will project a selection of experimental shorts, visually stunning pieces and innovative animations. These projections, visible from dusk until midnight on Valencia, near 21st Street, include work by Patrick Bergeron, Charles Fairbanks, Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim, Zachary Iannazzi, Nightmare City, Ben Popp & Kenny Reed, Nancy Jean Tucker, and Maarit Suomi-Väänänen.

ATA is located at 992 Valencia near 21st Street. Doors open at 7:30pm every night. Screenings start at 8:00pm. Tickets are $7-$10.

The ATA Film & Video Festival is dedicated to celebrate and support underground film exhibiting every year 2 original ensembles of short works by emerging and established film and video artists from all over the world. The festival also includes installations in our Mission District storefront gallery, a reception for the filmmakers, and workshops.

Throughout the year, work from the festival is broadcast to the San Francisco community on ATV, ATA’s weekly cable-access television show, and screened in other national and international venues.

Film Selection

Out of the hundreds of films submitted to the festival, a first selection of films is presented to a diverse panel of local filmmakers, curators and ATA staff. After sessions of viewings and discussion, the panel ranks them and 4 thematic sections are assembled from the best-ranked.

Festival Travels

The festival has traveled to different venues over the years!

2007 - La Enana Marron, Madrid
2008 - Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles
2008 - 700IS Reindeerland, Iceland
2008 - CINE FANTOM CLUB, Moscow
2008 - Galeria de la Raza, San Francisco
2010 - Millennium Film Workshop, NYC
2010 - La Enana Marron, Madrid
Contact us if you’d like the festival to screen in your city. festival@atasite.org

Staff

Festival Directors and Programmers are Shae Green, Isabel Fondevila and Kelly Pendergrast. They have been ATA volunteers since 2000, 2003 and 2008 respectively. Ariel Diaz aka Moon Child is the Art Director extraordinaire. Our new team member is film student & intern, Auri Jackson. The festival is also possible thanks to the hard work and commitment of all ATA volunteer staff members.

Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
http://festival.atasite.org

banner design by b. schumacher. poster design by a. diaz. site design by s. green.