http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110222/ap_on_re_us/us_jefferson_s_books
Monthly Archives: February 2011
SATURN RETURNS
A Screening Curated and Introduced by Brett Kashmere
Wednesday, February 23rd @ 8pm
Moffett Auditorium (Mudd 050)
Oberlin College
FILMS AND VIDEOS BY: Michael Bell-Smith, Jacob Ciocci, Oliver Laric,
Xander Marro & Mat Brinkman, Tara Mateik, Takeshi Murata, Marisa
Olson, Seth Price, Tasman Richardson, Michael Robinson, Ben Russell,
and Leslie Supnet.
With Appearances and/or Audio By: Judas Priest, Lightning Bolt, Velvet
Underground, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Prince / Sinead
O’Connor, Bobby McFerrin, New Jack Swing, Michael Jackson, R. Kelly,
Emilio Estevez, Sylvester Stallone, and more
* * *
The Saturn Return is an astrological phenomenon that occurs every
27-30 years in a person’s life; coinciding with the time it takes for
Saturn to orbit the sun. As the planet “returns” to the degree it
occupied at the time of our birth, we cross ove…r a major threshold
and into the next stage of life. My generation recently underwent its
first Saturn Return, the time when we leave youth behind, re-evaluate
the past, and solidify plans for the future.
Growing up in the 80s, we shared virtual experiences via Atari and
networked using payphones and post offices. We changed identities
often, slipping in and out of styles and subcultures, a novel concept
at the time. Music videos turned sounds into images, and TV framed our
social exchange. Mix-tapes and VCRs put recording and juxtaposition
into the hands of individuals, and sampling expanded the field of
re-production further, enabling new music to emerge from the old and
the overlooked.
In the 90s, adolescent affiliations began to fade. Technological
shifts paralleled personal changes. We traded in our tapes and bought
CDs. Some found value in rigor and guidance from the avant-garde,
especially in its pursuit of challenging form and anti-consumerist
stance. To reject popular culture and embrace the art of the 60s and
70s was to retreat from the contemporary world. For a while,
structural film and noise rock were the bomb.
Now, in the new millennium, we’ve lost our patience for durational
aesthetics and jam bands. Even Michael Snow re-made Wavelength for
those who don’t have the time. YouTube has ushered in radical brevity:
nothing over 10 minutes (the new “Don’t trust anyone over 30″). We
want our media to be concise, vertical, and portable. Compression,
condensation and simultaneity are the new moves. At the same time,
subcultures have gone mainstream and become search terms, tags. In
this meeting of margins and center, music is the passageway, offering
a readymade vocabulary of shared experience and shorthand emotional
cues.
Presented by CINE 323: Exhibition Practices in the Media Arts. Free
and open to the public.
THE PLAYLIST
1) The Animated Heavy Metal Parking Lot — Leslie Supnet, 2008, 2 min, video
2) Black and White Trypps Number Three — Ben Russell, 2007, 11 min, 16mm
3) Performed Listening: H — Marisa Olson, 2007, 7 min, video
4) Message The — Oliver Laric, 2007, 2 min, video
5) And We All Shine On — Michael Robinson, 2006, 7 min, 16mm
6) Don’t Worry Be Happy (stressful mix) — Jacob Ciocci, 2005, 3 min, video
7) NJS Map — Seth Price, 2001, 2 min, video
8) PYT (Pretty Young Thing) — Tara Mateik, 2004, 4 min, video
9) Chapters 1–12 of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet Synced and Played
Simultaneously — Michael Bell-Smith, 2005, 4 min, video
10) The Game — Tasman Richardson, 2007, 4 min, video
11) Untitled (Pink Dot) — Takeshi Murata, 2007, 5 min, video
12) 01/06 — Xander Marro & Mat Brinkman, 2006, 13 min, 16mm
Approximate Running Time: 65 minutes
More info:
http://brettkashmere.com/saturnreturns.html
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=112413868834961
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – “The First Filmed Kiss”
“The First Filmed Kiss”
Beverly, Massachusetts – February 3, 2011 – First filmed kiss
rediscovered and to be shared with the public on Valentine’s Day as
part of the launch of the Eadweard Muybridge Online Archive
(Muybridge.org). The Kiss, curiously between two unclothed women, was
produced as part of Muybridge’s famous 19th century motion studies.
The Kiss, like most of the image sequences in the Muybride Online
archive, was produced some time between 1872 and 1885, significantly
before the invention of the motion picture camera. It was created
using banks of still cameras firing in sequence. Artist and educator
David Gordon has compiled the frames into a digital film loop showing
the kiss once again in motion, possibly for the first time since it
was shot in the late 1800’s.
This labor of love is being shared on Valentine’s Day, in hopes of
bringing greater attention to the fascinating work of Muybridge, “The
Father of Film” and to the Muybridge Online Archive. For the first
time the general public, artists and academics will have easy access
to the majority of Eadweard Muybridge’s groundbreaking and beautiful
photographic studies of humans and animals in motion. These extremely
high resolution photographs, including all eleven volumes of Animal
Locomotion, will be provided free of charge and without restriction,
and will be suitable for printing. This project would not have been
possible without the support and encouragement of the Boston Public
Library who kindly provided access to Muybridge’s original
publications and helped to digitize thousands of images.
The Kiss, like many of the photographic series Muybridge created, was
intended to inform the scientific and artistic understanding of human
motion. To that end, many of these photos are of minimally clad or
unclothed people engaged in everyday activities such as walking or
working. He may have chosen to photograph the kiss with two women
because in the context of Victorian culture this was more likely to be
seen as innocent. For this reason many of Muybridge’s photos showing
interactions between what might be expected to be men and women use
women for both roles.
Oberlin Alumnus Dave Gordon, the creator and curator of the Muybridge
online archive, is an artist and academic, teaching at North Shore
Community College in Beverly, MA. For a number of years, he has been
working to create a short film called Victorian Dream entirely from
Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs which upon its completion may be the
oldest narrative film ever made. The impetus for the Muybridge online
archive emerged from the difficulty Gordon had gaining access to
Muybridge’s images and his frustration with the desire of many
institutions and individuals to profit from this long out of copyright
material.
We invite you to view the Eadweard Muybridge Online Archive, under
construction at Muybridge.org
Launch date: February 14th, 2011
Pop Up Books at Bowdoin College
http://www.bowdoin.edu/news/archives/1bowdoincampus/008200.shtml
BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE
Brett Kashmere, Visiting Assistant Professor in Cinema Studies, is coordinating a screening for early spring.
Details are below.
BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE
A Screening Curated and Introduced by Craig Baldwin
Wednesday, February 16th @ 8pm
Moffett Auditorium (Mudd 050)
Oberlin College
Americans are certainly witnessing a radical surge in types and
varieties of protest and street demonstration. Whole new modes of
dissent have emerged–more visual, more gestural, more interactive,
and much more humor-based than the tame and unimaginative
democratic-centralist manifestations of the Eighties. These tactical
interventions, or call them political pranks, are perhaps the result
of a generation’s increasingly intense need to break out of the
Coast-to-Coast corporate numbing of the popular will, as well as the
very healthy growth of the anarchist and direct-action wings of the
American Left.
This new breed of activism has been the subject of many recent
articles, books, conferences, and even college class offerings, as
well as, of course, ambitious interdisciplinary exhibition initiatives
from within the fine-art world. The explosion of creativity and
dialogue affords a unique opportunity to appreciate this contemporary
guerrilla theater against the histories of both agit-prop AND
performance art (among many other cultural studies), and so it is that
Craig Baldwin’s video program rolls into town.
Mr. Baldwin, director of Tribulation 99, Sonic Outlaws, Spectres of
the Spectrum, and Mock Up On Mu–four earlier critiques of corporate
hegemony–will be on hand to introduce the screening and answer any
questions.
Expect work by such artists and activists as Animal Charm, Billboard
Liberation Front, Bryan Boyce, Critical Mass, Paper Tiger TV,
WhirlMart, Whispered Media, The Yes Men, and more.
An Exhibition Practices Initiative in Cinema Studies, with support
from the Blanchard Fund. Free and open to the public.
ABOUT CRAIG BALDWIN
Craig Baldwin is a San Francisco-based filmmaker and curator whose
interests lie in archival retrieval and recombinatory forms of cinema,
performance, and installation. He is the recipient of several grants,
including those from the Rockefeller Foundation, Alpert Award,
Creative Capital, Phelan, AFI, FAF, and California Arts Council. Over
the last two decades, his productions have been shown and awarded at
numerous international festivals, museums, and institutes of
contemporary art, often in conjunction with panels, juries, and
workshops on collage and cultural activism. His own weekly screening
project, Other Cinema, has continued to premiere experimental, essay,
and documentary works for over a quarter century, recently expanding
into DVD publishing. After a 6-month world tour with his monumental
2-hour ‘collage narrative’ Mock Up On Mu, he has returned to studio
work, and research on his next short feature Invisible Insurrection.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/great-directors/baldwin/
http://www.incite-online.net/polta.html
