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7 Question Interview with Jeremy Boxer, Director of the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards

13 December, 2011 by

Vimeo Festival + Awards 2012 Logo

Dec. 13, 2011 — Vimeo, the amiable filmmaker and artist friendly video-hosting service, opened submissions today for the second Vimeo Festival + Awards, “which celebrates the most creative and original videos online and the individuals that make them.”

Beginning today through February 20, 2012, filmmakers can submit their works for consideration in one of 13 different judged categories.

Last year, the judge panel was impressive — David Lynch judged the “experimental” category — and this year the judges will be equally impressive; however, the judges are to be announced sometime in early January.

Submit your work to the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards ———> click here.  Vimeo will award Grants of $5,000 to all of the 13 category winners, as well as awarding a Grant of $25,000 for the Grand Prize winner.

Jeremy Boxer, the Director of the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards, spoke with us yesterday. Mr. Boxer explains now, more than ever, is a propitious time to be an artist producing work that’s disseminated on the internet.


 

(1) Why should a filmmaker submit to the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards?

The main difference from traditional film festivals is we only accept work that has premiered online — anywhere — not just Vimeo. The majority of film festivals do not accept work that has premiered online.   Our hope is that in the future every festival will accept work that has premiered online.

 

(2) What categories/genres are in competition in the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards?

There are 13 categories.  Experimental, which is of course of interest to your readers. Lyrical is a new category this year. The Lyrical category encompasses poetic videos based on a personal world-view. These are personal representations of the way the creator looks at the world. For example, travelogues or time-lapses of a local neighborhood.  Captured is a category not based on filmmaking technique but more on what is being captured by the video, for example, a performance based work or projection art.

The other new categories include Advertising, Action Sports, and Fashion and returning categories from our inaugural Vimeo Festival + Awards are:

  • Narrative
  • Animation
  • Original Series
  • Motion Graphics
  • Music Video
  • Documentary
  • Remix

 

(3) Will David Lynch return to judge the experimental category?

We are announcing a few of the judges now.   The remainder of the judges will be announced January. The judges will be equally as impressive as in 2010.

 

(4) Filmmakers can submit their work using Vimeo via the Internet; are there post-internet distribution/exhibition opportunities in place for the winners? Will there be a time to P-A-R-T-Y?

We will have an Awards ceremony, talks, workshops and a bunch of screenings as part of the festival.   As we are 6 months out, we’re currently in the planning process and are open to ideas.   As we get closer to making that announcement, we’ll reach out to you with all of those specifics.

 

(5) Last year, Chris Beckman won the Experimental category award for his film OOPS.

Shortly thereafter, Beckman’s film was named an official selection of the corporate-industry-driven 2011 Sundance Film Festival and Beckman directed a commercial for Motorola, for whom he made a branded short film directly inspired by OOPS.

What potential professional opportunities are available to a filmmaker submitting to the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards?

Our intention is to provide filmmakers with opportunities they would never have had before. We want to provide the gold standard for what you can find online and in so doing provide filmmakers the potential to be seen by a much wider audience which could lead to their big break. Because of Vimeo’s reach, we can put a filmmaker’s work in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands.

After its discovery at the Vimeo Festival + Awards, Chris Beckman’s Oops was chosen as an Official Selection at Sundance Film Festival 2011.  Chris then went on to direct for such brands as Motorola. Sundance reached out to me directly to ask for Chris Beckman’s information for him to be entered into the festival. This was great, as it was the first time I heard Sundance was accepting films that had premiered online.

Another inaugural award winner was Onur Senturk, he had just graduated university when he entered the Vimeo Festival + Awards.  After winning for his film Triangle, due to the Festival’s exposure, Paramount asked him to create the motion design title sequence for Transformers: The Dark Side of the Moon.

The Overall + Documentary winner, Eliot Rausch, has been showered with media attention that landed him a spot on the Carson Daily Show and more commercial work than he ever expected to see in his lifetime.  He’s in post- production on his latest documentary — a film he was able to produce with the grant money he received from winning the 2010 Vimeo Festival + Awards. He has gone on to be offered more work than he knows what to do with.

To give you a sense of what Vimeo can do for filmmakers, here is another very recent example.  A few weeks ago, James Curran, a 28 year old from UK, put up his own homage credit sequence for “Tin Tin.”   The beautiful animated piece came to the attention of Steven Spielberg who hired him for his next film.

You never know who might be watching.

 

(6) If you could send a submitting filmmaker one special message, what would it be?

The goal of Vimeo Festival + Awards is to expose your film to a much wider audience.   We welcome you to submit and we wish you all good luck!

 

(7) Anything else you want to add?

We’re just hoping that more filmmakers will submit so that more of them have a chance at all of these incredible opportunities in existing and new categories added for 2012.

 

More:

————> Submit

2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards

Jeremy Boxer on Vimeo

Submit : : 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards

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Posted in animation & motion design, documentary / ethnography, event, experimental film, film, interview
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Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) by Mark Leckey

26 September, 2011 by

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore by Mark Leckey (15:00, video, 1999)

Everybody dance now.

Described by one commentator as the best thing they’d ever seen in a gallery, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is an extended paean to the unadulterated bliss of nocturnal abandon. A documentary of sorts, Leckey’s video chronicles the rites of passage experienced by successive generations of British (sub)urban youth.
— Matthew Higgs, ArtForum

video still: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore by Mark Leckey

More:

Mark Leckey: Wikipedia

Mark Leckey: Rhizome Interview

Turner Prize Winner Mark Leckey

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Robert Gardner on that Unique Pattern, or Entelechy

13 September, 2011 by
“I suppose I should wish you success, but that is too easy.  I would like to wish you something that is harder to come by.  So I am going to wish you meaning in life.  And meaning is not something you stumble across like the answer to a riddle or prize in a treasure hunt.
Meaning is something you build into your life.  You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you; out of your own talent and understanding, out of things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something, the ingredients are there.
You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life.  Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you.  If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.”
— Robert Gardner
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HH 47: A Young Star Jet Expands

5 September, 2011 by

HH 47: A Young Star Jet Expands
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, & P. Haritgan (Rice U.)

Things are moving fast in the best possible sense. Happy Labor Day to all. Don’t work too hard, repose is important, too.

Explanation: Stars remain where they are. Nebulas appear the same. Day after day. Year after year. Given the vast distances in astronomy, even fast moving objects will not appear to change their appearance in a human lifetime. Typically. A recent spectacular exception to this, however, is the supersonic jet in the star forming Herbig Haro 47. HH 47 is so close — and the jets are moving so fast — that images from the Hubble Space Telescope from 1994 to 2008 have been combined into a time-lapse movie that actually shows a powerful jet expanding. Visible above, jets of plasma extending over 10,000 times the Earth-Sun distance shoot out from a forming star at speeds in excess of 150 kilometers per second. Studying how these jets evolve gives clues not only to how the star in HH 47 is forming, but how stars like our Sun formed billions of years ago. HH 47 is located about 1,500 light years away toward the constellation of Sails of a Ship (Vela).

Source: Astro Pic of the Day

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Down the Cosmic Path of the Cassini Orbiter

19 June, 2011 by

CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

Views from Cassini at Saturn
Credit: Images: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA; Video Compilation: Chris Abbas.
Music Credit & License: “Ghosts I-IV” by Nine Inch Nails.

Saturn, master of time. So staid and stately; the one guide that tells us ‘no’ when he means ‘yes.’ He teaches (forces) us to be patient, prudent, and to acknowledge the confining linear timeline of our world; however, this is a good thing. Saturn teaches us that we have more to do: more knowledge and experience to assimilate, more responsibilities to tend. He teaches us that under one’s own volition, we find what we seek. The rings of time, much like a tree: plant your seeds, love, care, nuture them, and watch your seeds grow into something beautiful and worthwhile. It’s a simple and lovely universal law of existence. Koolgrow.

Saturn teaches us to enjoy our continuance down ye merry path. Bubblemagic.

Indubitably, the Cassini orbiter has collected indelible, Earth-shattering imagery and here is a mystifying amalgamation of images assembled by Chris Abbas, with imagery from the Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL. ESA, NASA.

Explanation: What has the Cassini orbiter seen since arriving at Saturn? The above music video shows some of the highlights. In the first time-lapse sequence (00:07), a vertical line appears that is really Saturn’s thin rings seen nearly edge-on. Soon some of Saturn’s moon shoot past. The next sequence (00:11) features Saturn’s unusually wavy F-ring that is constrained by the two shepherd moons that are also continually perturbing it. Soon much of Saturn’s extensive ring system flashes by, sometimes juxtaposed to the grandeur of the immense planet itself. Cloud patterns on Titan (00:39) and Saturn (00:41) are highlighted. Clips from flyby’s of several of Saturn’s moon are then shown, including Phoebe, Mimas, Epimetheus, and Iapetus. In other sequences, moons of Saturn appear to pass each other as they orbit Saturn. Background star fields seen by Cassini are sometimes intruded upon by bright passing moons. The robotic Cassini spacecraft has been revolutionizing humanity’s knowledge of Saturn and its moons since 2004.

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Space Program: MARS, or War Huh Yeah What Is It Good For Absolutely Nothing Say It Again, 5/1/2011

29 April, 2011 by

Crossroads by Bruce Conner (36:00, 16mm, 1976)

SPACE PROGRAM presents
“MARS, or War Huh Yeah What Is It Good For Absolutely Nothing Say It Again”

Sunday the 1st of May at 7:30pm
at Thalia Hall, 1807 S Allport, Chicago, IL (map)
$5 suggested donation
this space is unheated, so bring warm clothes, sleeping bags, blankets, etc
curated by Ben Russell

**this space is unheated, so bring warm clothes, sleeping bags, blankets, etc

“ Oh, rust-surfaced sphere, with your receding polar ice caps and optical illusion canals!  If not for your half-mass, your eccentric orbit, and your global dust storms, we would call you sister or cousin; but it was your fiery red-lit temperament and your thin atmosphere that led the Romans to name you after their God of War, and we at SPACE PROGRAM shall do the same.  We shall land our newest craft upon the peak of your Olympus Mons, and from that vantage point (highest in the solar system) we shall survey the entire galaxy stretched out before us.  Unlike the 2/3rds of failed Mars voyages that left before us, we shall traverse your Valles Marineris with the understanding that the power of Mars as the power of War is a power best used to secure the peace.  Our childhood wargames (Geissler/Sann), our damaged soldiers (Single Spark Film Collective), our flicker destruction (Sharits), our media paralysis (Smith), and our transcendent explosions (Conner) are herewith submitted as evidence.  With a question on our lips we shall raise our flag upon your soil, its single dollar/Euro sign fluttering in the solar wind: Oh, Mars – if it costs $309,000 per kilogram to land upon your basalt surface, what (pray tell) is the average cost of peace? ” — BR

FEATURING:
Fuck the War by Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann (4:00, video, 2007)
Winter Soldier by Single Spark Film Collective (20:00, 16mm, 1971)
T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G by Paul Sharits (12:00, 16mm, 1968)
Frozen War by John Smith (11:00, video, 2002)
Friendly Fire by Thorsten Fleisch (7:30, 16mm, 2003)
Crossroads by Bruce Conner (36:00, 16mm on video, 1976)
TRT 90:00

***
MARS PROGRAMME DETAILS
Fuck the War by Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann (4:00, video, 2007)
The film is, on the one hand, a con­tem­po­rary Lord of the Flies, which evokes the ongo­ing sense­less­ness of vio­lence and war, bring­ing the mes­sage home by allow­ing Ger­man (rather than Iraqi or Sierra Leonese) chil­dren to explore the giddy chaos of mil­i­tary power. At the same time, it speaks to the innate instincts and prim­i­tive impulses that remain only shal­lowly buried beneath our civ­i­lized surfaces.

Winter Soldier by Single Spark Film Collective (20:00, 16mm, 1971)
Vietnam vets give testimony at the Winter Soldier tribunals. Vet after vet talks about what he personally experienced in Vietnam, what he was made to do as a soldier in an imperialist army. Revealed by nightmarish firsthand account are the atrocities committed against the Vietnamese people.

T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G. by Paul Sharits (1969)

T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G by Paul Sharits (12:00, 16mm, 1968)
“Merges violence with purity.” – P. Adams Sitney

Frozen War by John Smith (11:00, video, 2002)
A disorientating experience while attempting to watch the TV news in an Irish hotel room triggers a spontaneous response to the bombing of Afghanistan.

Friendly Fire by Thorsten Fleisch (7:30, 16mm, 2003)
… Friendly Fire (2003) literally burned what you could see, and it was the light of the fire, the projector’s beam, that played out in stunning violence onscreen. With so much attention dedicated to the preservation of film, FriendlyFire proposed a cathartic alternative: ruined figures of melted celluloid and crackling ash. in death film comes alive, more vital, reborn by the very forces that destroy it. (Genevieve Yue ‘Senses of Cinema’)

Crossroads by Bruce Conner (1976)

Crossroads by Bruce Conner (36:00, 16mm, 1976)
The 1945 atomic-bomb explosion at Bikini Atoll becomes a thing of terrible beauty and haunting visual poetry when shown in extreme slow motion, shown from 27 different angles, and accompanied by avant-garde Western classical music composed for electric organ by Terry Riley.
+++



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Seven Question Interview with Matt McCormick, Portland-based Filmmaker and Artist

20 April, 2011 by

Matt McCormick filmmaker and artist Matt McCormick filmmaker and artist Matt McCormick filmmaker and artist

Matt McCormick is an ardent filmmaker and artist who resides in Portland, Oregon. He is an eminent maker in the avant-garde and independent sphere of cinema — voted one of the best filmmakers of the 21st century, according to a poll conducted by the Film Society of the Lincoln Center — Matt found early success with his well-known short The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal (2002, narrated by Miranda July), which was named in  ‘Top 10 / Best of 2002’ lists in both The Village Voice and Art Forum magazine.

Matt collaborates with notable artists; Matt makes music videos for recognized bands: Broken Bells, The Shins, Miranda July, Sleater-Kinney, The Postal Service, YACHT, Al Burian, Eluvium, Patton Oswalt, and Calvin Johnson, to name a few.

Matt McCormick has an aptitude for successfully distributing his films, whether it be D.I.Y. and starting his own distribution label (Peripheral Produce) and founding the PDX Film Festival, or simply just making great work and having it exhibit in a theatre, gallery, or festival.

“Matt has had three films screen at the Sundance Film Festival, and has had work screened or exhibited at MoMA, The Serpentine Gallery, The Oslo Museum of Modern Art, the Reykjavik Art Museum, The Seattle Art Museum, and in 2007 he was selected to participate in both the Moscow Biennial and Art Basil.  He has received awards including Best Short Film from the San Francisco International Film Fest, Best Experimental from the New York Underground Film Fest, and Best Narrative from the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Matt’s debut feature film Some Days are Better Than Others premiered at SXSW and was invited to screen in the New Directors / New Films series presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.  Starring Carrie Brownstein and James Mercer, the film was acquired by Palisades Tartan and will be released theatrically in the spring of 2011.”

 

(1) During your early days of filmmaking, what were the challenges, and how did you surmount? What are the onerous aspects of the filmmaker’s journey?

I get the sense that the challenges never really cease. Even when I talk to my super successful filmmaker friends, I am always surprised to hear how difficult things can be. For me, the early challenges were as simple as getting access to equipment and finding venues that would screen my work. From there, the challenges largely became more internal — wanting to grow as an artist and make work that felt like a progression, or simply arranging your life so that the demands of filmmaking are not impeded on by other lifestyle choices. But I think the challenges are almost always there, from being frustrated because you want to make something, but lack the resources, to having made something, but being disappointed with how it turned out or was received. And then there is the whole “how am I going to make a living?” to boot. I think as a filmmaker, you just have to deal with it, and understand that there are challenges around every corner.

(more…)

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April 17, 2011: SPACE PROGRAM presents: Mercury, or One-Half a Life Spent in Darkness is One-Half a Life Spent Facing the Sun

15 April, 2011 by


SPACE PROGRAM presents
“Mercury, or One-Half a Life Spent in Darkness is One-Half a Life Spent Facing the Sun”
Curated by Ben Russell

This Sunday!
April 17, 2011 | 7:30pm
at Thalia Hall
1807 S Allport, Chicago, IL, 60608 (map)
$5 suggested donation

Messenger Mercury is retrograde until April 23, but with this SPACE PROGRAM screening series, Mercury turns direct on Sunday, April 17th, 2011. Guided by the afflatus of the planetary teachers, Space Program projects indelible cinema in the historic, Pilsen-based Thalia Hall — both NASA employees and non-NASA employees are invited — but please note that this space is unheated, so bring warm clothes, sleeping bags, blankets, beaver pelts, caribou furs, and other warm goods. Considering the typical 40°–80° Chicago-flux of weather this time of year, it is advised that you bring extra beaver pelts and warm materials.

Synopsis of the Mercury Programme: “In honor of its eccentric orbit, its 176-day day, its large iron core, its tidal bulges and Beethoven Crater and its ‘gently rolling, hilly plains,’ your navigators at SPACE PROGRAM hereby propose an audiovisual third fly-by of the smallest galactic sphere: MERCURY.  The innermost planet of our Solar System, Mercury is metaphorically volatile, changeable, fickle and flighty.  It is a slow rotation with a sharp edge; one that occupies the two poles of our human psyche – Mercury is radical darkness, sorrow and despair; Mercury is blinding radiance, heat and wonderment.  Mercury is youth.  It is the cusp of adulthood, the terrors of development, that bittersweet joy of (not) knowing enough.  Viewed from our telescope, Mercury is Eva Marie Rødbro’s constellation of Texan teenagers, all infrared desire and insect and nipple pierce and imminent danger — the anxiety of that next rotation is deep, soul-shaking.  When we focus again, we see Mercury in the overwhelming sweetness and sorrow of Martin Bell and Mary Ellen Marks’ Streetwise (1984) — a document of a 1980s gang of Seattle street kids living in abandoned spaces (echoes of Thalia Hall), with the sort of heart-baring openness that can only come from living far too close to the sun … Where there is light, there is darkness.”

Below is a letter from the curator, Ben Russell:

Fellow Travelers,

On behalf of your friends at Mission Control (Pilsen), I am proud to announce the launch of SPACE PROGRAM* – a screening series in four parts that will temporarily re-colonize a world heretofore lost to Silence-and-Darkness in the name of Light-and-Sound.  Presented in the shadowy maw of Pilsen’s historic Thalia Hall under the guidance of artist/astronaut Ben Russell, SPACE PROGRAM is a satellite alternative to dominant media practices, a time-image map for those new constellations rapidly forming in your heads.  From April 17th onwards, each of the initial four SPACE PROGRAM screenings are named after and thematically curated in relation to one of the planets of our solar system.  Come, discover new worlds with us!  More specifically:

April 17th, 2011: MERCURY (see details below)
April 24th, 2011: VENUS (details TBA)
May 1st, 2011: MARS (details TBA)
May 8th, 2011: JUPITER (details TBA)

Space Is the Place,

Ben Russell

MERCURY PROGRAMME DETAILS

Featuring:
I Touched Her Legs by Eva Marie Rødbro (15:00, video, 2010)
Streetwise by Martin Bell and Mary Ellen Marks (91:00, 16mm, 1984)
TRT 106:00

I Touched Her Legs by Eva Marie Rødbro (15:00, video, 2010)
These Texan youth are the descendants of David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’, and they are both invincible and as fragile as a deer caught in the headlights of an approaching car. The Danish artist Eva Marie Rødbro’s sound-and-image montage is an extraordinary experience – a deeply poetic anthropological study of the self-destructive rites of passage of teenage life. This is the fragility of youth, caught shattering.  Everything is simultaneously animal and human, domestic and ethereal – that kid backflipping off his couch is an astronaut, untethered in space; those forgotten Jesus hymns are portals to St.Elsewhere, true.  If this video is a document then it’s also a vision – not just about what one looks at, but how one sees and hears the world.

Streetwise by Martin Bell (91:00, 16mm, 1984)
“The first time I saw this film, when I was a child, I felt like running away and living under a bridge, someplace or other. It’s an extremely beautiful film, which captures a time and a place that no longer exists in this way.” — Harmony Korine

Martin Bell’s unforgettable vérité documentary was shot on the streets of Seattle in the mid-1980s, and follows a group of homeless teenage kids aged between 13 and 19, who live off ‘container-raiding’, stealing and hustling. Rat, the dumpster diver, Tiny, the teenage prostitute, Shellie, the baby-faced blonde, DeWayne, the hustler, all old beyond their years.  They talk as if they were port workers, but behind the tough façade lie the vulnerable, small beings that have chosen the freedom of the street instead of the broken homes they come from. A raw masterpiece, and a kind of documentary precursor to Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), which Harmony Korine himself wrote the screenplay for as a teenager.  This is a film that is rarely screened, one that you’ll never forget.

===========================================================================

STREETWISE courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

SPACE PROGRAM is made possible by a grant from Propeller Fund and through material support from the The Foundation for Emerging Artistic Talent (E.A.T.).

Launched in May 2010, Propeller Fund is administered jointly by Gallery 400, UIC and threewalls. Initial support for the program is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts as part of its initiative to promote informal and independently organized visual arts activities across the United States.

The Foundation for Emerging Artistic Talent (E.A.T.) is a non-profit organization dedicated to promote the arts by providing exhibition opportunities and educational resources for emerging artists in the Chicago-land community. E.A.T.’s goal is to enrich the neighborhood of Pilsen through inspired artistic productions showcased in Thalia Hall’s 800-seat theater and gallery space. E.A.T’s dynamic programs will cultivate a supportive artistic network where emerging artists can be empowered to share their voice.

More:
www.dimeshow.com

Thalia Hall

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The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity (2007), by Brian Springer, at Conversations at the Edge, Chicago, this Thursday, March 17, 2011

16 March, 2011 by

Image: The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity, Brian Springer, 2007

“Brian Springer presents his latest work The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity (2007) at Conversations at the Edge this Thursday, March 17, 2011.

Followed by a Q&A with the artist and Brian Holmes.

‘An unexpected masterpiece.’ — Grady Hendrix, New York Sun

Best known for his scathing news media exposé Spin (1995), Brian Springer’s latest film is a labyrinthine, semi-autobiographical documentary about the search for four disparate treasures buried on his family’s farm in Missouri. These include gold coins left behind by a 16th Century Spanish explorer; silver from the Civil War; the legendary lost diary of anarchist Kate Austin, who lived on the farm in the 1890s; and a mysterious limestone sculpture of dubious origin. Springer interweaves the stories surrounding these treasures with those of his family to spin a tale of spirit possession, Napalm, Indian massacres, early American opera, fanatical obsessions, 200 tons of dirt, and the way mothers try to protect their families from wounds that never heal.

At its core, The Disappointment meditates on the ways history is passed along, altered, and sometimes lost through archeological findings.  The screening will be followed by a discussion with the artist and writer Brian Holmes.”

2007, Brian Springer, USA, Beta SP video, 70 min plus discussion.

BRIAN SPRINGER (b. 1959, Kansas) studied video at the State University of New York at Buffalo and received his MFA in Art from the University of California Santa Barbara. While in Buffalo, Springer worked with a group of artists to create Squeaky Wheel, a nationally respected grassroots media arts center. Springer’s work has been shown at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Germany, the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Whitney Museum (NYC), the Institute for Contemporary Art (London), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and has been broadcast nationally in the UK. He currently lives in Ohio, where he works in the public schools through the Ohio Arts Council’s arts residency program.

Co-presented by Video Data Bank, in collaboration with Conversations at the Edge, a program of the Film, Video, New Media and Animation Department at SAIC.

SCREENING DETAILS
Thursday, March 17, 2011, 6:00 PM
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N. State Street
Chicago, IL
312.846.2600
www.conversationsattheedge.org

More:
The Disappointment on VDB.org

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The Great Northwest (2011) by Matt McCormick, Feb 17–April 2, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland

21 February, 2011 by


The Great Northwest
an experimental documentary / video installation by Matt McCormick
76 minutes / HD / 2011 + photography
More info and a short video excerpt can be found here.

“The Great Northwest is a 76-minute experimental documentary that explores how the visual landscape of the Pacific Northwest has changed over the past 50 years. The project is based on the re-creation of a 3,200 mile road-trip made in 1958 by four Seattle women who thoroughly documented their journey in an elaborate scrapbook of photos, postcards, brochures and receipts. Fifty years later, Portland artist and filmmaker Matt McCormick found that scrapbook in a thrift store, and in 2010 set out on the road, following their route precisely and searching out every stop in which the ladies had documented.

The urban and natural landscapes the women experienced during their trip has changed greatly since 1958. While urban centers such as Seattle, Portland, and Spokane have sprouted sky-scrappers and hefty suburban growth, other towns such as Vantage and Taft no longer exist; one being flooded by Columbia River damming and the other paved over by Interstate 90. Development, damming, industry, and construction of the Interstate Highway System have moved mountains and rivers as well as towns and communities. Yet many aspects of the Pacific Northwest appear relatively unchanged. Carefully preserved towns such as Wallace, Idaho, and steadfast tourist attractions such as the Oregon Coast’s Sea Lion Caves seem almost stuck in time except for perhaps a few new layers of paint.

The film is a meditative look at these changes while also becoming it’s own scrapbook-like document. With a very patient and observational approach, the film compares and contrasts the 1958 landscape with that of the present day while celebrating the enduring features of the Pacific Northwest. It is a lyrical time capsule that explores the fragility of history.”

The Great Northwest was funded in part by a 2010 Regional Arts and Culture
Council Project Grant and the 2011 Oregon Art Commission Media Arts
Fellowship.

Runs February 17-April 2
Elizabeth Leach Gallery
417 N.W. 9th Avenue Portland
www.elizabethleach.com

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Reefs, Sanctuaries of Life in the Sea

25 January, 2011 by


Destructive Trawling: Reefs to Rubble from Oceana on Vimeo

The honestly of nature only comes from the wild.

The year is 2011, and we need to realize that our Earth will come first. The ambit of our Spirit Earth is what matters. The Great Earth is our Mother.

We must respect our ocean, our Earth. Please take the time to watch these two videos, a brief glimpse into coral reefs and the devastating effects of bottom trawling. “With the capability to destroy century-old reefs in mere moments, bottom trawling is the single most destructive human impact on the ocean floor. Oceana fights to stop bottom trawling and protect the marine life that call these habitats home.”

More information on Oceana’s website.

More on bottom trawling here.

Urge President Obama to Protect the oceans. More importantly, spread awareness on your own.

Remember?

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