Dinca

Post-Internet & the Moving Image
Wed March 22, 2017, 5pm
The 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival

Plenty has been said about the term “Post-Internet Art,” and since the term emerged sometime around 2010, it has glided throughout the contemporary art lexicon inciting both adulation and contention. Little has been said about “Post-Internet Cinema,” a term which this program, “Post-Internet & the Moving Image,” seeks to define. This collection of recent (2011-2017) artist-made videos typify the profound influence of the Internet and technology on the cinema of today and tomorrow. Content and source material is culled from the Internet; images and media are appropriated and re-contextualized; new technological processes (webcam video, screen capture video, desktop hacking) are employed to create moving images; a process of creating and uploading is embraced. Here we find a new type of moving image based-art that would not exist without the advent of the Internet or without digital technological processes that emerged during the proliferation of the Internet. Is it the future of cinema? Is digital technology ephemeral? Time will tell. (AR)

Featuring work by: Trisha Baga, Darja Bajagić, Petra Cortright, Joe Hamilton, Emilio.jp, Shana Moulton, Brenna Murphy, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Jon Rafman, Nicolas Sassoon & Rick Silva, Jon Satrom, Amalia Ulman, and Andrew Norman Wilson. Curated and presented by Andrew Rosinski.

 

Stream
Joe Hamilton
2014 | 3 | HD video
Stream is a work that explores the well known analogy of water flow and the flow of data on the internet. The structure and movement in the browser window becomes a rigid framework that contains and shifts an array of found images and video of water. (JH)

 

Tanya versus Irena
Darja Bajagić
2014 | 9 | HD video
Tanya versus Irena considers the Internet’s utility in the sex economy. Moving at a protracted pace, it creates a durational discomfort between the viewer and the large amount of visually similar salacious imagery. (AR)

 

Bergman
Jaakko Pallasvuo
2014 | 6 | HD video
Blending the old with the new, Pallasvuo assembles a mélange of voiceover, found footage, and digital graphics and software icons into a poetic, essay-like structure that contemplates the life and career of art house cinema legend Ingmar Bergman, along with the history of cinema and the mechanics of filmmaking, social media, and various other tropes. Bergmanproduces a saccharine and sentimental tone that feels both sincere and insincere, emblematic of the emotional ambiguity of modern digital culture. (AR)

 

Workers Leaving the Googleplex
Andrew Norman Wilson
2011 | 11 | HD video
Paying titular and partly conceptual homage to the Lumière Brothers, Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895), Workers Leaving the Googleplex recounts Wilson’s time as a former Google employee. By examining the color-coded badge hierarchy of the Google workforce, Wilson gives insight and inside information pertaining to the tech giant’s internal company policies, as well as the stratification of its workers. (AR)

 

.*` .* ;`*,`., `, ,`.*.*. *.*` .* ;`*,`., `, ,`.*.*. *.*` .* ;`*,`., `, ,`.*.*. *
Petra Cortright
2010 | 2 | digital webcam video
Courtesy the artist and Foxy Production, New York
In .*` .* ;`*,`., `, ,`.*.*. *.*` .* ;`*,`., `, ,`.*.*. *.*` .* ;`*,`., `, ,`.*.*. * , Petra Cortright participates in the YouTube economy by showcasing the magic and sparkling potential of the uploaded webcam video. (AR)

 

Opening Folders
Emilio.jp
2015 | 3 | screen capture video
The folders are placed on desktop following a concentric and symmetric layout but they are named by numbers in a clockwise direction, with eight folders on every corner and the rest in the center. This composition makes the user create different animated transitions as the folders are selected differently before to open them. (EJP)

 

PathExtrude
Brenna Murphy
2017 | 5 | HD video
In PathExtrude, Brenna Murphy employs 3D animation software to render a bridge to the other side, where we gaze at abstruse patterns and explore otherworldly architectural spaces through a first-person POV that hearkens back to early computer games. (AR)

 

Annals of Private History: Frieze Live (London, 2015)
Amalia Ulman
2015 | 14 | HD video
Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London
In Annals of Private History: Frieze Live (London, 2015), Amalia Ulman’s live-recorded spoken word performance impels a poetic and diary-like narrative structure wherein personal thoughts and feelings and societal histories are revealed amongst visual slideshow compositions comprised of text, found images, animated gifs, sound effects and other various found multimedia. Ulman collected these via the Internet and crowdsourced submissions of hundreds of photos of diaries from all over the world, solicited from “Internet friends.” (AR)

 

Signals 1
Nicolas Sassoon & Rick Silva
2014 | 2 | HD video
Using the Internet as collaborative conduit, Nicolas Sassoon and Rick Silva merge computer generated images of undulating waves with a meshing rainbow pattern that replicates a reflective oil spill to create an ocean view simulacra. This is the first installment in a series of three videos whereby Sassoon and Silva participate in the nascent digital art economy, distributing 500 editions of each installment via the digital marketplace s[edition]. (AR)

 

Neon Parallel 1996
Jon Rafman
2015 | 11 | video
Digitally produced (and re-recorded to VHS), comprised of found footage and fictional text, and distributed online exclusively through the blog dismagazine.com, Jon Rafman’s Neon Parallel 1996 centers around a chat transcription between two Internet users, “sp1der” and “ang3l,” as it explores a cyber-noir narrative that fetisizes data while wistfully evoking the surreptitious cyber-hacker culture of the 90s. It’s a video that Rafman self-describes as a “Lost Vaporwave Classic” and that Gary Zhexi Zhang of Frieze Magazine describes as “sit[ting] somewhere between the warm softcore haze of Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle (1974) and the dystopian visions of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), cut like a tourist-board montage for an LA circa Blade Runner (1982).” (AR)

 

Swisspering
Shana Moulton
2013 | 9 | video
The video Swisspering is framed by the act of applying and removing makeup. As the makeup is removed with a product called Swisspers, the body is, in effect, carved away. Through this act, Moulton investigates Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), defined as the physical sensation of pleasurable tingling that begins on the scalp and moves throughout the body that is often triggered by whispering. (SM)

 

100 FORCE QUIT NOISE CANCEL CALCULATORS
Jon Satrom
2014 | 6 | screen capture video
for ((i = 0; i (JS)

 

MS Orlando 2D
Trisha Baga
2015 | 34 | HD video
Trisha Baga deftly amalgamates plenty of media in a beautiful way. We saunter through video sequences with overlays of iPhone screencaps of texts sent from her mother, and screen capture video of photoshop utilities and software popup modals. Pop music and audio lifted from movies create strangely sentimental emotional arcs, and travelogue images and quotidian footage of the city life produce a very heterogeneously sublime video. (AR)

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Program curated by Andrew Rosinski.

Andrew Rosinski is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator who received his BA from Columbia College in film and video with a concentration in post-production and documentary film. In 2009, he founded Dinca (dinca.org), a contemporary art blog surveying the most noteworthy and innovative artworks that exist in physical, digital, & time-based spaces. In 2012, he founded Vision Quest, a contemporary moving image & media arts festival based in Chicago. In 2014, he was awarded a Propeller Grant, a program by the Andy Warhol Foundation For The Visual Arts as part of its initiative to promote informal and independently organized visual arts activities across the United States. His artwork – moving image, painting & drawing, sculpture & objects, text, digital media – has exhibited around the country and internationally.