Barbara Agreste

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PIXILERATIONS [v.7]
New Media Fringe Festival @ FirstWorks.

video art screening

270 Westminster Street Providence,
Rhode Island – USA
September 30-October 10, 2010
in Providence, Rhode Island

PIXILERATIONS [v.7] is a new media showcase in Providence, Rhode Island that investigates the state of new media arts through installations, concert performances and film/video screenings. It is part of the larger FirstWorks Festival (www.first-works.org), a multidimensional performing arts festival held in Providence each fall.
Pixilerations is produced by FirstWorks in collaboration with the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, and the City of Providence’s Department of Art, Culture + Tourism.

Now in its seventh year, Pixilerations showcases groundbreaking work in digital music and art. Local, national and international artists, selected from over 350 applicants, investigate issues ranging from the controversy around surveillance technologies to private space as commodity to the richness of digital technology as an artistic tool.

This year’s fringe festival sweeps to the far reaches of the global frontier with provocative installations by Taiwanese artist Dar-Kuen Wu, Rhode Island’s Megan and Murray McMillan, and REDUX (Mark Cetilia and Joe Cantrell). Pixilerations extends its reach to new venues with performances at Firehouse 13 (Providence’s West Side), and Machines With Magnets (Pawtucket).

PIXILERATED VIDEO ART SCREENINGS:
Tuesday October 5 – 9:30pm
Cable Car Cinema, 204 South Main Street, 9:30p
Hosted by Magic Lantern Cinema
Join us for a line-up of new video art, animation, and experimental film from around the world.

Detailed artist and work information:

Sara Sun
Blue / Single channel video / 3 min. / 2006 / Brooklyn, NY A dance segment from the 1936 Swing Time, a Depression Era musical, recaptured from DVD screen. Blue uses color, animation techniques and juxtaposes an independent audio mix with reedited video. Sara Sun lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is predominantly video/installation, digital image and drawing.

Barbara Agreste
Lo Specchio (the Mirror) / 16mm stop animation / 2 min. / 2010 / Italy and England This film, the 3rd part of the Le Torre trilogy, examines themes of loss of control and hysteria. Originally shot in16mm as a stop-action animation the piece was then digitally mastered. Barbara Agreste was born in 1971 in Pescara where she first studied art at the Art Lyceum, followed by scenography in Milan and finally video and film at Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in London. Her projects have exhibited internationally. She lives and works in London.

Audrey Ellis Fox
I’m Like / Digital Video / 2010 / 2:52 min. / Providence, RI I’m like is an elliptical sound, video, and text collage that resists facile answers. Audrey Ellis Fox is concentrating in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is from Los Angeles.

Anders Weberg
For Sore Eyes / Digital Video / 2:17 min. / 2006 / Sweden For Sore Eyes is an exploration of the ambivalence of the male gaze and gendered (dis)order. It is a suggestive reflection of life in the sanatorium of consumer freedom. But really what is freedom? Anders Weberg (b.1968) is an artist and filmmaker. The human body lies at the root of his projects that formally and conceptually map identity and its construction as a preamble to broaching matters of violence, genders, memory and loss.

Lucky Leone
Saddest Green House / Digital Video / 11 min. / 2010 / Providence, RI A house, abandoned for many years, held the possessions of a family long gone. The mother we are told lived there until she died. After her death her daughters wanted nothing to do with the house. It was at this time that Lucky Leone was able to look through the house, and ultimately, to find a cardboard box emptied of its contents, her ashes.

Lucky Leone is a professional artist whose work ranges from sculpture to painting, electronics to video. Leone has a BFA and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from San Diego State University.

Dave Fischer
Ylla’s World / digital video / 5 minutes / 2010 / Providence, RI Ylla’s World is a five-minute experiment in animated textures, based on algorithmic manipulations of photographs of Mars’ surface from a NASA probe. It was inspired by Albert Lamorisse’s Le vent des amoureux, and his portrayal of the desert regions of Iran. Dave Fischer lives and works in Providence.

David Dvorin and Douglas Crockwell
Glen Falls Sequence / Animation / 8:16 min. / 2010 / USA In the late 1930s experimental animator Douglass Crockwell created a series of short abstract animated silent films titled Glen Falls Sequence. Now, David Dvorin has created an entirely new surround-sound electroacoustic composition that would complement the surreal and abstract visualizations of the animations.

An Emmy-nominated composer, author, and educator, David Dvorin’s music has been performed in numerous new music festivals around the United States. He has worked with such composers as Terry Riley and performers as the Kronos Quartet. Currently he is Professor of Music Composition and Electronic Music at California State University at Chico, and the artistic director of the annual New Music Symposium.

Jacopo Jenna
The Visible Man IV / Video / 2:43 min. / 2010 / Italy A plastic model The Visible Man is a full-scale reproduction of the human body. The skin of the model is completely transparent revealing the bones and the inner organs. The video explores the concept of visibility through six chapters, in which fuzzy anonymous bodies pass through different places as reality merges with the surreal.

Jacopo Jenna is a visual artist and professional dancer. He approached dance only as an adult when he studied in Holland in Codarts-Rotterdam Dance Academy. He has worked in dance companies and on projects across Europe.

Melanie Beisswenger
Follow Me / Digital Video / 1:30 seconds / 2010 / Germany and Australia In Follow Me images and sounds flow together, as if fleeting thoughts shooting through the mind.

Melanie Beisswenger is a German born director, animator and visual artist. After undergraduate studies in architecture, she received her Masters degree at the Institute of Animation, Filmakademie Baden- Württemberg in Germany. Beisswenger has worked in animation on a number of international feature films and TV commercials. Her animation credits include the Academy Award winning feature film Happy Feet. Currently Melanie Beisswenger is Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, NTU in Singapore.

Susanne Wiegner
Mixed Reflextion/ Digital Video / 2:40 min. / 2010 / Germany Mixed Reflection uses the mixture of different video and animation techniques, as well as the mixture of the different common media in confronting the artist’s face — the mirror, the screen and the camera. The video is set in the intimacy of a bathroom.

Susanne Wiegner

studied architecture at the Academy of fine Arts in Munich and at Pratt Institute in New York City. She works as an architect and 3D-artist in Munich, Germany. In addition to projects in real space, for several years she has been creating 3D computer animations dealing with literature and with virtual space.

Anton Hecht
Carousel/ Digital Video / 3:42 min. / 2010 / England In Carousel over 40 players filmed separately play five instruments edited together and superimposed to create a loop of music.

Anton Hecht works with communities in the northeast of the UK. He also writes and directs theatre works. Hecht holds a degree and MA in art from Manchester University. Have shown in galleries and non-gallery sites throughout England.

David Montgomery
Pollenating II / 1:52 min. / 2010 / Florida The Pollenating series revisits the often painted and photographed realm of a universal sensuality inherent in the anatomy of flowers. Stigma, stamen and petals from more than 30 blossoms are used to create flowing, pulsing motion, which complements the nature and function of these organs.

David Montgomery, a hybrid naturalist and digital content creator, spent a childhood spent mostly outdoors until at a still very early age an onset of video game addiction may have set the stage for his art.

Andrew Wilson
Virtual Assistance / Digital Video / 4:05 min. / 2010 / Chicago There is a company based in Bangalore, India called ‘Get Friday.’ It typically provides remote executive support, wherein a largely American client base is assigned a ‘virtual’ personal assistant. Wilson is part of that client base. His primary assistant is a 24-year-old male Bangalore resident named Sachin. He engages him in creative collaborative projects and even reversals of the normative outsourcing flow. Much activity has developed from their online and postal interactions. Virtual Assistance is an excerpt from such a collaboration in response to a task in which Wilson was asked to make a video about the best fighter jet in the world.

Andrew Wilson (b. 1983) is an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has recently worked with media theorist Lev Manovich, filmmakers Sam Green, Craig Baldwin, and Micha Peled, as well as with the labor union Unite Here!

James George
Hesitation/ Digital Video / 9:30 min. / 2010 / Brooklyn, NY Choreography by Alice Gosti Performer Anh Nguyen Sound design by Daniel Peterson

Hesitation is a film in which dancers respond to the architecture in a distorted space-time. A metaphor for the formation of a relationship, ‘Hesitation’ depicts two individuals encountering one another in a space where movement is met with disruption. As one attempts to understand the other through uncertain exchanges, they find themselves powerfully connected.

Director James George is a software artist who creates interactive systems. Sound designer Daniel Peterson was born in Honolulu, HI. He received a B.A. in Comparative Literature. Choreographer Alice Gosti was born and raised in Perugia, Italy, where she trained at Dance Gallery with Rita Petrone and Valentina Romito. She graduated in 2008 with a B.A. in Dance from the University of Washington.

Collin McRae
Following the Huron / Animation / 1 min. / 2010 / Michigan Following the Huron is an animated investigation of geographic forms used as graphic and musical notation. Instead of classical black notes as dots suspended on five black stretching lines, the artist superimposes a system of rules where the eye follows a changing shape of the river’s curve and speed, and the sounds respond.

Collin McRae is a violinist and former portrait painter currently working toward a MFA at the University of Michigan. She draws inspiration from semiotics, incorrect maps, graphic notation, her synaesthesia, Ottoman Turkish calligraphy and cracks in cement.

SPINE
Reframed / Digital Video / 13:35 min. / 2009 / Brooklyn, NY This work was commissioned by and premiered at the Berkshire Fringe Festival 2009 and made with the support of Dancenow/NYC. Like watching an episode of ‘Friends’ with decidedly disturbing undertones, Reframed takes the familiar plight of 20-something romantic confusion in an unexpectedly sinister direction.

SPINE is an artist-led production company dedicated to the exploration of movement, language, and technology. SPINE was formed in 1999 and presented extensively throughout Europe and the USA. Reframed was conceived, written, performed, filmed by Paul Coffey, Brent Felker, Cory Nakasue, and Kristen Revier. Directed and edited by Brent Felker. Score by Peter Wise link:

www.pixilerations.org