iota News June 2007
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Different Skies is an annual meeting of electronic musicians in Acrosanti in the Arizona desert. Their music takes two forms — precomposed material for debut performance and improvisation. The week-long workshop is designed to help usually solitary electronic musicians gain connections and form a community.
These performances are accompanied by visuals developed by viviographer David Tristram. He uses a combination of 3D computer graphics and prerecorded video to enhance the often serene and wandering music with stunning colorful visuals. The DVD “Arcs and Angles” is comprised of recordings of 8 improvisations from the 2004 workshop, each accompanied by improvised visuals from David Tristram. |
Flame – A digital lumia work by George O. Stadnik
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With Flame, George Stadnik displays his skill as a lumia artist. Flame is evocative and delicate, where light undulates sinuously and ceaselessly as though trapped underwater. The images are perfectly matched to a calm ambient music track, creating an aesthetic universe unto itself.
DVD: 49min |
_grau – Honorary award winner at the Kunst Film Biennale 2004
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Excerpt from the DVD materials:
“_grau is a mesmerizing, beautiful and disturbing work of art that fuses dark and light to create organic forms and amorphous shapes. The scenes unfold slowly, elegantly revealing tensions between seemingly simple fragments of life. It feels like a long look at some primordial soup giving birth to some of the world’s first life forms, or one-celled organisms that can’t quite fully resolve themselves. The soundtrack, with its lonely drones rising and falling, makes us believe we are witnessing a dark creation. The director’s most impressive accomplishment was in going beyond the technology of the computer to create something that feels as if it is made of real moments in time, inside a reality only slightly offset from our own.” -Motion Theory “”¦_grau is a personal reflection on memories coming up during a car accident, where past events emerge, fuse, erode and finally vanish ethereally. Various real sources were distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure to create not a plain abstract, but a very private snapshot of a whole life within its last seconds”¦” -Robert Seidel, on his inspiration for _grau DVD 10 min |
Borealis – Dimensional fluid light and sound for visual meditation and atmosphere
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Lynn Augstein’s Borealis is a work that swirls with light and color from the entire spectrum. Its meditative images are reminiscent for the Northern Lights from which it derives its title. Accompanied by an eclectic music score ranging from synthesizers to acoustic instruments to Tuvan throat singers, Borealis is an otherworldly experience that both calms and invades the senses simultaneously.
Excerpt from the DVD materials: Visual fluid light images supported When light images and sympathetic These experiences transport us to a place outside These transcendent moments are vehicles DVD 90min |
Theater Games and Taming the Mind Ox – Two works by Stephen Nachmanovitch
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excerpt from the DVD materials:
Theater Games“In June of 2005 I taught a workshop called “Gibberish, the Universal Language” in Seattle, as part of Unexpected Productions’ Seattle International Festival of Improv. When several months later, the video arrived, I was inspired to play with this material and make an art piece of it. I took the 12 hours of video and sped them up to 10 minutes, rendered the fuzzy outlines into lollipop colors, and then added a score of electronic string music.” Taming the Mind Ox“I composed an earlier version of Taming the Mind Ox in 1985 for a retrospective of my visual music pieces at the UCLA music department. That piece required two slide projectors, a dissolve unit and a multitrack reel-to-reel tape. Twenty years later, this subject is still compelling to me, and I wanted a fresh approach. This is a new version with new music, for violin and viola. The video is composed directly on the computer. The pictures [in this film] represent stages on the path of a spiritual journey to the mastery of one’s mind-heart (shin). At the beginning, the young man is lost, looking everywhere for the essence of this mind-heart, and suddenly he finds himself chasing and wrestling with a wild ox or bull. Taming that wild, irrational, powerful creature, becoming one with it– changing and being changed– finding a still point in the midst of the hubbub of life– is a lifelong effort and adventure.” |
Slither – A stunning marriage of sight and sound
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A collaboration by Jeffers Egan and Jake Mandell, Slither brings together elegant computer animation with a rich ambient music score. At once beautiful and unsettling, this world conceived by Egan and Mandell proves itself difficult to look away from. It is an overall powerful and visceral experience that certainly doesn’t disappoint.
DVD: 41min |
Spontaneous Fantasia – Live performance by J. Walt Adamczyk
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The Glendale Community College Planetarium presents cutting-edge immersive 3D real time animation SPONTANEOUS FANTASIA, performed live by artist/programmer/ composer J.Walt Adamczyk. The show represents a brand new art form where the one-hour animated program won’t exist until the artist creates it live in front of the audience.
June 15,16 at 6:30pm & 8:00pm Website: www.spontaneousfantasia.com |
Not Still Art Festival – Call for entries for the 12th annual Not Still Art Festival
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Not Still Art has announced a call for entries for its 12th annual Festival of abstract and non-narrative electronic motion imaging with music and sound design. The festival will take place Saturday October 6, 2007 in New York City. Past participants have included: Chris Casady, Stephanie Maxwell, JWalt Adamczyk, and Dennis Miller.
Deadline: Postmark June 15, 2007 |
Punto y Raya Festival Back to Basics – Call for entries for the 2007 festival
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Punto y Raya is the new Dot and Line Festival in Spain, which is returning to abstraction in its most basic form. The competition will accept only those films in which these basic lines and dots avoid all figuration and all narrative. This challenge is open and free to filmmakers worldwide.
Deadline: July 15, 2007 |
International Abstract Cinema Exhibition – Call for entries!
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“The Cultural Association ZAC and Link Campus University of Malta announces the INTERNATIONAL ABSTRACT CINEMA EXHIBITION (ABSTRACTA) in ROME. The purpose of the exhibition is to offer an opportunity of meeting and exchange of experience to the authors of abstract cinema and the possibility for the public to see their works. ABSTRACTA is open to filmmakers from all over the world.”Deadline: June 30, 2007 Place: Rome Website: www.abstractacinema.com |
Animation of the Unconsciousness: CalArts and the Teachings of Jules Engel
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Join us on Monday (10/10/2011) at RedCat for a screening of films by the great Jules Engel and his students. Curated by Christine Panushka. See films by Adam Beckett, Sky David, Henry Selick, Lisze Bechtold and others.
Christine Panushka, Sky David and Lisze Bechtold will be there in person to answer questions and talk about Jules and his life. Buy your tickets here and we will see you there. |