iota News March – May 2010

The iotaCenter Salon – Presented by The iotaCenter and UCLA Design| Media Art Department

 

The next iotaSalon will be held on May 6th in the Broad Art Center at UCLA, first floor at the EDA screening space. The theme for this screening is “The City.” Join us!

For more information and program line up, please visit the iotaSalon: May 2010 page.

When: Thursday, May 6th, 2010, 7:30pm – 9:30pm
Where: UCLA Design | Media Art Department, 1st Floor Broad Art Center (EDA), Westwood, CA

Map and Directions

The iotaWeekly – May 3-9, 2010

 

 

Clip of the Week
“Giant Steps” (2001) by Michal LevyWatch a clip from Michal Levy’s “Giant Steps,” a delightful exploration of the abstraction of space, architecture and the city brimming with color and jazz.

“Giant Steps” screens this Thursday at UCLA as part of The iotaSalon: “The City.” To find out more about this and previous salons, please visit the iotaSalon Main Page.

To find out more about Michal Levy and her work, please visit her website.

Site of the Week
Ring Festival LA
April 15-June 30, 2010Celebrating all-things directly and indirectly related to Richard Wagner and his opera “The Ring Cycle,” the Ring Festival LA has brought together special events from Los Angeles’ most renowned arts institutions and some of the lesser known. Those interested in more “eclectic” fair should check out Griffith Observatory’s new planetarium show “Light of the Valkyries” and Machine Project LA’s “Out of the Forest and Into the Light,” a presentation by artist Liz Glynn examining “the evolution of Wagnerian set design from naturalism to abstraction as it evolved at the Bayreuth Festival.”
Artist of the Week
Erick Oh“Erick Oh is an award winning animation artist based in Los Angeles. His work has been introduced and nominated at Student Academy Awards, Annecy Animation Festival, SIGGRAPH, Anima Mundi, Ars Electronica, LACMA Director”™s Night, and numerous other film festivals. He spent most of his life in Korea where he started producing a variety of work, in which the boundaries were blurred between media and contents. Even though it is in animation where Erick feels most comfortable as his main tool to communicate and interact with the viewer, he would not consider himself only as a film maker but as an artist who continues trying to expand the definition of animation and art. By building on his fine art background established in Seoul National University, Korea where he achieved his BFA degree, he continues his in-depth study in animation. He is currently enrolled at UCLA’s MFA graduate film program.”–artist’s website

Erick Oh’s “Communicate” screens this Thursday at UCLA as part of The iotaSalon: “The City.” For more information about the artist and his work, please visit his website.

The iotaWeekly –

 

 

Clip of the Week
“a moment of silence” (2009) by Diana ReichenbachWatch a clip from Diana Reichenbach’s “a moment of silence,” a meditative and melodic piece that whisks the viewer through a darkened forest into soft explosions of light.

Diana Reichenbach is currently an MFA student at USC’s John C. Hench Department of Animation and Digital Art. To see more by Reichenbach, please visit her Vimeo page.

Site of the Week
Australian International Experimental Film Festival
April 30-May 2, 2010Though only in its first year, the Australian International Experimental Film Festival is determined to bring the best in experimental film to Australian audiences. The three-day festival based in Melbourne is the brain-child of artists sue.k., Richard Tuohy and Diana Barrie who along with selection committee members Mark La Rosa and Keith Deverall have crafted an exciting program drawn from all over the globe.

Check out the festival line up here.

Artist of the Week
Jan Svankmajer“One of the great Czech filmmakers, JAN SVANKMAJER was born in 1934 in Prague where he still lives. He trained at the Institute of Applied Arts from 1950 to 1954 and then at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts (Department of Puppetry). He soon became involved in the Theatre of Masks and the famous Black Theatre, before entering the Laterna Magika Puppet Theatre where he first encountered film. In 1970 he met his wife, the surrealist painter Eva Svankmajerova, and the late Vratislav Effenberger, the leading theoretician of the Czech Surrealist Group, which Svankmajer joined and of which he still remains a member.

Svankmajer made his first film in 1964 and for over thirty years has made some of the most memorable and unique animated films ever made, gaining a reputation as one of the world’s foremost animators…Svankmajer has moved further away from his roots in animation towards live-action filmmaking, though his vision remains as strikingly surreal and uncannily inventive as ever.”–Zeitgeist Films

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: The iotaCenter Salon –

 

Submit your work for the next iotaSalon where we get together to screen and discuss new experimental works alongside some classics. The theme for our next iotaSalon is THE CITY and will take place on May 6 at UCLA.

For more information, please visit the May 2010 iotaSalon Page.

Celestial Navigations: The Short Films of Al Jarnow – Available from The iotaStore and for viewing in The iotaCenter’s Research & Study Center

The iotaCenter is proud to offer “Celestial Navigations: The Short Films of Al Jarnow.” The 45 films collected here have been transferred and color corrected from the original 16mm prints, along with fully remastered sound.

Special features include a 30-minute documentary on Jarnow’s creative process, as well as film playlists designed for both children and adults alike. The deluxe package includes a 60-page book loaded to the gills with essays, ephemera, storyboards, photos, and a complete film index, all housed in the iconic Numero slipcase.

Celestial Navigations: The Short Films of Al Jarnow – Presented by Cinefamily and Cinespia with a reception provided by Intelligensia Coffee and iotaCenter

Al Jarnow in attendance!

 

“Celestial Navigations: The Short Films of Al Jarnow” comes to Los Angeles with a screening at Cinefamily at The Silent Movie Theater. Come celebrate this visionary artist with a full program of his most astounding films, as well as the new documentary short “Asymmetric Cycles,” which details Al’s entire creative process.

For more information and program line up, please visit the Cinefamily Calendar.

When: Saturday, April 24, 2010, 7:30pm
Where: The Cinefamily, 611 N Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, 90036

Map and Directions

The iotaWeekly – April 19-25, 2010

 

 

Clip of the Week
“Phosphenes” (2010) by Aaron Ross and Anna GeyerWatch Aaron Ross’s and Anna Geyer’s “Phosphenes,” an exciting collaboration that explores the images that come to us between waking and sleeping through the combination of 2D and 3D animation with 16mm film manipulation techniques.

For more information about Aaron Ross and his work, please visit his website.


Site of the Week
The Red Vic Movie HouseWhen in Northern California, put San Francisco’s Red Vic on your list of must-do’s. Found on legendary Haight Street., the independently operated theater celebrates it’s 30th anniversary this year as it continues to enlighten the SF Bay Area with a range of cult, arthouse, and experimental films.

On April 22, The Red Vic hosts a screening of “Celestial Navigations: The Films of Al Jarnow” with Al Jarnow in attendance for a very special Q&A session.

Artist of the Week
Al JarnowBorn December 20, 1945 in Brooklyn, NY, the multi-talented Al Jarnow is a painter, software developer, “beach builder,” exhibition designer, and filmmaker whose film work has screened internationally and on children’s television on shows like Sesame Street and 3-2-1 Contact has touched the lives of millions.

In Los Angeles? See “Celestial Navigations,” a retrospective of Jarnow’s work with Al Jarnow in person at The Cinefamily on April 24 at 7:30.

For more information about the artist and his work, purchase his new DVD “Celestial Navigations” and visit his website.

The iotaWeekly – April 12-18, 2010

 

 

Clip of the Week
“Train Landscape” (1974) by Jules EngelWatch a clip from Jules Engel’s “Train Landscape,” a rush of rectangles and color rendering views in a locomotion of abstraction.

“Train Landscape” can be found on iotaCenter’s 2009 KINETICA™ Video Library release “Jules Engel: Selected Works, Volume I” available from the iotaStore.

Site of the Week
Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Techonology CenterThe Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon offers an exciting multi-disciplinary two-year masters program that brings artists and technologists together to create innovative new work to inspire, inform and entertain. Like UCLA’s ART/SCI Center & Lab, ETC unites academic paths that are too often seen as polar opposites, fostering a much needed creative dialogue and new ways of expression.
Artist of the Week
Nancy HermanNancy Clearwater Herman has been working on ‘translating’ music to color for over 30 years. At the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, after studying Josef Alber’s theories about color interaction, she was struck by the similarity between the way two colors change each other because of their interaction and the way musical notes combine in the ear when presented in a sequence in time. She imagined how wonderful it would be to be able to play colors in time. As a result she began to ‘translate’ specific short pieces of music to color in paint to see if there was anything to the idea that a one to one color translation was beautiful…

Around 2000, she began using Bliss Paint to create works with colors dancing in time to music and in 2006 she began animating each note of musical selections using Flash. This work in Flash is an attempt to find a way to create an instrument that would be simple enough to actually play color and music at the same time.

She is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of the State of Pennsylvania, the Brevard Museum and over 100 public and private collections.

For more information about the artist and her work, please visit her website.

The iotaWeekly – April 5-11, 2010

 

 

Clip of the Week
“Never Saw a Dweeble I Didn’t Like” (2010) by Audri Phillips
Music by Anton HaugenWatch a clip from Audri Phillips’s newest work “Never Saw a Dweeble I Didn’t Like,” a delightful, humorous, and exuberantly colorful abstract exploration involving detailed three-dimensional aquatic biological forms strangely reminiscent of dueling pom poms.

The film premieres this Thursday, April 8 at The iotaSalon: “Visualizing the Body and Biology.”

Site of the Week
iotaCenter TimelineExplore iotaCenter’s rich and diverse history with our new interactive iotaCenter Timeline, a great overview of the numerous projects iota has pursued over the years as well as a quick look at some of our most recent and exciting developments.

Digitopia (2005)
Artist of the Week
Miwa Matreyek“Miwa Matreyek is an award-winning animator, designer and artist working in LA. She is a graduate of CalArts, and a Princess Grace Award recipient for film in 2006. Her films and performances have shown internationally at film, theater, and performance festivals, and she won the Student Grand Prize and the Audience Choice Award for Best Installation at the Platform Int’l Animation Festival in 2007. She is currently freelancing in the motion graphics industry around LA.”–artist’s website

Miwa Matreyek’s “Digitopia” (2005) screens this Thursday, April 8, as part of The iotaCenter Salon: “Visualizing the Body and Biology” at UCLA. For more information about the artist and her work, please visit her website.

The iotaCenter Salon – Presented by The iotaCenter and UCLA Design | Media Art Department

 

The next iotaSalon will be held on April 8th in the Broad Art Center on campus, first floor at the EDA screening space. The theme for this screening is “Visualizing the Body and Biology.” Join us!

For more information and program line up, please visit the iotaSalon: April 2010 page.

When: Thursday, April 8th, 2010, 7:30pm – 9:30pm
Where: UCLA Design | Media Art Department, 1st Floor Broad Art Center (EDA), Westwood, CA

Map and Directions

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.