The iotaWeekly June 28-July 4, 2010
Clip of the Week
Watch this charming short work from Diana Reichenbach, “A Moment Revisited” (2009), a playful interaction retold with a light soundtrack and frame manipulation as an experimentation in live-action movement and found footage editing.
Site of the Week
Expanded Cinema
Published in 1970 by media arts theorist and scholar Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema was the first book to place video within the realm of the art world, and helped to establish the world of media arts.
In his book, Youngblood looks at new technological advances and their function in film and media creation, including computer & video art, special effects, and even holography. He traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. New technological extensions of the medium have become necessary. Thus he concentrates on the advanced image-making technologies of computer films, television experiments, laser movies, and multiple-projection environments, laser movies, and multiple-projection environments.
The entire book of Expanded Cinema can be found and downloaded from an online database hosted by visual media performers Woody & Steina Vasulka.
Artist of the Week
Maya Deren
Maya Deren’s first film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) immediately designated her as one of the seminal figures of experimental cinema. As both a theorist and artist, Deren created works that paved the way for future trance filmmakers by using film to explore and express her psychosexual identity in a stylistic and poetic way. She also wrote essays about the nature of film and filmmaking, emphasizing concepts (such as medium specificity) that she believed were essential to film as a medium. Deren was an outspoken critic of Hollywood and its artistic, political, and economic grasp on American cinema, believing that it prevented cinema from developing into a fine art form. She was a key figure in the formation of the New American Cinema.
Deren and her work are currently featured as a film exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City entitled Maya Deren’s Legacy: Women and Experimental Film. To learn more about Maya Deren and her work, please click here.
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