Stream catalog + Stream 2
The catalog for last summer’s Stream exhibition is here. You can see and read about all the site-specific projects around a stream in southern Vermont. Thanks to Cindy Smith and Wolfgang Berkowski for their great work on the exhibition and the catalog.
Planning for Stream II, which will happen in August, 2015, has begun. My solar-powered Survivalist Cinema will return, but this year I am curating a program of video on the posthuman and the anthropocene.
iLAND collaborative residency
I am super excited to be participating in a process-intensive, collaborative residency with iLAND (Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance). Meeting periodically over the space of a year with five collaborators, our Urban Backstage group is exploring the East River Waterfront in Lower Manhattan and the surrrounding urban landscape with an ear for ecological infrastructure, among other things. So far we have made a tour of the former Collect Pond that lives beneath the civil, criminal and family court buildings as well as the former Five Points neighborhood, explored the Lenape myth of the Corn Maiden and talked a lot about CSOs (combined sewer overflows). Between us our interdisciplinary activities span landscape architecture, dance, musical theater, playwriting, media art, socially engaged practice and we will collaborate with scientists. We will have at least one public engagement event, which will be on July 18th, 2015. Thanks to LMCC for collaborating with iLAND to form the three research groups. (The other two are Water and Immigration and Embodied Mapping)
Codes and Modes
I was so pleased to participate in the first ever Hunter College Department of Film and Media Codes and Modes: The Character of Documentary Culture Conference. For our session: Social Practice and/as Documentary I invited Jody Wood to present her fantastic project Beauty in Transition, and especially her process of making a documentary about it. Beauty in Transition, a mobile hair salon that offers beauty services to homeless, is supported by a 2014 A Blade of Grass Fellowship. We shared the session with media producer Mandy Rose, who shared her research on developing a participatory culture of documentary.
What does it mean to make images for others from a project so much about the immediate exchange between participants? How are issues around visibility compounded when working with a population considered to be disenfranchised and often invisible to the culture at large?
Harun Farocki 1944-2014
RIP Harun Farocki, a filmmaker who has been a great inspiration to me and to many people I admire. Still surprised at the loss nearly a month later, and with gratitude for his prolific, insightful, and inscrutable work that is not without humor, I am sharing a PDF of the review I wrote of his exhibition at MoMA, (June 2011-January 2012) for Millennium Film Journal’s Structures and Spaces: Cine-Installation issue: The Territory of Images: Harun Farocki, Images of War (at a Distance).
Re-reading the review, I am struck by how relevant Farocki’s recent installation work is in relation to the shooting of Michael Brown and the apparent militarization of the police force in Ferguson, revealed during the protests that followed. Particularly, Farocki’s highlighting of ideologically inscribed practice simulations that soldiers are trained with speaks to the ways in which pre-conceived notions of race and urban space have been playing out through social media and how, in online video of the protests, the police officers, with all their gifted military equipment, appear to be play-acting in a war-themed video game. Farocki’s I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts feels like an evergreen critique of institutionalized authority. In Ferguson, curfews, armed police and tear gas maintain the town as a space of discipline and containment.
Survivalist Cinema at STREAM
Survivalist Cinema – a solar powered micro-cinema that features 1970s environmental dystopia and survivalist films – was grandly realized at STREAM, an exhibition curated by Cindy Smith and 2 Chairs, that took place over a weekend, August 9th & 10th, 2014, near South Windham, VT. All pieces were super. More images and info to follow.
ARTISTS
Edward Allington (United Kingdom)
Anthea Behm (Australia)
Josef Bull (Sweden)
Jack Carr (US)
Ingela Ihrman (Sweden)
Erin Ikeler (US)
Allan Kaprow (US-Allan Kaprow Estate)
Rachel Stevens (US)
Patricia Thornley (US)
Special thanks to Dave Bonta of Sunnyside Solar
More images of Survivalist Cinema:
