Marco Brambilla
Sea of Tranquility, 2006 6:20 minutes

Marco Brambilla is an artist and filmmaker. He first studied film in Toronto, and quickly moved to working in commercials and feature-length films. He directed Demolition Man (1993), the successful science-fiction movie starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes. In 1998, Brambilla shifted his focus to video and photography projects, and has since exhibited in private and public exhibitions including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

In Sea of Tranquility, the American spacecraft, Eagle, is recreated in a computer-generated time-lapse of the lunar landing site of Apollo 11 in 1969. Years are compressed into seconds while the spacecraft and the American flag gradually disintegrate over time as they are bombarded by thousands of micro-meteorites. The sound is taken from recorded radio transmissions between mission control and the Tranquility base—all dialogue has been removed leaving only the radio carrier signals, static and interference.

Irit Batsry
View From Both Sides

Irit Batsry is an artist working mainly in video and installations. In 2002, she was awarded the prestigious Whitney Biennial Bucksbaum Award, given to " an artist whose work demonstrates a singular combination of talent and imagination - a person who promises to make significant contributions to the visual arts". She received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1992 and the Grand Prix Video de Création of the Société Civile des Auteurs Multimedia, Paris (1996 and 2001) as well as many international festival prizes including: Grand Prix - Locarno 90 and 95, First Prize - Vigo 94 and 01 Best Intl. Artistic Contribution - Cadiz 91, First Prize - the Australian Video Festival 89, First prize - San Francisco Poetry Film Festival 89.

Her work has been shown extensively in 35 different countries. Selected shows include the National Gallery in Washington DC, the National Film Theater and the ICA (London), the Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Museu d'Arte Moderna (Rio), Ludwig Museum (Cologne), Tel Aviv Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art (New York).

Laurel Beckman, Teja Ream, tarik Abdel-Gawad and Ben Ritter
(Reflections on) Animals in Film
A LBB production Curated by Laurel Beckman

Animals in Film presents 4 sequences of images that are imaginative interpretations of the roles and relations of animals in films. Created especially for public projection, the project aims to delight as it provokes notions of human-animal relationships and perspectives as played out in popular cinema. Themes explored include mutation, animal-to-animal gaze, the re-formation of animals in groups, and the cinematic animal POV (point of view). Sequences are inspired by the following films: The Fly, Finding Nemo, Lassie, Blade Runner, Dancing with Wolves, The Snake Pit, The Birds, The Rescuers.

Participants:
Laurel Beckman
Working with and nurturing eccentric public spaces, Beckman's research highlights free culture and public display. Attending to themes at the crossroads of consciousness and social conditions, meta-physics and science, Beckman's practice investigates perceptual phenomena, language, and empathy in unlikely public settings. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Tarik Abdel-Gawad makes art out of films, videos, still pictures, holograms, and words. He received a B.A. from the UCSB department of art in 2006 and now resides in the Bay Area.

Teja Ream is a multimedia artist working with video, photography and installation. Animal themes at the juncture of fantasy and expectation predominate in her provocative practice.

Ben Ritter's art investigates the structure of space from drawing to paper sculpture to dynamic screen-based digital environments. Based in Brooklyn, his recent exhibitions include group shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Anya Belkina
Crowded With Voices, 2007 4:39 minutes

Born in Russia, Anya Belkina studied the disciplines of drawing, painting, and design at the Moscow Art Institute In Memory of 1905. She received her B.F.A. in Visual Arts from the University of California at San Diego. She is currently assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Duke University. Belkina's paintings are held in private and corporate collections throughout the United States. Her recent new media projects have been screened at numerous international film festivals. A multi-screen installation of Crowded With Voices was recently seen in the Art Gallery section of SIGGRAPH 2007.

Crowded With Voices is inspired by the poetry of the Sufi mystic Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), whose 800th birthday is being celebrated this year. The film is intended as a tribute to Rumi's teachings and art that apealed to people of many faiths in his lifetime and united them at his funeral. Rumi's message of love, tolerance, and acceptance is as relevant as ever in our era of high-speed connectivity, nuclear weapons, global pandemics, terrorism, and large-scale natural disasters. The central visual motif of the film is an image of a whirling dervish whose revolving motion is in harmony with the motion of the smallest particles in nature and the largest galaxies in the universe.

Peter Bill
Waiting For Oona, 2005 2:34 minutes
Rebuild the City 2007 6:50 minutes
40 Worth

Peter Bill is from New Haven, where from the heights of East Rock he surveyed the city of his birth, and began his explorations of the urban landscape.  He studied his home town from alleys, street-corners, and rooftops.   It was here that he became fascinated with the play and progression of light across forms, and the spatial procession of time passing.  This passion is manifest in his painting and in his first digital explorations with time-lapse.  His digital work matured  in Prague, where he collaborated with a professor from FAMU, the Prague film academy.   His first large format, multichannel time-lapse collages were realized at the University of Washington's Center for Advanced Research in the Arts and Humanities, where he was a teaching assistant.

Peter's video installations have shown at the Henry Gallery in Seattle as part of the TERRAFORM collaboration, at the Kitchen in NYC, the FILE Festival of Electronic Media in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and in other international exhibitions.  He currently lives in LA, where he teaches new media at the California Design College.

Beth Block
True or False? 2007 4:38 minutes

Beth Block is a multi-media artist working in film, video, photography, digital media, and installation. Her films have been screened nationally, including the Ann Arbor, Sinking Creek, Black Maria and Philadelphia Film Festivals. She works professionally as a digital compositing artist creating visual effects for motion pictures. and as an adjunct professor film at California Institute of the Arts. She is also an arts advocate, first serving on the Board of Film Forum including two years as its president, then as a founding member of the board of New Town Pasadena Foundation where she has remained active for the last ten years.

Mark Bradford
Practice 2003 2:47 minutes

Inviting comparison to the De Stijl and Bauhaus movements, Mark Bradford’s large-scale canvases reinterpret the Utopian ideal as influenced by contemporary life. Extending from the geometric formalism of Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers Bradford’s grid-like paintings reflect a cosmopolitan chic of a new world order.

Based in south-eastern Los Angeles, Bradford often works from materials & imagery found within his immediate environment. His layered compositions incorporate elements of graffiti, merchant posters, and billboards to create abstracted fields evocative of inner-city experience. Resembling maps or industrial terrain, Bradford’s paintings encapsulate the cacophony of urban life. His highly textured surfaces sprawl as simmering microcosms of activity where paint and recycled signage pile up in evidence of a dissonant evolution.

Underlying Bradford’s work is an engagement with cultural identity and transaction. Using peripheral languages associated with gender, ethnicity and class, Bradford brings into question the strategies of mainstream cultural definition and perception. In confronting globalism, Bradford presents its harsh realities and wonderful diversity as an aesthetic sublime.

Mark Bradford creates paintings that recall modernist style but which are grounded in the materials of his local urban environment: South-Central L.A. His work is primarily based on notions of ethnicity and beauty as defined by the community of his youth. Bradford experiments with materials drawn from local beauty salons and other local businesses and hangouts that hold significant meaning to the South-Central social scene.

Mark Bradford was born in Los Angeles in 1961. He studied at California Institute of the Arts, earning an MFA in 1997 and a BFA in 1995. He has won numerous awards for his work. Among them are: Bucksbaum Award (2006), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2003), the Nancy Graves Foundation Grant (2002) and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award.

Bradford’s work has been exhibited both nationally & internationally. He has been featured in several prestigious exhibitions including the Sao Paulo Biennial (2006), Whitney Biennial (2006), Liverpool Biennial (2006), “ARCO 2003” in Madrid, “Farsites” at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and the Centro Cultural de Tijuana, and “USA Today” at The Royal Academy in London.

Chris Cassidy
The Isthmus of Kansas, 2007 8:06

Chris Cassidy's area of expertise includes sculpture, installation and digital media. He is currently Assistant Professor of Design at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His work has appeared in exhibitions and screenings in Pennsylvania, Florida, New York, California and North Carolina. He has been commissioned for work by private and public organizations, including permanent installations at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the State University of New York

The Isthmus of Kansas combines location footage from the Pacific Coast of California and the Atlantic Coast of the Carolinas into a single image foreshadowing rising sea levels and a shrinking North American landmass.

Kim Collmer
Berlin Skin, 2007 4 min, The Pin-Ups 2006 7:20

Kim Collmer is an animator and educator located in Germany. Kim makes animated films using stop
motion animation and 2D digital techniques. She also creates underwater films (including one under-
water animation). Kim is a Guest Professor at the University of Applied Sciences, Schwaebisch Hall.
She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she also taught before
relocating to Germany. She has exhibited internationally in festivals and exhibitions, with reviews
published in the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine. Additionally, Kim curates animation
screenings through the Director‘s Lounge in Berlin.

Thorsten Fleisch
Energie!, 2007  5:11 minutes

1972 born in Koblenz - Germany
1991 first film experiments
1995 studies in Marburg: art history, music & media theory
1996 studies experimental film at the Städelschule in Frankfurt with Prof. Peter Kubelka and Guest Prof. Robert Breer for two years
2001 member of TIE’s - The International Experimental Cinema Exposition´s Board of Artistic Directors
2002 receives a grant from the Filmbüro NW
2003 receives a grant from the Museum of Contemporary Cinema
2004 first show of recent works at the mediaruimte gallery in Brussels
2005 presentation of his works at the California Institute of the Arts and University of Southern California as well as curating a program for The International Experimental Cinema Exhibition in Denver
2006 'Blood of Machines' exhibition in Karlsruhe where he showed his recent high-voltage photograms

The films of Thorsten Fleisch have been shown at festivals around the world, including:
Ann Arbor Film Festival
Ars Electronica
New York Film Festival

Thorsten Fleisch has received many awards for his films, including:
Best Experimental Film at the 6th MicroCineFest
Best Video / Computer Art at the Asolo Film Festival
Director's Choice Award - Black Maria Film & Video Festival
Best Experimental Film – Chicago Underground Film Festival

His film 'Gestalt' has been included in three DVD compilations to date.

From a mere technical point of view the tv/video screen comes alive by a controlled beam of electrons in the cathode ray tube. for 'energie!' an uncontrolled high voltage discharge of approx. 30.000 volts exposes photographic paper which is then arranged in time to create new visual systems of electron organization.

Each frame was completely hand-drawn on 500 separate sheets of paper., hence the title of the work: Ream; 500 sheets at 30 frames per second = 16.66 seconds.

Tom Friedman (born 1965) is an American conceptual sculptor known for his work employing everyday material, such as toothpicks or sugar cubes in intricate geometric arrangements. Friedman was born in St. Louis, Missouri and attended Washington University there, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts in graphic illustration in 1988. He pursued graduate coursework at the University of Illinois at Chicago receiving a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture in 1990 He has exhibited extensively in major museums throughout the world. His most recent exhibitions include Tom Friedman, South London Gallery, London; Stitching, Fondazione Prada, Milan; Tom Friedman, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, which traveled to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Aspen Art Museum, CO, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. In October 2006, Friedman had his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since 1997at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills.

Jason Graham
Raindrops No. 7

Jason Graham (b. 1974) is a film/video artist working and residing in New York and
Miami, Florida. Since 1999, he has been creating a body of work exploring the themes of
chance versus fate, nostalgia and internal political turmoil. Experimenting with various
formats (35mm, 16mm, 8mm, HD and MiniDV), Jason has been focused visually on
capturing intimate moments in their natural light; examining the emotional impulses
generated from color, movement and temperature.

When not concentrating on his own projects, Jason works as an Assistant Director on
feature films, working alongside such acclaimed filmmakers as Michael Haneke, Manoel
de Oliveira, Larry Clark, Wai Keung Lau and Allison Anders.

Raindrops No. 7 is a study in conflict and movement, light and color… involving
raindrops, air pressure, and a moving vehicle.

Linda Graveline
Psyquatic, 2003  4:30 minutes

Linda Graveline's background in fashion and production design in New York led her to Los Angeles, where she began experimenting with digital video, installation, photography and collage in 2002. Her first endeavor, a video installation titled NO DIVING was such a hit at the spring 2002 Brewery ArtWalk, that LACMA asked her to show it at their Muse ArtWalk event that June. She has since exhibited at Bank Gallery, the L.A. Art Show, Art in Motion at the Armory Northwest, and Burning Man festival and has done commissions for clients such as Sami Hayek and Ben Lee.

....a digital aquarium and reminder of the other world on this planet. Think of it as a liquid meditation with delicate jellyfish, tranquil leafy seadragons, mercury fish, pulsating plantlife and delicate floating membranes.

Brent Green
Paulina Hollers, 2007 13 minutes

A self-taught filmmaker based in Cressona, Pennsylvania, Brent Green's work has received acclaim with a project at the Hammer Museum and screenings at the 2007 and 2006 Sundance Film Festivals, The Wexner Center, The Andy Warhol Museum, and The Getty Museum. Paulina Hollers was realized with the support of a grant from the Creative Capital Foundation.

Paulina Hollers follows the story of a disagreeable boy's death and banishment to Hell, his distraught mother's suicide, and their bid for escape from the underworld. The film alternates between the three dimensional living world where Paulina, a hand-carved wooden figure in a skeletal dress, lives amongnst crooked homes and spinning birds, and a hand-drawn Hell populated by spindly Giacometti-like characters. Green's creative process is exposed with visibly numbered drawings and scotch tape revealed on screen.

Michelle Handelman
ICU, 2000 2:29 minutes

Michelle Handelman is a multimedia artist working with video, performance, and digital media.

Working in the tradition of feminist body artist who use their bodies not just as makers of the work, but as agents of the work, Handelman states, "My work can be described by theorist, Helene Cixous' ideas of Visceral Feminism: aggressively traversing the corporeal landscape in it's various forms of excess and undress, while simultaneously giving it up for the viewer in an overflow of visual and psychological sensations."

Handelman moved to New York from San Francisco, having her first one-person show at the Cristinerose Gallery (Feb. 2000) and subsequent shows at Jack Tilton/Anna Kustera Gallery and Exit Art.

She is a recipient of the NYSCA individual artists program grants 2004; her work has shown internationally including the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris; The Institute of Contemporary Art, London; and the American Film Institute. Los Angeles.

1-channel to be looped continuouslyApproaching the lens as the ultimate object of affection. Handelman pulls eyelashes out of her mouth, assaulting beauty, artifice and the grotesqueness of desire.

Nan Hoover
Flora 1986 6:30 minutes
Watching Out - A Trilogy 1985 9:11 min

Flora is a study in visual perception. Hoover uses the petals of a flower to create indefinable compositions that transform themselves with the slight changes in light. 'Light slowly moves across a flower suggesting to the viewer summer light-clouds moving across the sun, the light intensifying the color and form of the flower. The silence of the images I hope, would recall in the viewer images once seen or dreamed of.'

Watching Out deals with the process of sight itself. We watch a woman whose head and hands appear on screen and who looks out over what appears to be a seascape. She holds her hand above her eyes - a gesture which seems to aid perception. These images (in contrasting black-and-white) sometimes resemble abstract ink paintings on white paper. Watching Out is visualized 'introspection'.

Nan Hoover, an American-born artist who has been a Dutch citizen since 1975, produces formalist works that are highly sensual. Through meticulous renderings of light, color and movement, she creates associative visual compositions that suggest external and interior landscapes. Fluidly manipulating light and shadow into sculptural form, Hoover creates an evocative tension between abstraction and reality. Precisely composed, unfolding in real time, these minimalist reveries invoke the sublime.

Exploring subtle ambiguities of visual perception, Hoover elicits an evocative tension between abstraction and reality, fluidly manipulating light and shadow into sculptural form with slow, concentrated movements. Precisely composed for a stationary camera, unfolding in real time, these contemplative reveries use austere reductivity to invoke the sublime. A hand, traced by shifting light, becomes a luminous, sculptural landscape; moving shadows suggest a mountain veiled in mist. Nuanced orchestrations of light on a close-up of the body or a surface create enigmatic illusions of scale, form, space and temporality, evoking metaphorical transformations and timelessness. A painterly aesthetic pervades these minimalist works.

Prior to concentrating on video, performance and photography in 1974, Hoover worked in painting and drawing. She writes that her images "reflect quietness, using slow movement to catch the gradual changes in light, color, and form. I attempt to transport one into an area within ourselves where we can dream and explore our personal worlds."

Nan Hoover was born in 1931. She attended the Corcoran Gallery Art School. Hoover moved to Amsterdam in 1969, and has performed and exhibited her work extensively throughout Europe. She received a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship in 1980. Her video works have been exhibited at festivals and institutions internationally, including Documentas 6 and 8, Kassel, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre International d'Art Contemporain, Montreal; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kijkhuis, The Hague; Sydney Video Festival; Berlin Film Festival; Kunstmuseum, Bern; and Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany. Hoover lives in Amsterdam.

Takehito Koganezawa
Neon 2003 22 minutes

Neon is a poem to the beauty of this modern electric medium where the artist has layered multiple details of commercial neon signage, creating new compositions and colors. At once a comment on urban commercialism and a purely visual composition completely divorced from words and meaning, the textures grow and become more complex in a rhythm of its own as time goes on.

Takehito Koganezawa, an artist living and working in Tokyo and Berlin, has developed a diverse art practice united by a minimalist aesthetic. His media work includes drawing, video, sound sculpture and performance. Koganezawa's videos often originate from live performances and include the artist as an actor/participant. Other works take everyday objects or occurrences as a starting point endowing them with a poetic, dreamlike quality. Sometimes the focus is on little details which trigger a complete train of thought and emotion, thus increasing the visual impact. As Koganezawa says, "My work is about the hole. Like the hole of a donut that becomes visible because of the donut, in my work I create the donut to get closer to the hole."

Koganezawa was born in Tokyo in 1974 where he graduated from Musashino Art University. He has been living in Berlin since 1998 and has exhibited internationally at various institutions such as Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Institute of Visual Art, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery; Institute for Contemporary Art, London; Internationales Filmfest, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; La Biennale de Montreal, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Queens Museum, New York; Project Rooms, ARCO, Madrid, the Mori Art Center, Tokyo and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Jared Katsiane
Superhero, 2006 3:54 minutes

Jared Katsiane teaches filmmaking in the same public housing development where he grew up in Boston. His award-winning films have screened at all sorts of venues around the world, and he has received fifteen grants and fellowships. Jared’s 2005 film Solace premiered at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, was awarded the Silver Prize at the 47th Bilbao International Festival of Documentary and Short Film, screened at 37 other festivals, and was hailed as a “milestone” by the editor of France’s premier film journal, Cahiers du Cinema.

Experimental documentary about a young artist waiting for a bus.

Aaron Koblin
Flight Patterns, 2007 3:36 minutes

Raised in La Canada-Flintridge, Aaron Koblin recieved his MFA from the Department of Design|Media Arts at UCLA and his BA in Electronic Art at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Aaron has studied in The Netherlands and Japan and his work has been shown internationally in festivals including the Japan Media Arts Festival, Ars Electronica, Electrofringe, and the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. Utilizing a background in the computer game industry Aaron led a courses in game design for the web at UCLA in '05 and '06 and has been working with data driven projects as an interactive designer and researcher for the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). Aaron received the National Science Foundation's Science Visualization Challenge 1st place award in 2006.

Flight Patterns is a series of animations created by parsing and plotting data from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Without geography, the patterns and paths of air planes over the United States and Canada expose the systems and complexities in the skies above us.

Kadet Kuhne
Infinite Delay

Kadet Kuhne is a media artist based out of California where she received an MFA in Experimental Music Composition and Integrated Media from CalArts. As an award-winning filmmaker she has numerous video shorts that are exhibited worldwide, including her most recent film, Infinite Delay, which premiered at Sundance. Kadet's audiovisual installations integrate sensors, 3D interfaces or live processing, and explore themes centered around communication, control and surrender. Kadet has two solo CD releases, Seismic and Thin Air, and is featured on various compilations including MONO:POLY, SOUNDWALK and Women Take Back The Noise.

Select exhibitions and performances include Museum of Art Lucerne, Musees de Strasbourg, Galerie Oxyd, Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), Fringe Exhibitions Gallery, LACMA, New York Underground Festival, The Weisman Art Museum, CEAIT Festival, Highways Performance Gallery, Chicago Underground Festival, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Toronto Film Festival and Not Still Art.

Kadet teaches sound courses related to Film, Theory and Production, currently at the California College of the Arts and previously at UCSD and The Art Institute of California. Along with a full-time job at Google as a 3D-Web Sound Director she owns a post-production sound studio, Audible Shift.

“A restrained subject surrenders to a sublime state of waiting in a mysterious underwater world.”
—Sundance Film Festival

About Infinite Delay
Infinite Delay is a film that explores the subtleties of tension that exist between
surrender and resistance through an unconventional, experiential narrative. The
captivating underwater images of a restrained subject present a dialectic - possibly
depicting someone who is being forced to wait, or alternatively representing a subject
actively engaged in the erotics of waiting. The voiceless figure in this mysterious
subterranean atmosphere investigates how renunciation could be an affirmation of
power and a means of absolute embodiment. The sensing body in its inaction
surrenders itself, and all questions of identity and placement are dissolved into a virtual
suspension of absolute definition. The result is a blurring of lines - between the inner and
outer world, self and other, and past and present.

Steve Montiglio
Shemachine 2006 2:49 minutes

Steve Montiglio is a native New Yorker who now resides in Hollywood, California. His large scale paintings of body parts on aluminum panels or stained canvas explore the human form as symbol, and reach back to the Renaissance and Baroque for their compositional and technical roots. Uniquely erotic, these paintings have been widely exhibited in Southern California, and have found their way into the collections of such Hollywood notables as Sylvester Stallone, Juliette Lewis, Clive Barker and heavy metal goddess Julie Strain. In print, they've appeared on the pages of In-Style; Hustler; Venice and Cyberzone magazines - among others. Montiglio's work has also caught the attention of the film industry, and can be seen in such movies as "Collateral," "Mean Girls," "All the Pretty Horses," "Hellraiser III," "Lord of Illusions" and "Titanic," and on television in the hit series, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." His imagery is now appearing on the covers of books by authors like Ian Watson, Peter Atkins and Charles Stross and is published regularly in "Spectrum-the Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art." Now, after directing his first animation as part of a collaboration with academy award winning producer Michael Phillips he's just completed his first independent experimental video, "Shemachine". Utilizing digital imagery from his recent series of paintings and prints, it's a wild mix of sci-fi/cabaret and war culture with medieval alchemy.

Dustin Muenchow and Evan Jones
Daily Motion 2007 2:22 minutes

Bio- This is Evan Jones and Dustin Muenchow's  second project together.  Both are students at Mira Costa High School and are going into their senior year.  They are enrolled in the video production class and have done multiple internships.  Both hope to continue their passion for the media arts through college and beyond.

Description-  This short just over 2 minutes hopes to parallel the machinery of society with the technology we have developed.  The film explores the similarity between man and technology.  It also brings about themes of the repetition and the seeming less lifeless life that some people live.

Bret Nicely
An Essay on Liberation, 2007  7:09 minutes

Bret Nicely is an artist living in Los Angeles. From 1999 until 2002, Bret was Chief Creative Officer at FREEwilliamsburg.com where, along with author Robert Lanham, he created The Hipster Handbook (New York: Anchor, 2003). In 2006 Bret launched artlthr.com, a web site that maps how the internet contributes to artistic practice. Bret Nicely is currently Web Generalist at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) where he conceives web initiatives that augment and articulate the museum’s exhibitions. Bret has a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD), and an MFA from Art Center College of Design (ACCD).

The artist is a motivated shopper, searching for and then occupying positions within an irrational and incoherent marketplace. Popular ideas of the artist as shopper place the all-important moment of selection, when the artist chooses what problem to engage, in an outdated loop of production and consumption. This position implies that the artist must regress into the role of consumer, an inference rooted in the belief that shopping is a diversion, and that the shopper is a disempowered actor lost within the marketplace.

I select objects that productively engage with questions of relative empowerment and disempowerment to create new forms. This is a heuristic activity. Universal problems, such as discovering the artist’s duties and potential liberation within the market, are impossibly abstract. My practice therefore invents tangential systems where amelioration is possible because I’ve chosen defer on the goal of liberation.

Anne Niemetz
Hommage à Max Ernst 2003 12 seconds looped for 2 minutes

Hommage à Max Ernst adapts the compositional layout of the picture “Vox Angelica” painted by Max Ernst in1943. Considering that the duration of the video loop is only 12 seconds, the piece may be described as an “animated painting”.

Combining imagery from the natural as well as the technological realm, the artists’ inspiration seems appropriately expressed with the words of the Vulcan alien stranded on earth: “They’re on the verge of countless social and technological advancements. I have the unique opportunity to study an emerging species.”

Anne Niemetz holds a Media Arts degree from the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe (HfG), Germany (2002) with a focus in digital media and interactive installation. She continued her studies at UCLA where she received an MFA in Design and Media Arts. Her fields of interest and work include video, audio, internet, installation, and stage design. Recent works deal with the scientific discovery of cellular audio and the rediscovery of the video installation.

Pat O'Neill
Coreopsis 1998 5:49
Let's Make a Sandwich 1982 18:42 minutes

Pat O'Neill primarily makes experimental films in Los Angeles. He is especially respected for his innovative special effects and use of optical printing, a process by which images are layered over other images in conjunction with animation and computer graphics, a process exemplified in his 1982 film Let's Make a Sandwich. O'Neill's first feature, Water and Power, a journey through a California of the imagination, was a Sundance Grand Jury winner in 1990 and was hailed as a touchstone for filmmaking in the future. The film became an instant classic, and was received with delight at the New York Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, Telluride, London, Los Angeles and many others. O’Neill’s second feature film, The Decay of Fiction (2002), is an archeological exploration of the Hotel Ambassador. Several of the 14 avant-garde 16mm short films he produced between 1963 and 1982 are also considered classics (especially 7362, Runs Good, and Saugus Series) and all are in international distribution and in the collections of major museums, from the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris to the Austrian Film Archive in Vienna.

He was founding Assistant Dean for Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts 1970-1975, and since 1975 has operated his highly regarded special-effects and optical printing company, Lookout Mountain Films. He has always supported the making and showing of experimental film, and donates much time and energy to other filmmakers. He and his wife Beverly, who is also active in the Los Angeles film community, were co-founders of "Oasis," a Los Angeles film cooperative, and he often serves as a jury member for international film festivals. O'Neill and his films have been the recipient of Filmmakers' Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The American Film Institute, The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation.

Pat O'Neill (born 1939, Los Angeles) received a Master of Arts degree in graphic design and photography from UCLA, where his mentor was photographer Robert Heineken. He produced his first short film in 1963 in collaboration with computer-graphics pioneer Robert Abel. During the '60s and '70s he taught photography at UCLA, while experimenting with and refining the limited means for combining images that were available at the time (the optical printer, first in 16mm and then in 35mm). He was the subject of a one-man exhibition of his work at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2004.

The artist lives and works in Pasadena.

Laurent Pernot
Life's Attraction, 2004 3:26 minutes
Gravity, 2006 3:27 minutes

Laurent Pernot’s work explores the deep ambiguities of human existence, centering on the eternal question of the meaning of life. He seeks to represent and explore the cycle of birth, life and death that is common to every living organism. For Laurent, mankinds' current situation has never previously required us to ask questions of our origins and our future, of our individuality, our variety and our complementarity. He observes that the differences between us will always be much less significant than the similarities that bring us closer.

“Since the beginning of my career, I have used electronic media to produce installations, film, videos, animations, sound compositions, books and photographs, attempting to convey allegory and poetry. I have always been interested in philosophic and scientific issues, especially those that deal with life’s consciousness and patterns.”

Laurent Pernot has had solo shows at The Joan Miro Foundation in Barcelona (2006), the Alvar Aalto Musem in Jyvaskla, Finland and the Interxcross Creative Centre in Sapporo, Japan (2004). His work has been screened widely across the world, gaining him international acclaim. His work is in various collections.

Laurent Pernot holds a Master of Photography and Multimedia degree from Paris VIII University and post-diploma of Le Fresnoy National Studio of Contemporary Arts, Tourcoing, France.

Life's Attraction
Night falls on a narrow street. A child starts to run, whilst snowflakes luminous and corpuscular float slowly. The young boy begins to run more and more quickly as the snow continues to fall. Celebrating life’s cycle in a sparkling run through the snow, ‘Life’s Attraction’ explores time as an infinite journey.
Night falls on a narrow street. A child starts to run, whilst snowflakes luminous and corpuscular float slowly. The young boy begins to run more and more quickly as the snow continues to fall. Celebrating life’s cycle in a sparkling run through the snow, ‘Life’s Attraction’ explores time as an infinite journey.

Gravity
In this video, the soft and almost intangible picture of an angel contrasts with its impossibility to fly away, despite several attempts, as well as with an enchanting and dramatic sound atmosphere. Being a teenager, the age of the premises of liberty, innocence, sensuality, and where the desires build themselves while they cross obstacles, the face of the angel symbolizes more generally the "dream to fly" than carried humanity, a freedom that Icarus was about to reach…

Diego Quemada-Diez
I Want To Be A Pilot, 2006 11:45 minutes

Diego Quemada-Diez started his career in film working as a camera assistant for British director Ken Loach (Land and Freedom, Carla's Song). His graduation film at the American Film Institute, A Table Is A Table, won the 2001 student award by the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC). His film I Want To Be A Pilot was shot in Kenya after working on The Constant Gardener as a Camera Operator.

Deep in the slums of East Africa, a 12-year-old boy has only one dream.

Ray Rapp
truckZ

Ray Rapp is a video/video installation artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York.
Recent exhibitions include Fringe exhibitions (LA), Frederieke Taylor Gallery (NY),
Carl Hammer Gallery (Chicago), OH+T Gallery (Boston), Photo San Francisco, Photo Miami,
Pulse NY, Scope NY and Miami.

The video humanLocomotion_la is a compilation of digital animations created for the video installation of the same name exhibited at Fringe exhibitions in 2006.  The work is named after the collection of photographs by Edwaerd Muybridge documenting simple movements of male and female subjects.  The subjects for humanLocomotion_la have been extracted from movies featuring Los Angeles as the center of the action.  The characters have
been redrawn and animated, first populating the 40 monitors in the Fringe exhibition and now acting as a single channel video for Projections on the Lake.

truckZ was created from original video taken by the artist while driving from New York to Summit, New Jersey in 1998.  These video vignettes were then warped and compiled using several computer programs.

Leslie Raymond
Railroad Cinema, 2007 14:39 minutes
Monks and Holidays, 2007 6:44 minutes
Sandy Loam, 2007 10:25

Leslie Raymond (b. 1968) is a video artist living in San Antonio, Texas. 

Her solo and collaborative films and videos have been presented at festivals including the 50th Sydney Film Festival (Australia) dLux Media Arts "Future Perfect" screening, the Lausanne Underground Film & Video Festival (Switzerland), Loop Barcelona, and the Museo de Arte Contemprareano (Argentina) in which her work was awarded first place in video installation.
As vjFutureWorkerGirl, Raymond has mixed video live with experimental musicians and DJs at festivals and venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, 21 Grand, the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, and the Soap Factory. 

She and her partner Jason Jay Stevens are known as Potter-Belmar Labs, a collaborative team who have been working together in multimedia performance and installation since 1999.

Born in Saint Paul and raised in Detroit, Raymond received her BFA in film and video from Rhode Island School of Design in 1990, and an MFA from the University of Michigan School of Art & Design in 1999.  She currently teaches at The University of Texas at San Antonio, where she started the New Media Studio Program in the Department of Art & Art History.

The videos of Leslie Raymond are moving paintings, infinite loops holding a space in time.  The potential for stories lie therein, gathering force through the viewer's gaze and attention.

Jean Robison
Bird, 2006 3 minutes

Jean Robison works with video, animation and photography to reinterprate the known object. Using familiar objects such as a Coca-Cola cup, a baseball or glass from a broken windshield she reconsiders these cultural products with all their symbolic possibilities. As a result of re-positioning objects, a shift occurs for the viewer/consumer. New meanings emerge and transcendent, sometimes erotic, relationships occur. The work plays with national icons, like Coke or baseball, as well as humbler subjects, such as a crayfish, orange juice or a solitary bird. All these themes, put under the same scrutiny, yield fresh meanings. Video projection furthers the exaggeration of the re-positioned object. The subject of the work combines with specific architecture, each lending its own context and particular declaration.

Bird is an animation made up of 1,917 graphite drawings.

Alexis Rockman
Painting 2004

Alexis Rockman (born 1962) is an American contemporary artist known for his paintings depicting the precarious relationship between man and nature. He has been exhibiting his work internationally since 1985, when he received a BFA in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts. His artworks are information-rich depictions of how our culture perceives and interacts with plants and animals, and the role culture plays in influencing the direction of natural history.

Alexis Rockman is a native of New York City. He grew up in and around The Museum of Natural History. He is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts. His work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and is in the permanent collections of several prominent institutions, including Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Baltimore Museum of Art.

Curtis Stage
So Outta Tune

Much of Curtis Stage's work is an exploration of sound and vision, which collides the worlds of contemporary music and art. Stage's work addresses the possibility that video/sound can be a seemingly endless archive of cultural and personal associations to be layered,  ripped apart, and re-mixed by the artist and viewer to create new "narratives".  For Stage, reinterpretation, plundering and rearranging to create a frenzy of imagery and sound that is at once alluring and dizzying, fuels his interest in communication and our cultural need to connect with each other.

Curtis Stage is a Los Angeles based artist working with media art and photography. For the last few years much of his work has revolved around relationships to the self and how we connect with each other in a culture of technological experience. We have wrapped music, television, cinema, and the Internet into the fabric of our lives and it has influenced our sense of time, place and identity.

Curtis shows work in Los Angeles at Fringe Exhibitions in Chinatown.  He also is the Vice Chair and Assistant Professor of Multimedia at the Institute of Arts and Multimedia at Los Angeles Mission College and Visiting Artist of Digital Art at Claremont Graduate University.

Laurie Simmons
The Instant Decorator 2004, Photograph

The Instant Decorator (2004), based on reproductions in a 1976 decorating book of the same name, features images of Modernist architecture collaged helter-skelter with images of women and men sampled from popular magazines and catalogues.

Laurie Simmons was born on October 3, 1949, in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens, New York. She began photographing at the age of six, when her father bought her a Brownie camera. She received a B.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1971 and two years later moved to the SoHo neighborhood of New York. Her first photographs were portraits of friends, but she began photographing toys—in particular dolls from the 1950s that she had purchased at an antiquated toy store in the Catskills—after working as a freelance photographer for a dollhouse miniature company.

Simmons has had solo exhibitions at P.S. 1 in New York (1979), Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1987), San Jose Museum of Art in San Jose, California (1990), and the Baltimore Museum of Art (1997), among other venues. Her work has also appeared in the Wiener Internationale Biennale (1981), Whitney Biennial (1985 and 1991), Bienal de São Paulo (1985), Austrian Triennial on Photography in Graz (1996), and Open Ends: Minimalism and After at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2000). She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984.

Dean Smith
Labyrinth

Dean Smith’s films have screened at San Francisco Cinematheque, The 19th London Lesbian/Gay Film Festival at the National Theater, London, the Clarke Centre, Montreal, the Kunst Museum, Zurich, ATA: Artists Television Access, San Francisco, and in galleries nationally. labyrinth, which Leah Ollman of the LA Times described as, “a mesmerizing haunt,” premiered at Christopher Grimes Gallery in 2003. Known primarily for his works on paper, Smith’s recent solo exhibitions include Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, and Marvelli Gallery, New York. His drawings are represented in numerous museum collections, including The British Museum, London, The Hammer Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Dean Smith lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Jennifer Steinkamp
sin(time) 2003 6 minutes

Jennifer Steinkamp creates interactive video environments that are designed for specific architectural spaces. The viewer manipulates the environment either by seeming to enter the projected image, or by triggering a reaction by movement.

Born in Denver and raised in Minnesota, Steinkamp studied film, video art and computer animation in the 1980s, when she attended CalArts in Valencia and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. She also worked on and off as an animator in the commercial sector. The artist lives in Los Angeles.

A pioneer in the medium, she seems able to make software do anything she wants; or as she puts it: "I write scripts to control things."

Jennifer Steinkamp had a retrospective of her work at the San Jose Museum of Contemporary Art in August 2006, which will travel to the Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City and the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo. The Denver Art Museum commissioned a special installation by Steinkamp for their new building which opened in 2006. She studied at Art Center in Los Angeles, and has exhibited worldwide at The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; the 8th Annual Istanbul Biennial; the Seoul Museum of Art; and the Corcoran Gallery Of Art, Washington DC, among others. Her work was also included in Visual Music at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and is in many major public and private collections.

Her work is part of the collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and MOCA, North Miami. She has been the recipient of two NEA grants, the Getty Individual grant, a research grant from Art Center College of Design, and two Art Matters grants.

For almost 20 years, Verene has photographed his hometown of Galesburg, a small working class railroad town in western Illinois. In these pictures Verene documents with dignity and a wry sense of humor both joyful events, like a cousin’s wedding, and the hardships of poverty, divorce, and death.

Born in Galesburg, Illinois, Chris Verene was raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He received a BA from Emory University and an MFA from Georgia State University. In addition to being a photographer, Verene is also a performance artist and musician in the indie rock band Cordero. His works have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and in Times Square, New York. His photographs are held in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Whitney Museum and the High Museum. Verene currently lives and works in New York where he is an adjunct Professor of MFA Photography and Related Media at the School of Visual Art.

S. Vijayaraghavan
Journey of Discovery an Existentia, new media animation 2006 3:37 minutes

S. VIJAYARAGHAVAN: S. Vijayaraghavan was born in 1981 in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. He Studied Bachelor of Fine Arts in College of Fine Arts, Chennai, India. 2007 - FR8 [Waterfront Festival, California, U.S.A], Curated by Anne Bray, Executive Director, Free waves, U.S.A. IZOLENTA 07 International Digital Film Festival, St.Petersburg, Russia. 2006 – Free waves Presents “Too much freedom” 10th Biennale Film, Video & New Media Festival, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, U.S.A. Eighth International Digital Art Exhibit and Colloquium – Havana, Cuba.   El Arte de la Installation with Mexican Artist “Felipe Ehrenberg” – Sanskriti Foundation, New Delhi.  2004 - Gallery International’s Global All Media International Competition & Exhibition, Baltimore   – MD, U.S.A. 26th International Hollfelder Kunstausstellung, Kunst Museum, HollFeld – South Germany. Currently he is living and  pursuing Master of Fine Arts – Painting in College of Art, New Delhi, India.

In this project I focus on questioning the relationship between Body & mind, Pain & Pleasure in the human phenomenon. While this Project gives new dimensions, perceptions and psychologies that may raise curious questions about our existing beliefs, values and thoughts about Human values.

The idea is to show the interaction with emphatic and maltreat how they transform us, and how we become feeling with them. As the existing values and meanings of this society can be tracing very accurately and therefore always put into the mind. One can wonder how we react in the work of changing… and it’s going to be conventional thinking.

Lawrence Weiner
Inherent in the Rhumb Line 2005, 7 minutes

With the advent of the rhumb line - a line of constant bearing or loxodrome - a cognitive pattern developed in the Western world that allowed the possibility to conceive pillage on voyages of discovery. Inherent in the Rhumb Line is an imperative for use - regardless of consequence - a flattened convolution that marries landscape with loot and preordination. Inherent in the Rhumb Line is a silent 7 minute motion drawing." - Moved Pictures

A key figure in Conceptual Art, Lawrence Weiner has long pursued inquiries into language and the art-making process. From his pioneering installation works of the 1960s and '70s through his new digital projects, Weiner posits a radical redefinition of the artist/viewer relationship and the very nature of the artwork. Translating his investigations into linguistic structures and visual systems across varied formats and manifestations, Weiner has also produced books, films, videos, performances and audio works.

In his recent series of digital works, Weiner stakes out new territory even as he extends these investigations. Evoking analytic philosophy and linguistic games, Weiner deploys animated drawings and epigrammatic text that interact in a symbolic language. Ultimately, these visual and linguistic systems take on provocative narrative meaning.

Lawrence Weiner was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1942. He has received numerous grants and awards, including the Skowhegan Medal for Painting/Conceptual Art; Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany; the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among many others. Weiner's works have been widely exhibited internationally. Recent solo exhibitions have been seen at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany. His work has been included in major group exhibitions internationally, including Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and the Venice Biennial.

Weiner lives and works in New York.

Jody Zellen
More Real Then Now

Jody Zellen is an artist living in Los Angeles, California. She works in many media simultaneously making photographs, installations, net art, public art, as well as artists' books that explore the subject of the urban environment. She employs media-generated representations of contemporary and historic cities as raw material for aesthetic and social investigations. Solo exhibitions include Paul Kopeikin Gallery (2007), LAXArt (2007); Pace University's Digital Gallery (2005); The Laguna Art Museum (2004-05); Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects (2002); Deep River, Los Angeles (2001). Her net art projects have shown world wide since 1997 in festivals and exhibitions such as Mundourbano, Madrid, E-Poetry Festival, Paris, Cyber Feminism, Vienna, WRO Media Art Biannual, Warsaw, File (2007); Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Stuttgart, Germany; 9th Japan Media Art Festival, Tokyo (2006); Arte Nuevo Interactive, Mexico; ACCEA, Armenia; Prog:Me, Rio de Janeiro (2005); File, Brazil; Festival du Noveau Cinema, Montreal; Siggraph, Los Angeles; International Festival of Electronic Art, Argentina; Cosign, Croatia (2004); New Forms Festival, Vancouver; Recontres Internationales, Berlin (2003); Whitney Museum Artport (2002); XXV Bienal de Sao Paulo (2002); Art Future, Taiwan (2000); Net_Condition, ZKM (1999); Film + Arch.3, Graz (1997). Her website "Ghost City" (www.ghostcity.com) begun in 1997 is an ever changing meditation on the urban environment. "Crowds and Power" was the October 2002 portal for the Whitney Museum's artport (http://artport.whitney.org). "Disembodied Voices," 2004 (www.disembodiedvoices.com) began as an online project that was then coverted into a 5 projector interactive installation. She has recently created five online projects for the Dutch Newspaper Volkskrant.

 

 

A City of Pasadena Public Art Program

Curated by David Bradshaw, Los Angeles
Developed by Michael Maloney / Maloney Fine Art Advisory, Santa Monica
Funding by