This is an excerpt from a brilliant bit of filmmaking. As all media makers know, compressing and re-compressing in the digital age can create some unexpected results. This piece takes that concept and pushes it to an extreme. The pixels slowly degenerate though out the video until what is left is a smear of painted pixels spilling out across the image. Eventually, the image collapses to the point of being completely impossible to percieve the original picture. This is merely an excerpt. So, make sure to keep an eye open for it at a nearby film festival.
Artist of the Week
Adam Hyman
Congratulations to Adam Hyman and everyone at the LA Filmforum. Not only has their Pacific Standard Time initiative project of Alternative Projections trumpeted off with brilliant success, but they recently had a dense write up in the New York Times commending them for their intense and historically ground breaking project. If you are in the area and have not checked out a show you must. The next one will be held on November 11th at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and it's absolutely free. We'll see you there.
Celibrating 50 glourous years of distributing great films around the globe we have the New York Filmmakers Cooperative. This year they will have their 5th Annual Art Auction and Benifit Concert. Mark your calanders of November 16th! You have no reason not to go and support the wonderful institution that we know and love. Many filmmakers will be auctioning artwork and singing praise of the great institution. We look forward to 50 more years!
Once again our friends at the Punto y Raya Film Festival have put together a wonderful program of new and old films. They have compiled them into a beautiful and delicate trailer exemplifying all the different kinds of abstract films that will be bombarding Madrid from November 3rd to 6th. If you are in the area you simply must make your way over. Many of our old friends will be included this year - Richard Reeves, Ying Tan, Chris Casady, Jodie Mack, Joaquin Gil, Huckleberry Lain and many more. There will also be a retrospective screening organized by us at the iotaCenter. Don't forget to vote for your favorite film!
Artist of the Week
Barry Schrader
Not only is Barry Schrader well known in his own right as a brilliant composer of abstract music, but we remember him best for his infusion of abstraction in films such as Adam K. Beckett's Heavy-Light. This coming weekend will be the latest intrusion of his brilliance in another category - curation and presentation at the SCREAM Festival presented by SCREAM and NewTown. The Southern California Resource for Electro-Acoustic Music Festival will be held at RedCat and be featuring some of the best collaborations of audio and visual abstractions created in recent years. As the founder, the festival would never have been possible with out Barry Schrader. This is on the recommended to do lists if you are in LA this weekend so get your tickets now while they are still available.
For more information about Barry Schrader and his work, please
visit his site.
And finally, if you are in Frankfurt, Germany this week we will expect you to check out the Visual Music Awards 2011. In it's 5th year the VMA will be the most intense yet. With 13 films entered from all around the world the ceremony announcing the best of the best will be held on November 1st. Stay tuned, keep your ears to the ground and hold your breath that your favorite will win.
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notification of the latest iotaWeekly here.
Outdoor projection-mapping on buildings is becoming a
popular way to bring visual excitement to a space during a
special event. Here is a great example, featuring a
600-year-old clock tower in Prague. The historical building
appears to come alive and travel through time.
Bill Alves is a composer, writer, and video artist based in
Southern California. He has written extensively for acoustic
and electronic instruments and also worked in mixed media,
including the integration of music and computer video, robot
choreography, and web art. Thomson/Schirmer published his
book Music of the Peoples of the World in 2005 and his other
writings have appeared in numerous journals such as
Perspectives of New Music, Computer Music Journal, SEAMUS
Journal, and 1/1. From 1993-94 he was a Fulbright Senior
Scholar Fellow in Indonesia. He is one of the organizers of
MicroFest, the annual Southern California festival of new
music in alternate tunings. He teaches at Harvey Mudd
College of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California,
where he also directs the American Gamelan Ensemble. His
video work "Aleph"
(2002) is also available at the iotaCenter
store.
For more information about Bill Alves and his work, please
visit his iotaCenter
Profile and his website.
A place to explore cinema from every film-producing country
in the world, the Pacific
Film Archive reaches out through the art of cinema to
the many cultures that make up the lively Bay Area
community. With daily screenings—over 600 different programs
are offered each year—PFA presents rare and rediscovered
prints of movie classics, new and historic works by the
world’s great film directors, restored silent films with
live musical accompaniment, thematic retrospectives, and
exciting experiments by today’s film and video artists,
including provocative, independently made fiction and
documentary films.
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notification of the latest iotaWeekly here.
"Relentless, The REV" by flight404
Music by The Flashbulb
Site of the Week
wonderfl
An online collaboration site allowing users to create, share, and create variations on Flash interactive projects.
Recommended projects: Sketch of Voronoi WireForest Fireworks
Person of the Week
Ed Emshwiller
Emshwiller (1925-1990) was an influential figure in the experimental film movement that helped expand the horizons of American filmmaking in the 1960's and his work was frequently shown in museums and festivals.
He was an abstract expressionist painter and award-winning science-fiction illustrator before turning his attention to film and video. Many of his experimental films, including Relativity, Totem, Three Dancers and Thanatopsis have received awards and screenings at film festivals in New York, London, Berlin, Edinburgh, Cannes and a number of other cities.
In early 1979, he produced the ground-breaking three-minute 3-D computer work entitled Sunstone, made at the New York Institute of Technology with the help of Alvy Ray Smith as software programmer.
As dean of CalArts' film/video school (1979-1990), he infected his students and staff with his enthusiasm for art and technology, supporting multimedia projects and founding the CalArts computer lab.
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A non-narrative and abstract visual poem in five parts. Its title refers to the underworld river of forgetfullness. The drawings are created from non-traditional animation media including rubbed and erased graphite, pigment, and aluminum powders to make an animate surface of unusual richness.
Young Projects Gallery
An alternative space devoted to showcasing and supporting the art of moving imagery. Located withing the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, You Projects Gallery curates and showcases video art and installation. Well worth a visit!
Person of the Week
Mirai Mizue
Mirai Mizue is continuing to create stunning works of abstract animation. He was born in 1981 in Tokyo and studied animation at Tama Arts University. His hand-drawn animations are characterized by his affection towards cells in his non-narrative animation films. His films have been nominated in some major animation festivals like Annecy, Zagreb, Ottawa and Hiroshima.
In the last few years, he has been animating distinctive abstract designs, creatures that morph and crawl, each a particular genotype with its own behavior. Check out "And And", a music video he created for Toru Matsumoto. In this animation, Mizue continues to evolve and explore his menagerie of playful creatures, making them dance and transform across the paper. Shades of Kandinsky, Japanese prints, Len Lye, Busby Berkeley, psychedelic comics, Adam Beckett and much more.
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The Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State LA brings you World Arts Day with Animation workshop by the iotaCenter
Join us on October 8th from 2-5pm for a special workshop on direct manipulation filmmaking. We will be teaching you how to create the most basic and brilliant animation between hand-painted and scratch on film animation.
Jump on the band-wagon with Harry Smith, Stan Brakhage Caroline Leaf and many others of your favorite animators by learning the most basic technique in animation. There is absolutely no previous animation experience required. And a the end of the workshop your film will be shown with a live performance by Papá Cuy and Muñeca e burro a fresh and new digital cumbia music duo. For more information visit the Luckman website.
Clip of the Week
First trailer for the upcoming film series "Undone".
A work-in-progress by artist C. Andrew Rohrmann (aka SCNTFC). Macro photography of bubbles, and liquid flow.
The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) opened its doors in 2008 and was hailed by the New York Times as a “technological pleasure dome for the mind and senses… dedicated to the marriage of art and science as it has never been done before.”
Founded by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, EMPAC offers artists, scholars, researchers, engineers, designers, and audiences opportunities for creative exploration that are available nowhere else under a single roof. EMPAC operates nationally and internationally, attracting creative individuals from around the world and sending new artworks and innovative ideas onto the global stage.
Person of the Week
Caroline Leaf
In anticipation of the World Arts Day Animation workshop by the iotaCenter, we're celebrating the work of Caroline Leaf. A master of under-the-camera and direct animation, Leaf has created personal, expressive, and touching films using a variety of techniques including sand and paint on glass. Her 1991 film "Two Sisters" was creating using "direct animation" -- etching each image directly on 70 mm film. See her website, and learn how to create direct animation at the workshop on October 8!
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Simple and thought-provoking, with a beautifully hypnotic musical score, this NFB-funded interactive piece aims to explore the basic principles of human communication through a unique blend of digital and stop-motion animation.
"The viewer makes the story possible: without him or her, the characters remain inert, waiting for the next interaction. The spectator clicks, plays and searches through the uncluttered scenes, truly driving the experience."
Click the image to right to be directed to the project interface on NFB's website!
Friday, September 30th marks the start of the 49th annual New York Film Festival, presented in affiliation with the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Of particular interest to fans of experimental film is the Views from the Avant Garde program, which will be screening a number of new and classic works by groundbreaking filmmakers including George Kuchar, Ernie Gehr, Paul Clipson, Lewis Klahr, Betzy Bromberg, and Kevin Jerome Everson.
Among the films screening in this year's Views from the Avant Garde program are works by London-based filmmaker Ben Rivers. Navigating both the art gallery world and the film festival circuit, Rivers creates works which similarly walk the line between documentary and fiction, landscape and portraiture. Visit his website to learn more about his distinctive work.
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A meditation on the nature of matter and energy
Created with hand-drawn particle animation, optical printing, and hand-developed solarized film. Electronic soundtrack by Henk Badings.
Canada's public producer and distributor, the National Film Board of Canada creates interactive works, social-issue documentaries, auteur animation and alternative dramas that provide the world with a unique Canadian perspective.
On September 6, 2011, the great film pioneer Jordan Belson died. He leaves behind a monumental body of works that illustrate spiritual journeys and heightened states of mind. The New York Times described him as "Part avant-garde animator, part optical alchemist, part mystic, part psychologist of perception, Mr. Belson made more than 30 short films between the late 1940s and 2005, all of which defy ready classification. Wordless, they employ moving, abstract images of mercurial fluidity painstakingly choreographed to music. As they slowly change size, form, color and direction, the images rivet the eye."
Jordan Belson was highly influential for many generations of Visual Music makers. To this day his process is still somewhat mysterious, but his images speak for themselves.
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