The invisible lake called telepathy was exhibited at CURRENTS New Media 2016.
Linking memory to the mirrored surfaces and murky depths of a lake, movement and voice recall the experience of swimming in dark, mysterious waters. Drawn lines animate over video footage of the moving body while the tone shifts from scientific explanation into a personal recollection.
ELIZABETH LEISTER engages a practice that includes video, performance, drawing and virtual & augmented reality. Her projects act as meditations on the unreliability of memory and the passing of time conceptualized through a feminist perspective on the female body, language and landscape. Her work has been presented at the Torrance Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Delaware Museum of Art; The Drawing Center, Art in General, and P.S. 122 in NY, and Highways Performance in Santa Monica in addition to various artist run spaces.
Her VR work has been presented at FIVARS, REFEST by Culturehub, FEMMEBIT and Mana Body + Camera Festival. She earned an MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Arts at Bard College and a BFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Leister is Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Production in the Cinema and Television Arts Department at CSUN.
UNTITLED BARRIER is a 3D animation which was shown as a single-channel video at CURRENTS New Media 2018.
There is a place that has emerged, a window opened that we’ve stepped through. Within it, consciousness is developing as a form of wildlife, a breeze rippling across the emerging landscape. Welcome to UNTITLED BARRIER:
the UNTITLED BARRIER from ∆ndrew Elijah Edwards on Vimeo.
My deep fascination with vision, looking, and the mind’s eye, is expressed in the transmutation of light through digital media. I am creating work that explores the moving image as a medium for experimentation within a perceptual landscape of direct experience that lives on the outskirts of linguistic expression and a metaphysical power channeled through the imagination. I am in a lifelong love affair with the mystery of other worlds and the enchanted other of the dreamscape.
My processes develop in fascinations with the horizons of consciousness and new imaginal realms facilitated by our relationship to emerging digital media. There is a ‘language’ in the mind capable of communicating with the world in a space beyond language and my work inhabits and navigates this place.
Andrew received his MFA in Emergent Digital Practices from the University of Denver in 2014 and has been exhibiting work throughout the country from Santa Fe to Maine. He works at Spindleworks, a non profit art center in Brunswick Maine for adults with developmental disabilities where he brings a fascination with the electric landscape to facilitating an environment for animation, video, performance, and immersive installation.
Saturnine Tassajara was shown as a Single Channel Video at Currents New Media 2018.
Saturnine Tassajara tells the tale of two monstrous outcasts, who, in the midst of existential crisis, set out on a hero’s journey to search for what is missing in their respective lives. Intertwining both the narrative structure of an Ancient Greek play and the compositional underpinnings of a pop song, the story alternates between four acts and three response choruses.
Like Nichols’ photographic and videographic work, Saturnine Tassajara explores the formal possibilities of digital distortion and the randomness of glitch as an integral process of creation. The loose narrative is displayed through amorphous forms, which transform with each successive act as the video chorus shifts through a distorted wireframe rendering of the campy, cult porn Batdude. With both sections, Nichols may be drawing a connection between the randomness of technical glitch and unforeseen potentialities in life and love.
The video addresses issues of “otherness,” showing how those who do not easily fit into preconceived notions of normalcy are sometimes viewed as monstrous and undeserving of inclusion. As with the song snippet, from Frankie Goes To Hollywood, which opens the video, Saturnine Tassajara emphasizes the importance of love in our daily lives and its influence on transcendence, transformation and the conditions of identity.
Toban Nichols, is a visual artist and filmmaker from Los Angeles. His work has been seen in film festivals & galleries around LA, in Romania, Israel, & the Netherlands. He was also featured in Pop Rally at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
After earning a Bachelor’s degree in painting, he studied New Media at the San Francisco Art Institute in California where he received an MFA in New Genres. He has been granted a residency with the Experimental Television Center in New York, and awarded the Juror’s Pick at the ArtHouse Film Festival for his video entitled “BATTLESTATIONS!!
In the past eight years Nichols launched a line of textiles, created a photo app for iDevices worldwide and published his first photo book titled ‘MY TWIN’.
He is currently in post production on his first feature length documentary titled “Beyond the Trees” for wide release in 2021.
Memory Garden was shown as a Single Channel Video at CURRENTS New Media 2018.
A combination of photogrammetry and animation, Memory Garden looks at the temporal life and digital eternity, the difference between documentation and observation, and the inevitable passing of purpose.
memory garden from nolan tredway on Vimeo.
Music by Bell Mine
Found covered in moss near the Korvik River, Nolan was raised in the Great North by a mountain and a burning forest. He learned the art of storytelling from his time among the Volkos, before studying art at the University of Nebraska and Fundacion Ortega y Gasset in Toledo, Spain. He is currently the co-director of Tugboat Gallery and founder of the performance art collective, kindred.
Steve Summers screened The Garage as part of the Experimental Documentaries shown during Currents New Media 2019.
The Garage from Steven Summers on Vimeo.
Using his father’s garage as a launching point of contemplation, a son compares and contrasts his blue-collar father to astronaut John Glenn. Wrestling with preconceived notions of fatherhood, what it is to be a man, and the taste of candy corn, he unlocks what it means to be a son.
Steve Summers is a filmmaker living and working in Chicago. His work varies from installation-based work to narrative films to experimental documentary.
Tiempo, a 2D and 3D animation by Federico Cuatlacuatl was shown as a single channel video, along with two other pieces by the artist, at Currents New Media 2019.
Tiempo from federico cuatlacuatl on Vimeo.
Single Channel 9 minute looping video: “Tiempo” is a video and animation that used various techniques and methods in the production stages: live action footage, 3D animation, and 2D animation. This project explores the perception of time from an immigrant’s experience and perspective. The visualization of the past, present, and future becomes a poetic approach through the scope of personification: the past misses me and begs me not to abandon it or forget it while the present needs me next to it at all times, and the future has always been desperately awaiting for my arrival.
Born in Cholula, Puebla, Mexico, Federico Cuatlacuatl is an indigenous artist based in Virginia. He grew up in Indiana and received his MFA in 2015, specializing in Digital Arts from Bowling Green State University. Federico’s work is invested in disseminating topics of Latinx immigration, social art practice, and cultural sustainability. Building from his own experience growing up as an undocumented immigrant and previously holding DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), Federico’s research is primarily concerned with pressing realities in current social, political, and cultural issues that Latinx undocumented immigrants face in the U.S. Federico’s independent productions have been screened in various national and international film festivals. As founder and director of the Rasquache Artist Residency in Puebla, Mexico, he actively stays involved in socially engaged works and binational endeavors.
Matteo Zamagni installed the immersive VR experience Nature Abstraction 2.0 and screened Horror Vacui at Currents New Media 2019.
Horror Vacui from øøøø on Vimeo.
Taking place in the current unfolding global crisis,
the film explores the geological self-similar formations of Earth and the frenetic hyper-development attained by mankind;
It reflects upon the alienation from nature and the resulting break of the harmonious balance of life.
By apposing computer generated images and real-world footage the video blurs the distinction between reality and a digital recreation of it, questioning the act of perceiving and the biased notion of ‘reality’.
Techniques used consists of Aerial Drone footage, Macro photography, 3D scanning, geological LIDAR point cloud, Ultra hi-res Satellite Imagery, 3D Modelling, Organic Physics simulations.
Horror Vacui (from Latin :’Fear of empty space’) referred during Middle Ages, to the style of filling entire surfaces with detail;
this term reflects the ongoing human expansion in the film.
On the other hand ‘Horror Vacui’ relates to the Buddhist concept of Emptiness, the fear of the unknown and attachment to the materialistic worldview.
‘Here then,
Form is no other than emptiness,
Emptiness no other than form.
Form is only emptiness,
Emptiness is only form.
Feeling, Thought, and choice,
Consciousness itself,
Are the same as this.
So, emptiness, no form,
No feeling, thought, or choice,
Nor is there consciousness.
No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind;
No colour, sound, smell, taste, touch,
Or what the mind takes hold of,
Nor even act of sensing.’
Excerpt taken from the Buddhist Sevenfold Puja.
Created by Matteo Zamagni
Soundtrack by TSVI
3D Production : Lino Sabia, Lorenzo Depascalis, Claudio Giambusso, Matteo Zamagni
Editing, Compositing, VFX, Grading: Sabrina Haas, Claudio Giambusso, Matteo Zamagni
Executive Producer : Thomas Wightman
Nature Abstraction – Fractals Excerpt from øøøø on Vimeo.
Nature Abstraction is an immersive sensory experience that explores the arcane forms of fractals, mathematical visual representation of natural and biological forms.
Hosted at the Barbican Centre for the group show ‘Interfaces’ the project gives an insight into fractal formations through virtual reality, where they appear as three planets: Birth, Communion and Aether; Each accompanied with scores designed to facilitate meditative state and relaxation;
The fractals have also been processed through Google’s Deepdream, transforming the fractal landscapes into morphing psychedelic patterns that our eye will recognize as
very familiar shapes although the way the images are created only aims to create a variety of random patterns on the canvas.
The audience is guided to explore these planets and dive into their vast complexities as well as observing the contrast between the entirely digital created world inside the VR against the fully analogue created film projected onto the faces of the cube which have been filmed in real life, recreating using analogue visual effects and various chemical elements.
Credits
Installation/Fractals : Matteo Zamagni
Scores : Daniel Ben Hur
Deepdream : David Li
Matteo Zamagni is an Italian born, new media artist and director based in London. He uses technology as a tool to create Immersive and interactive videos, Installations and performances.
His research stands between spirituality, art and science to create works that explores themes of consciousness, the body as perceptive interface, the expansive impact of mankind on the ecosystem as well as the recursive relation of natural phenomenons spanning across the observable world.
Is There A Cure For My Friend by Natasha Maidoff was featured in at the 2019 Festival Experimental Documentary Screening.
You can watch an excerpt of the film here on our IGTV or the film in its entirety on Vimeo, link following.
Is There A Cure For My Friend? from Natasha Maidoff on Vimeo.
“In 1987 my best friend found out she was HIV. We’d known each other since we were 3, and I couldn’t face thinking of the future without her. We decided to make a film together, and make it much the way we did as children, calling our production company, “Two Girls Lost In the Forest.” Our images came from games we played as children such as doing “the bicycle” with each other, or pretending to “run away” from home. This time, we were searching for a cure for her life-threatening disease. An androgynous shaman sends us on a journey through the four elements: first water, then air, fire, and finally, earth. I bury my best friend. The process of making the film was as important to us as the film itself; it brought us closer.”
Natasha Maidoff’s work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and in the online archive at the Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Her films The Orange Orange, Is There A Cure For My Friend and Traverse have toured internationally and have been screened at Guggenheim New York and the Pecci Museum in Italy. She has been a recipient of a Yaddo Artist Residency, and her triptych, “Live Cinema! The Sleepwalker, The Cowgirl & The Motherboard” opens at the Kennedy Museum of Art for Spring 2020 in Athens, Ohio. For the past four years her installations, performances and multi-channel works have been included in the Venice Family Clinic Artwalk and screened at Google,Venice.
For more information about the ongoing fight to end the AIDS crisis please visit:
https://www.amfar.org/ The Foundation for AIDS Research
https://nycaidsmemorial.org/ The New York City AIDS Memorial
https://actupny.com/ ACT UP New York
https://www.blackandpink.org/ Black and Pink organization fighting alongside incargerated LGBTQ+
Their focus is on the so-called “sharing economy” and the contemporary artists “anxiety to make” in the accelerationist, neoliberal economic landscape. Our work has appeared recently in EMMEDIA, Transmediale, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Luminary, V2_Lab, and MoMA PS1.
Performative Validation For Working With Unfamiliar Materials was shown as a single channel video at the 2019 Festival.
How is one to understand technology by investigating its economies? The video “Liat Berdugo + Emily Martinez as Five Twins” is an ongoing commission of fake twins sourced from Fiverr.com who double themselves in postproduction. In outsourcing identities to laborers in this economy, this work examines the kinds of subjectivities produced by the sharing economy– and how these ideas relate to a subject re/produced in vulnerability, self-appreciation and self-esteem, qualities that underlie the psychology of the neoliberal subject.
Liat Berdugo + Emily Martinez as Five Twins from anxioustomake on Vimeo.
Anxious to Make, is taking artistic entrepreneurship to the next level. From existential anxiety to art market worthy end product, Anxious to Make proposes that by outsourcing all of the facets of artistic practice (and life) to gig workers and algorithms, anyone can make themselves into a creative enterprise and achieve the neoliberal dream.
Anxious to Make developed a methodology – along with a series of online generators, commissioned performances, interactive quizzes and an analog algorithm – to walk artists through common blockages and offer solutions that can be commissioned through the sharing economy, gesturing toward an endless productive duplication. This piece documents the body of video work resulting from this project.
Liat Berdugo is an artist, writer, and curator whose work focuses on embodiment and digitality, archive theory and new economies. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally and she collaborates widely with individuals and archives. She is currently an assistant professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco.
Watch both here on our IGTV channel, along with previous Revisiting artists.
Cut Out from Guli Silberstein on Vimeo.
Radiant, raging 11 year old Ahed Tamimi is punching the empty space in front of her. A computer algorithm roughly cuts her out of the surroundings, struggling to contain her, with her enemies rubbed off the frame. Gradually, more fragments of the scene are revealed, and the context is made clearer. The processing of the 2012 video found on YouTube highlights the documented scene as an image, both of a fight for freedom and a media event.
Disturbdance from Guli Silberstein on Vimeo.
A young woman is blocking two armed soldiers from firing, probably rubber bullets, at protesters in a Palestinian village in the West Bank. The image, picked up from a TV news report found online, is digitally processed and slowed down, and the soundtrack is replaced with lyrical music. The scene is turned to a peculiar dance, almost romantic, highlighting the magical and rare human connection created in the heroic act, captured and transmitted by digital technology.
London-based artist, video editor and lecturer Guli Silberstein (b. 1969, Israel) researches the moving image by creating digital video experiences since 2001. Guli received a BA in Film from Tel-Aviv University in 1997, a MA in Media Studies in 2001 from The New School University, New York, USA, where he lived in 1997-2002, and since 2010, he is based and settled in London UK. His works are characterised by processing personal recordings, found footage, and mixes of both to create reflections regarding social-political issues and human perception. The videos have been shown and awarded in numerous festivals and art events worldwide, and a selection of it is included in Sedition Art’s curated selection alongside Bill Viola, Yoko Ono, Rioji Ikeda, Tracey Emin and others.
Through computer-generated video, PAN/PAN (2018) probes the connections between exploration, wilderness, and technology in a contemporary context. Drawing on the visual vocabularies of landscape painting and NASA live-streams, PAN/PAN presents a series of relics from a distant future. Hovering between motion and stillness, virtual scenes are devoid of human presence, yet biomorphic apparatuses function as technological stand-ins for embodied experience. Their unexpected presence in the landscape calls into question colonial narratives of discovery embedded in early twentieth-century landscape painting. By conflating categories of artificial/natural and virtual/actual, PAN/PAN generates a playful yet uncanny vision of our technologized future.
PAN/PAN | FULL VIDEO (2018) from anna eyler on Vimeo.
As life moves more and more into virtual spaces, I am interested in the ways that digital technology influences our relationship to the natural world. Through a combination of sculpture and new media, I explore emerging forms of technological nature; that is, how technology mediates, augments, or simulates depictions of the natural world. I look to the materiality of the screen—as both portal and container—in an effort to probe this changing relationship. I focus on the porous boundary between virtual and actual space, looking to materialize the digital and dematerialize the physical. Drawing on the visual vocabularies of science fiction, nature documentaries, and online virtual worlds, my work speaks to the new ways that we experience nature in a contemporary context, examining the gains and losses therein.
The materiality of the digital is a core dimension of my practice, as I bring forms and materials from the physical world into virtual space and back again. Using 3D modelling software, I simulate and deconstruct objects from the natural world and embed them within virtual environments. Documented through looping videos, digital subjects are animated in unexpected ways that trouble their apparent material identities. At times, their forms are flexible and geometric, and at others, rigid and organic. In certain works, these virtual subjects are embedded in digital biospheres. In others, they are extracted from their “natural habitats” and forced to negotiate the void of digital space.
My recent work is centred on how we imagine and inhabit virtual spaces. I am interested in the ways that the global media industry—from cinema to video games—informs our online interactions, with particular attention to how real life power imbalances leak into virtual space, both in terms of design and use. At the same time, virtual spaces can operate as platforms for playful subversion and pointed resistance. Focusing on multiplayer online worlds and games, I examine virtual spaces as sites of emergence, where participant interactions exceed prescribed game dynamics and relationships. Although our visions of virtuality are deeply conditioned, I consider how online environments can function as spaces for radical imaginings of the future, both in-game and out.
Anna Eyler is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montréal, Québec. She holds a BA in Religious Studies and Art History from Carleton University (2010) and a BFA from the University of Ottawa (2015). She is currently an MFA candidate in Sculpture and Ceramics at Concordia University (2017-). Recent awards include the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (2017), the Desjardins Academic Scholarship (2018), and the Emerging Digital Artist Award (2018). Eyler has participated in residencies with Espace Projet (Montréal, 2015), Verticale (Laval, 2018), and the Bòlit: Centre d’Art Contemporani (Catalonia, 2019). Recent solo exhibitions with Nicolas Lapointe include beyond différance, and now at Ace Art Inc. (Winnipeg, 2016) and void loop () at the City Hall Art Gallery (Ottawa, 2018). Recent group exhibitions include Femmes Futuristes at Eastern Bloc (Montreal, 2019), the Currents New Media Festival (Santa Fe, 2019), and the Vector Festival (Toronto, 2019). Eyler currently holds the position of Coordinator for the Textiles and Materiality Research Cluster at Concordia University (Montréal, 2018-).
Two things are for sure: as long as there is humanity, violence is certain and art will always be created from its sparks.
-Alia Ali
BORDERLAND
The term “borderland” is most commonly referred to as the crossroads where nations collide. It is a porous zone that diffuses outward from an artificially imposed human made punctuation called a border. Borders enact violence on the geography and identity of those living in borderlands. They are both imprints of power and scars of destruction. Borderlands, on the other hand, are the result of naturally occurring interactions among people and of nature trying to forge an existence in proximity to what is around them. In her photographic series, BORDERLAND, Alia Ali, re-examines these demarcated zones as territories of exploration drawing attention to them as transient physical spaces and a contemporary phenomenon from which the body of artwork is presented and the viewer is a participant.
Who is on the other side of the screen questions the very nature of belonging and interrogates the binary of home and exile. Is the subject the one who imposes the standards, the decision maker, the ‘include’? Or the ‘exclude’? In the human act of processing our surroundings, we unconsciously categorize. We separate good from evil; familiar from unfamiliar; threat from safety; alien from native… We, influenced by categorizations create these dichotomies ourselves. The theme of duality extends to questioning the moment in which the mysterious becomes apparent, freedom becomes restraint, and illusion becomes reality.
Seeing is an act of power, but so is being seen. When confronting the characters in the film, we are forced to confront the ways we include and exclude others in our daily lives. Is exclusion motivated by a primitive fear and search for security? A form of self-preservation? A metamorphosis of the outcast into villain?
What are the fabricated barriers in society that inhibit the incorporation of others? Or are the obstacles just that: ideas, intuitions, fear, discriminations and ‘understandings’? The fabric, like borders, is narrow but long, defined physically and yet interpretative in identity- both have a capacity of exploration. Textiles are products of the earth, canvases through which culture manifests itself at the surface, and objects that become a part of us. Aren’t borders as well? Or are they simply spaces of blankness?
BORDERLAND was inspired by the aggressive push to block access, coupled with a strong nationalistic phenomenon taking precedence over providing security and refuge for those in greatest need. This discourse has already begun to build walls around the globe while simultaneously eroding communities built on diversity.
The characters in these snapshots are “undocumented” characters- their names are ambiguous and their exact location, a mystery. Collectively they weave together such as color, symbolism and texture eventually and simultaneously drawing on a sense of connection and alienation. Their existence questions what the human is and what lies outside and within it.
Fabric, ancient in its invention, is archival with the passage of time. The fabric, like the human beneath it, or the border it symbolizes within this body of work, is also vulnerable to the elements and to time. When all is said and done, borders shift and textiles disintegrate, but if well preserved and nurtured with culture, knowledge and grace they remain intact.
Borderlands, like textiles, are territories of exploration and zones in which we will be judged for our humanity.
BORDERLAND by Alia Ali from gulf photo plus on Vimeo.
Alia Ali is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist. Having traveled to sixty-seven countries, lived in seven and grown up among five languages, her most comfortable mode of communication is through image and multi-sensory mediums. Her extensive travels have led her to process the world through interactive experiences and the belief that the interpretation of verbal and written language has dis-served particular communities and presents more of a threat than a means of understanding.
Alia’s aesthetic interests stem from people, place, and the processes which unite and divide us, all at once. Her work reflects on the politics and poetics of contested notions surrounding the topics of identity, physical borders, universality, mental/physical spaces of confinement, and the inherent dualism that exists in everything. Her work blurs the lines between what we claim to be objective and subjective, illusion and reality, truth and interpretation.
Alia’s work has been featured in publications including the Financial Times, Le Monde, Elle, Vogue, Hyperallergic, and Harper’s Bazaar Arabia. She has won numerous awards including the LensCulture Emerging Artists Award, the Allan Sekula Social Documentary Grant, the Magenta Foundation’s Emerging Talent Award, and Gold in the Fine Art Category of the Tokyo International Foto Awards. She has exhibited internationally and has most recently exhibited in museums, fairs and festivals including PhotoLondon 2019 in the UK, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in Morocco, Karlsruhe in Germany, the Lianzhou Photo Festival in China, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in the Netherlands, the Katzen Museum of Art in Washington DC, The Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, and the Kuala Lumpur Photo Festival in Malaysia. Alia has presented lectures and workshops at Harvard University, the LACMA, the Middle East Institute, Gulf Photo Plus and the Arab American Museum.
Alia Ali lives and works in Los Angeles.
Annette Isham was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in Colorado. Her work questions identity and its relationship to geographical locations. The video acts as a link between alienation from the American western landscape and the forming of a new narrative. She uses drones to capture landscape and has recorded herself in various Venus garments to suggest a place where the feminine can move between dimensions.
…My work does deal heavily with the human relationship to landscape and it has connections to the sublime on many levels. Throughout my work, the functions of landscape and my body change depending on the project. In my most recent series, Among the Multitudes, I want to simulate the duality of something real and something made both in the environment and in the individual depicted, provoking thoughts of metaphysics. I am interested in the idea of dimensions congruently existing and want to suggest a world where doorways exist within the landscape, where one could be in between two places. I also want the landscape to be the habitat for an unearthly feminine form and represent a place where she visits often, coming and going whenever she wishes.
OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Annette Isham
Among the Multitudes
Video / 5:42 / 2018
“My work researches identity, role-playing, and physical limitations. I explore these dynamics by experimenting with video, photography, installation, and by developing and acting out narratives. My work enjoys the absurd and often layers moments of fantasy and reality, creating worlds that play with time and space.”
Annette Isham
Such Swiftly Subside
Video / 5:11 / 2018
Annette Isham currently lives in Denver, Colorado. Isham received her B.A. in Studio Art at the University of Richmond and an M.F.A. from The American University in 2010. She was awarded a fellowship at the Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington, DC, where she has shown two solo exhibitions. Isham has exhibited nationally including Condition X at Westside Gallery in NYC and Man as Object, Reversing the Gaze at SOMArts in San Francisco. She has recently completed a residency at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, CO and is teaching Time Based Media classes at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.
https://annettewashburneisham.com/
Read more of the interview with OtherPeoplesPixels at https://blog.otherpeoplespixels.com/otherpeoplespixels-interviews-annette-isham
Our first artist is Robert Campbell, who has shown single and multiple channel video in several of our past festivals. This video is a virtual representation of a four-channel video which was shown in 2017 and made in collaboration with choreographer and costume designer Babette Pendleton.
Solastalgia is an historical image-based research project being conducted by Ecco Tecchi, well known in the field of early 21st century elemental digital archaeology and reconstruction (AEDR). She has been working for five years at a site in the Civita di Bagnoregio archaeological sector (SACB) of central Italia in the region known at that time as Lazio.
The project is comprised of approximately one hour of recovered image data. Each reconstructed data segment is introduced by two identical identification tags on the outer panels, and a single frame of visual data interpolation in the center. The linear order corresponds to the data modification dates retrieved from two aluminum data discs unearthed at the site.
The originating group behind the image genesis is unknown. It is possible that the imagery might have had some sort of speculative documentary relevance in its day, but the reconstructed files reveal little if anything. Tecchi is fairly certain that the images are from disparate parts of the world: the metal, glass and cement buildings in one of the image data reconstructions, for instance, have been positively identified as belonging to the lost city of Seattle on what once was the west coast of North America. Most of the data reconstructions portray the architectural features of human civilization in and around the SACB (as noted in the archives of noted 20th-century architect Astra Zarina, a long-time inhabitant of Civita di Bagnoregio) before it was destroyed by a series of powerful earthquakes three centuries ago. Though not included here, Tecchi has also identified incomplete bits of written materials discovered at the site as connected to the originating group, repeatedly referencing topics such as markers, empire, the singularity, and solastalgia, a term describing forms of existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change.
A note on sound: many of the reconstructions had damaged sound data embedded in them. Wherever possible, that data has been activated for the viewer to hear.
Ecco Tecchi’s Solastalgia project has been curated for Currents by media artist Robert Campbell and choreographer/costume designer Babette DeLafayette Pendleton. Tecchi usually presents the reconstruction in a live context, acting as presenter and interpreter of the data.
Robert Campbell’s body of work includes video art, digital media, multi-media performance, installation, and documentary film. Since 1984, his single-channel video art work has been exhibited at festivals and exhibitions in the U.S., Europe and Japan. For the past 20 years his new media, installation and digital print work has been featured regionally and nationally at the Frye Art Museum, Whatcom Museum, Kittredge Gallery, Henry Art Gallery, 911 Media Arts Center, COCA, Fuel Gallery, SOIL Gallery, Kirkland Art Center, Peeler Art Center, Commencement Art Gallery, MOV-iN Gallery, Santa Fe Center for Contemporary Art, Cheekwood Museum of Art, Museum of Northwest Art, University of Arizona Museum of Art, and included in the 2012 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and eight of the past ten annual Currents Santa Fe International New Media Festivals. His video/dance/music collaborations have been featured at On the Boards, Bumbershoot, Cornish Playhouse, Port Angeles Fine Art Center, MOXSonic Missouri Experimental Sonic Arts Festival and Lincoln Center.
He has produced documentaries in the U.S., Italy, Ukraine, Cambodia, Zambia and South Africa, with excerpts of his work in Africa selected for the Journey to Planet Earth series on the PBS network. He was the 2016 Astra Zarina Fellow with The Civita Institute in central Italy; Artist-In-Residence at: Pilchuck Glass School (2006, ’07); Centrum (2000, ’05 and ’09) in Washington State; and Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland (2000). He has taught courses in video art, documentary, animation, digital imaging, experimental cinema, video for dance, and video installation at Cornish College of the Arts since 1991.
In 2012 he founded the Institute of Emergent Technology + Intermedia (iET+I) at Cornish, which he currently co-directs with composer Jarrad Powell, Cornish Music faculty. Campbell received his BFA and MFA degrees from the School of Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts.
http://www.robertcampbellstudio.com/
Babette DeLafayette creates activated environments through her multidisciplinary work as an artist, curator, and producer. Babette utilizes her background as a choreographer and performance artist to build immersive body, sculpture, and multimedia based installations and performances.
Within highly collaborative environments, Babette works with others to combine elements of choreographed movement with endurance based tasks, sculpture, and video in haptic, embodied, and visually untamed performances and installations. Using surrealism as a way to subvert reality, roping together energetically authentic sources of pain, pleasure, and power while pursuing freedom through non-linear, psycho emotional releases that cultivate mystery and an unknown journey for the viewer, Babette builds physical collages that are emotional visual narratives filled with cacophonies of chaos, subtle disruptions, and empowering, thoughtful, risks.
Babette is the artistic director of Yellow Fish Durational Performance Art Festival, an experimental festival that presents, engages, and supports artists with a platform for durational and time-based performance art.
Her past curatorial work in Seattle includes building the Pendleton House, a creative collaborative entity that was a conduit for interdisciplinary artistic experiences to merge, and running a multipurpose art photography studio, New Tomorrow, which allowed for the integration of art, business, research, and communion.
Beginning in 2019, Babette stepped in as a producer and project manager for Sarah Cameron Sunde’s, 36.5 | A Durational Performance with the Sea. 36.5 is a time-based art project, spanning seven years and six continents, that engages people directly on personal, local, and global scales about the crisis of sea-level rise. In 2019 the project will be produced in Brazil and Kenya.
Babette is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.
