Strobe gif made with artistic renderings of monuments designed by Boullée.

Still from The Wild Bunch

Danny’s Tavern
1951 W Dickens Ave
Chicago, IL 60614
8PM, $5 Suggested donation at the door

Danny’s Tavern will be hosting a benefit/fund-raising event for Expressive Media Express, a weekend long initiative of workshops, interactive installations, and events showcasing Chicago’s vibrant New Media arts community for Chicago Artists Month. Expressive Media Express – initiated by jonCates, Christy LeMaster, and Nicholas O’Brien – will encourage Chicago youths to participate in two workshops that will put the basic tools of experimental digital media production in their hands at an early stage. For this weekend, Nightingale Cinema (where Expressive Media Express is hosted) will turn into a hub of creativity and exploration into media art and reposition the conversation away from technophobic fear and into playful discovery.

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More .info about Expressive Media Express (sorry for repetition)::

Expressive Media Express is a weekend long interactive slate of programs designed to encourage creative use of digital tools and simultaneously showcase Chicago’s energetic New Media community. It will include two workshops, two screenings, and an ongoing media installation online and at DIY cinema, The Nightingale, curated by Jon Cates (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Christy LeMaster (The Nightingale), and Nicholas O’Brien (Interactive Art and Media, Columbia College).

The installation is an interactive technology time line aimed at youth combined with a historical continuum of digital media (computers, video games, New Media Art) on display for hands-on interaction.

The opening night of the program will include a screening of Chicago New Media works as part of the Screen Grab series developed by Cates and O’Brien (screengrab.tumblr.com). This series aims to connect the experimental cinema and New Media communities in Chicago by showcasing online work in a traditional cinema venue.

In the first workshop, entitled BentBox, has children circuit bend toys to change the sounds they make, learning to reshape electronics. At the next day’s workshop, Stepmania School, digital music composition and game programming will be taught in the context of making your own DIY (Do It Yourself) games and electronic music.

These software and hardware skills put the basic tools of digital media in the hands of kids at an early stage.

Expressive Media Express is part of Chicago Artists Month 2009, the fourteenth annual celebration of Chicago’s vibrant visual art community. In October, more than 200 exhibitions of emerging and established artists, openings, demonstrations, tours, open studios and neighborhood art walks take place at galleries, cultural centers and arts buildings throughout the city. Chicago Artists Month is organized by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and is made possible through support provided by Bank of America. For more information, visit www.chicagoartistsmonth.org.

I woke earlier than I would, and went to get coffee.

Fall has set it. Showing the pavement gray after a mild summer, the sky was freckled and lower than a month ago. The early traffic of the otherwise heavy intersection was populated with yellow leaves. A woman wore a scarf and cardigan, with open toed shoes and sunglasses.

I have nowhere to be today.

Last night (September 18th, 2009) The Nightingale hosted Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat’s multi-media performance The Time Machine as part of the Chicago Underground Film Festival. It was hard to be one of the only people in the room that had a negative reaction to this piece.

There was much celebration and heavily lauded enthusiasm for this work for it’s apparent novelty and ingenuity. I, on the other hand, had trouble reconciling the “uniqueness” of this piece with the rich history of live interactive audio-visual work that has existed in Chicago for several years. Many stylistic traits of the piece seemed to be offered to the audience as singular inventions of the makers, without recognizing, or engaging with, the legacy of real-time performance. The piece begins with an electronically stylistic (if not campy) reading of the tools being used to conduct the experience; tools all too familiar to a new media or experimental audio performer (MaxMSP, oscillators mounted on CDs, an analog video mixer, joysticks). And although these tools were familiar to me (and perhaps to some others in the room), I felt that the majority of the audience, at the request/proposition of the performers, were received as unrecognizable devices that contained exotic possibilities to the experimental film community. In other words, the filmmakers had “found” the world of analog/digital image-making/manipulation and had decided it was an otherwise uncharted territory for experimentation.

This conceit resulted in a rehashing of film rhetoric into fetish technology. The preoccupation with the tools outweighed the limited range of their execution. Combined with what I thought to be ill-prepared, and lackluster staging of it’s chapters, the work seemed more reminiscent of a road-trip than a time warp; meandering through thoughts of spaces and places, recognizing it’s own transience only to reinforce the presence of the stage, and the spectacle of screen. After guiding us through suburban deserts and highway hotel wastelands, an interactive beach-ball (generating sound and image based on sensors) gets tossed into the audience, solidifying the extravaganza with a high-school graduation bravado that unravels the pseudo-philosophical rhetoric of digital narratives moments before.

The proposition of these tools being “custom” or outfitted specifically to the task of the piece (which some devices certainly were) seemed to pay only lip-service to performers like I <3 Presets (who performed at CUFF last year), and LoVid who have set a stage/standard of a new(ish) generation of audio-influenced video, and experimental time art. However, this history is not limited to makers of the last decade. The thread can easily be traced much further back to early video experiments and analog image processes developed/performed by Dan Sandin and Phil Morton (to just keep it local). The novelty of sound-image relationships can be observed as being typified by the 1972 Rutt-Etra synthesizer, used by the likes of the Valsulka’s, Nam June Paik, and Gary Hill.

This is not to say the new insights cannot be made into this medium/mode from fresh perspectives. I’m not convinced however that Bill and Sabine accomplished this, and in turn might have taken a step backward instead of forward (not to suggest that this history need an overarching progression/linearity). What was successful, and perhaps a harsh lesson to learn, was the willingness of audience members to receive work like this when framed within a film context. It has been a long-term project of mine to bridge the gap between New Media and Experimental Film/Video (part of the main goal of the Screen.Grab series), and to have Bill and Sabine accomplish this in their way was rewarding to see but hard to swallow.

I kept thinking, “what if this was somewhere else?” In other words, the mere fact that this piece took place in a cinema, located it within the vocabulary of it’s respective mediums. In doing so, the piece automatically gains credit where it might otherwise not be due. Perhaps when considering how to approach the future of this dialog, myself and collaborators might think about how to properly frame the discourse of our work through the lens (no pun intended) of the Experimental/Underground Film/Video community.

I realize that in some ways I’m being a party pooper, and I should be excited by what Bill and Sabine have hopefully initiated with this piece. I’d happily invite others to comment with their thoughts of the evening. I know I’m not in the majority with this critique, and I’d be very interested to hear how others received the work to continue this conversation.