Luminous Realities: Projection and Video Art

Luminous Realities is part of a continuing series of exhibitions devoted to the exploration of concepts and processes in contemporary art. This exhibition wed artistic sensibility to modern technology by utilizing the talents of seven contemporary artists working with video and projection devices as their media. David Cort explains video and projection art as a process. The classical painter expresses an abstract idea on canvas, but I think a video artist expresses an idea through a process. Art for a video artist is the creative process, art for the audience is the participation. The following catalog attempts not only to serve as a record of the exhibition but also to introduce the reader to the work of the seven participating artists: David Cort, Tony Conrad, Douglas Davis, Anthony McCall, Nam June Paik, Paul Sharits, and Jud Yalkut. It is intended to be an introduction to the oeuvre of important contemporary artists brought together for the first time in a single exhibition.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/restein_catalogs/1021/thumbnail.jp

Teaching Queer Cinema With Independent Media

In lieu of an abstract, this is the article\u27s introductory paragraph: One of the most exciting dimensions of teaching film (and popular culture) is learning what students already know and then generating an informed and critical epistemology from the familiar. Teaching LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) representation in film and media presents rich opportunities to build on student familiarity — with such mainstream breakthroughs as Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2006) and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003-07) — and to formalize the knowledge and challenge the assumptions that students have about LGBT history, lives, and struggles for representation. With the commercial success of gay-themed work and the acceptance of such out celebrities as Ellen Degeneres, the recent past is a teachable moment of both social transformation and market logic, and students of diverse backgrounds have illuminating perspectives on and important stakes in making sense of it. By focusing on film and media by and about LGBT producers, teachers can connect questions of political and aesthetic representation and expose students to independent media sources

The Culturator: Film Noir Meets Bike Culture

Part of this weekend’s nuit blanche Northern Spark festival, project Mobile Experiential Cinema invites goers to embark on a rambling, bicycle-mounted, multi-location cinematic experience that blends bike culture with locally-bred film. Created by artists Daniel Dean and Ben Moren, the project launched alongside the inaugural Northern Spark fest last year as an interactive projected film-focused group ride featuring live performance elements and urban exploration embodying all plot twists and theatrical curve balls we’ve come to expect from the mystery genre. We caught up with Mobile Experiential Cinema collaborators Dean and Moren to chat about the project’s creation, its noir influences and how they plan to epitomize the classic cinematic experience via an non-traditional platform

Conflicts, integration, hybridization of subcultures: An ecological approach to the case of queercore

This paper investigates the case study of queercore, providing a socio-historical analysis of its subcultural production, in the terms of what Michel Foucault has called archaeology of knowledge (1969). In particular, we will focus on: the self-definition of the movement; the conflicts between the two merged worlds of punk and queer culture; the \u201cinternal-subcultural\u201d conflicts between both queercore and punk, and between queercore and gay\lesbian music culture; the political aspects of differentiation. In the conclusion, we will offer an innovative theoretical proposal about the interpretation of subcultures in ecological and semiotic terms, combining the contribution of the American sociologist Andrew Abbot and of the Russian semiologist Jurij Michajlovi\u10d Lotma

Sarah Jacobson

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

Chinese cinema and transnational cultural politics : reflections on film festivals, film productions, and film studies

This study situates Chinese cinema among three interconnected concerns that all pertain to transnational cultural politics: (1) the impact of international film festivals on the productions of Chinese films and their reception in the West; (2) the inadequacy of the “Fifth Generation” as a critical term for Chinese film studies; and (3) the need to address the current methodological confinement in Western studies of Chinese cinema. By “transnational cultural politics” here I mean the complicated——and at times complicit—ways Chinese films, including those produced in or coproduced with Hong Kong and Taiwan, are enmeshed in “a larger process in which popular- cultural technologies, genres, and works are increasingly moving and interacting across national and cultural borders” (During 1997: 808). Designating this process as “transnationalization” rather than “globalization,” Simon During calls on scholars to investigate the challenge that commercial cultural production, or what he terms “the global popular,” poses to “current cultural studies’ welcome td difference, hybridicity, and subversion” (During 1997: 809). Before embarking on the transnational and cross-cultural issues, I would like to start with a personal observation. When I completed my first essay on Chinese cinema in the summer of 1989 (Zhang 1990), I had practically no idea that Chinese film would gain such unprecedented popularity in the world within such a short period of time. Despite the facts that Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987) had just won the first Golden Bear for Chinese film at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival and that Chen Kaige\u27s Yellow Earth (1984) had attracted critical attention from the West, China\u27s turbulent political situation in 1989 prevented anyone from making an optimistic prediction. Nevertheless, political setbacks notwithstanding, China’s economy has enjoyed a high rate of growth, and Chinese film has continued to develop its particular type of global appeal. Less than a decade after my initial essay, one is overwhelmed if one attempts to count every major award Chinese films have won in recent film festivals around the world.1 To be sure, this spectacular international success has provided ample opportunities, for scholars of Chinese film and culture, but it has also created problems in Chinese film studies. In what follows, I will examine a number of issues under the headings of screening, naming, speaking, and mapping, and I will reflect on film festivals, film productions, and film studies from the perspective of transnational cultural politics

Handmade films and artist-run labs. The chemical sites of film’s counterculture

This article addresses handmade films and especially artist-run labs as sites of hands-on film culture that reactivate moments and materials from media history. Drawing on existing research, discourses and discussions with contemporary experimental filmmakers affiliated with labs or practicing their work in relation to film lab infrastructure, we focus on these sites of creation, preservation and circulation of technical knowledge about analog film. But instead of reinforcing the binary of analog vs. digital, we argue that the various material practices from self-made apparatuses to photochemistry and film emulsions are ways of understanding the multiple materials and layered histories that define post-digital culture of film. This focus links our discussion with some themes in media archaeology (experimental media archaeology as a practice) and to current discussions about labs as arts and humanities infrastructure for collective project and practice-based methods