[Frameworks] Magic Lantern Presents: FROM THE CLOUD, curated by Faith Holland (March 13)

[Watter, Seth]

Magic Lantern Presents:



FROM THE CLOUD

Video in Cyberspace



Curated by Faith Holland



March 13th, 2013

9:30 PM

Cable Car Cinema & Café

Providence, RI

$5



In February 2005, YouTube was launched and forever changed our relationship
to moving images, both as viewers and producers.  But even well before
then, the web had made a large variety of new materials accessible to see
and to download, as well as upload. “From the Cloud” is a video program
that looks at found footage "films" in the Internet Age.  The proliferation
of archived photographs, digital images, and videos made available to
everyone online as well as an exponential increase in production has
changed the way artists interact with pre-existing material.  The artists
in this program both pull material from the cloud and implicitly comment on
the cloud by doing so.



FEATURING:



“Black Hole (Mutant Sequence),” Kari Altmann, 2009-ongoing, digital video,
color, silent, 54 sec.

“Cultivation (Mutant Sequence),” Kari Altmann, 2010-ongoing, digital video,
color, silent, 51 sec.

“Where is the Blood? (Mutant Sequence),” Kari Altmann, 2009-ongoing,
digital video, color, silent, 52 sec.

Employing a customized version of the vital logic behind memes, brands, and
algorithms that suggest similar search results, Altmann appropriates images
into new, mutant sequences with their own messages.



“Arnold Schoenberg, op. 11 - I - Cute Kittens,” Cory Arcangel, 2009,
digital video, color, sound, 4:21

Arnold Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11-I played by cats on pianos.



“Only Girl,” Hilary Basing, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 3:53 min.

My performances on camera aim to equalize identities through the adoption
of their different characteristics and gestures. Only Girl explores the
gestures of femininity and the breakdown of information through mimicry as
I imitate drag queen Raja’s imitation of Rihanna’s Only Girl (In the World).



“Electric Sweat,” John Michael Boling, 2007, digital video, color, sound,
54 sec.

This video is a valentine to hardware that raises technolust to the level
of technoromance.



“A Total Jizzfest,” Jennifer Chan, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 3:22
min.

A sample of the richest and sexiest men in computer and Internet history.



“New American Classic,” Jennifer Chan, 2011, digital video, color, sound,
1:44 min.

Is it sculpture or furniture?



“Am I Evil?,” Jacob Ciocci, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 4:14 min.

In her essay, “Mirror Horror”, Trinie Dalton describes, “In early times,
since mirrors were rare commodities, only qualified shamans had mirrors.
But in 1438, when Guttenberg started a mirror-making business, anyone
untrained in magic could use and be tempted by one. This proliferation of
mirrors perpetuated myths of witchcraft, since some theorized that mirrors
were being used for maleficence by those corruptible, vain and immoral
enough to admire their own reflections.”

The good witch (Harry Potter?) tries to understand his reflection but the
mirror shatters as soon as he touches it. The evil witch (Wicked Witch of
the West?) tries the same thing but the mirror again shatters. The mirror
always shatters just before a fixed identity can be sustained.  A mirror is
magic in much the same way many newer image-making tools are magic: for a
brief moment you are put under a spell, you believe in it. But the longer
and the closer you look, everything begins to fall apart. That is the real
magic. This is the 3rd piece in Ciocci’s ongoing series “Trapped and Frozen
Forever,” an investigation into the relationships between online and
off-line images: images trapped (not tangible) on-screen and images frozen
(not moving) in the physical world. In this iteration Ciocci has scanned
section by section each of the 2 large collages on the wall, using them as
the basis for the animated projection.



“Apocalypse Now,” Jesse Darling, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 1:06
min.

A roundup of the year 2012, made especially for the end of the world.



“Too Many Dicks,” Feminist Frequency/Anita Sarkeesian, 2010, digital video,
color, sound, 1:19 min.

It is no secret that the majority of video games these days star overly
muscular men often carrying big swords, guns, baseball bats, chainsaws or
other phallic weaponry. Many games normalize this extremely macho form of
masculinity while uncritically glorifying war or military intervention.
Sadly too many games tend to celebrate grotesque displays of violence
instead of providing opportunities for creative, less violent, innovative
forms of conflict resolution. Today with the growing dominance of the first
person shooter genre players are encouraged to really participate in the
destruction, testosterone and gore up close and personal.

Not only are these games dominated by male characters but even the few
women characters who do get staring roles are often made to replicate
overly patriarchal, violent, macho behavior (but inside of a hyper
sexualized female body). Not surprisingly the vast majority of game
producers, designers and writers in the industry are still men.



“Erased de Kooning,” Mike Goldby, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 2:58
min.

In this video, Goldby brings an image of a de Kooning drawing into
Photoshop and, as Robert Rauschenberg did 60 years ago, erases all the
markings. But what is at stake when this is just a digital file, with
another exact copy of the image available again to download or one can
simply undo using ⌘Z?



“Analog Internet,” Faith Holland, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 5:12
min.

“Analog Internet” is a video-sculpture that reveals a pyramid of
three-dimensional rendered CRT televisions, each with a different cat video
appropriated from YouTube playing. This is the core of the Internet: an
Egyptian site of worship for cats.  Considering the Internet’s obsession
with cats, Analog Internet re-imagines having the same relationship to cat
videos in physical, not digital, space.



“Bieber Fever” Daniel Johnson, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 5:10 min.

Excerpted and looped from Justin Bieber’s music video “Baby,” in “Bieber
Fever,” Bieber encircles us in all his glory while a symphonic slowed-down
version of his song plays. As he spins, more and more about his gestures,
posturing, and the environment emerges.



“No Fun,” Eva and Franco Mattes, 2010, online performance, color, sound,
15:46 min.

For No Fun Franco Mattes simulated committing suicide in a public
webcam-based chat room. Thousands of random people, unwillingly recorded,
watched while he was hanging from the ceiling, swinging slowly, for hours.
The video documentation of the performance is an unpredictable, at times
disturbing, sequence of reactions: some laugh, some are completely unmoved,
some insult the supposed corpse, some take pictures with their mobiles.



“#Postmodem,” Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva, 2012, digital video, color,
sound, 14:37

#PostModem is a comedic, satirical sci-fi musical based on the theories of
Ray Kurzweil and other futurists. It's the story of two Miami girls and how
they deal with the technological singularity, as told through a series of
cinematic tweets.



“Money2,” Lorna Mills and Yoshi Sodeoka, 2012, digital video, color, sound,
1:16 min.

"Money2" by Lorna Mills and Yoshi Sodeoka is a brief, merciless video
assembled from Lorna Mills's found and altered animated gif collages. These
looping animations play against a soundtrack by Plink Flojd, a super
audiovideo collective started by David Quiles Guillo with co-founders Yoshi
Sodeoka and Eric Mast. The video is the cacophonous, dysfunctional, absurd,
idiotic sequel to Pink Floyd's classic “Money.” The band’s original version
from the 70’s exhorted their audience to reject wealth and conspicuous
consumption, while at the same time launching them into the stratosphere of
commercial success.  Pink Floyd's "Money" remains an enormously popular
song, despite the fact that all of the ideas about capitalism embedded in
the song are now four decades out of date. “Money2” expands the original
imagery to include the darkness, desperation, folly and anxiety that
surrounds wealth and the lack of it. By pairing a mashed, mangled musical
version with found, then re-arranged, animated gifs, Pink Floyd’s “Money”
is revived and buried alive at the same time.



“All Y’all,” Gracie Nesin, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 4:51 min.

“All Y'all” is one of a cycle of nine commemorative 'songs' called White
Witch/Bluff City—a diaristic narrative about codeine, boarding school, the
Athenian courtesan Phryne—dreams, shreds, parts. It's impressionistic,
creepy-trill, a drunk/dull/sleepy recollection of prostitution both low and
courtly, reenacted and past-life-ephemeral, a punchy Southern Gothic poem
about After Empire sung somewhat underwater, smoked and muffled by a blue,
New Age cloud, all collapsed and hilarious: yesterday today and tomorrow.





“Search by Image, Recursively Starting with a Transparent PNG,” Sebastian
Schmieg, 2011, digital video, color, silent, 4:04 min.

With near-scientific method, Schmieg begins with a transparent PNG image
file and allows Google’s Search by Image to visually free associate. The
result is an insight into how Google’s algorithm “sees.”



“On Beauty,” Hennessy Youngman, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 5:11 min.

Is beauty still relevant in our future age where information is mad
valuable and neoliberalism is the number one pop tune that seems like it
will always be playing every time you turn on the radio forever into
infinity? Well I don't got answers to these questions, but that don't stop
me from enwisening y’all to this shit!



CURATOR:

Faith Holland is an artist and current student at SVA MFA Photography,
Video & Related Media. She is currently working on different visual models
of the Internet through videos, GIFs, web-based projects and a few IRL
objects. Her work has been exhibited at the Art in Odd Places festival (New
York), Elga Wimmer (New York), Axiom Gallery (Boston), the Philips
Collection (Washington, D.C.), and File Festival (São Paulo). Her work is
currently on exhibit at Xpo Gallery (Paris).



Magic Lantern Cinema was founded in Providence in 2004 by artists Ben
Russell and Carrie Collier as a venue devoted to the exhibition of
experimental film and video, and is currently organized by Josh Guilford,
Colleen Doyle, and Seth Watter.  Magic Lantern is supported by the Robert
Rauschenberg Foundation and the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and
Media Studies at Brown University.
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