THE WALTER READE THEATER

THE NEW YORK VIDEO FESTIVAL

A CO-PRESENTATION OF THE FILM SOCIETY AND LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL

VIDEOMAKERS: ENTER THE 2005 NYVF (DOWNLOAD PDF FORM)

above: History of the Sea See Flash Images

FLASH IMAGES PAGE


2004 Program Notes:

As another edition of the New York Video Festival gets set to enthrall you, once again there are familiar faces as well as newcomers to our annual boundary-breaking fete. After last year's success, we go even deeper into the wild world of web-based and gaming work this year. And be sure to check out the live video mixing program, complete with an afterparty for those of you who are of age - the club culture comes uptown. Also on the music front, Armond White returns, but this time he's brought a friend - Ben Stokes will be on stage to talk about his music video work in a rare show-and-tell. Meanwhile, we're also hot for the very cool video work of artist Mike Kelley, so we've gathered a selection of new and recent work to shine a spotlight on this talent, including work chosen by Kelley himself. Many works in the festival this year make reference to our misadventures in Iraq (how could artists not?), but with a thoughtful, historic, and universal perspective. In addition, artists turn their sights toward relationships, performance, and journeys (interior and otherwise) in a series of compilation programs designed to fascinate. And look for three feature-length works in the festival: Gina Kim's INVISIBLE LIGHT is a narrative feature with a decidedly uncomplicated bent; PEEP "TV" SHOW from Japan blurs the lines between reality and non. And French experimental filmmaker Françoise Romand looks for her own self in her autobio-essay, THEME JE / THE CAMERA I. Notice that our guests this year are videomakers and filmmakers. And artists, and kids playing with computers. Face it: the lines have been crossed. Enjoy the transgressions.

The Film Society thanks 2wice magazine for its support of the New York Video Festival.

Organized by Marian Masone, Gavin Smith, Graham Leggat, and Cord Dueppe. Special thanks to AIVF, Thomas Münz at Transmediale, Berlin; Ikeda Hiroyuki at Image Forum, Tokyo; Electronic Arts Intermix; Mike Sperlinger at LUX, London; Catherine Verret and Antoine Khalife of Unifrance; Video Data Bank; and Kedy at Videotage, Hong Kong and Susan Fou at the Film Society.

The Gershwin Hotel is the preferred Hotel for The New York Video Festival

PROGRAM 1: ROAD TRIP
103m
right: 1.1 Flat Acre Screen  (See Flash Images)  very fantastic (See Flash Images)
Journeys to close and faraway places. Five visual treatises on the determination of the individual in an urban and/or archaic landscape.
Rome, NY
Ada Bligaard Søby, Denmark, 2003; 26m
A filmmaker from Denmark keeps her eyes open in a dormitory suburb and catches a hidden America. A cheerful voyage of discovery.
Starship
Bernard Gigounon, France, 2002; 6m
Gigounon shows that alien objects landed on earth ages ago and that we do not even have to look that hard to find them. A stunning and beautiful work.
Fade into White #4
Goshima Kazuhiro, Japan, 2003; 19m
Another psychedelic voyage by one of the most inventive independent computer animators, Goshima Kazuhiro, exploring the interface between model-making and filmmaking and the space between watching movies and dreaming.
very fantastic
Stella So, Hong Kong, 2002; 8m
Drawn on Chinese calligraphy paper, this beautiful animation reflects on the cultural and aesthetic aspects of Hong Kong architecture.

1.1 Flat Acre Screen
eteam (Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger), U.S., 2004; 43m
September 4th, 2002: The eteam collective won an eBay bid for a plot of land in southwestern Utah. They then left New York to locate their 1.1 acre in the desert. Throughout the following year, they used the land as their virtual studio and invited three other artist collaborations to do the same.
Wed July 14: 6:15; Fri July 16: 4

PROGRAM 2: THE WILD WILD WEB
Easily the most significant new communication medium since, well, ever, the World Wide Web is home to thousands of handmade, home-brewed works of pure video genius, many of them as artless and natural as found objects. This screening and discussion program will showcase a variety of styles from the hilarious to the sublime to the completely bizarre, including content from legendary sites HomeStarRunner, Hoogerbrooge, Star Wars Kid, All Your Base, and RedvsBlue as well as barrels o' new talent. With commentary by Webby award-winner and co-organizer Ze Frank, plus world premieres and live appearances.
Wed July 14: 9

PROGRAM 3: APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR
75m
right: Afterlifers: Walking and Talking
Performance anxiety, improvisation, and other forms of resistance.
Afterlifers: Walking and Talking
Halflifers, 2004; 16m
Being undead isn't as easy as it looks.
Sod and Sodie Sock (Vienna cut)
Mike Kelley &Paul McCarthy, 1999-2004; 18m
A military encampment with a tunnel complex and shower room is the setting for a semi-narrative with references such as the Sad Sack comic strip, the bawdy teen comedy Porkys, task-oriented performance art, the military comedy, and the theoretical writings of Clement Greenberg, Georges Bataille, and Wilhelm Reich.
Hung Up
Eric Saks, U.S., 2003; 9m
Time to be a wrench in the works: an agitprop manifesto and call to arms.
The Whale
Stephen Connolly, U.K., 2003; 9m
The micro-politics of contemporary life as refracted through a dialogue on survival strategies for when animals attack, plus contributions from terrorist Ulrike Meinhof and political philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
The Star Eaters
Peggy Ahwesh, 2003; 23m
An open-ended experimental narrative (two women, an extended stay in Atlantic City) that employs play acting, joke telling, aimless physical romps, vamping, dressing up, and non sequitur interactions to interrogate and unsettle the performance of social behavior.
Thurs July 15: 4:30; Sat July 17: 9

PROGRAM: 4: INVISIBLE LIGHT
Gina Kim, South Korea/U.S., 2003; 78m
INVISIBLE LIGHT consists of two parts: the first centers on Ga-in, who's dumped by her married lover and spends her time obsessing about her body and binge eating; the second focuses on Do-heui, the wife of Ga-in's lover, who's become pregnant by another man, stocks up on abortion pills, and flies back alone to Seoul to decide whether to take the pills or not. "Kim has a terrific eye, a gift for near-wordless storytelling, a knack for generating a tense gliding rhythm between images and sounds, shots and scenes, and for yielding a quality of radiance in her actors." - Michael Almereyda
Thurs July 15: 6:30

PROGRAM: 5: SYNAESTHESIOLOGISTS: GLOBAL AUDIOVISUALS NOW
right: Slither  See Flash Images
Audiovisualists David Last and Benton-C present a wide range of work by contemporary synaesthesiologists — international artists fusing sight and sound in an exploration of visual music — from the pure abstraction of Jake Mandell and Jeffers Egan's Slither (Berlin) to the orchestrated reality of Sein and Sequence3's Concrete (Tokyo). New commissioned works by Damon Soule (San Francisco) and DJ Ray Dawn (NYC) bring hip-hop and graffiti-based art ever closer, while LMNOPF (Troy, NY) perform live with their own imagemaking software. The live performances continue downtown at an after-party at Rothko (over 21 only), organized by Lisa Hsu of Enabler Network. This program is supported by a grant from the Experimental Television Center. The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and mediaThe foundation, inc.
Go to http://ax.to/syn for more on these artists and their work.

Thurs July 15: 9

PROGRAM: 6: IN THIS WORLD
right: Buildings and Grounds: The Angst Archive
Legacies of loss and unreconciled contradiction.
Ssitkim: Talking to the Dead
Soon-mi Yoo, South Korea, 2004; 36m
This investigation of South Korean military involvement in the Vietnam War is equal parts excavation and exorcism.
Travis
Kelly Reichardt, U.S., 2004; 12m
The eternal return of bad news.
Buildings and Grounds: The Angst Archive
Ken Kobland, U.S., 2003; 45m
A "rumination with landscape" in which the endless re-negotiations of the restless mind and the reality of place are worked through via "a series of borrowed 'dialogues.'"
Fri July 16: 6:30

PROGRAM 7: STYLE MAKES CONTENT: BEN STOKES
Critic Armond White interviews music video pioneer Ben Stokes and presents a selection of new and past classic visions. Stokes, originally working out of Chicago's H-Gun production house, has continued his multimedia creations through San Francisco's Tinocorp, combining live-action performance with innovative digital graphics. Stokes gives new meaning to the music video, finding a future in its bold formal qualities and meaning in its application to the art of ingenious musicians. White notes, "Stokes is a master of collage-animation, featuring a keen political sense and infectious humor." Come relish our proud presentation of this memorable, original artist.
Fri July 16: 9

PROGRAM 8: WHO DO YOU LOVE?
right: Dad; Crossing the Rainbow Bridge (See Flash Images); Swf, 29, seeks self
88m
Co-presented by the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF).
Interhuman relationships in the broadest sense, romantic attachments in particular. A selection of atmospheric, thought-inducing films that are directed more at feeling than at recognition.
Mother, Father, Son
Oliver Hockenhull, Canada, 2004; 3m
The filmmaker's father was a navigator of a RCAF Lancaster bomber, which took part in the Dresden raid. The work uses family photos and archival imagery to reflect on the nature of the devastating strike (and contemporary war lies).
Homebound / Balikbayan
Larilyn Sanchez and Riza Manalo, Philippines, 2003; 5m
A tale of family, love, and imported goods.
Chubby Buddy
Erika Yeomans, U.S., 2003; 13m
Meet Francis Howard, a New York publisher who gave up his career and marriage in order to act upon some peculiar impulses.
Dad' Dead
Chris Shepard, U.K., 2002; 7m
Fights, camera, live action. It's dark days in sink town. Teenage kicks all through the night, for sure (peer pressure you see: balancing fear and admiration). Friends for life? Well, maybe not.
Crossing the Rainbow Bridge
Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukaçs, The Netherlands, 2003; 14m
Split-screen love affair, cloyingly sweet and romantic. The stuff dreams are made of.
Kings of the Hill
Yael Bartana, Israel, 2003; 8m
In the coastal hills near Tel Aviv, a group of men drive around in circles or motor up steep slopes in their SUV's, often losing traction and sliding back down again. Leisure time of a society that sees itself in a permanent state of war.
Time for Radio Exercise
Daisuke Nose, Japan, 2003; 14m
Every morning at 6:30 people gather in a park and to a voice from the radio, they exercise together. For many contemporary Japanese, it is a practice evoking nostalgic memories of summer holidays during elementary school.
Dad
Steve Dwoskin, U.K., 2003; 15m
"An ode to my father, and perhaps to all fathers. Called a "moving painting" by my sister, the film blends found family footage of the young and the aging father."
Swf, 29, seeks self
Gretchen Skogerson, U.S., 2003; 9m
Swf, 29, seeks self contrasts educational film footage and messages culled from a personal ad against a story of loss.
Sat July 17: 2

PROGRAM 9: THE CAMERA I / THEME JE
Françoise Romand, France, 2004; 75m
See Flash Images
In the late 80s, documentary filmmaker Romand shook up the genre with two works - Mix Up and Call Me Madame. Now Romand has turned her penetrating camera on herself and her quest, at her own mid-age, to finally figure out who she is. At its core, Romand's work is about our daily disconnects and babblings, and she confronts her own indulgences in that area. The video creates both a personal and universal history, as Romand makes a work that is something "unpredictable, that faces the risk of failure, that questions form as well as meaning." The French title is a play on words - the sound is that of "t'aime je", as in "je t'aime", as in "I love you." In English, "camera I" becomes the camera eye - keeping a close watch on all. Finally, Thème=theme, idea, thesis. Je=I, or self. Thème Je=Romand's philosophical thesis on herself.
Go to www.romand.org for more on Françoise Romand's work.
Sat July 17: 4:30

PROGRAM 10: BRIGHT FUTURE
103m
right:Soothsayer; Das Kapital version .07 (See Flash Images)
As the image world empties out, the outline of a disembodied, post-human optic begins to appear before our eyes.
History of the Sea
Alfred Guzzetti, 2004; 14m
A series of excursions and dream journal entries frame a dialectical meditation that moves between the overwhelming presence of the physical world and the linguistic perambulations of the unconscious mind.
Soothsayer
Bobby Abate, 2004; 12m
Prophecies of doom, disaster and political catastrophe envisioned by some of the world’s most famous psychics between the 1960’s the year 2001 are conjured up through 3D-animation, industrial films, text and historical footage -- the sum of which combine to form a visually stunning meditation on the forces which are driving us into a dark, paranoid and uncertain future. Video artist Bobby Abate’s latest video reconsiders yesterday’s daunting and sometimes whimsical predictions for the future after they’ve been outpaced by time. ( Bobby's website: http://www.sweetkitty.com )
Elevated Nation
Eric Saks, 2003; 3m
In part 1 of Elevated Nation , an investigation of the National Security Agency's Echelon electronic surveillance apparatus, trigger-word phone conversation tidbits are served up for the data-miners to chew on.
Das Kapital version .07
Marcello Mercado, Germany, 2004; 17m
Like a nightmarish descent into the society of the spectacle's unconscious, this "moral and economic sketch of digital dissolution" traverses the infernal realm of the "commodity-image," then rebukes it with the cold reality of death. Go to www.khm.de/~marcello for more on this project.
War at a Distance
Harun Farocki, Germany, 2004; 57m
Ace video essayist Farocki reflects on the relationship between smart weapons, "operational" images, and the increasing depersonalization of the visual world.
Sat July 17: 6:30

PROGRAM 11: MIKE KELLEY
right: Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene); Bridge Visitor (Legend-Trip)  (See Flash Images) ; Sod and Sodie Sock
Out O’ Actions
(1998, 4 minutes, directed by Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy)
Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene)
(2000, 29.44 minutes)
Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 is the first in a projected series of 365 videotapes and video installations related to my sculpture Educational Complex (1995), an architectural model made up of replicas of every school I have ever attended. In this model, all of the architectural sections that I could not remember were left blank. My inability to recall these sites is explained through the pop psychological theory of Repressed Memory Syndrome, which postulates that extremely traumatic experiences are repressed and forgotten. Thus, these empty architectural zones are designated as sites of abuse. The Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series is designed to fill in these memory blanks with standardized abuse scenarios based on descriptions in the literature of Repressed Memory Syndrome. Details are provided by my own biography, intermixed with recollections of popular films, cartoons, and literature. Personal and "mass cultural experience" are treated equally as "true" experience.
The Educational Complex was meant to evoke such utopian architectural projects as Rudolf Steiner's Goetheanum. Steiner's metaphysical organizing principles have been replaced with a formalist base: specifically, the "push pull" compositional ideas of Hans Hofmann, which I present as a form of institutional indoctrination and mental abuse. This choice stems from my own rigid undergraduate painting training in the Hofmann manner. As detailed in repressed memory literature, abuse becomes the underlying organizational rationale for all aesthetic production in my über-architectural world. Like Steiner, I desire to create a Gesamtkunstwerk - a unification of architecture, theater, dance, painting, etc. Repressed Memory Syndrome and "push pull" are the unifying theories at the root of all of these varied productions.
The Projective Reconstruction series consists of re-stagings for video of photographs of "extracurricular activities" found in high school yearbooks. I purposely chose images that are ambiguous. Outside of the context of the yearbook, they would not necessarily be recognized as school-related activities. Many of these images have "artsy," "cultish," or perverse sexual overtones. They do not look like standard school events and can be read as "carnivalesque" productions, symbolically at odds with the ordered world of education. I am not interested, specifically, in the aesthetics of high school and the age group associated with it. Rather, I am interested in common, socially accepted rituals of "deviance"-Halloween rituals, for example. This project focuses upon yearbooks as a common source for such imagery, but similar photographs may be found in local newspapers, and I am working, simultaneously, on another project utilizing photographs taken from that source. To downplay the tendency to see this work as reflecting a "teenage" mindset, I plan to use actors of a variety of ages in the video re-stagings of these photographs.
Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 takes as its starting point a photograph of what looks to be a play. Two men interact in a set depicting a shabby apartment, the centerpiece of which is an open oven. In keeping with my reading of the image as a play, I wrote a script and shot a half-hour production of it in the manner of early television dramas, which were basically plays performed live on television. My script is a playful, melodramatic reading of this image and reflects the influence of Tennessee Williams and the paranoiac worldview depicted in Saul Bellow's novel The Victim. The oven acts as an associational lead-in to a fetishistic portrayal of a ghostly Sylvia Plath, who famously committed suicide by gassing herself. This particular image was chosen to be the first of the re-stagings because it was one of the most complicated, as far as production demands were concerned. I envision other tapes as being, simply, moving tableaus with little or no spoken dialogue.
The Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction project is ambitious in scale and meant to rival such grandiose productions as Max Reinhardt's theatrical spectacles. My goal is to eventually make one tape representing each day in a year, and, finally, to re-stage the tapes live, consecutively, in a twenty-four-hour period. I want to create a grand public ritual, designed specifically for, and mimicking, "victim culture," yet unrepressed and ridiculous in nature.
Bridge Visitor (Legend-Trip)
(2004, 17:53 minutes)
Bridge Visitor (Legend-Trip) was made for "100 Artists See Satan", a show organized by Cal State Fullerton as a rather tongue and cheek response to an ICI exhibit curated by John Baldessari and Meg Cranston entitled "100 Artists See God," which includes work by Kelley.
Bridge Visitor's subject matter relates to what is known as a "legend-trip" in folkloric studies. In this case the legend-trip refers to the ritualized journeys taken by teenagers to "spooky" locales in search of darker knowledge. The tape plays with various adolescent infatuations with Satan. Two examples culled from Mike Kelley's own youth include divination through the melted remnants of plastic garbage bags burned ceremoniously at parties and the fire bombing of a country bridge to invoke a spirit.
Various juvenile tropes are featured in the tape and are laid out in the following sections:
The invocation of Satan: a fire bomb is tossed onto a rural bridge at night.
The voice of Satan: a burning "zilch bag" produces an eerie vocal sound.
He who has no form: the appearance of morphing reflections of the face of death.
The creator/destroyer of worlds: juvenile fantasies of power are projected upon the changing continent-like forms of urine suds.
The dweller in the depths: a camera is sent down to explore the underworld of Kelley's studio.
The multi-face of evil: various random blob-like forms produced by the melting "zilch bag" are presented as symbolic examples of the myriad forms of evil in the world.
The tape is made up of three sections: initiation, fulfillment and retrospection. "Initiation" is the tape's opening invocation of Satan; "fulfillment" is the central section made up of "portraits" of Satan, and "retrospection" is the final reiteration of the invocation in which the artist appears in the guise of Satan. The video is meant to be a light-hearted play with the form of the metaphysical avant-garde film as exemplified by the films of Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, and Harry Smith.
Sod and Sodie Sock (Vienna Cut)
(Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, 1999)
Sod and Sodie Sock (Vienna Cut) was shot on site at the Secession in Vienna, Austria, concurrent with the installation Sod and Sodie Sock Comp O.S.O. (1998): a large encampment of military tents, a tunnel system, and a shower room. The installation served as the set for various videotaped activities; roughly edited versions of these tapes were later presented within the installation as five ambient video projections. In the "Vienna Cut" sections of this mass of footage have been edited together into a semi-narrative which references such varied cultural and historical subjects as the original Sad Sack comic strip, task-oriented performance art, the military comedy, and the theoretical writings of Clement Greenberg, Georges Bataille, and Wilhelm Reich. The tape documents a squad of costumed performers and museum crew engaged in the actual construction of the encampment and in numerous scripted and improvised scenarios such as theater warm-up exercises, "monument" building, and alien abduction. The piece also includes a re-staging of the "peeping in the shower room" scene from the bawdy teen comedy Porky's, substituting a group of transsexuals for the high school girls in the original film. This single-channel version of Sod and Sodie Sock differs from the ambient tapes included within the installation in its evocation of filmic language through the use of montage. The "Vienna Cut" is a test edit for a proposed feature-length version of the tape.
Sun July 18: 2

PROGRAM 12: FOREIGN AFFAIRS
79m
right: Baghdad in No Particular Order
It's a small world after all, but how each culture understands it is another matter.
Baghdad in No Particular Order
Paul Chan, U.S., 2003; 51m
"This is the Baghdad You Destroyed": Glimpses of daily life on the streets of a city between wars, brought to you by the cameras of the multinational Iraq Peace Team and the Baghdad Snapshot Action project. Go to www.nationalphilistine.com for footnotes and much more.
How to Fix the World
See flash images
Jacqueline Goss, U.S., 2004; 28m
An animation depicting how the people of Ferghana Valley in Uzbekistan make sense of the world, inspired by a 30s Soviet scientific study of the cultural basis of cognitive development.
Sun July 18: 4:15

PROGRAM 13: PEEP "TV" SHOW
See flash images
Yutaka Tsuchiya, Japan, 2003; 98m
Raw, authentic and ostentatiously low-budget, this DV feature dissolves the borders that supposedly separate fiction from reality. Centered on the generation of kids that hang out on the streets and small apartments around Shibuya, in Tokyo, Tsuchiya's film captures two months of the strangely dislocated lives of these young people. No family life is hinted at; they often live alone and isolated in cubiclelike apartments. Obsessed by the Internet, by surveillance cameras, at home with Internet porn, always dealing with sex but at the same time strangely sexless, but caught up in numerous forms of peeping in which they peep and in turn become somebody else's spectacle, this is a generation for which fashion statements are not just a way of life, but their very being and identity. - Rotterdam Film Festival
Sun July 18: 6:30

PROGRAM 14: GAME ENGINE 2: OUT IN THE WORLD
See flash images
As video games continue to emerge into and energize mainstream culture, the stereotype of the gamer as a basement-dwelling shut-in is giving way to a new appreciation of the extraordinary talents of the teeming hordes playing games and working in the game industry. Co-organized by Taeko Baba of New York-Tokyo, this program of screenings, commentary, and live appearances will introduce the audience to the work and play of a variety of gaming amateurs and professionals—each with his or her very own brilliance, slyness, or breathtaking savantism. Guests will include NYC independent gamemakers Marc Fernandez of Tricycle, Scott Vogel of Mission NYC, Eric Zimmerman and Peter Lee of gameLab, and Keith Halper of Kuma|War; Twin Galaxies founder Walter Day, Pac Man world record holder Billy Mitchell, and Major League Gaming's Sundance DiGiovanni; live GameBoy mixing by Bit Shifter and Nullsleep; a special videotaped message from Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima; and a live performance of "On the Campaign Trail with Lenny and Larry" by the ILLClan.
After-party follows at the Tribeca Grand Hotel (21 and over only).
Sun July 18: 9

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