[NetBehaviour] Screen Grab.1

[marc garrett]

(originally posted by jonCates on Furtherfield's 'add + your
listing/event' section on front page'.


Screen Grab.1
August 14th, 8PM
Nightingale Cinema
1084 North Milwaukee
Chicago IL, 60622

$7 to $10 Donation

Screen Grab.1
Artists Included ::
Petra Cortright
Dennis Knopf
Oliver Laric
Guthrie Lonergan
Travess Smalley
Rick Silva

Organized by ::
Nicholas O’Brien

Screen Grab, a new series curated by jonCates and Nicholas O’Brien for
Nightingale Cinema, aims to bring New Media Art to experimental cinema
audiences in order to create dialog. Although the language doesn’t
differ greatly between these camps, there still remains a dislocation.
Screen Grab hopes that this process will create more overlap in the
continuing discourse of moving image arts.

Some works in this program need little help with this process. Oliver
Laric’s Versions, for instance, is as much a nod towards Chris Marker as
it to 4chan (a message board that serves as a meme breeding ground).
Travess Smalley’s Liquify can certainly be connected to durational films
without much hesitation, not to mention its direct like with psychedelic
cinema of the 60s and 70s; Photoshop is the new overhead projector.
Petra Cortright’s Dragon_Ball_P also fuses the psychedelic with
technological. In utilizing the campy preset effects of webcam software,
Cortright creates a lo-fi dance that seems like a Skype ritual ceremony.
Dennis Knopf’s Office Party borrows from flicker films and the
superimposition that occurs through the use of this cinema device.
However, Knopf’s work shows what was once sensational (i.e. Paul
Sherit’s T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G), might have become bland (corporate office
portraits). Guthrie Lenrgan’s 3 Notes, on the other hand, references the
emerging hybridity that is found in digital environments. The youtube
collage of sound in this piece exemplifies the subtle juxtapositions
that can occur through online communities. Likewise, Rick Silva
(releasing previous projects under the pseudonym Abe Linkoln) uses
glitch aesthetics in AntlersWifi to contemplate the abundance of blog
culture. He uses these spaces as a medium for calculated data dumping,
noise compacting, and saturation zones where he crafts a new cinema
dialog of image corruption and sonic dissonance.

–

Screen Grab.1 as well as being the inaugural show for the series, will
also raise funds for an upcoming collaborative project called Expressive
Media Express that will occur during Chicago Artists Month in October.
This initiative is designed to encourage creative use of digital tools
and simultaneously showcase Chicago’s energetic New Media community to
youth in the city. By creating a weekend-long interactive slate of
programs – including workshops, a screening, and a historical timeline
installation of Digital Media Arts in Chicago and abroad – organizers
Jon Cates, Christy LeMaster, and Nicholas O’Brien hope to provide
software and hardware skills that put the basic tools of digital media
in the hands of kids at an early stage and reposition the conversation
away from technophobic fear and into playful discovery.