Lunchtime-Series

Fall 2015 Luncheon Speaker Series Presents Mark Amerika

Anonymous — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 21:56:30 +0000

Fall 2015 Luncheon Speaker Series Presents Mark Amerika Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/02/2015 - 14:56

Painted Light: Form, Affect and Aesthetics in the Art of the Moving Image

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2ND: THE BRAKHAGE CENTER PRESENTS MARK AMERIKA

Remixthecontext: The Transmedia Artist in Network Culture
Mark Amerika, Professor, Art and Art History
University of Colorado, ��«��Ƶ

In this presentation, artist and theorist Mark Amerika will discuss a few of his art works made using mobile phones and/or online software programs such as Google Street View. Amerika started using mobile phone video recording technology in early 2006 before the advent of so-called smart phones like the Andoid and iPhone. He began exhibiting his first experiments in mobile visual art under the title Mobile Phone Video Art Classics (2007). In 2009, Amerika released Immobilité, generally considered the first feature-length art film shot entirely on a mobile phone. Upon its release, Immobilité was exhibited in major international museum exhibitions and film festivals and, two years later, his second transmedia narrative, Museum of Glitch Aesthetics, was commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices and was released in conjunction with the London 2012 Olympics. In his presentation, Amerika will discuss his investigations into remix, glitch, image, affect and metafiction, subjects he addresses in his two most recent books, META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (MIT Press, 2009) and remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Monday, November 2, 12:00 PM The Brakhage Center, ATLAS 311

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Fall 2015 Luncheon Speaker Series Presents Phil Solomon

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 21:41:27 +0000

Fall 2015 Luncheon Speaker Series Presents Phil Solomon Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/05/2015 - 15:41

Painted Light: Form, Affect and Aesthetics in the Art of the Moving Image

MONDAY, OCTOBER 5TH: THE BRAKHAGE CENTER PRESENTS PHIL SOLOMON

Seasons with Stan

Phil Solomon, Professor, Film Studies
University of Colorado, ��«��Ƶ

Professor Solomon will give a talk on his work-in-progress essay film about his friendship and work with Stan Brakhage entitled, A Snail's Trail in the Moonlight: Conversations with Brakhage, and discuss the making of Seasons..., their third and final collaboration.

Phil Solomon (M.F.A. Massachusetts College of Art) is an internationally recognized filmmaker and has been teaching both film history/aesthetics and film production at CU since 1991. Professor Solomon’s work has been screened in every major venue for experimental film throughout the U.S. and Europe, including 3 Cineprobes (one-man shows) at the Museum of Modern Art and two Whitney Biennials. Professor Solomon’s films have won 10 first prize awards at major international film festivals for experimental film (including six Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival)... Read more

Monday, October 5, 12:00 PM The Brakhage Center, ATLAS 311

Painted Light: Form, Affect and Aesthetics in the Art of the Moving Image

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Fall 2015 Luncheon Speaker Series Presents David Gatten

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 21:33:43 +0000

Fall 2015 Luncheon Speaker Series Presents David Gatten Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/14/2015 - 15:33

Painted Light: Form, Affect and Aesthetics in the Art of the Moving Image

MONDAY, SEPT. 14: THE BRAKHAGE CENTER PRESENTS DAVID GATTEN

THE GIVEN & THE MADE
Word & Image, Idea & Emotion, Materials & Methods in the Hand Painted Films of Stan Brakhage & Jennifer Reeves

David Gatten, Associate Professor, Film Studies
University of Colorado, ��«��Ƶ

How does knowledge of specific visual and literary artworks from the past influence what we make today? When and why do words inspire images? How do our personal reactions to works of art inflect our handling of the materials of cinema and help determine the formal choices we make? Professor Gatten will speak about the trajectories of creative process in films by Brakhage and Reeves.

Monday, September 14, 12:00 PM The Brakhage Center, ATLAS 311

Painted Light: Form, Affect and Aesthetics in the Art of the Moving Image

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Spring 2015 Luncheon Series Presents Robert Schaller

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 18:49:26 +0000

Spring 2015 Luncheon Series Presents Robert Schaller Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/05/2015 - 11:49

The spring 2015 Luncheon Series at the Brakhage Center for Media Arts is pleased to announce that it will feature Robert Schaller on Monday, February 9th !

The presentations will take place from 12:30-1:30pm in the ATLAS building, room 311. The events are FREE! Everyone is welcome! Bring your lunch!

Robert Schaller: A Practice of Film as Music

Robert Schaller is a filmmaker and composer whose current projects revolve around the integration of film and classical chamber music, handmade pinhole cinematography, handmade film emulsion, and dance. His works have shown at many venues and festivals in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Robert founded and directs the Handmade Film Institute, an internationally known non-profit organization based in the Rocky Mountain foothills west of ��«��Ƶ, CO, that is dedicated to the understanding and teaching of photochemical processes as a tool for the making of cinematic art. He received his MFA in 1997 at the University of Colorado in Interdisciplinary Arts, working with Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage. He was a faculty member at the University of Colorado, and subsequently taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. He teaches classes, seminars, and workshops with the Handmade Film Institute, and has been a teacher and visiting artist at numerous Colleges, Universities, and artist organizations around the world.

Robert will talk about the formal and performative influences that musical thinking offers to the art of filmmaking.

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Michelle Ellsworth and Alicia Gibb

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 18:57:44 +0000

Michelle Ellsworth and Alicia Gibb Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/02/2014 - 12:57

The fall 2014 Media Arts Luncheon Speaker Series at the Brakhage Center for Media Arts is pleased to announce that it will feature Michelle Ellsworth (Monday, October 20th) and Alicia Gibb (Tuesday, November 4th).

The presentations will take place from 12-1pm in the ATLAS building, room 311. The events are FREE! Everyone is welcome! Bring your lunch!

Michelle Ellsworth-Monday, October 20th, 2014

Michelle Ellsworth makes solo performance/video work, websites, and drawings. She is a 2013 Creative Capital and New England Foundation for the Arts’ NDP Grantee and a 2011 United States Artists Knight Fellow. Ellsworth’s work has been commissioned by: On The Boards, Danspace Project, the National Performance Network, Diverseworks, and Dance Theater Workshop. She has performed and taught at Brown University, Columbia College, The University of Costa Rica, and in Ireland. Her drawings and spreadsheets have been published in CHAIN and her screen dances have been seen around Europe and throughout the U.S. The New York Times has described Ellsworth’s solo work as “virtuosic,” and “completely winning.”

Ellsworth will discuss her work Clytigation: State of Exception.

In a 4’X4’X7’ faux sod-covered box, Ellsworth demonstrates her “over-the-counter counter-terrorism” protocols for avoiding surveillance, interpersonal drama, and death. Using an ancient text and modern technology, “Clytigation” investigates the impact of wars on bodies and legal protocols while examining the gap between emotional intention and physical execution. A mobile-device-friendly website and a choreography-generating exercise bike both accompany the performance, and help technologize and outsource this embodied experiment.

Alicia Gibb-Tuesday, November 4th, 2014

Alicia Gibb is an advocate for open hardware, researcher, and a hardware hacker. Alicia has worked within the open source hardware community since 2008. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), an organization to educate and promote building and using open source hardware. She directs the BTU Lab at CU ��«��Ƶ, where she teaches in the areas of physical computing and information technology. Previous to serving OSHWA, Alicia was a researcher and prototyper at Bug Labs where she ran the academic research program and the Test Kitchen, an open R&D Lab. She was awarded a National Science Foundation SBIR grant for her sensor-based data collection module while at Bug Labs. She is a member of NYCResistor, where she has curated two international art shows, founded and co-chaired two Open Hardware Summits, and sits on the board of the Ada Initiative. Her electronics work has appeared in Wired magazine, IEEE Spectrum, Hackaday and the New York Times. When Alicia is not researching at the crossroads of open technology and innovation she is prototyping work that twitches, blinks, and might even be tasty to eat.

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Intermedia Art, Lost Leaders, and Korsakow: An Interview with Matt Soar

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 19:46:30 +0000

Intermedia Art, Lost Leaders, and Korsakow: An Interview with Matt Soar Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 03/16/2014 - 13:46

On March 3, 2014 Renée Farrar interviewed intermedia artist, film maker, and writer Matt Soar, of Concordia University in Montreal. The interview explores Soar’s recent work, methodology, and residency at the Media Archaeology Lab here at the University of Colorado, ��«��Ƶ. *

Renée: I’ve had the opportunity to view several of your short films on Vimeo and was incredibly impressed with your work. Can you describe your most recent project with film leaders?

Matt: My main interest and the reason I’m here now, finishing up this very short residency at the Media Archaeology Lab, the workshops that I’ve done, and the talk I gave at Counterpath, is intermediality – the edge spaces between, and around, established media. Raymond Williams identified these as residual and emergent media, and I’m especially interested in the relationship between those two.

I’m fascinated by the stuff in the lab and by the medium of film, especially film leaders. My project, called Lost Leaders, has been going for a couple of years, but it’s been on the back-burner for too long. I mean ‘lost’ in several senses. First, film leaders are generally lost to the viewing public, meaning you only ever see them if the projectionist messes up. Second, they’re lost because of the current process of what Dan Streible calls the “mass digitization” of films. Projection is becoming a digitized realm. The film arrives on a hard drive and you get a code to make the film run each time. It calls home and tells the studio who’s running what and when. So there’s inevitably digital metadata, but I like to think of leaders as analog metadata. Third, leaders] are lost in the sense that, in terms of archiving and restoration of films, I’ve been told that leaders are often discarded because they used to be made of less durable material. So they’ve often degenerated faster; they’ll get the ‘vinegar syndrome’ quicker, and get dumped. That’s a tragedy for me, in a sense. And, finally, I mean ‘lost’ in the sense that I’m lost – and that’s okay.

My creative process has changed a lot over the last few years, partly because of the residential 16mm filmmaking workshop that I did a couple of times called the Film Farm, which is run annually by a wonderful filmmaker called Phil Hoffman on his farm in rural Ontario. It’s really process-based, so it doesn’t matter all that much if the outcomes aren’t quite what you expected or wanted. I’ve very much embraced that as my own creative approach: to take risks, and to know that things might not work out. So I’m lost right now, because I’m just making stuff. I’m buying 35mm movie trailers off eBay, taking the first few feet and last few feet and throwing the middle bit away. I’ve layered the leader and shot it on a lightbox; put it under my colleague Tagny Duff’s inverted tissue culture microscope; I’ve even made stained glass. I’m also working with Jackie Gallant, an amazing sound artist, on these very short pieces shot with the microscope, kind of choreographed expeditions across the surface of film.

Leaders are what I would call a paratextual element of films – they’re not ‘the film’ itself. The analogy would be that the paratextual element of a book is its cover, the photo of the author, the promo materials, etc. They’re also incredibly attractive to me as someone who trained as a designer. They have so much amazing information in them. You start to look closely and some frames are just gorgeous. It is kind of an accidental language, a very rarified language. Lisa Gitelman talks about a medium being the technology and the protocols that go with it. This is a protocol around film technology – the film technology that we are losing as we move towards digitization – a private conversation between the labs, where films get processed, printed, and distributed, and projectionists, where the information is meant to be read by eye. It’s not really meant to be projected anyway; it goes by so fast when you try it. But it has a lot in it in terms of the stories it can tell about those protocols, which is part of what draws me to them.

Renée: Can you talk more specifically about how you do this physical process of composition and about the incorporation of music?

Matt: Yes, absolutely. When I’m doing those choreographed pieces – I say choreographed because I think there is some purpose to them. Somebody said the other night, when I did my talk at Counterpath, “When do you know you’re done?” I think it’s a gestural thing. It’s like a movement. I’m certainly not a dancer (actually I’m a very bad dancer). What I’m doing is moving the stuff under the lens and just trying to follow my instincts, as rough as they are, in terms of: okay, this is a moment, this makes sense as a movement, and now this feels like there is some closure. They end up being thirty seconds up to two minutes long. But, when I look at them, if there’s a tension there it’s often quite hard to find it because they feel actually very banal and random. But then I started working with Jackie. I would show her these videos and she would compose experimental sound to go with the film. The magical thing about it is, marrying up the sound to it gives them a sense of motivation that I had either not been aware of consciously or maybe just wasn’t there to begin with. So that’s been really exciting. They end up being these very short films that I’ve projected and that I’ve put online, but I’ve also pulled intoKorsakow and started making interactive ‘sketch’ films. They take me an hour to assemble, but it’s another way of working with the material and it’s another way of, playfully and in an open-ended way, communing with this residual medium.

Renée: When you work on these compositions or other films you’ve worked on in the past, do you work with an audience in mind or is your work about the type of media that you’re working with? Are you working to show something in particular (you talked with me earlier about advertising and the influence of the ‘maker’ and his values on the product)? I’m wondering if you have any of those influences in mind or if your work is something you view as ‘purely creative’?

Matt: I think that’s a really great question and I think it gets to the core of the way my creative process has changed. As an advertising art director and a designer, I was encouraged to take a flight to fancy and to be off the wall and to surprise myself and to ‘think outside the box’ and, you know, all the other clichés that go with a commercialized sense of creativity. But it was also a very defined and delineated process: there’s always a deadline, there’s always a client, which is usually the account handler, there is an ultimate client who might buy the work, there’s a way in which the work comes back to you in which it’s been… (it’s such a cliché, but it happened again and again and again) they’d come back with a smile on their face and say that the client bought it, we’ve got a budget, let’s go ahead and produce it. And then always, as an afterthought as he left the room, “By the way, you have to take the dog out of it.” The dog was the idea. That was the thing in it that was the idea. So effectively, they did not understand what you were doing. They bowdlerized the idea, removed the idea, so now the content is concept-free. It was just heart-breaking, as business work and as a creative process. Somebody told me as I was leaving the business, “You’re too nice to be in advertising” and that spoke a lot about my sense of the creative process. That transformation I experienced being at the Film Farm, I’ve been much more drawn and absorbed into the idea of working with residual media and getting away from the digital dogma – the “digital sublime” as Vincent Mosco calls it. Working with my hands has been incredibly liberating. It’s kind of perverse really. I feel like I’m going against the crowd, although I’m also seeing it with some of my students, who are really starting to get interested in 8-tracks or wet lab photography. They’re starting to be interested in collecting vinyl records. I think it’s slowing down. But to get back to your question:

I think you have to have an audience in mind when you’re an advertising person or when you’re a design person. It’s that kind of cultural production where there is an expectation of a particular result on a particular day at a particular moment and it has to be credible, because your job depends on it. I think in a more artistic or experimental vein, which is where I find myself now and I’m much happier in, I think I have less of a sense of an audience and that’s liberating, too. I feel that if I’m doing the work right – and I think artists have known this for a long time, I’m catching up in a lot of ways – that if you are doing work that you think is meaningful, that you have a sense of faith that you’re good at what you’re doing, that it will find an audience. So, with the Korsakow film that I made Ceci N’est Pas Embres, which I was thrilled found an audience (you just told me you watched and enjoyed it, which I find fantastic and rewarding). It also got into a Montreal film festival in November, which was wonderful and a great audience showed up and I think many of them enjoyed it. Did I have any of those people in mind? Did I have you in mind when I made it? I don’t think so. So, that’s a significant change for me. Maybe it’s the change from a very grounded cultural production model to a more artistic model, where you’re trying to follow your sense about what might work on a small scale, not a grandiose scale. And that if it’s meaningful to you, if you’re doing it right, then you’re going to find an audience. And if it finds an audience that then identifies itself back to you, because it goes up to a screening or you meet somebody and they say “I’ve seen your work,” that’s fantastic. That’s really great. But I think I found that audience (I think maybe you responded to it because, partly because) I was making the work, because it felt like the right thing to make.

Renee: You talked about your film that was screened at the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM). This must have been an incredible recognition for your work to be showcased in that way. I wonder what this means for you as an artist, for your work, and maybe even for Korsakow.

Matt: It’s incredibly validating. First off, it’s important to know that they did not come and find me. I had to make the conscious step, as every artist or film-maker knows. You have to make a conscious step to put the work out there: try to get it screened, try to get it broadcast, try to get it circulated, and then hope that when people see it, they’ll respond positively to it. So, I did submit it and it was accepted and they also accepted Florian’s most recent film. Florian Thalhofer is the inventor of Korsakow and I work very closely with him on its development. We’ve worked together for about six years now. They showed both films together as part of the Docs 2.0 section. We had sixty people show up, the theater was pretty full which was great. It’s nominally interactive, it’s non-linear work, so it was great that there were two Korsakow films in the program. It’s great that they were running together. How do you show an interactive work to an audience? That’s a puzzle anyway. Florian showed his with light pens. He handed out laser pointers, and people chose the previews that they wanted to look at and the ones that got the most red spots were the ones that he clicked on, because he was the one that was at the podium. That has its downside, because there is always somebody in the audience who can’t stop pointing. And there’s always somebody who wants to point at you. So, we are thirty seconds into the film and somebody’s pointing at Florian and he says very politely “Could you please not point your pointer at me.” When I tried it a couple of years ago, doing the laser pointer thing, I had a headache all afternoon, because somebody had pointed it in my eyes. So, that’s not the way I would choose to go.

When I showed my film, I put the film on autoplay, which wasn’t great either, because the autoplay function really takes its time thinking about the next piece it’s going to play. I wasn’t at the podium. I was in the audience and it was excruciating because it seemed like it was taking a lifetime to choose the next SNU, the next piece to play, and I was dying. I kept thinking I should get up and go to the podium and start clicking through, but I told everybody it was going to autoplay. Anyway, the lights came on at the end and the people who were left said they’d liked it. What I will do next time is, and I should have known this, because in 2011 Monika Kin Gagnon and I put on a conference called Database/Narrative/Archive and we have a publication that came out of it, also called D|N|A, which is a bunch of interactive essays, not using Korsakow but a thing called Scalar. Anyway, we had a showcase evening with one of our keynotes. Katerina Cizek, who’s the filmmaker in residence at the National Film Board of Canada, is making amazing work, interactive web doc stuff. The work that she was showing that night had been built in Flash. The way she did it was each section had music composed for it, she took the music out for the evening. This is a work about living in high-rises across the world and she’d decided which ‘chapters’ she was going to show in advance. We had a live band, who had rehearsed with her and then semi-improvised music for each section. She stood at the podium and was in the driving seat, there with the mouse. She would mouse over things, but she knew what she was choosing next, in terms of a path through the material, and it worked brilliantly. It was such a moving evening. It was fantastic to have the live music, with her at the podium with this gorgeous film. The lesson was that the next time I show work in public, I will be the guide. I will lead people through it. I think it’s the best solution.

Renée: I think that’s incredibly interesting: the limitations of an interactive film.

Matt: It’s kind of the Achilles heel, if you think about it in terms of an audience that’s bigger than one person. It’s designed for an audience of one, which has all sorts of implications when you get to claims, some of them outlandish, that have been made about the nature of interactivity and the way that it’s supposed to empower the audience and decenter the author – who somehow relinquishes control! If you’re making an interactive work about highrises, it will always be an interactive work about highrises. The implication with some of the sillier claims is somehow that it’ll be a film about something else, because the author has relinquished control, which of course is not the case.

Renée: I would find this particularly so in Korsakow, since you can privilege particular images or video clips to play more frequently.

Matt: Absolutely. You’re still assembling a set of material with a particular point-of-view.

Renée: Can you talk a little more about Korsakow, its use in the classroom, and its influence on how you construct your own work?

Matt: The first time I ever heard about Korsakow was when a colleague of mine called Marty Allor, who knew what I was trying to do in my intermedia classes, told me about it in 2005 or 2006. He said, Hey, there’s a free piece of software out there called Korsakow. Florian had made it available since 2000. It had got to version three, I think, and had been picked up by a media arts group called Mediamatic in Amsterdam, he was doing a lot of workshops there. The films he’d made up until that point were starting to get quite well known and, at that time, they were being distributed on DVD-ROMs. So, I saw it, I downloaded it, I started using it in my classes. One of the reasons was because I was really, really fed-up with Flash. My students are not specialists. They’re certainly not programmers. I don’t count myself as a programmer at all, though Lord knows I’ve tried in the past to become one. I was very frustrated because I found that (this was mid 2000s) my students wanted Flash. They didn’t know why they wanted Flash, but they wanted Flash. And teaching them Flash, two weeks in, they all hated it because they realized that to make anything of significance in Flash you needed to be able to program. You open up the program and there is this thing called ActionScript and if you don’t learn ActionScript you can’t make anything interesting. The other thing for me as a teacher is that it is far too easy to make awful looking work in Flash. So, the work that we were getting out was not good, either. And it’s also proprietary software and you output this thing called a ‘swiff’ that’s this hairball, where everything is in there and it’s not good at handling video and it’s not good at handling sound. It’s horrible really.

So, for a variety of reasons, I was looking around for other things and found Korsakow and was delighted to discover that not only was it free, but it did not require any coding at all. It has a graphical interface. The basic steps for putting a film together were accessible. We just had a workshop here this morning and, in an hour and a half, I think I got the basics across, which is testament to the quality of the software. So we started using it in the classroom and the next year I reached out to Florian and invited him to come. He came and led some workshops and gave a few lectures and talks. So my colleague Monika Kin Gagnon and I got together to write a grant to see if we could get some money to work on Korsakow with Florian, because the one thing that was fairly obvious at that time was that the way the application had been built had become a problem. Florian built it in MacroMedia Director, the films output to Shockwave, which was being replaced by the Flash plug-in in browsers, so it wasn’t working as well as it might.

So, we got the grant and Monika and I set about building up some sort of intellectual, critical context for the software. We worked with Florian and we completely rebuilt it from the ground-up as an open-source application in Java. So, it affected my teaching in the sense that suddenly I had a powerful application that makes potentially amazing films and doesn’t have a gargantuan learning curve to it, so that we could get on with making work. It was also an iterative process, an experimental process. You can use it very quickly to make a film in an hour, just to see whether the concept you have works. That’s because it’s been refined over the years. So now when I teach, usually the first thing we do is use the Vine app to make very short, square-shaped, 1 to 1 aspect videos, that are already compressed in the right codec and that are fun to do, because anyone who’s got an Android or an iPhone can shoot with it. And the Korsakow films made with Vines are often really, really fun.

Now with my own filmmaking, I made a fairly formal interactive narrative film, or what I called a database diary, which was thirty short films about creative process seen through the lens of being in this little village in France with my family. I’ve also used it to do this Fibonacci film, where I use a very formalist approach to look at where the Fibonacci Sequence occurs in nature. I also bent the rules a little bit and I also photographed curved objects like teapots and plates and things. I shot dozens of those, then built this film that assembles and reassembles the Fibonacci Sequence with 68 Vines. And then with Lost Leaders, I’ve also made some sketch films, which are very, very short, where I take these different moments, throw them together, and see what happens when it becomes an interactive work. Some of them have several different sources of sound, so as you mouse over or click on certain elements you’re ‘playing’ the film as if it were a musical instrument.

So, overall, I’m using Korsakow in several different registers and that’s something that’s very exciting about working with an emergent medium. We’ve also found that other people are using it in ways that are really fun that we couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

Renée: As far as your time here in the Media Archaeology Lab, can you explain any projects you have undertaken here?

Matt: It’s been a very short residency, we’ve been joking that it has been more of an artist drive-by. I’ve really only been in the lab for a few hours in total. Not being a programmer, I’ve been a little bit intimidated by trying to start machines up and to hack with them. I think that someone who’s more skilled, more adept at that could have a wild time. My first impressions about the lab were the extraordinary range of computers – the history of the PC. We are sitting in this room here, and there is an Altair that you and I have both been drawn to, which doesn’t even have a monitor with it. You flip switches, the binary switches for on and off, and the output is a bunch of red flashing lights. It’s a gorgeous looking machine. There are the early Apples, there are early IBMs, we see an Osborne I, the early Compaqs, and a couple of Silicon Graphics servers in the corner from TheThing.net, which was one of the first bulletin board systems. There is some amazing stuff around and what is most remarkable about it is that you don’t have to put gloves on to use it. Lori’s ethos with this stuff is that we should all be using it. So, I’ve turned some things on and have been able to (very gently) have a look around the back, and flip over the keyboards, and have a look underneath them. I’m not a programmer or a hacker, but I’m here to make work, which was a bit intimidating. I came with a bag of tricks, 99 percent of which I haven’t used.

There are two projects I’ve been working on – the seeds of ideas. Again, back to The Film Farm, very playful, very open-ended, superficial, maybe pointless – I don’ t know. So at first when I walked in the door, I was struck by this line of Apple computers. There were all these beige boxes, but there was an incredible variety of shades of beige – I call it “50 Shades of Beige.” And yet there are also these moments of extraordinary bright color. So, on the Altair, it’s beige but then it has this sky blue trim to it and when you fire it up, which we’re allowed to do, all these amazing bright red lights go on. If you look around at some of the other stuff that’s around in the lab, sure the overwhelming color is this sort of dun blue or beige color, but there are these little moments, whether it’s one of the iBooks, or the Silicon Graphics box which is gunmetal blue, but has this vivid orange badge on it. The keyboard of the Minitel, the Minitel logo is printed on the keyboard, is this very rich purple and deep orange and one of the keys has a bright green surround on it. I donated an OLPC and there was already another one here that was in a different color combo.

I guess what I’m really looking at is the early days of product design for PCs, which you can look at in any number of ways: the operation of the screen, where you put the on/off switch, the way that the keyboard is the lid for some of them (that it collapses onto the front of the computer so that it becomes this sort of carrying case, a portable, luggable thing), whether it’s a clamshell. All the thought that’s gone into, and sometimes very poor design like the mouse that Apple confessed was the worst they’d ever designed, the round puck. I’m thinking about product design and I’m thinking about color palettes. What I did was, very simply, I went and captured the main color palette from a sampling of a dozen of the machines in the rooms here. Then I collected them together, digitized them, and I sent them out on Twitter. I’ve been using Adobe’s Kuler App (which isn’t very good at all) to create them on my phone.

So now I’m working up some more substantial documentation, which will be a mapping of the colors, not in terms of proportion of how much color is in each of these things, but just a sense of the palettes. But it’s also an indication of a problem in terms of what I’m doing. How does the color change over time? There is an Apple Lisa next door that is not beige, it’s yellow. I mean it’s really yellow – it’s jaundiced, it looks very unwell. What color was it when it started out? I don’t know. I’ve got a sense that it’s the only jaundiced computer in the room, so perhaps it wasn’t that color when it started out. So, what I’m capturing is not an objective analysis of the color palettes used for the product design of the casings, I mean I haven’t even looked at the screen colors when you start the things up, but it’s just a provocation. It’s just getting into some of those issues. So, that’s the seed of something.

Then the other thing really comes from the Lost Leaders stuff. I did this presentation at Counterpath in Denver on Saturday night. Lori came along and we had this conversation about marginalia. This is one of the terms I’ve been thinking about, or through, like paratext and liminality. Marginalia is another way to think of what you find on film leaders, because if marginalia is the writing in the margins of a book (at least initially) or even of manuscripts, you could also think of it as the hand-writing on film leaders. What you often find is that some of the stuff on film leaders is hand-written: somebody in the lab had to mark it up with the serial number of the print, the name of the film. Sometimes it’s quite gorgeous, when you look at this stuff close-up. It’s kind of like a signature. So I then thought, I’m going to take the idea of marginalia and bring it into the lab here and ask “What is the marginalia here?” I started looking around and there’s an Apple II that has an old sticker on it. It’s the ‘Keep on Trucking’ thing with Robert Crumb cartoon characters on it. Then I started looking through some of the manuals and, lo and behold, like for the Altair, there is some scribbling in the margins. Somebody bought this thing for this massive amount of money at the time, for what we can see now is a relatively primitive PC, but took an inordinate amount of time to go through the manual and check things off and write notes to themselves in the margins, which I think are part of that discourse and which are very meaningful in terms of helping us understand the histories of these things. The informal metadata about these artifacts.

What else did I find? There’s a Compaq, a portable, luggable Portable Plus from 1983 that has a set of handwritten stickers on the top of it, which were reminders to the owner like ‘Don’t forget to specify diskdrive A or you’ll lose C’; and, ‘here’s how to reboot’, etc. There’s also the markings on the sides of the computers. There’s a Mac Classic in the other room, which has “Den Pub Sch” written down the side of it in black marker. It’s really thoughtless in a way, but it speaks volumes about where that computer was and what it might have been used for and by whom. It seems a travesty now, looking back, but perhaps hints at the degree to which these things were used, rough-housed, manipulated.

Anyway, this was my ‘way in’ to think about these machines. I got my macro lens out and took a few photographs of the Altair very, very close up. When you go really up close to the little red lights, you can see that it’s a chip board front that’s been cut out quite roughly and then the lights have been poked through it. So, in some ways it’s strangely primitive as a machine, but in some ways it’s also very, very human. The slicker that this stuff gets, the more we kind of lose the sense of that human touch. But then, there are a couple Apple iBooks over there, a turquoise one and an orange one, and they are quite gross if you go up really close. There are eyelashes and all kinds of gunk underneath the keyboards. Some of the keys have either broken or worn down because they’ve been used so much. You pick it up and look at the underside of it and it’s got scratches, scored to hell because it’s been dragged across so many different surfaces. The Osborne over there looks like it’s been in a battlefield. It’s really beaten up, seen some serious action, which I think is fascinating.

Renée: This just about leads us to the end of the interview. Is there anything you are working towards or you’re thinking about? Any new projects or do you have any parting remarks that you’d like to have included?

Matt: First off, I really appreciate that you’re interested in my work. It’s been great to have an opportunity to try to explain what it is I’ve been doing. It’s been great being in the lab. I don’t know if I’m the best fit for the lab, in terms of the types of things I’ve been doing here. I’m sure there are some much better informed, much more skilled, much more technically-minded people, who could do amazing work in here. The fact that the machines are available to use, it’s a hands-on petting zoo approach to media archaeology, which I think is fantastic. It’s opened up some ideas for me about color, I’ll be thinking about color and technology in new kinds of ways. It’s enriched my idea about what might qualify as marginalia and I’ll take that back into my Lost Leaders work.

I’m what the Canadians call a researcher-creator. I do scholarship and I write, I do what we might think of as conventional research, but I also am a maker. The conversation about what the Brits call ‘practice-based research’ is rapidly expanding. There are a lot of unanswered questions about it. There are several basic ways to go about it, as my colleagues Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk have pointed out. There’s research for creation: scholarly investigations, background research, and then you make stuff. There’s creation as research, which is making as a way of doing research. I’ve done the creation bit so far – that’s it. I think I usually do research for creation, but in this instance, I’m really stumbling around. I’m lost, too. And I think that’s a really good place to be for me right now.

So I’m doing the creative stuff, the creation, and ultimately I think it’s going to lead to some more research. I want to go to some film archives and start, in a formal and organized way, looking at film archives. There’s really not much scholarship on leaders out there, but I’ll keep looking for it. I’ll continue to work on the development of Korsakow and to make it do things that we had not imagined it doing and to keep teaching workshops on it. I think the lack of fixity is part of the excitement of it. But to just keep making work, because it feels like it’s the right thing to do. And then resisting the felt necessity, which I feel like I’m shaking off, to justify what I’m doing in the moment. I think it’s really good that we allow ourselves to just play and explore without having to produce to a deadline. I say that and that’s, of course, an incredible luxury. Most people don’t have that luxury. Those of us that have that luxury of doing that also have an implicit burden to make the most of it.

Renée: Matt, that was wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me about your work.

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From Apple BASIC to Hypercard: Translating bpNichol in the Media Archaelogy Lab

Anonymous — Sun, 01 Dec 2013 20:57:02 +0000

From Apple BASIC to Hypercard: Translating bpNichol in the Media Archaelogy Lab Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 12/01/2013 - 13:57

Hi everyone, a reminder…

I’d like to invite you all to Dr. Lori Emerson’s talk this Monday, Dec 2, from 11:30-12:30.

The talk will take place at the Media Archaeology Lab, 1320 Grandview Ave:

Talks are open to everyone — bring your friends.

If you haven’t seen the lab yet, please come check it out — it’s amazing — and truly one of a kind in the world.

Feel free to drop by at anytime during the hour. The talk is part of a lecture series I’m organizing — normally the talks take place at the Brakhage Center for the Media Arts. You can read all about it on the BC blog: http://brakhagecenter.com/?cat=32

Email me if you have questions. (info@melhogan.com)

See you Monday!

Mél Hogan

———-
Co-sponsored by: Media Archaeology Lab mediaarchaeologylab@gmail.com

The Brakhage Center for the Media Arts presents

From Apple BASIC to Hypercard: Translating bpNichol in the Media Archaelogy Lab A Talk and Workshop with Dr. Lori Emerson 11:30 am, December 2, 2013 Media Archaeology Lab, 1320 Grandview Ave. ��«��Ƶ, CO

Dr. Emerson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Colorado at ��«��Ƶ and Director of the Media Archaeology Lab. She writes on and teaches digital literature, experimental American and Canadian writing from the 20th and 21st century, history of computing, and media theory.

She is the author of Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press, Spring 2014). She also co-edited three collections: The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, with Marie-Laure Ryan and Benjamin Robertson (forthcoming 2014); Writing Surfaces: The Selected Fiction of John Riddell, with Derek Beaulieu (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2013); and The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol Reader, with Darren Wershler (Coach House Books 2007).

Dr. Emerson’s will discuss her work in the Media Archaeology Lab and demo hardware and software housed in the lab, such as an early work of digital literature on an Apple IIe and a later “translation” of that same work into Hypercard on a Macintosh Powerbook 160. After her talk, visitors will be welcome to explore the lab’s collection further under the guidance of Dr. Emerson.

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BC Luncheon Series Welcomes Matt Soar March 3rd, 2014

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 21:16:57 +0000

BC Luncheon Series Welcomes Matt Soar March 3rd, 2014 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/29/2013 - 15:16

As part of our annual luncheon media arts lecture series at the BC, we are happy to confirm Matt Soar for March 3, 2014. Soar is an intermedia artist, designer, and filmmaker, and associate professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. He is co-developer of the Korsakow System, an open source software application for interactive, nonlinear storytelling. His most recent Korsakow film, Ceci N’est Pas Embres (2012), a ‘database diary’ reflecting on life in a small French village, was recently selected for RIDM – the Montreal International Documentary Festival. Soar’s eclectic writing has appeared in journals such as Cultural Studies, Jump Cut, Body & Society, and Eye: The International Review of Graphic Design. He has contributed to the forthcoming anthologies Dynamic Fair Dealing (University of Toronto Press) and New Documentary Ecologies (Palgrave). Soar also collects old signs and is an aspiring voiceover artist.

March 3rd, 2014 — Matt Soar

Lost Leaders: Exploring the metadata of film

My current research-creation project explores the meanings of commercial film leaders: the ‘hidden’ footage at the beginning of a film reel, littered with all kinds of esoteric markings: logos, lab notes, handwriting and type, color tests, projection cues – often taking up only one or two frames each. Leaders are doubly ‘lost’ due to their routine invisibility from the audience, and their impending obsolescence. Working with a sound artist (Jackie Gallant) and a variety of tools – a lightbox and a macro lens, a DSLR video camera attached to a high-powered microscope, interactive narrative software – Lost Leaders aims to be an extended poetic engagement with the metadata of film; the graphical residue of film processing, printing, and projection.

Matt Soar will be speaking from 11:30am to 12:30pm, in the ATLAS building, room 311.

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BC Luncheon Series: Andrea Zeffiro Nov. 4th

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 21:11:28 +0000

BC Luncheon Series: Andrea Zeffiro Nov. 4th Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/29/2013 - 15:11

As part of our annual lunchtime media arts lecture series at the BC, we are happy to confirm Andrea Zeffiro for November 4th, 2013. Zeffiro is a researcher and writer whose work intersects the cultural politics and practices of emerging technologies, contemporary media histories, feminist media studies, and multidisciplinary research methods. Over the last 10 years, Zeffiro has worked as an ethnographer within a number of transdisciplinary research formations alongside artists, designers, social scientists, computer scientists, engineers, and medical doctors. She holds a Doctorate in Communication Studies from Concordia University, and from 2011-2012, she was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Interactive Arts + Technology, Simon Fraser University. Prior to her academic pursuits, Zeffiro spent a number of years drafting and implementing garment-purchasing policies for the public sector while channeling her creative energies towards AMBUSH: a line of clothing designed and created from second hand garments.

Locative Praxis
My talk will focus on mobile artivist practices, specifically the manner in which artists have adopted mobile communication devices as tools not only for interaction, but also reaction, that is, as instruments to facilitate political and cultural dissent. I will use the occasion to workshop what I have termed ‘locative praxis’: a conceptual framework that articulates a politicized dimension of experimental and location-based media production through which the dialectic of practice and reflection, at the intersection of social action and intent, can further an understanding of the spatial and socio-political dimensions of a space/place.

Andrea Zeffiro will be speaking from 11:30am to 12:30pm, in the ATLAS building, room 311.

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Mark your calendar!

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 21:18:38 +0000

Mark your calendar! Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/27/2013 - 15:18

Mark your calendar!

MEDIA ARTS WORKSHOP & LECTURE SERIES

Brakhage Center for the Media Arts

Free! Everyone is welcome! Bring your lunch!

I would like to invite you all to attend and participate in the Brakhage Center for the media arts lunchtime workshop & lecture series, done in collaboration with the Media Archaeology Lab.

Presentations take place from 11:30am to 12:30pm, in the ATLAS building, room 311, on the first Monday of each month, from October 2013 to March 2014.

Speakers in this series include multimedia artist Eric A. Meyer (Oct 7th), cultural theorist, Dr. Andrea Zeffiro (Nov 4th), MAL Director, Dr. Lori Emerson (Dec 2nd), artist and designer, Joel E. Swanson (Feb 3rd), and intermedia artist, designer, and filmmaker, Dr. Matt Soar (March 3rd).

–

October 7th, 2013

Room 311, ATLAS

CU ��«��Ƶ, CO

11:30 am – 12:30 pm

Presenting Eric A. Meyer:

As the first speaker of our annual lunchtime media arts lecture series at the BC, I am happy to confirm Eric A. Meyer, a multimedia artist. Meyer is a co-founder, designer, and web developer at OddBird; a poet & musician with Teacup Gorilla; a writer, director, and producer for Vicious Trap; an open-source advocate; and a member of Denver Poets’ Theatre. Formerly Artistic Director of New World Arts, and Technical Director for The LIDA Project, his work has also appeared (or is imminent) in Exit Strata PRINT!, SpringGun Journal, the PackingHouse Center for the Arts, EOAGH Journal, and scattered across the internet.

His talk:

No One Wants Your Media Arts

Artist, audience, and academy have vastly different priorities. Unfortunately, the audience never shows up for a Media Arts conference or Lunchtime Series. Who’s looking out for the audience? What can we learn about audience from game designers, web developers, user interface experts, and the technologies they use? How might new media & experimental practice actually help us expand our reach, with art that is more exciting for everyone involved? Why are we even here?

–

You can keep up with all the events on our blog, at brakhagecenter.com or follow us on Twitter @BrakhageCenter, or me, the organizer @mel_hogan. Tweet me if you plan to attend!

Please forward this to all others interested, and circulate freely to other lists and throughout your networks and communities.

Email me if you have questions.

Bring your laptops, or just come and listen and discuss!

Looking forward to seeing you in October,

Mél Hogan

Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Curation

Armory 1B24, JMC, CU ��«��Ƶ

@mel_hogan @BrakhageCenter @MediaArchaeology

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Lunchtime-Series

Fall 2015 Luncheon Speaker Series Presents Mark Amerika

Painted Light: Form, Affect and Aesthetics in the Art of the Moving Image

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Painted Light: Form, Affect and Aesthetics in the Art of the Moving Image

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Fall 2015 Luncheon Speaker Series Presents David Gatten

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Spring 2015 Luncheon Series Presents Robert Schaller

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Michelle Ellsworth and Alicia Gibb

Michelle Ellsworth-Monday, October 20th, 2014

Alicia Gibb-Tuesday, November 4th, 2014

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Intermedia Art, Lost Leaders, and Korsakow: An Interview with Matt Soar

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From Apple BASIC to Hypercard: Translating bpNichol in the Media Archaelogy Lab

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BC Luncheon Series Welcomes Matt Soar March 3rd, 2014

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BC Luncheon Series: Andrea Zeffiro Nov. 4th

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Mark your calendar!

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Painted Light: Form, Affect and Aesthetics in the Art of the Moving Image