[-empyre-] -empyre- September, 2015, Video: Behind and Beyond

[Kathy High]

Hi Isak,
Thanks so much for this posting. It is so great to get to know your work!

³The End of History² effectively and viscerally details the Yugoslavian war
in ways that are really compelling. Again the glitch! The glitch and stutter
and halting of it all ­ the interruption.
The split of time - and even the split of frames - in times of war. It makes
me think of  a very different kind of moment. I appreciate how much this
piece moved me.

How else to explore the limits of representation?  Would love to hear your
further thoughts.

Thank you.

Kathy

From:  <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Isak Berbic
<isak.berbic at stonybrook.edu>
Reply-To:  soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Date:  Friday, September 11, 2015 at 6:33 PM
To:  soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject:  Re: [-empyre-] -empyre- September, 2015, Video: Behind and Beyond

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Thank you for the invitation to contribute to empyre this month. I've been
here a few times before ... last time writing from the Middle East, where I
was based for 6 years. These days I live and work in New York ... and
currently I am editing a new video about a 20th century steel mill that is
forced to depart planet earth into outer-space, in search of ore, where the
workers will be able to continue and make pots, pans and automobile rims.
The story is inspired by hilariously absurd anecdotes my grandfather used to
recount about the plant he worked for in the city of Zenica, BiH.

Building on John Conomos' post:
I also work with video as a material of images in time, where my
investigations always seem to return to exploring the limits of
representation, and often in effort to explode mythologies without
sentimentality (I hope).

Tonight, I would like to invite you to view one of my works from 2008: "The
End of History". This piece takes a particular moment in video
history/technology (VHS handheld cameras), and probes the image found at the
periphery of erasure.

Eyewitness recordings of the Yugoslavian war (early 90s) seemed to fade
quickly, as video standards rapidly advanced into digital codec formats.
Even though this war was among the first to be recorded massively by
multitudes of citizens using handheld cameras, the videos seem to be trapped
in their plastic cassette bodies, in people's storage bins, and dusty
bookshelves. 

Vimeo Link:    https://vimeo.com/77293548

Digitized analog tapes, computer-generated imagery
SD DVD video, with sound, color
Runtime: 10 minutes

A conversation develops between two personified subtitles: poet-politicians;
one red, the other white. Their subject, persona and voice are abstracted
and confused as they discuss literature, religion, nationalism and
philosophy. Images recorded by people in Sarajevo under siege, in the early
nineties, are transformed into a visceral, poetic, and dark audiovisual
space. The End of History is a montage of this transcoded appropriated
footage. While some invoke iconic images of Sarajevo under mortar shelling,
others are computer generated and the sound entirely follied.

Regards,
Isak Berbic




On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 1:42 PM, Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu>
wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hello, -Empyreans-,
> 
> 
> Now that the US holidays have passed and the heat of the summer has finally
> settled into Upstate New York, it's time to look to the fall startup of the
> 2015-16 season of -empyre­.  We look forward to a a wide-ranging discussion
> throughout the remainder of September of "Video and Beyond."  Information
> about the topic and this week's guests is below:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> September, 2015 Video: Behind and Beyond
>  
> Moderated by Tim Murray (US) and Renate Ferro(US) with invited discussants
>  
> Week 1 September 8-13: Andrew Deutsch (US) Kathy High (US), Sherry Hocking
> Miller (US), Renate Ferro (US), Tim Murray (US) Isak Berbic (US),  John
> Conomos (AU), Carolyn Tennant (US)
>  
> Week 2 September  14-20: Megan Roberts (US), Raymond Ghirardo (US), Lynne
> Sacks (US), Alan Sondheim (US)
>  
> Week 3 September  21-26 Maureen Turim (US), Benton C Bainbridge ( US)
> Week 4 September  27-30  Sarah Watson (US), Gabriel Menotti (BR), Anca Rujoiu
> (SG)
> In celebration of the legacy of the Experimental Television Center, -empyre-
> dedicates the month of September to discussion of ³Video: Behind and Beyond.²
> For over forty years, the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York,
> was one of North America¹s preeminent residencies and funding sources for
> video art, fostering a community for creative and innovation in technology.
> Through its residency program and practical research program artists worldwide
> passed through its doors.  The Experimental Television Center was founded by
> Ralph Hocking, in 1971, who collaborated with Nam June Paik and others in the
> creation of innovative tools used by ETC artists for experimental creation in
> and around video.  Throughout the years both Ralph Hocking and Sherry Miller
> Hocking have provided support and services to the media and technology
> community by encouraging electronic media technologies and honoring
> independently creating moving-image history.  They have single handedly
> initiated projects that encouraged partnerships for research, education, and
> preservation.  
> During the month of September, we encourage discussion of the early days of
> video art and its movement beyond the analogue into pairings with digital
> technologies.  ETC fostered and encouraged these pairings from the very
> beginning.  In addition to hearing from international guests with specialized
> artistic and critical interests in video art, we will be joined by many of the
> artists and technicians who have been affiliated with ETC.
>  
> The month¹s discussion coincides with a major exhibition, opening September
> 24, at the Hunter College Art Gallery in New York City with the collaboration
> of the Rose Goldsen Archive for New Media Art, which holds the ETC archive.
>  
>  the center over these past several years to celebrate the history and
> heritage of ETC during Week 1, to examine the affect of the center¹s influence
> beyond the scope of a regional video center to an influential player in the
> digital and internet age nationally and globally during Week 2 and 3, and
> finally during Week 4 to discuss the Center¹s preservation and archival drive
> for the future.  
>  
> TO MAKE A POST TO THE SUBSCRIPTION LIST USE:
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>  
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> TO:
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>  
> Biographies:
> 
> Moderators:
> 
> Renate Ferro (US) Renate Ferro¹s creative work resides in the area of emerging
> technology, new media and culture. By aligning artistic, creative practice
> with critical approaches to technology her work broadly spans installation,
> interactive net-based projects, digital time-based media, drawing, text, and
> performance. Her artistic work has been featured at The Freud Museum (London),
> The Dorksy Gallery (NY), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), The
> Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), and The Free University Berlin (Germany).
> Her writing has been published in such journals as Diacritics, Theatre
> Journal, and Epoch.. She also is the founder of the Tinker Factory
> <http://www.tinkerfactory.net/>  Lab. Ferro is a Visiting Associate Professor
> of Art at Cornell University.  She has been on the moderating team for -empyre
> soft-skinned space since 2007 and is currently the managing moderator.
>  
> Tim Murray (US) Tim Murray is Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media
> Art, Director of the Society for the Humanities and Professor of Comparative
> Literature and English at Cornell University.  A Moderator of -empyre-, he
> sits on the Executive Committee of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and
> Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC). Author of Digital Baroque: New
> Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota 2008) and Zonas de Contacto: el arte
> en CD-ROM (Centro de la imagen, 1999), he is completing two books on Virtual
> Archives and Media Art in Asia, and editing volumes on Jean-Luc Nancy and Xu
> Bing.
> 
>  
> 
> Weekly Guests: 
> 
> Week 1
> Isak Berbic (BA) is an artist primarily working with photography, moving image
> and performance. His recent artworks reimagine popular narratives, crossing
> them with social and personal histories, often appropriating anecdotes and
> myths, politics and contemporary issues, environmental and economic ecologies,
> art history, cooking, migration, humor, tragedy, the global circulation of
> images and the limits of representation. Reflecting on contested histories, he
> uses fiction and documents, found and primary material, exploring the image
> and the literary in the construction of his pieces. His work takes on
> different forms of presentation, including image-text-object installations,
> photographic prints, videos, actions, texts and publications.
>  
> John Conomos (AU) is an artist, critic and theorist who exhibits extensively
> both locally and internationally.  He is an Associate Professor at Sydney
> College of the Arts, the University of Sydney.  His art practice cuts across a
> variety of art forms-video, new media, installation, photo-performance, and
> radio-phonic art‹and deals with autobiography, identity, language, memory,
> post-colonialism and the Œin-between¹ links between cinema, literature,
> critical theory and the visual arts. Conomos is a prolific writer and artist.
> He is currently working on three new video projects.
>  
> Kathy High (US) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator working with
> arts and biology. In the early 1980's she studied for her masters in film
> and video at University of Buffalo with media pioneers Hollis Frampton, Steina
> Vasulka
> and Tony Conrad. She has received awards including Guggenheim Memorial
> Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and NEA. Her art works have been shown at
> Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Science Gallery, (Dublin),
> NGBK,
> (Berlin), Fesitval Transitio_MX (Mexico), MASS MoCA (North Adams), Videotage
> Art Space (Hong
> Kong). High is Professor of Video and New Media in the Department of Arts at
> Rensselaer. She was co-editor of The Emergence of Video Processing Tools:
> Television Becoming Unglued with Sherry Miller Hocking, Assistant Director of
> the Experimental Television Center, and Mona Jimenez, Associate Professor of
> the Moving Image and Preservation Program, In Cinema Studies at NYU, a
> twovolume anthology about the history of video imaging tools, Intellect Books
> (UK)/Chicago University Press (IL), 2014.
>  
> Sherry Miller Hocking (US) has worked since 1972 with the Experimental
> Television Center, which until 2011 served the media arts community by
> providing an international residency program, educational opportunities and
> sponsorship for independent media and film artists and projects. For over 40
> years she helped administer the artist in residence program, inviting over
> 1500 artists to create new works. She also worked to support individual
> artists¹ projects; ETC helped raise almost 2 million dollars in direct funding
> to media artists. For 22 years Hocking directed the Electronic Arts Grants
> Program, providing funding to individuals and arts organizations. In 1994 she
> designed and continues to direct the Video History Project, an online
> informational research database for media scholars worldwide. She has helped
> organize a number of preservation conferences, notably the Video History
> Conference at Syracuse University.  With Kathy High and Mona Jimenez, she is
> co-editor of The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming
> Unglued(Intellect, 2014). The archives of ETC are in the collection of the
> Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University.
> http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org
> 
> 
> Carolyn Tennant (US) has been a champion in Upstate New York of collaborative
> efforts to digitize and preserve video.   The Director of Archives and
> Migrating Media at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, in Buffalo, New York,
> Carolyn has been a primary consultant in efforts to archive the collections of
> the Experimental Television Center, Hallwalls, and other New York experimental
> venues.  
> 
> Timothy Murray
> Professor of Comparative Literature and English
> Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
> http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
> Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
> http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
> A D White House
> Cornell University,
> Ithaca, New York 14853
_______________________________________________ empyre forum
empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

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