1,000 PLACES TO DEFINE "GREAT"

1,000 PLACES TO DEFINE "GREAT"
2009 BOSTON GLOBE ARTICLE BY TOM HAINES
ARTICLE MENTIONINGPARSONS HALL PROJECT SPACE
HOLYOKE,MASSACHUSETTS
VIDEO LINK

THE EUROPEAN MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL

THE EUROPEAN MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL
OSNABRUCK,GERMANY - APRIL 22nd-26th 2009

Saturday April 25th
A Stroke of Genius (short video & film program)
Magical science and the myth of technology encounter one another here openly: Darwin sends his regards!

Le nouveau omiza, … / Ute Hörner / D / 5:00
What If? / WP / Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin / USA / 11:00
Binnenverblijven / Arianne Olthaar / NL / 4:00
Für Meiko / F.K. Flumen / D / 4:00
Prometheus/Odysseus / C. Onitsch / D / 6:00
Secret machine / WP / Reynold Reynolds / 10:00
Syscapes # Interlude / E. Schockmel / UK / 22:00

"MIGRATING FORMS" MEDIA ART FESTIVAL / NYC

MIGRATING FORMS
Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Ave. at Second St., NYC
April 15–19, 2009

CONJURER VISIT (SHORT VIDEO/FILM PROGRAM)
APRIL 18TH - SATURDAY - 8:30PM

STEVE CLAYDON
The Ancient Set
EMR (DYLAN MIRA AND MATH BASS)
Somethings Gonna Soon
STEPHANIE BARBER
The Visit And The Play
JD WALSH
Untitled RPG
SHANA MOULTON
Sand Saga
SABINE GRUFFAT
Black Oval White
TORSTEN ZENAS BURNS & DARRIN MARTIN
WHAT-IF?
JACOB CIOCCI & SHANA MOULTON
Untitled Super-8 Collaborations
GREY GERSTEN
Transmissions

3 VILM SCREENINGS & EDU PRESENTATIONS

DARRIN MARTIN & TORSTEN ZENAS BURNS
COLLABORATIVE VILM EDU TOUR

March 30 - Institute for Electronic Arts @ Alfred University, Alfred, NY
March 31 - The Colloquium, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
April 1 - Mass Art Film Society, Boston, MA
RECALL / VOLCANICA / THE ABOMINABLE FREEDOM / WHAT-IF?

FINAL FRIDAYS #3 AT PAPER CITY STUDIOS ("KOREANAUTICA" VIDEO -WORK IN PROGRESS)

Final Fridays #3 at Paper City Studios
Time: March 27, 2009 from 7:30pm to 11pm
Location: Paper City Studios, Floor 3
Street: 80 Race Street
City/Town: Holyoke
Website or Map: http://www.gonzocomixandtours.com
Contact Info: 413-230-7739
Event Type: Performance / Video
Organized By: Rebecca Migdal

Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’s classic “Sonata In Primeval Sounds,” also called “Ursonata,” is performed by Andy Laties as part of GonzoQuest’s Final Fridays Open Mike Night, on Friday, March 27th at 8pm, Paper City Studios, 80 Race Street, in Holyoke. The open mike, interspersed with “Ursonata” movements, features performance poets, artists with slideshows, and musicians: sign up at 7:30pm.

Published in 1932, Kurt Schwitters’s “Sonata In Primeval Sounds” is the granddaddy of sound-art poems: a 45-minute nonsense opus that develops 26 abstract themes in classical sonata format. Andy Laties’s rousing participatory interpretations were honored in Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art’s major “Chicago Artists 1945-1995″ retrospective. He is joined by performance artist Rebecca Migdal and drummer Eric Blitz. (N.B. See my previous blogpost for videos of the January show. This March show will be even fancier!)

As if that weren’t fabulous enough, this Friday Torsten Zenas Burns will screen a work-in-progress video project that he is creating in collaboration with students in Korea. Torsten writes:

“Scenes in KOREANAUTICA explore re-imagined space training workshops, gestural relationships, sculptural set-ups, and micro / macro vehicle delivery systems. Further scenes investigate diverse medical treatments, rituals, superstitions, sexuality, hygiene, manifestations, humor and the creative arts aboard a fictional international Korean space station. The last collection of footage is appropriated from NASA-TV, capturing months of the 2008 training and the launching of the 1st female Korean astronaut.”

COMING TO A THEATER NO WHERE NEAR YOU SOON!

(VISIONARY DRAWING BUILDING)

(VISIONARY DRAWING BUILDING)
2009 ONLINE ARCHIVE AND BOOK PROJECT
CURATED BY MATT BUA & MAXIMILIAN GOLDFARB



2009 NANOBAUTICA -TORSTEN ZENAS BURNS / HOLYOKERESEARCH
2009 UNIVERSAL-RESCUE CLUSTER & GRAVICLE - HALFLIFERS
2009 CRAFTSPACE (DOUBLER) - HALFLIFERS

HALFLIFERS GROUP SHOW IN MARCH 2009

The Stan Brakhage Symposium

The Fifth Annual Brakhage Symposium
March 14 and 15, 2009
10:00 a.m. — 9:00 p.m.
University of Colorado at Boulder
ATLAS building

We will be screening:
DAY ONE - SATURDAY 3PM
AFTERLIFERS: WALKING & TALKING - 22:00/2007
ACTIONS IN ACTION - 10:30 / 1999

Steve Seid, curator of the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, California brings "A Cavalcade of Eccentricity" on Saturday, March 14th:

"If one desired to subvert cultural homogeny, eccentric behavior might be a practice worth pursuing. An exuberance of tics, gestures exaggerated, a histrionic of historic proportion, these characteristics can account for a performative presence that resists uniformity while shedding expectation. The works in this cavalcade of the unconventional represent a brand of artist-bound performance that promotes the peculiar, thrives on half-digested narrative, and places the artist, or, at least, a proxy, in a delirious universe of manic materiality. The settings for these performances brim with objects and surfaces that acquire uncanny meaning as the artists move about in frantic exhortation. These are not performances linked to the seventies when artists demanded great attentiveness to the minutiae of the everyday. Rather, here, the artist's presence is just the starting point for an artful journey of sly incantation, physical verve, and pop criticality. This pageant of the peculiar patches together ten antic artists who unravel the mysteries around us as they themselves unravel." — Steve Seid

AGATHA HARKNESS (RESEARCH PORTRAIT)

SPECIAL THANKS TO: DARRIN MARTIN

COLLABORATION WITH VIROCODE
SPECIAL THANKS TO: ANDREA MANCUSO

CRYSTALINE PEACE

SPECIAL THANKS TO: DARRIN MARTIN

PARSONS HALL PROJECT SPACE VEHICLES

SMILEY-FACIAL MOBILERS

HAPPY HOLISECOND

SALEM RE-REMEMBERED

ANALOG IMPORTATIONS

TWO SISTERS

FURRY DIVINATION

MASS ART FILM SOCIETY (VIDEO SCREENING)

MASS COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN–BOSTON,MA - OCTOBER 29TH 2008
TITLE: “TORSTEN ZENAS BURNS: COLLABOTRONICA”

Spectral space station training, etheric man-infestations,
re-imagined educational workshops, obsessive compulsive
androids, gestural researchers, and semi-dead hosts are
entwined at the spirited spine in this selection of works by
video makers who work together and apart.
These Collaborative works between Torsten Zenas Burns,
the Halflifers, Darrin Martin, The Foundry, Virocode and
Michael O’Malley chart a processed terrain of variable
speculative fictions.

WORKS TO BE SCREENED INCLUDE:
Ship to Ship (3:00 - variable date)
Torsten Zenas Burns & Mike O’Malley
Extending Trainer: Pressure suits & Broom-crafts (21:00 – 2007)
Torsten Zenas Burns
Afterlifers: Walking & Talking (Extendead version)
(23:00 – 2007) HALFLIFERS(Torsten Zenas Burns & Anthony Discenza)
I am today’s lesson plan – (11:00- variable date)
Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin

PARSONS HALL PROJECT SPACE (2008 EVENT)

VIDEO_DUMBO FESTIVAL 2008

Freund Hein | Elizabeth Smolarz | 2008 | 4:00 min.
Freund Hein is an anachronistic German vernacular expression, ‘Hein’ being the impersonation of Death as an unwelcome ‘friend’ knocking on once door. I my latest video installation I conceptualized a performance based film project as an exploration of the question of death. Since the human death is typically hidden from everyday life what is the source of our death-image? I invited people of different ages and backgrounds to my studio and asked them ‘to die’ in front of the camera. The participants were free to improvise in whatever way they wanted to pretend the act of dying. Some choose to be ‘shot’, some were ‘stabbed’, some ‘chocked', others said ‘good bye’, laid down and ‘died’. The sequences of these performances were mostly short, maximum a few minutes, showing that most people imagine the act of dying as an abrupt event, a crass unexpected rupture in the experience of an everyday time continuum.

Bamboos | Fanny Allié | 2008 | 00:45 sec.
My artwork revolves around the notion of Identity or loss of Identity and how we present ourselves to the world. The people I film are assigned to play a role or to follow a specific instruction in order to take a distance with their own self (their everyday “self”). In my last project called “The disappearance of the cleaning lady” (2008 - 2.32 min), I asked four cleaning ladies who have been working together for many years, to create a story about the possible and sudden disappearance of one of them. They therefore fill their role with their own feelings.

Parallel Paradises (Japan) | Manuel Saiz | 2007 | 4:00 min.
Rin and Mai are two dancers of parapara, a disco dance trend popular in Japan. Their perfectly synchronized movements have a very precise pace and protocol, like they were speaking an unknown language. They perform in a forest were their figure and attitude results heterogeneous to the organic movement the nature around them, both words exist complete in the same space but do not touch each other.

Tears for the Future | Javier Morales/John Michael Boling
2008 | 4:45 min.
Javier Morales/John Michael Boling have solo as well as collaborative practices. They are based in Athens, Georgia. Since 2005 they have worked together on videos, as well as a number of web-based projects, most notably the video web blog Channel 53. A selection of the duo’s earlier works are hosted on John Michael Boling’s redoubtable 53 o’s website
(in google search ‘53 o’s’ – quicker than typing www.goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
ooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com) where you can also view some of his and Morales’ individual works.

What If…? | Torsten Zenas Burns/Darrin Martin | 2008 | 11:47 min.
WHAT-IF? is an experimental video & installation unfolding a role-playing workshop where participants reenact a fictional polyamorous romance. The performance, played by a rotating international cast of artists, leads to a group wedding and honeymoon between characters based upon two obscure Marvel superheroes and two internationally renowned art personalities. The happy foursome are Stelarc, an artist whose cybernetic mission in life is to render the body obsolete; Orlan, an artist whose actual redefinition of her own body via plastic surgery confronts representations of woman throughout art history; the Scarlet Witch, a mutant superhero who has unlimited powers over probability, and the Vision, a “synthezoid” whose mechanically fabricated body contains a human soul. WHAT-IF?…unfolds the entangled story that brought this romantic foursome together spanning the gulf between genders and representations; the body and technology.

A Matter of Fiction | Julie Casper Roth | 2008 | 3:35 minutes
A Matter of Fiction is a study of truth in traditional documentary film. It takes a recognizable model of documentary film - the historical documentary - and alters it to demonstrate the vulnerability of supposedly reputable information. The result places historical scholars in a web of fictional banter about their own lives and indiscretions. Commentary that was utilized in an authoritative context becomes banal.This humorous piece was born out of the artist's own work in documentary filmmaking and her acknowledgement of the vulnerability of truth.

From above | Fanny Allié | 2008 | 1:30 min.
My artwork revolves around the notion of Identity or loss of Identity and how we present ourselves to the world. The people I film are assigned to play a role or to follow a specific instruction in order to take a distance with their own self (their everyday “self”).

Sittin' on a Million | Penny Lane/Annmarie Lanesey | 2008 | 26 min.
Mame Faye did not exist... At least that's what the history books would have you believe. Prostitutes and madams, no matter how popular and successful, are not part of legitimate history. But the citizens of Troy, New York insist that Mame Faye did exist. Everyone past the age of retirement has a story - funny, sordid, unbelievable - about Troy's most famous madam. Filmmakers Penny Lane and Annmarie Lanesey present these stories in all their contradictory glory, alongside vintage erotica, reenactments, and street performances. Mame Faye ran a world famous house of prostitution in Troy, New York for almost forty years (c. 1906 to 1941). Mame's story offers a rare view into sex, money, politics, and women's place in society in the early 20th century. Sittin' on a Million asks us to consider the role of memory and imagination in creating history, and reminds us about all those ordinary, extraordinary people erased from the official record.