ecopolis

The world’s first feature-length mobile phone art film.
A story about a future world where the dream of living in utopia can only be sustained by a nomadic tribe of artists and intellectuals, Mark Amerika’s Immobilité mashes up the language of “foreign films” with landscape painting and literary metafiction. The work was composed using an unscripted, improvisational method of acting and the mobile phone images are intentionally shot in an amateurish or DIY [do-it-yourself] style similar to the evolving forms of video distributed in social media environments such as YouTube. By interfacing this low-tech version of video making with more sophisticated forms of European art-house movies, Amerika both asks and answers the question “What is the future of cinema?”

Exhibitions and Screenings
Tate Modern, Intermedia Fall 2008 Program (interview at the Tate Britain)
Chelsea Art Museum, April 8 – May 9, 2009

Cast and Credits
Created by Mark Amerika
Original soundtrack by Chad Mossholder
Featuring Camille Lacadee and Magda Tyzlik-Carver

EMAF ‘09
22-26 april 2009
Osnabrueck, Germany

Productions by internationally renowned media artists and the innovative works of new masters from the academies will be presented at the 22nd European Media Art Festival. The EMAF is one of the most influential forums of international Media Art. As a meeting point for artists, curators, distributors, gallery owners and an audience of specialists, the festival has a great impact on the topic and aesthetics of Media Art. Each year the festival offers its visitors a current overview of new experimental films, performances, lectures, an exhibition and the Media Campus. Around 250 current contributions will be selected this year for the festival from a total of 2400 submitted works, offering a comprehensive insight into the latest tendencies in Media Art.

An international jury will present the “EMAF Award” for a trend-setting work in Media Art and the “Dialogpreis” of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the promotion of intercultural exchange. Furthermore, the jury of the German Federal Association of Film Journalists will award the prize for the best German experimental film of the year.

Watchmen is a twelve-issue comic book limited series created by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins. The series was published by DC Comics in single issues during 1986 and 1987, and has been subsequently reprinted in collected form. Watchmen originated from a story proposal Moore submitted to DC featuring superhero characters that the company had acquired from Charlton Comics. As Moore’s proposed story would have left many of the characters unusable for future stories, managing editor Dick Giordano convinced the writer to create original characters instead.

Moore used the story as a means to reflect contemporary anxieties and to deconstruct the superhero concept. Watchmen takes place in an alternate history United States where the country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, freelance costumed vigilantes have been outlawed and most costumed superheroes are in retirement or working for the government. The story focuses on the personal development and struggles of the protagonists as an investigation into the murder of a government sponsored superhero pulls them out of retirement and eventually leads them to confront a plot by one of their own to stave off nuclear war by killing millions of innocent people.

The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) is a mobile festival integrating video art with the urban and social environment. The festival removes the technologically complex medium of video out of the institutional situation re-positioning it as open and reflexive in the public domain. The artworks have site-specific thematic relations to the space where they are shown, engaging and reflecting upon the unique architectural, historical, and interpersonal context of each area the festival travels to.

One of the aims of the festival is to create a continuous dialogue from the videos into the community, focusing on lapses in the current framework such as an absence of communication or invisible components of the area. Open to local and international artists, the festival widens the panorama of the discourse to include the perspective of communities elsewhere that have parallel circumstances.

A self-contained, transportable GPU (Guerrilla Projector Unit) facilitates the incursions into the public realm. Transforming public space into a fertile ground for experimentation toward new possibilities in the relationship between art and society.

The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) will be held 19-20 February in three unique areas of the Dublin: Talbot Street, Parnell Street and Rathmines. Using a converted rickshaw, the festival navigates the city, stopping to project films directly on building facades, monuments and temporary structures, illuminating the urban landscape.

The festival aims to counter the ever-present billboards and advertising screens that have transformed the urban setting into a homogeneous landscape from New York to Shanghai. Over 50 international artists will be participating with films that engage the distinct social and architectural character of each site. The International Guerrilla Video Festival, previously held in Florence and Milan, suggests new possibilities in the relationship between art and the social context.

Xing presenta Netmage 09
international live-media festival – 9a edizione
22>24 gennaio 2009
Bologna – Palazzo Re Enzo

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PROGRAMMA
Giovedi 22 Gennaio
h 20.00 Mesmerizing Show (Performing Arts)
Bock & Vincenzi (UK) The Infinite Pleasures of the Great Unknown
h 21.00 + h 23.00 Megascope
Virgilio Villoresi/Dominique Vaccaro/Angstarbeiter (I) Eclissi
h 22.30 Mangrovia
Camilla Candida Donzella (I)
Pete Swanson/John Wiese/Liz Harris (USA)
Emeralds (USA)
Keiji Haino (JP)

Venerdi 23 Gennaio
h 20.00 Mesmerizing Show (Performing Arts)
Bock & Vincenzi (UK) The Infinite Pleasures of the Great Unknown
h 21.00 + h 23.00 Megascope
Virgilio Villoresi/Dominique Vaccaro/Angstarbeiter (I) Eclissi
h 22.30 pm Live Media Floor
Pierre Bastien (F) Kinetic Syncopators
The Skaters (USA) play Le Vampire de la Cinémathèque by Roland Lethem (B)
Growing (USA)
ATAK NIGHT: Keiichiro Shibuya (JP), Evala (JP)
h 24.00 Mangrovia – Village Oblivia
Invernomuto (I) with Sunburned Hand of the Man (USA)
Sabato 24 Gennaio
h 21.00 Mesmerizing Show (Performing Arts)
Bock & Vincenzi (UK) The Infinite Pleasures of the Great Unknown
h 21.00 + h 23.00 Megascope
Virgilio Villoresi/Dominique Vaccaro/Angstarbeiter (I) Eclissi
h 22.00 Live Media Floor
Németh (A) plays I.E., Domino by Lotte Schreiber (A)
Andrea Dojmi/Flushing Device (I) The Distance to the Sun
Mudboy (USA)
Black Dice (USA)
h 24.00 Mangrovia
Camilla Candida Donzella (I)
Pascal Battus/Kamel Maad (F) Eyear
Mattin/” ” [sic] Goldie (Basque Country/UK) Deflag Haemorrhage/Haien Kontra
Thomas Ankersmit/Valerio Tricoli (NL/I)
AAVV jam session (Mangrovia/Live Media Floor all guests plug-in)

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Netmage 09
sede: Palazzo Re Enzo – Piazza Nettuno Bologna
www.netmage.it
www.xing.it

For the BFI visual artist Pierre Bismuth and film director Michel Gondry have created a new version of The All-Seeing Eye, an installation which explores the themes at the core of the feature movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Gondry and based on an original idea by Bismuth; it won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, making Bismuth the only contemporary artist to have ever received an Oscar.

The All-seeing Eye shows subtraction as the metaphor for a world without communication and relationships: a room is stripped bare, the non immediately apparent visual erasure taking place creates a moment of displacement in the spectator comparable to the feeling experienced when a memory is lost, despite its strength and against one‘s will, simply by means of time passing.

The subtractive process of scenery changes, seemingly high-tech, was instead manipulated off-screen in real time while filming, an example of Bismuth and Gondry’s shared fondness for special effects created by low-tech or non-digital means.

Pierre Bismuth and Michel Gondry

The All-Seeing Eye

(The Hardcore Techno Version)

Fri 12 Sep – Sun 23 Nov

BFI Southbank Gallery, London SE1

http://www.bfi.org.uk/bismuthgondry

Entrance to the BFI Southbank Gallery is FREE