Freund Hein | Elisabeth 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.

Elisabeth Smolarz was born im Poland, her family emigrated to Germany in 1979. In 2003, after receiving her MFA from the State Academy of Fine Art in Stuttgart, where she studied with Prof. Michou, Prof. Eigenheer and Burkhard Blümlein, she moved to New York. Here she got more and more involved in the idea of how consciousness and perception is formed by one’s surrounding and its specific cultural, political, social and economical conditions. Since then her work has been shown in the USA, Germany, Iceland, China, Spain, and Denmark - in venues such as Galerie Reihe 22, Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn Arts Council, Artists Space, Photography Triennial Esslingen, Baden Wuerttembergischer Kunstverein, Scope, Flux Factory, Reykjavik Photography Museum, Espai d'art contemporani de Castelló and the Sculpture Center among others.

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.

Fanny Allié was born in 1981 in the South of France (Montpellier). She obtained a Master’s degree in Visual Arts in 2005 from the National Superior School of Photography in Arles, France where she studied photography and video. She was a selected artist for the program, Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) at the Bronx Museum of the Arts during 2006-07. Fanny has exhibited in Belgium, Germany, Spain and in the US. She has also participated in art residencies in Berlin (2005) and Brussels (2008). She is currently enrolled in the BCAT/BRIC Rotunda Gallery Video Residency in Brooklyn.

 

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.

Manuel Saiz is a London based visual artist. Since the middle eighties he has been showing sculptures, photographic prints and videos in art galleries and museums worldwide. Since 1995 he works mainly in video and video installations. His productions have been shown in many art film and video festivals, Manuel Saiz is represented by Galeria Moriarty (Madrid) and Montevideo (Amsterdam).

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.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com) where you can also view some of his and Morales’ individual works.

In previous films such as ‘Blood Fantasy’ and ‘Body Magic’, the pair’s use of existing footage – commercials, tv shows, music videos – underpins the fundamentals of their work. As immediate as its sources, the work firstly appeals for its pop culture references engrained in an MTV generation’s subconscious, and then for its methods of display and exhibit, for example on video streaming sites like YouTube, where a number of their works can also be viewed. These resources act as a cultural hub for a new generation of artists who have found a home on the internet and continue to forage existing materials, with Duchampean vigour, to mix with new and old technologies.

 

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.

Torsten Zenas Burns and Darrin Martin began their collaborations in the video and sculpture programs at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University, where they both received their BFAs, 1990 and 1992 respectively. Burns was born in 1968 and received his MFA in video and performance from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993. Martin was born in 1969 and received an MFA in media and sculpture from The University of California, San Diego in 2000. Together, they have based their single channel videotapes, curations and current performance works on their research into diverse Séance-fictions including reimagined educational practices, cryptozoological musical productions, and transhuman sexuality recontructions. They have jointly participated in residency’s at Eyebeam,and The Experimental Television Center in New York State. In 2003, Electronic Arts Intermix commissioned their net art project, “Lesson Stalls:Learning Net” which can be found at www.eai.org/lessons. Selected videotapes are distributed by VTAPE, Canada; Recontres Internationale, France; and Video Data Bank, USA. Videotapes have screened at venues including The Museum of Art and Design (NY), Monkeytown (NY), The Chicago Underground Film&video Festival, Pacific Film Archive (CA), Aurora Picture Show (TX) ,Madrid Museum of Contemporary Art (Spain), Recontres Internationale, (Paris/Berlin), Oberhausen Short Film and Video Festival (Germany), Art Space Bandee (South Korea).They most recently curated "Apportmanteau" for The Stuttgarter Film winter festival for expanded media. Burns is a visiting assistant professor at Massachusetts College of Art & Design. Martin is an assistant professor at UC Davis, CA.
 
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.

Julie Casper Roth is a video artists and filmmaker whose work has been presented at venues including the MadCat International Women's Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and the Chicago Reeling Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival. Her work has also been shown at SCOPE New York, SCOPE Basel, and Artists' Television Access in San Francisco. Most recently she was the 2nd place winner in the experimental category of the Athens In'tl Film and Video Festival and is a 2008 recipient of the New York Foundation for the Art's Individual Artist's Fellowship in Video.

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”). 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.

Fanny Allié was born in 1981 in the South of France (Montpellier). She obtained a Master’s degree in Visual Arts in 2005 from the National Superior School of Photography in Arles, France where she studied photography and video. She was a selected artist for the program, Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) at the Bronx Museum of the Arts during 2006-07. Fanny has exhibited in Belgium, Germany, Spain and in the US. She has also participated in art residencies in Berlin (2005) and Brussels (2008). She is currently enrolled in the BCAT/BRIC Rotunda Gallery Video Residency in Brooklyn.

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.