This Sunday: UTOPIA 1.0 screens at Happy Lucky No. 1 in Conjunction with Temporary Agency's Wild Seeds Exhibition

The Temporary Agency presents

WILD SEEDS Exhibition with Book share & screenings by Annie Berman, Rebecca Goyette, Kevin Kelly, Clara Darrason and Andrew Erdos

Sunday, March 27th,  4-7pm
@ Happy Lucky No. 1, 734 Nostrand Ave, Brooklyn, NY

What better way to celebrate this Sunday than in Second Life with a Salem ghost bitch at NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory in a landfill. Watch all of this in a screening of film and video and celebrate the final event in our series in conjunction with the current exhibition WILD SEEDS.

Screening Menu:

Utopia 1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D!, 2015, USA, Directed by Annie Berman, 20 min.

As the sun begins to set on the once-bustling online pseudo- reality Second Life, filmmaker Annie Berman sends her avatar in to investigate the decline of this utopian world.

Ghost Bitch: Arise from the Gallows, 2015, USA, Directed by Rebecca Goyette, 38 min.

Rebecca Goyette’s alter ego Ghost Bitch, is a freelancing apparition of her direct ancestor, Rebecca Nurse, hanged as a Salem witch. Ghost Bitch performs as a history-reenacting aerialist by day and a dominatrix by night, alchemizing puritanical pain and conjuring subconscious pleasure for tourists of historic Salem, Massachusetts. 

Proximity + Priority, 2015, Kevin Kelly, 13:31 min.

An attempt to sign up for New York City's Department of Sanitation's 'Adopt-A-Basket' program leads the artist to perform an ontological action on the trash basket itself. Scenes from old and repurposed landfill landscapes are intercut, while voiceovers from a frustrated community leader and poetic narrator are heard.

Song of The Sun, Erdos & Darrason, USA, 2014-2016, 8 min.

For their first collaboration, Andrew Erdos and Clara Darrason present Song of the Sun a video and sound installation realized the Navajo Nation. Song of the Sunconsists of a video depicting the Sun’s surface activity - the swaying lava and gasses dancing on the star, its eruption, coronal mass ejections and solar flares. 

Temporary Agency is a nomadic collective initiated and operated by artists Natalee Cayton, Kiran Chandra, Dominika Ksel and Amanda Turner Pohan. Temporary Agency brings exhibitions, screenings, lectures, performances and ideas outside of general institutional ideologies and capitalist frameworks to a public platform, collaborating with artists and community members to nurture a sustainable space of education, information and creativity.




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NYC PREMIERE OF UTOPIA 1.0: POST-NEO-FUTURIST-CAPITALISM in 3D! at The Museum of Modern Art's Doc Fortnight, Feb 20th and 21st →

I am thrilled to announce that Utopia1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D! will have its NYC Premiere at The Museum of Modern Art's Doc Fortnight

 Saturday, February 20th at 2:30PM and Sunday, February 21st at 5:30PM. 

The film will accompany Time Passes by Ane Hjort Guttu.

Tickets will be released two weeks in advance starting at 9:30 a.m. at the main lobby information desk and online. There is an advance charge of $1 for Museum members and $2 for the general public if tickets are purchased one day or more in advance. There is no advance reservation fee for tickets purchased on the day of the screening. http://www.moma.org/calendar/events/1806

Doc Fortnight 2016

February 19-29, 2016

The Museum of Modern Art (The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters)

Doc Fortnight, MoMA’s annual international festival of nonfiction film, celebrates its 15th year with 10 days of important new discoveries in documentary cinema. Featuring the New York premieres of recent films by first-time and established artists—many of whom will introduce their work in person—the festival offers fresh ways of seeing and understanding the world. Combining short and feature-length work, Doc Fortnight highlights the growing ambition and experimentation within the documentary field at a time when documentaries are commanding more popular and critical attention than ever.

This year’s Doc Fortnight underscores the founding principle of the festival: that cross-fertilization among experimental, fiction, and nonfiction films enriches our understanding of the increasingly complex world in which we live.

 

ANAMORPHOSIS show at OPEN SOURCE Gallery NYC, Jan 9-30, 2016; Opening Reception: Jan 9, 7PM

/rive: Anamorphosis

Anamorphosis | Convergence Lines | Press Release | Artist Website | Facebook Event

January 9-30, 2016
Opening Reception: January 9, 7-9pm

/rive collective presents Anamorphosis, an installation for Open Source Gallery.

Anamorphosis is a spatial and relational exploration of what makes and defines a neighborhood, set in, and inspired by, the area surrounding the Open Source Gallery. The exhibit’s video and photo installations seek to collectively make visible the physical and social lines that demarcate and connect a community. Through site-specific and mobile media projects that encourage residents to reflect upon their neighborhood and share their stories, /rive seeks to highlight the relationships between public space, mobile technology and local or microhistories.

In Horizon Lines, Annie Berman and Samara Smith uncover the edges that mark the neighborhood’s undefined and immutable borders. By visually exploring lines of demarcation, Berman and Smith investigate the areas where neighborhood life meets neighborhood boundaries. In Convergence Lines, Samara Smith and A.E. Souzis outline the area’s social connections by mapping photographs sourced from the neighborhood’s residents. Visitors to the exhibit and residents will be invited to submit photographs via text throughout the month of January. When the images are collected and exhibited, they will create a more complete portrait of the surrounding communities, offering a glimpse into the many individual narratives that exist within the neighborhood.

/rive is a Brooklyn-based artist collective focused on site-specific, locative projects that meet at the intersection of psychogeography, locative media and documentary narrative. Most projects are set in, and explore, urban public spaces. Inspired by social practice, /rive embraces collaborative and participatory methodologies, blurring the boundaries between maker, subject and audience. Members Annie Berman, Samara Smith and A.E. Souzis have exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Queens Museum, Anthology Film Archives, New York Film Festival, Hammer Museum, Art in Odd Places and beyond.

- See more at: http://open-source-gallery.org/rive/#sthash.mU7twx8t.dpuf

STREET VIEWS part of the 'NEW YORK I LOVE YOU, BUT . . .' show at Gallatin Galleries

'NY I LOVE YOU, BUT . . . ' opened last night at NYU's Gallatin Gallery curated by Keith Miller. The exhibit is on view through January 26th. 

New York, I Love You, But…'
November 5, 2015 - January 26, 2016
The Gallatin Galleries
Gallery Hours: Monday to Friday 10-7; Saturday 11-4, Closed Sundays
Opening Reception Thursday November 5, 6-8pm
http://galleries.gallatin.nyu.edu/
For information please contact curator Keith Miller at km96@nyu.edu

The Gallatin Galleries is proud to present
New York, I Love You, But… 
a collection of works in painting, photography, video, architectural proposals, sculpture, sound works, and more. This show looks at the changing nature of our city and our complicated feelings toward it, both historically and right now.

Curator’s Statement
All the arguments against it are right: too crowded, too loud, too spread out, too expensive. But also: too exciting, too energetic, too fast, too much. All superlatives. New York, I Love You, But… is a glimpse at the superlative that is New York; an audience to the internal conversation of the person pressed against the subway door, smelling something unidentifiable on the journey home from some unique and wonderful New York moment. It is a glance at the instances of excess and intimacy, humanity and wonder that define being a New Yorker. “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now,” (Colson Whitehead) because being a New Yorker is as much about the frenetic thrust into the present (and by that we mean the future), as it is about harboring nostalgia for a New York that’s eternally slipping away. CBGBs or Shea Stadium, Ebbets field or the Twin Towers; affordable rent or addicts in Times Square: all gone. What is lost is our city, the city that each of us individually makes through momentary encounters, reflections in the window of a cab, panoramic vistas we didn’t know existed, but became ours because that is where we fell in love, were held up, got away, and all the other endless events that create the place we call home

As part of that bifurcated experience, New York also lays out too plainly its problems. Economic disparity is nowhere so clear as on a walk through the city. A multi-million dollar pied-à-terre, not even inhabited most of the year, minutes away from a cockroach infested five-story walk up. The changes imposed upon neighborhoods blind the existing owners and tenants. A white man claims to have “settled” a part of Brooklyn, and we all know what he means: moved into a Brown space, a POC space, before the caucasian influx, made it safe for the late comer, as if it were an uninhabited desert, forgetting , of course, that he too is an invader. The admixture of race and class, ethnicity and education, location and proximity make the turbulence apparent on the surface, all too quickly. The split is everywhere, and the only ones who seem not to see it are literally above the fray, in buildings with park views that push the clouds a little bit further up

Within that constant but often unstated battle there remain the connections and crossings that fill ones day with a reminder of how strange and magical New York can be. Tourists openly marvel at acapella gospel groups on the subway, but diehard New Yorkers, too, look up with a warm recognition of talent. And on those platforms and trains, glances cross and moments had that push distant strangers into accidental intimacies. It’s not just Tinder and Grindr, OK Cupid and Bumble, but also real human bodies that meet by chance and make us murmur New York, I Love You, But… 


Khalik Allah
Annie Berman
Sophie Blackall
Margaret Chandler
Nathan Fitch
Brian Foo
Joy Garnett
Suzanne Goldenberg
Nina Katchadourian
Paul McDonough
Lawrence Mesich
Ron Milewicz
Amy Park
Maddalena Polletta
Casey Ruble
Ken Schles
Terreform ONE

L'EMERGERE DEL POSSIBILE's Francesco Cazzin Reviews Utopia 1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D!

A thoughtful analysis of Utopia 1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D! this week in L'EMERGERE DEL POSSIBILE.  Thanks also to Dedda DeAngelis for generously submitting the English translation below. 

Utopia 1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D! (USA, 2015, 21') is based on Second Life, a virtual reality videogame from which Berman draws a cinematic reality essentially coextensive not only to the reality of video places but also to the expansive one, defined in time and space, in which we live daily. Berman’s short actually moves further away from other cinema works dealing with the world of videogames, such as for example Phil Solomon’s masterpiece, Rehearsals for retirement (USA, 2007, 11') or Harun Farocki’s latest experimental works, merged in the Parallel I-IV tetralogy (Germany, 2014, 43’). In the end her short materializes into an experience that ultimately dismantles the video ludicity that is, at least formally, its structure, in order to recover a primal, fundamental absence. Moreover, the Utopia in the title is specifically what is missing (Thomas More), besides the composition of an otherness, which reaffirms its present absence while fading away and appearing beyond its presence.  Thus the utopia of the video becomes a cinematic heterotopia; which is what Utopia 1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D! actually is, as a film and not as a videogame. After all, the channeling of the videogame apparatus of Second Life turns out to be the acceleration of relationships which determine the nature of the place as such, as another reality, a second life, specular to an earlier, invisible one, which is nothing else but our everyday life.  On the contrary, Utopia 1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D! is instantly a suspended place, a “placeless place”, whose only move is to be while not being and to find  its placement in its very displacement. “If you can imagine it, you can create it”, but the avatar through which the player lives a second life claims now all its ontological substance, since it is not played any longer, but seen. By sliding her videogame into cinema, Annie Berman not only transvalues the merits of Second Life, she also makes them absolute, which is to say she unties the bonds that define them as a videogame. For this reason if Second life is a utopia Utopia 1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D!  is a heterotopia, since it is not any longer an absence but the very presence of such absence; and cinema is precisely what makes such negativity present. Thus clearly such negativity does not disappear, it stays present and Utopia 1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D!  is such permanence. That said, we must examine the fact that the negativity, the video game is not totally deleted; what is left is the graphics, which means, at a deeper level, that what remains is the absence of time. The absence of time, the very nature of Second Life, is devastating from the cinematic viewpoint, for the simple and not banal reason that the director, as Gilles Deleuze teaches after Tarkovskij, is the one who works with blocks of time, the one who carves them.  The 3D in the title refers to nothing but this: there is only space, the fourth dimension is absent, and such absence is, as we have guessed by now, the present absence we mentioned, an absence that cinema only can make present.  What makes it present?  The eternity of capitalism, thus its emptiness.  If cinema works with time and if time, in Marxist terms, is what capitalism is based on, then we could say that Utopia 1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D!, because of its absence of time, is really heterotopic insofar as it is utopic. But the term utopic will not designate the impossible site (οὐ-), but rather the beautiful site (εὖ); beautiful, mind you, not because there is no capitalism, but because of its inherent inaccessibility and impossibility.  Post-neo-futurist capitalism is not a joke, it simply does not exist. It exists there, in the impossible beauty of the digital and synthetic site.  Now, one of two things: tertium non datum. Annie Berman is not a reactionary, she certainly does not want to admit that if timeless capitalism exists there, it cannot exist here, since here it implies space and time. Her criticism results rather from an abolition of the law of the excluded middle: capitalism exists here and there, with or without time.  There is a place, which is far from utopic and which deviates from the very coordinates of capitalism, which would claim to be the excluded middle. This place is cinema, the film itself.  Deleuze wrote: “This is the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money. If it is true that movement maintains a set of exchanges or an equivalence, a symmetry as an invariant, time is by nature the conspiracy of unequal change or the impossibility of equivalence, thus it is money.” And there certainly is an eternity in capitalism, so much so that it is not enough to eliminate the fourth dimension in order to stay out of it. It is as though, in spite of the imperviousness of capitalism and inside its boundless space, there were holes, or heterotopies where the balance of power, as usually understood and defined, is overturned.Broadly speaking we call these places Film, which does not mean that cinematically there is no capitalism, (films are and will continue to be produced) but rather that a product (of capital) cannot be cinematic. There is therefore something that evades capitalism and this is Cinema (what the protagonist of Utopia 1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D! finds at the end of her search).  And by cinema we mean all the environments defined in space and time which allow, within capitalism, an experience unrelated to it, an event not only different in its mechanical technique, but which cannot be controlled by its police  (for Utopia 1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D! the experience is plasticized in the Oculus Drift).

Leap Motion brings presence to Oculus Rift VR

Martin Schubert is doing amazing things with Leap Motion on the Oculus Rift. Finally, we can see our own hands and use our hands to interact with virtual space. There is even a way to swipe switch between a Virtual Reality experience and an Augmented Reality experience. I got to see a demo at the NYME Conference last week. And, the Leap team so generously gifted me one of my own - I'm eager to make good use of this. This and my new Google Cardboard viewer. 

Laurie Sumiye gives Leap Motion a go. NYME Conference NY, NY 2015

Laurie Sumiye gives Leap Motion a go. NYME Conference NY, NY 2015

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EMERGENCY INDEX: AN ANNUAL DOCUMENT OF PERFORMANCE PRACTICE, VOL. 4 →

STREET VIEWS LIVE  FROM BERLIN will be included in this year's EMERGENCY INDEX of performance art. PRE-ORDER today to secure your copy at a discounted price. Discount code: HISTORYNOW for $15. Discount available until Oct. 31. 

"This is a bible of performance art activity. And if you are, like I am, a believer in performance art and the value of this ephemeral art activity to change the hearts and minds and consciousness of people, then you need to have this bible in your life. The end."  —MARTHA WILSON

EMERGENCY INDEX: AN ANNUAL DOCUMENT OF PERFORMANCE PRACTICE, VOL. 4   Various Contributors, Vol. 4 edited by Yelena Gluzman, Sophia Cleary PERIODICAL/PERFORMANCE | $25$20  Fall 2015