The video visualizes the nightmare of internment and torture without the usual use of the Islamic male body. The “bride” is symbolic of a space between two realities, of neither a past nor a future. She defines an indeterminate state.

Guantánamo’s Bride, 2009 – TRT 11:00 mins

Sama Alshaibi is Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of Arizona. Alshaibi received her M.F.A. in Photography, Video & Media Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Born in Basra, Iraq to an Iraqi father and Palestinian mother, and now a naturalized US citizen, Alshaibi’s recent works investigates “borderlands”, including her own hyphenated identity, as critical sites in physical and psychological terms. In her work the language of war and exile is prominent, a restless protagonist struggling against the double negation of her homelands. Selecting among her multiplicitous and polarized identities, Alshaibi’s own body puts to test issues of access, privilege and constraint. The work is an articulation of these negotiations between body, disputed land(scapes), and shifting political realities.

A multi-media artist, Alshaibi exhibits internationally including South Africa, The Middle East, the United Kingdom, China, South and Central America and the United States. Her work has recently appeared in Nueva Luz, Frontiers, and Social Dynamics. She is represented by the Empty Quarter, Dubai and Selma Feriani Gallery, London.

Sama Alshaibi – Tucson Arizona

www.samaalshaibi.com

I am fascinated by the disparity of a unified understanding or comprehension of common symbols and imagery though standardized structures exist. Working in photography, video, new media, performance, sculpture, installation or a hybrid, I explore the concept of things and information. Specifically I am interested in the structure, collection, storage, organization, categorization, processing, retrieval, and cross listing and dissemination of information, images, knowledge and memory.

This particular video, seeTV, was prompted by the spectacle of television and “over-sharing” structure of the increasingly popular “reality” television shows. I deconstruct and deny the expected content. As is consistent with much of my other work, general themes of identity, communication, representation, commodification, media seduction, sensory overload, meaning, hype and contradiction are satirized and critiqued.

seeTV, 2003 – TRT 3:00 mins

I am adopted and have been renamed three different times. I have double vision in booth eyes. I have an un-natural love for eating eggs. I can weld and make awesome pie. Climbing trees is fun. I do not have the patience for needlepoint, basketball, Mel Brooks films or stripping furniture. I fixed Robert Plant’s rental car on the island Nevis in 1987. My favorite camera is my newly restored 8×10 wooden Agfa/Ansco. I live in the Detroit Metro area but wish I lived somewhere warm. My first job was in photography. I have too much clothing so that it requires a separate room to hold it all. One of my favorite authors is Raymond Carver. Ontology recapitulates hegemony.

Susan Evans – Pleasant Ridge Michigan

www.susaneevans.com

17 Minutes is a performance and video blog project. It is estimated that someone commits suicide every 17 minutes. For each performance I spend 17 minutes standing outdoors next to a tree. At the end of this 17 minutes I fall to the earth. This ritual offers a place of reflection, the time between. It also deals with the specific circumstance of my own brother’s suicide and as a reenactment aims to be reminder of the life with which I am engaged.

Chris Barr is an artist and designer concerned with interconnectedness, patterns of social behavior, and intimate communication. His work spans various media including networked performance, installation and video and has been exhibited internationally and nationally, notably at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, The Lab in San Francisco, and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Spain). Chris currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Design at West Virginia University.

Chris Barr – Morgantown West Virginia

www.chrisbarr.net

I have no clear idea about my video works, I always improvise. Maybe I´m looking for something but I don´t know what it is yet. I like to make short films with my mobile phone, but i don´t like to show the real things around me. I prefer to find the mysterious around us. For me the sound and the image have the same importance, so I usually make the music or the sound of my videos. Peso means weight in Spanish. Pesar means sorrow. I see Peso as a religious walk. It is like a walk over the fire. I have so much to say about it.

Peso, 2007 – TRT 7:06 mins

monoperro is the name I adopted some years ago and under which I am producing my work. This work is developed inbetween diverse fields as sound-art, video-art and performance. The common point between these disciplines is the exploration of the anthropological dimension of the inhabitants in big contemporary cities, as well as their tribal and wild dimension, so my work is more symbolic than conceptual, or even religious. In this sense and due to internal coherence, the development of my work is more intuitive rather than rational, something I named uncultured art. From this intention to de-cultivate art (some kind of acculturation).

Ignacio Álvarez Bordoy – Madrid Spain

http://www.monoperro.com

statement forthcoming

Salad Fingers – episode 1, 2004

episode 1 (Salad Fingers, 2004), episode 2 (Friends, 2004), episode 3 (Nettles, 2004), episode 4 (Cage, 2004), episode 5 (Picinic, 2004), episode 6 (Present, 2005), episode 7 (Shore Leave, 2006) and episode 8 (Cupboard, 2007).

bio forthcoming

David Firth – UK

www.fat-pie.com

Let’s Get Married is a collaborative project between artist team of Magsamen + Hillerbrand and playwright, Kirk Lynn based on the surrealist writings of Comte de Lautréamont. In this video three different people playfully construct and devour faces made out of bread, peanut butter and jelly. The images become chaotic and the viewer looses track of what is created and what is regurgitated as audio of bees buzzing and a woman reciting lines that end with “peanut butter and jelly” gets louder and louder.

“All my life I have seen narrow shouldered men, without exception, perform innumerable stupid actions, brutalize his fellows and poison minds by every conceivable means. Seeing these things I have desired to laugh and smile with the others, but this strange imitation was impossible for me. I have taken a knife and severed the flesh at the spots where the lips come together, cutting them into a smile. For a moment I thought to have accomplished my end. I looked into the mirror and inspected the mouth I had deliberately butchered. It was a mistake! The blood falling copiously from the two wounds made it impossible to distinguish whether this was really the smile of other men. But after several minutes of comparison I could see clearly that my smile in no way resembled human laughter: in other words, I was not laughing.” Lautremont

Let’s Get Married, 2008 – TRT 3:30 mins

The collaborative team of Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hillerbrand have been working on photography and video projects together for the past several years. Relationships, perception, and everyday transcendence permeates their work—a collective portrait of their commitment to process. They continuously renew their experimentation with video, light, sound, and performance. Their visual vocabulary celebrates available everyday materials such as cookies, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and family. Their work manipulates time, image, and material, mesmerizing the viewer and transmuting the common into a visceral abstraction.

Their work has been shown internationally in exhibitions and screenings which have included; Chicago Underground Film Festival, LA Freewaves Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, VAD International Video and Digital Arts Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival and Aurora Picture Show. Their work has also been exhibited internationally including: The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Houston Center for Photography, Dallas Contemporary, Butler Institute of American Art, The Boston Center for the Arts, Lawndale Arts Center and Contemporary Art Center of Virginia.

Mary is the Curator at the Aurora Picture Show, a micro-cinema in Houston and Stephan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston.

Magsamen + Hillerbrand – Houston Texas

www.maryandstephan.com

Trinity, titled for the location of the first atomic explosion on July 16th, 1945 utilizes the techniques of collage and montage to combine original video footage with found footage. This collision of imagery addresses the birth of the atomic age, ground zero and its complex relationship with history. Trinity combines image metaphors, text and music that relate the apocalyptic nightmare, haunting military power and the twisted memories of the first atomic blast. Archival imagery juxtaposed with original footage shot at the Trinity Site in the White Sands Missile range in southern New Mexico display the banal fascination with the destructive power of the atomic bomb. 



Trinity opens with a brief history of atomic age and the explosion of the first nuclear device. This moment transforms history and the viewer is thrust into the horrifying beauty and power of the blast. Red and orange flames fill the screen and the viewer is transported to the present day Trinity Site. We experience the Trinity Site through a tourist’s eyes. The present day transforms into footage from Bikini Atoll, Nevada, and Naval ships all sites testing the world’s greatest power. The viewer is returned to the present day Trinity Site to shop for memorabilia.



Trinity asks the viewer to critically examine the powers of war, its impact and our selective loss of memory.

Trinity, 2007 – TRT 14:30 mins

Michelle Bauer Carpenter is an Assistant Professor of Digital Design in the College of Arts & Media at the University of Colorado Denver. Carpenter has produced, directed and edited various experimental and documentary pieces. Her video pieces have screened on broadcast television, numerous international and national film festivals and art galleries.

Michelle’s prior work experience as operations director at Free Speech TV includes collaboration with grassroots organizations and larger institutions including the Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Roosevelt Institute, Human Rights Watch International, among others. She has received numerous grants including her recent Colorado Council on the Grant and Arts Fellowship.

Michelle Bauer Carpenter – Denver Colorado

www.michellecarpenter.net

Scott Blake takes barcodes and turns them into art – art that is simultaneously pop and op, intellectual and personal, minimal and ocular. Blake uses the black and white icon of our data-drenched existence to stimulate thought on topics from consumerism to religion and individual identity. He urges the viewer to consider the limitations of digitized human expression and to appropriate these symbols of commodity.

Experimental Animation, 2002 – TRT 2:21 minutes

Scott Blake is a very frivolous artist and his work has been in fantastic art galleries. The New York Times, FHM, and Adbusters magazine have featured Blake’s Barcode Art, in addition he was interviewed on ABC World News Tonight and Tech TV. Barcodeart.com website has been reviewed in 15 languages and Blake’s work is in private collections throughout the world. The artist was commissioned to create custom work for the actress Jane Fonda and also by the University of Ottawa in Canada. The creators of Photoshop recognized his artwork at the 2002 Adobe Design Achievement Awards, held in the Guggenheim Museum NYC. Scott Blake received a B.F.A from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He was born in Tampa, Florida 1976 (I am 32 years old) and he currently live in Omaha, Nebraska.

Scott Blake – Omaha Nebraska

http://www.barcodeart.com

‘Near the Egress’ is a phantasmagoric memory of the circus, as experienced by the aging and restless mind. The viewer shares a front row seat to the sight and sounds of marveling men, women and beasts as they perform extraordinary feats of movement in suspended time.

Originally shot on 35mm b&w photo film, each frame of the moving circus was later printed, and ultimately, processed as a dry-plate tintype which was scanned and digitally re-sequenced to make a moving-image piece about memory and reverence for the spectacle.

Near the Egress, 2008 – TRT 2:30 mins

Antonio Martinez (born 1979) is an emerging artist with deep interest in manipulating the still image. He was raised in Oklahoma, educated in Nebraska (Creighton University), North Carolina (East Carolina University) and now currently teaches photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is a recent recipient of the 2009 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for photography.

Antonio has always been intrigued with the absurdities and spectacles of life and works to produce images or videos, which represent the splendor and fear associated with his subject. Antonio defines himself as a traditional and digital image-maker whose interests include photographing spectator events, which range from mma cagefights to the traveling circus.

Antonio Martinez – Carbondale Illinois

http://www.antoniom.com

The video album DING summarizes video works by Alec Crichton from the years 2003-2006. On a conceptual level the album deals with the idea that an artistic practice tends to serve a more unifying than differentiating function, where established symbols and traditional ways of perceiving and understanding may be confused. This effect may be called ‘poetic’ or ’surreal’ whenever it strengthens an internal unity, where all elements of a work refer to each other, enabling an aesthetic or emotional form of sense, without requiring another significant meaning or an external source for understanding.

DING 01 – Mauenheim, TRT 1:24 mins

DV PAL 16:9 | 9 Films | 43min | 2003-2006
Mauenheim, Zaunsein, Ameisenbau, Lichtdifferenz, Bauschatten, Autumnir, Eremozoikum, Haustauben and Frequenzfluss.

Alec Crichton is a British Cologne based artist, writer and curator. He received his masters at the Academy of media arts in 2008, where he is working on his thesis, titled “Paradise function”. He progressively releases his work at www.crichton.tv. Since 2008 he is an active partner of Souvenirs from Earth, the first TV Channel for Film and Video arts on the European Cable Network.

Alec Crichton | Cologne Germany

www.crichton.tv | www.souvenirsfromearth.tv

The Big Slip juxtaposes representations of Brazil/ians in U.S. movies and of the U.S. and its people in Brazilian movies. The result, humorous and absurd, reflects stereotypes and bias from both sides. Both countries play a narcissistic game where their “dark side” (and secret fantasy) is realized as “other,” which is at once seductive and repulsive.

Famous movies (i.e. “It is a Wonderful Life,” “Notorious”) are given new meaning by association and context. For example, a scene taken from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” where Audrey Hepburn desires that her Brazilian children will have green eyes, is shown side by side with a scene from the Brazilian movie “The Kiss of the Spider Woman” in which Raul Julia imagines the heroine of a story with black, “not green eyes.” Racial phobia is an underlining tension in those cross representations.

In another juxtaposition we see a sexual proposition mediated by a translator, where the Brazilian is the passive sexual object of desire (Wild Orchid) and, at its side, a scene where Brazilians are interrogating a U.S. ambassador taken hostage for political reasons (7 Days in September). The comparison underlines fears of the uncontrollable, be it sex for the U.S., or political imperialism for Brazil, where the “other” is made into a manageable, repressed symbol.

The Big Slip is a game of mirrors and a truncated dialogue between those 2 sister American countries, Brazil and the U.S.

The Big Slip, 2005 – TRT 2:45 mins
(see video)

In the past few years Lopes’ work was seen in the United States at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, at El Museo del Barrio, ApexArt and the America’s Society in New York, at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis, among other venues. In the same period his work was also seen in France, Germany, Poland, Chile and Portugal. In his native Brazil the artist has shown at the National Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art of Salvador, and the Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP), among other institutions. His work was curated into exhibitions by artists such as Janine Antoni, Luciano Fabro and Lygia Pape, as well as by curators such as Paulo Herkenhoff. Lopes was the winner of the Worldstudio AIGA and RTKL awards, the Contemporary Art Museum Project award (Saint Louis), the Stetson/Hand Award for Professional Achievement, and the Prêmio Phillips of trip to Paris.

Cyríaco Lopes – DeLand Florida

http://www.cyriacolopes.com

I primarily work in Super 8 film. It is a nostalgic medium that could have been made yesterday or 40 years ago and is instantly recognized as a “home movie”. Also, I went to school for painting. The process of making a film vs. making a painting is a similar process – building up layers of a painting and letting the oil dry and then the process of shooting, developing, and then transferring and editing the film (digitally).

The Super 8 films I make are not scripted, they are neither fiction nor pure documentary. They are hand-held and subjective, much like Jonas Mekas’ personal diary films. They do document real moments. I am interested in cultural pockets, in the case of this film, bicyclists. This is the annual Bike Kill event in Brooklyn put on by the Black Label Bicycle Club.

Lyrics to Matt Frank song:

I Just want to ride my bicycle
I Just want to ride my bike
I Just want to ride my bicycle
But I fear that I might die.

Bike Kills 4, 2006 – TRT 52 seconds
Sound by Matt Frank

Nick Golebiewski (United States, 1980) is a filmmaker/artist working in Super 8 film, shadow puppetry, photography and drawing. In 2002 he received a BFA in Painting at the University at Buffalo. He has exhibited/screened/performed at The National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia), Anthology Film Archives (NY), White Box Annex (NY), Rooftop Films (NY), the Cambridge Super 8 Festival (UK), Columbia University (NY) and Hallwalls (Buffalo, NY).

He is currently the Media Director at the Bicycle Film Festival and lives in New York, New York.

Nick Golebiewski – Brooklyn New York

http://www.foedesigns.com/nick

Loose narratives unfold in visual stories, expressing the immeasurable depth of the human condition and the metaphors nature offers for existential understandings. Lush environments partner with liminal places; capturing them through imagery and created environment is a long growing theme in my work. Liminality creates a state where transcendence can occur, insinuating change and transformation. It is a threshold, a passageway. At a political border it is considered no man’s land. In nature it is the boundary between land and water that continually blurs as water rises and falls, ebbs and flows. Not only an external visual element, for me it provides a blueprint for the internal terrain of the consciousness. To image place and people across continents and seas, simultaneously marking and blurring differenc is a visual record of existence; searching for the notion of home, of belonging, not only in society or culture, but in the very sense of being human.

le traversée, – TRT 3:34 minutes

Tomiko Jones, born in the twentieth century to a Japanese American mother from Hawai’i and a Welsh German American father from Pennsylvania, finds she belongs neither here nor there, yet finds home anywhere.

Loose narratives unfold in sculptural video installations and questionably fictional photographs. She exhibits regularly in Seattle and Portland, and exhibited abroad in solo shows in Tokyo and México City and group exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Dubai, Istanbul and Berlin.

She received her Master of Fine Arts in Photography with a Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Arizona in Tucson in 2008. She is the recipient of awards including the national Society for Photographic Education Freestyle Crystal Apple Award for Outstanding Achievement, 4Culture (King County, WA) and Tucson Pima Arts Council International Exchange Grant. During her studies she interned with the international women’s art collective 6+, Center for Creative Photography’s Voices of Photography and Lucky Number 7, SITE Santa Fe and was guest curator and for Elizabeth Mellott’s This War Between Us at the University of Arizona Union Gallery.

In 2008 she spent three months in residence at the Museé Niépce in Chalon-Sur-Saône, France, the acclaimed birthplace of photography. Along with explorations in photography and video, she had the opportunity to touch on 19th century processes, access the museum’s vast archive, and organize several public video projections. This fall she will return to France for a project-specific fellowship at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis.

Tomiko Jones – Tucson Arizona

http://tomikojonesphoto.com

statement forthcoming

Bitmapping, 2004 – TRT 4:10 mins
sound by Håkan Lidbo

Anders (b.1968) is an artist and filmmaker working in video, sound, new media and installations and he is primarily concerned with identity. The human body lies at the root of projects that formally and conceptually chart identity and its construction as a preamble to broaching matters of violence, genders, memory, loss or ideology in which personal experiences co-exists with references to popular culture, the media and consumerism. Specializing in digital technologies, he aims to mix genres and ways of expression to explore the potential of audio visual media.

Currently based Malmö in the south of Sweden and has exhibited at numerous art festivals, galleries, and museums internationally, including: Biennale of Sydney 2008, Sydney, Australia; Transmediale08, Berlin, Germany; File Brazil 07-08, São Paulo, Brazil; [10th] Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan; 13th Barcelona International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art, Sonar, Barcelona, Spain; Scope New York, US; Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC), Santa Fe, Argentina; Pocket Films in Paris, Centre Pompidou, Paris; The 2nd Art and Science International Exhibition and Symposium, Beijing, China; etc.

Anders Weberg – Ängelholm Sweden

http://andersweberg.com

Inspired by film noir and b/w Hollywood horror films, my most recent work is a series of short video loops produced exclusively with composited computer animation. In these videos there is no beginning and no end, only a single moment continually repeating like a skipping record. Questions are not answered; the story is implied but never defined.

In Dreams, 2008 – TRT 2:12 mins

Born in Kansas City, MO in 1969 I received my BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1991. In 1997 I moved to New Orleans to attend the University of New Orleans Graduate Fine Arts program (MFA 2000). Since 2003 I have lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY.

Michael Greathouse – Brooklyn New York

www.michaelgreathouse.com

Kill Your Lovers is a hand-processed experimental super 8 film interpreting the cycle of a past relationship through performance and text. The film was made with Tri-X b/w reversal film, capturing one frame per second. Sound by Jax Deluca (aka Communication Vault) and Adam Morowsky. 2006.

Kill Your Lovers, 2006 – TRT 2:37 mins

Jax Deluca is an experimental video/sound, installation, 2-d, text and performance artist residing in Buffalo, NY. Her work has been shown internationally and nationally. Sometimes involving bleak costumes, her work contains underlying themes of death, anxiety and secret fears coupled with an offbeat sense of humor. She is currently the Program Assistant at Squeaky Wheel, a non-profit media art center in Buffalo, NY.

Jax Deluca – Buffalo New York

My work is an attempt to enter the mind of the invertebrate. I want to understand what it feels like to engage in their behaviors, movements and rituals. So I intensely study invertebrates—I read about them; I watch videos of their movements; I watch live creatures in the wild and in zoos; I talk to beekeepers and scientists. I contemplate the odd gestures of bugs and try to bring them into my world.

Invertebrates engage in enthusiastic, although often inelegant, dances for purposes of mating and communication. Humans are similarly inclined to dance in order to communicate an idea or invite sex; and so I use dance to bridge species. I translate invertebrates’ rituals into choreography that I perform, unpracticed, in front of the camera. During my engagement in these dances, a strange system emerges as I try to remember which movement to perform next. The dance begins to feel oddly intuitive, but never graceful. The resulting videos are concerned with playful anthropomorphization; they are meditations on the fantasy that humans and invertebrates have a shared set of experiences, accessible through awkward, hybridized dance steps.

Scuttle, 2006 – TRT 1:23 mins

Julia Oldham was born in Frederick, Maryland in 1979 and grew up in both Maryland and New Hampshire. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2001, and a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Chicago in 2005. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL; The University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA; Art in General in New York, NY; and Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. Her work has been supported by the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs; Artadia, the Fund for Art and Dialogue; and Art in General in New York. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Julia Oldham – Brooklyn New York

www.juliaoldham.com

My films are experimental, I work very much with animation, but I often mix two-dimensional successions of drawings and three-dimensional settings (animated using the “stop motion” technique) with real life shots. I like crossing over layers of different bits of film that were created with these different techniques. A lot of time based images in my films are abstract. I do not use narrative, action or talking, and the narration is for me what happens through the succession of images and places that appear on the screen one after the other with their elements moving into and out of the frame. Very often, I include figurative elements to the scenes that I construct: they could be objects created with clay carefully put in the right pace to signify a particular concept, real human beings moving and conveying particular emotions, or falling plants and water to give to the viewer the sense that a change is in progress. I think the most important thing in a movie is the shape of objects or their colors that alone can express a mood or send a message without the needs for words.

It is useful for me to stop for some time working with the camera, and start dealing with materials like paper, water, glue, canvas and clay: my video work is very much connected to the making of art. I think more like a sculptor or a photographer; I am much more a marker of shapes that when interlaced with time and sound make things happen, than a story teller.

The Tower Trilogy, 2005 – 10:00 mins

Barbara Agreste was born in Pescara in 1971. She first approaches art-making i the Art Lyceum of her town, and after completing the course she goes to Milan to attend a scenography course in the Academy of Arts. Not happy with the cultural atmosphere that surrounds her in Italy, at the age of 23 she moves to London where she begins working as a performer for “Rawhead Dance Theatre”. In 1996 Barbara enrolls in Kent Institute of Arts & Design taking as her subject of study “Film & Video Production”. After graduating in July 2000 she has access to the MA course in “Fine Art” at Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in London where she is awarded the “Master of Arts” in September 2004. Since then Barbara has continued producing films and paintings, exhibiting and attending film festivals in UK, Italy and in the rest of the world. Barbara lives and works in London although her visits to Italy are very frequent.

Barbara Agreste – London United Kingdom | Pescara Italy

www.bambee.org

Generally speaking, I work in a variety of media including sculpture, animations and digital technologies focusing on postmodern thought related to the body – as a biological entity and a cultural idea. Through a combination of materials and methods, my installation environments undermine notions of a fixed, homogenous body/persona relationship. I present objects and other elements (projected and monitor-based animations, mixed media drawings, digital prints, etc.) that visually partition a body throughout a space, each element acting as a type of prosthesis; a series of artificial replacements that – as a whole – create an eccentric landscape. Currently, I’m exploring cyborg identity and issues related to disembodiment – a term often associated with the use and integration of technology into everyday life – within my creative practice. Using sources ranging from cybertheory, posthuman theory, cyberfeminism and science fiction, I’m investigating issues regarding the absence of the body within cyberspace and the impact of this absence on our understanding of the mind/body relationship. Most importantly, my work hypothesizes an expansion of gender and biology in light of these divergent modes of exploration.

Using digital and analog techniques, my animations typically depict twittering, jittering, microscopic bitmaps that evolve, transform and transgress over time. Although most often viewed independently, these animations serve to establish an interior life for the anatomically derived objects within my installations; abstract, full color parasites that seemingly adjust and optimize the larger organism (or object). Using its native programming language Actionscript, I code generative components in Flash that create the kinetic behaviors of these animations. In a recent residency at the Experimental Television Center in March 2007, I began using other customizable software programs – specifically MaxMSP+Jitter – the in the creation of these elements.

Your Adam’s apple is my synthetic port, 2007 – 3:12 mins

Krista Hoefle – South Bend Indiana

www.kristahoefle.com

It has been suggested that in dreams, every character represents the dreamer. In this short video loop the artist painstakingly chases himself, exuding much effort, with no reward. The sensation of struggle is in turn emphasized by the transformation of the landscape, audio distortion, as well as the continuous loop.

Dream, 2007 – 35 secs

My work’s strongest connection is through me and is fueled by my everyday experiences and an obsession with time. I feel the constant pressure to be productive/efficient, but have the desire for tranquility. The work goes back and forth between a sense of anxiety and a sense of peace, which is caused by an internal restlessness. I struggle to find balance.

My background in painting is very important to how I approach the content and execution of my art. In a painting, I find myself responding mostly to the physicality/manipulation of the medium, and the mysterious quality in the constancy of the image. I want to treat video in a manner that considers the physicality of the material, including pixels, camera handling, and movement. Simultaneously, I want to deconstruct the most integral aspect of video, the timeline. I hope to establish a connection with the viewer, in a metal space that is similar to the one I enter when experiencing a painting, which activates emotions and stimulates thoughts, but does not necessarily suggest a specific predetermined conclusion. My attraction to the loop and gestural editing is driven by repetition, and its inherently compelling nature. When rhythm is established, a viewer can connect, and the details become accessible. A Key interest in my work is transitional state. I speculate that when I am in transit, that is where I find calmness. The stresses of point A and point B disappear in the space/time in between the two. It is in those moments and places I find myself free to think about any and every thing, or nothing at all, while becoming a purely sensory being.

There are other things that really inspire me; my concerns and interests on a broader scale such as spirituality, quantum physics, interconnectivity, philosophy, history and the future. The reason these topics are important is because I think this is how my work becomes accessible to others. These are the same topics I wonder about when pressured to produce or while in the serene transitional state. Everyone deals with peace and anxiety on a personal level, I think this is where the connection between myself and the viewer exists.

Adam Cruces – Kansas City Missouri

www.adamcruces.com