This week is full of great screenings and shows connected to this event. Check out the full schedule here.

Two highlights that are opening Thursday, March 20:

Almagul Menlibaeva. Jihad, 2004.

I Dream of the ‘Stans: New Central Asian Video
Co-curated by Leeza Ahmady, Murat Orozobekov and Edward Winkleman, works by artists from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan. Incredible critical international acclaim has greeted Central Asian artists in recent years. Most of the newfound attention centers on the remarkably strong single- and multi-channel video works produced in the region, a fact often attributed to the centuries-old traditions of street theater, storytelling and weaving.

Winkleman Gallery - 637 W. 27th St. (Bet. 11th and 12th Ave.)
6–8 P.M. Opening Reception

Ashok Sukumaran. Glow Positioning System, Mumbai, 2005.

Ashok Sukumaran: Glow Positioning System and Other Forms of Address
A Golden Nica winner for Interactive Art, 2007 Prix Ars Electronica, Sukumaran presents video documentation of his multifariously panoramic, light-based work originally installed in Mumbai. The result of a vast collaboration with street decorators, residents, and private and state agencies that could be activated and animated by a single “viewer” using a hand-crank.

Thomas Erben Gallery - 526 W. 26th St. (4th floor)
6–8 P.M. Opening Reception

DocuClub was a fine institution that was temporarily on hiatus. Now ArtsEngine has brought it back to life and the first screening is one I’d definitely like to see…

DocuClub’s first session for 2008 is scheduled for Thursday April 3rd, at 7:30pm, at the screening room of our partner Goldcrest Post (799 Washington Street, between Horatio and Gansevoort. For map with directions, go to www.goldcrestpost.com), in New York City.

We will watch Kimberly Reed’s PRODIGAL SONS, the story of “a brotherly rivalry between a man and a woman… and Orson Welles.” Reed was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film for 2007. Our moderator will be DocuClub founder Susan Kaplan.

If you are planning to attend, please RSVP.

If you’d like to have your rough cut considered for future sessions of DocuClub, contact Felix Endara.

We all got just a taste of these moving stories of immigrants and refugees when Judith presented a few weeks back. It was really great to see so many people staying after to talk with Judith. She and this project has been very inspiring to us all.

I HIGHLY recommend that you go see this performance!

Save the Date!

Sunday March 30, 3pm

Crossing the BLVD performance of monologues, sounds and images of new immigrants and refugees with Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan.
Post show discussion moderated by Brian Lehrer, talk show host WNYC radio and wnyc.org

Goldstein Theatre, Queens College
All seats $12. Order online at http://www.kupferbergcenterarts.org/ or call: 718.793.8080.

About the Performance: As immigration policy is being hotly debated around the country in terms of national, economic, and cultural security, Crossing the BLVD presents the very human stories of why new immigrants and refugees have migrated to the United States and what their experiences have been since they came here pre- and post-9/11. Writer and artist, Warren Lehrer is the tour guide providing commentary and perspective as actress and oral historian Judith Sloan “channels” many of the people they interviewed on their three-year journey around the world through the borough of Queens. Sloan’s vocalization work and movement bring these characters to life. Their performance is illuminated by projections of Lehrer’s stunning photographs of the subjects, urban landscapes, objects they have carried with them from home to home, and Queens’ landscapes, along with soundtrack of original music, sounds, and voices. [Soundtrack includes music by Scott Johnson and Gogol Bordello.]

“Immigrant life as told in the intimate, rich, comic, ironic and sad stories so often seen but not heard in America’s big cities…” The Washington Post

“A turbo-driven Eyewitness guide…BLVD is a demonstration of the way you can explore the world without leaving home.”
The Guardian, London

“An offbeat ethnic tour of one of the country’s most ethnically diverse counties. Riveting stories…”
The New York Times

“Crossing the BLVD boldly carries the tradition of oral history into the 21st Century… Electrifying!
Eve Ensler, author, oral historian, performer The Vagina Monologues

Winner Brendan Gill Prize, Municipal Art Society of New York 2004

The performance is held in conjunction with Lehrer and Sloan’s Multimedia Exhibition of the same name at Queens College’s Godwin-Ternbach Museum. The exhibition includes 90 portraits, story excerpts, 14 sound stations, and an interactive Mobile Storybooth. It runs through June 28 and will be on view before and after the performance on March 30th.

http://www.crossingtheblvd.org

http://www.earsay.org

This should be a really great screening that you might be interested in attending tomorrow night [March 14] at The City Reliquary:

Other People’s Pictures is a documentary about collectors who share an unlikely obsession – snapshots that have been abandoned or lost by their original owners and are now for sale. The film is set at New York City’s Chelsea Flea Market where, every weekend, dozens of collectors sift doggedly through piles, boxes and bins of cast-off photos, ready to pay anywhere from a few cents to hundreds of dollars for a single snapshot. Many of the film’s subjects find that collecting ‘other people’s pictures’ helps them confront the darker aspects of human existence – familial trauma, social injustice, historical atrocity. Others simply appreciate the beauty, humor and mystery of these scavenged images.

Following the screening the filmmakers Lorca Shepperd and Cabot Philbrick will be on hand to answer any and all inquisitive questions from the audience.

The film will continue to run during the second half of the “76 Kisses” exhibition, ending March 31st.

Other People’s Photos
By Lorca Sheppard and Cabot Philbrick
March 14th, 2008 7:30pm
$5 suggested donation.
http://www.other-peoples-pictures.com

The City Reliquary
370 Metropolitan Avenue (at Havemeyer St)
Williamsburg, NY
(L train to Metropolitan / G Train to Lorimer)

So two crews from UnionDocs will be heading down to Durham, North Cackalacka to attend and cover the Full Frame Festival. We hope to make side trips to Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies and possibly the Elsewhere Collective in Greensboro. We are eagerly looking forward to seeing and discussing a bunch of new work…. and we’ve have been working out our wrists for the anticipated helicoptering… see Petey Pablo’s classic below.

Anyhow, looks like some excellent films there again this year…
See the New Docs screening at Full Frame.
This list just went live this morning.

I’m looking forwad to the Sahara Chronicle coming up at CINEMAEAST. See the info and the clip below. You can also find out more about Ursula Biemann at her website.

CINEMAEAST FILM SERIES SHOWCASES RENOWNED CURATOR, SCHOLAR AND VIDEO-ARTIST URSULA BIEMANN

SAHARA CHRONICLE, highlighting international politics of mobility

February 8, 2008 New York, NY — ArteEast’s 2008 CinemaEast Series today announced plans to premier “Sahara Chronicle” at this season spring series at Cantor Film Center. The program takes place on Friday, February 29 at 6:30 pm with video-artist, curator, and scholar Ursula Biemann in person to present and discuss her work.

Premiering in New York, Ursula Biemann presents Sahara Chronicle, a video collection documenting the present sub-Saharan exodus towards Europe and the interdependence of migrations with international politics of mobility. Videos include Desert Truck Terminal, Interview Adawa, Tuareg Border Guides, Iron Ore Train and Deportation Prison Laayoune and show the major gates and nodes of the trans-Saharan migration network in Morocco, Niger, and Mauritania. Sahara Chronicle is part of The Maghreb Connection, an exhibition and research project directed by Biemann involving activists, scholars, and artists who live in different Mediterranean countries. For more information on this project visit www.geobodies.org.

WHAT: Sahara Chronicle, presentation and discussion by Ursula Biemann. Switzerland, 2006/7.

WHEN: Friday, February 29, 6:30 P.M.

WHERE: Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8 Street (between Broadway and University Place), New York.
6 train to Astor Place, R train to 8th Street, B/D/V/F/A/C/E to West 4th Street.

For more information about the CinemaEast 2008 Spring Series, please visit http://www.arteeast.org/pages/cinemaeast/series/spring-2008/

I wanted to share my two final papers from last semester, as both approach projects and issuses of the documentary arts. All comments very welcome!

The subject of the first paper was inspired directly by the presentation of Jonathan Mitchell in The Documentary Bodega Audio Series (thanks UD & Jonathan!). This essay explores Walter Ruttmann’s 1930 experimental radio documetnary Weekend. In particular, as I write, my aim here is to develop an analysis of Weekend in the context of the discourse of documentary arts, sensorial experience, and urban representation. While groundbreaking on many fronts, I am most interested in Ruttmann’s attempt to represent the urban experience in a purely sonic form through documentary recordings. For as Fran Tonkiss writes, “The modern city, for all that there is to see, is not only spectacular: it is sonic.” It is precisely this interplay between the visual and the aural in the context of urban space and its representation through montage that makes Ruttmann’s work so compelling. While my analysis focuses on Ruttmann’s Weekend, I also travel through the work and theory of other avant-garde critics and artists of the time, especially Rudolf Arnheim, Dziga Vertov, Alfred Döblin, and Walter Benjamin. Recent research into the role of the senses in experiencing place conducted in geography and neuroscience helps further develop the framework for my theoretical arguments. Cultural geographer Gerald Pocock writes, “[Sound] is dynamic: something is happening for sound to exist. It is therefore temporal, continually and perhaps unpredictably coming and going, but it is also powerful, for it signifies existence, generates a sense of life, and is a special sensory key to interiority.” It is the auditory faculty’s unique “key to interiority” that can be developed through temporary blindness that grounds my final argument about the new subjectivity suggested by Ruttmann’s Weekend.

You can read listen to the piece and read the whole paper online or download a PDF.

The second paper examines a project that has long been a major inspiration, ABCDF:The Graphic Dictionary of Mexico City, a project produced in 2001 that encompasses a 1502 page book, an interactive CD-Rom and a public museum exhibition. Theoretically, I draw most heavily upon Giuliana Bruno’s expansion of the cinematic field in her discussions of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne-Atlas and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas; George Landow’s writings about hypertext and hypermedia; Umberto Eco’s ideas of performance and openness; and Michel de Certeau’s exploration of the relationship between language and the city. I have chosen ABCDF specifically because I believe it illustrates a unique approach to representing the city that re-invents the dictionary, not as a vehicle for establishing a pretense of total knowledge, but instead as an “open work” that is “performed” through an embodied and active spectatorial subjectivity enacted through walking in the city. Produced on the cusp of the widespread adoption of the Internet and virtual geographic software such as Google Earth, ABCDF crystallizes the potential of hypermedia, not simply to interconnect multiple media objects, but to reveal the hypertextual nature of our physical environments and stimulate a subjectivity sensitive to our place within them.

You can read the whole paper online or download a PDF.

I was watching Odds of Recovery, a film by Su Friedrich, which she left for our library here. I got excited to see the shot below. It seemed to me for an instant that this was the exact place in Williamsburg that Johanna and I had run into Su by chance on her bike about a month ago. Is this where it was, Su?

Looking closer though, I’m pretty sure this is N11 between Berry and Wythe. The Brooklyn Brewery makes it sorta clear. We saw Su on N7 between Driggs and Roebling. Su had her camera in her backpack and mentioned she was working on a project about the neighborhood. Looking forward to that… she’s been in the area for a long time.

Also, see Su Friedrich’s new film at Lincoln Center this week…
FROM THE GROUND UP
Thurs. Feb 7 at 6:30pm.

Hunter’s MFA/IMA student group is hosting an event this Thursday, NOV. 15th. Join us for drinks and media artist/filmmaker presentations from grad students at Hunter, NYU, Parson’s and more…

// [ ESC ] is Electronic Social Club: a network of NYC graduate students connected by the practice of creating social dialogue through projects in media, art and design. //

Mixer + Presentations
November 15, 2007
7-10 PM
Hunter College Black Box
695 Park Avenue, Room 543 Hunter North

Directions:
6 train to 68 street or F to 63 street
enter on 69th street between Park & Lexington
elevator or stairs to the 5th floor

* Free & open to the public.
electronicsocialclub[AT}gmail[DOT]com
www.eyespeakIMA.org

Also Nov. 16th, 7:30 pm, Hunter MFA/IMA POW WOW event, come learn about the new media program…same location,
contact integrated.media.arts@hunter.cuny.edu