Kicking off with a multi-projector performance by Roger Beebe (including the first screening of the 7-projector Last Light of a Dying Star in NYC in a decade), this three-day workshop will explore expanded cinema as it stands (and expands) today. What does it mean to transform a screening into an event? What do presence and liveness bring to the film theater, especially as we emerge from a long stretch of telepresence and atomized at-home spectatorship? What forms of performance and performativity can be deployed in and beyond the black box? How can nonfiction be enlivened and broadened? How can archival materials be activated by expansive, performative presentations?

Composed of six sessions, this workshop features a diverse array of practitioners who work at the intersection of experimental and documentary film traditions, exploring their respective approaches to expanded cinema now. Ranging from Jeanne Liotta’s bringing cinema “out of the booth” to Diana Arce’s Politaoke, all will interrogate how performance can resonate today. It will also touch on the de-rigeur “Desktop Documentary” as animated by Chloé Galibert-Laîné and expanded upon by Zia Anger and discuss the role of the performer themselves, as in Kristin Reeves’ body-oriented works and Jesse Malmed’s “Conversational Karaoke.”

In addition to the introductory performance, the workshop will also feature an evening session inspired by the legendary PDX-aoke (at the PDX Film Festival in 2008 & 2009) to further blur the lines between workshop participant, audience, and performer. In its original iteration, experimental filmmakers made works to pair with classic jams from Boys II Men to Kelly Clarkson to the Rolling Stones to create an unusual and unforgettable evening. This time, VJ-ed by Roger Beebe (and featuring some of his own work from the original session) and held in the UnionDocs backyard, this promises to be an unparalleled, unique karaoke experience for those lucky enough to participate. Break out your laptops, pens and pencils, dancing shoes, and best karaoke voice, this workshop will be one for the ages!

10:30a

First Workshop Session

12:30p

Lunch (on your own)

1:30p

Second Workshop Session

4:00p

Wrap Up

Zia Anger works in moving images. In 2018 she began touring a new solo performance that traces the last ten-years of her lost and abandoned work, titled MY FIRST FILM. The performance was named by The New Yorker as one of the “Sixty-two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking.” Her most recent short MY LAST FILM premiered at the 53rd New York Film Festival. In 2015 her short I REMEMBER NOTHING had its world premiere at New Directors/New Films and its international premiere at Festival del film Locarno. She has made music videos for various artists including: Mitski, Beach House, Maggie Rogers, and Jenny Hval; the latter of whom she also toured with – as a performer and stage director. Her work has been written about in various publications including: The New Yorker, Cléo, The New York Times, Mubi, Cinemascope, and Filmmaker Magazine, In 2016 Zia participated in the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters Intensive. In 2015 Zia was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” issue. She is a 2015 fellow in film/video from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2008 she was the recipient of the Panavision New Filmmaker Grant for her short film LOVER BOY.

Diana Arce is an Alaskan-born Dominican, raised in a multicultural equivalent of the Brady Bunch family. She was lucky enough to be mentored by an amazing anarchist, atheist law professor, who convinced her to pursue social sciences through making art. Diana developed Politaoke, the non-partisan political speech karaoke bar in 2007, which she toured across the United States during the 2008 Presidential election. The success of the US tour and subsequent international shows led to her founding Artist Without a Cause, a non-profit that develops collaborations between activist-artists and social justice groups. Diana has discussed her work on NPR, BBC Outlook, Deutschland Radiokultur and ARD and has been featured in Comedy Central’s Indecision 2008, Metro New York, The New Amsterdam News and the German publication IQ Style. She has lectured and led workshops internationally on her work methodologies, artistic activism and multicultural representations in the museum context. She has a BA in Cultural Studies and Experimental Film from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and an MFA in Art in Context from the University of Arts, Berlin, Germany. She also hold degrees from the Academy of Rebellion and School for Creative Activism. She’s survived an apartment fire, lived in a commune, traveled internationally and multiple times across the continental United States and once shepherded a herd of sheep in Hawaii. Her website’s name is pretentious but she decided not to change it because she had it for too long and a make up artist in Chicago bought dianaarce.com.

Roger Beebe is a filmmaker whose work since 2006 consists primarily of multiple-projector performances and essayistic videos that explore the world of found images and the “found” landscapes of late capitalism. He has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art with solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, The Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, and Los Angeles Filmforum among many other venues. Beebe is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and was the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival from 2004-2014. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University where he helped launch the new Moving-Image Production major in Autumn 2017.

Chloé Galibert-Laîné is a French researcher and filmmaker. She currently works as a post-doctoral researcher at the Lucerne School of Art and Design – HSLU in Switzerland. She regularly teaches theory classes and artistic workshops about film and media; recently she taught at CalArts (US), Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Marseille (FR), Université Paris 8 (FR), Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (NL), Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (DE) and Merz Akademie in Stuttgart (DE). Her work takes different forms (texts, films, video installations and live performances) and explores the intersections between cinema and online media. She is particularly interested in questions related to modes of spectatorship, gestures of appropriation, processes of knowledge production and mediated memory. Her films have shown at festivals such as the IFFRotterdam (NL), FIDMarseille (FR), Ji.hlava DFF (CZ), True/False Festival (US), EMAF (DE), transmediale (DE), Images Festival (CA), Kasseler Dokfest (DE), Ars Electronica Festival (AT), WRO Media Art Biennale (PL) and FIPADOC (FR).

Jeanne Liotta is an artist and filmmaker who makes both single-channel films and other cultural ephemera such as her ‘one-cut’ newspaper collages, moving image installations, and live projection performances. Her main body of work takes place at a curious intersection of art, science, and natural philosophy. Observando El Cielo, her 16mm film of the night skies was voted one of the top films of the decade by The Film Society of Lincoln Center, was Artforum’s Best Films of the Year, was awarded the Tiger Award for Short Film at Rotterdam International Film Festival, Best International Screen at Images Festival, and Most Beautiful Sound Design award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her work has been seen in The Whitney Biennial 2006, The Whitney Museum Dreamlands exhibition, The New York Film Festival, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Exploratorium of San Francisco, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Centre de Georges Pompidou Paris, CCCB Spain, MCA Denver, and The Menil Collection Houston among others. Awards include NYSCA, The Jerome Foundation, The Museum of Contemporary Cinema, and The Orphans Film Symposium’s Helen Hill Award. She has written a monograph on her research into the Joseph Cornell Film Collection at Anthology Film Archives and is a long-time faculty member at the  Bard MFA Program. Liotta is represented by Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn, and her work is collected by The Museum of Modern Art, The Austrian Film Museum, The European Media Arts Collection, The New York Public Library, Harvard, and Duke Universities.

Jesse Malmed is an artist and curator living and working in Chicago. His work in moving images, performance, text and occasional objects has exhibited widely in museums, cinemas, galleries, bars and barns, including recent solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Roots and Culture, the DePaul Art Museum, Flatland, the Chicago Cultural Center, D Gallery, Syntax Season, Cinema Contra, Microlights, Echo Park Film Center, Lease Agreement and the University of Chicago Film Studies Center. His platformist and curatorial projects include the Live to Tape Artist Television Festival, programming at the Nightingale Cinema, instigating Western Pole, the mobile exhibition space and artist bumper sticker project Trunk Show (with Raven Falquez Munsell), programming through ACRE TV and organizing exhibitions, screenings and performance events both independently and institutionally. His writing has appeared on and in Bad at Sports, Cine-File, Incite Journal of Experimental Media, The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature, Temporary Art Review, Big Big Wednesday and YA5. Raised in Santa Fe, he earned his BA from Bard College and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was named a “2014 Breakout Artist” by Newcity and has attended residencies at ACRE, Ox-Bow, Summer Forum, the Chicago Cultural Center and Links Hall. He is an Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and teaches in the Chicago Public Schools through CAPE. He is the lead singer of The Fucs (a Fugs cover band) and was profiled recently in Newcity’s Film 50 and the Chicago Tribune.

Kristin Reeves has shown her interdisciplinary work internationally in museums, galleries, theaters, art events and festivals such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Crossroads Film Festival, San Francisco; Ann Arbor Film Festival; The Chicago Underground Film Festival;  Antimatter [Media Art] Festival, Victoria; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück; Revelation Perth, Australia; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn. She was awarded the Indie Grits Film Festival Helen Hill Memorial Award for Body Contours and she has been an Artist in Residence at ACRE, Signal Culture, and Visual Studies Workshop. Reeves has also collaborated in over 20 live multimedia projects staged in performance venues such as Steppenwolf Theater, Chicago; The Boiler, Brooklyn; The Granoff Center, Providence. She is the Programing Director for That One Film Festival in Muncie, IN. Currently she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Ball State University where she can be found laser cutting 16mm film and managing her projector collection.