October 25th, 2014
@ Farewell Books (map)
8pm
Free! ($5-$10 Suggested Donation)
Experimental Response Cinema and Farewell Books presents an evening with the Basement Media Fest, with curators LJ Frezza and Nicholas Tamburo in person! The Basement Media Fest is a survey of contemporary artists working with lo-def, lo-tech, and lo-fi motion picture techniques. Founded in response to hi-res commercial media and corporate-sponsored film fests, BASEMENT is a celebration of the mediated experience as aesthetic experience. Featuring work by Ben Balcom, Andy Birtwistle, Stephen Broomer, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Chris Paul Daniels, Anja Dornieden & Juan David Gonzalez Monroy, Scott Fitzpatrick, N. Heppding, Faith Holland, Salise Hughes, Josh Lewis, Jordan Lopez, Ryan Murray, Dylan Pasture, Tyler Tamburo, Laura Thatcher, Emma Varker. Curated by LJ Frezza and Nicholas Tamburo.
NOTES: BASEMENT VIDEO FEST by LJ Frezza and Nicholas Tamburo
LJ Frezza creates video works of heavily edited found-footage and curates moving image programs for the BASEMENT Media Festival and Spectacle in NYC. He is currently pursuing his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Nicholas Tamburo studied experimental filmmaking and photography in Boston, MA. After graduating he stopped making movies and started cooking. He has since worked at restaurants in Boston, New York, Portland, and Belgium. He currently works at Momofuku Ko in New York City.
Check out this article on the Basement Media Fest on The Berkeley Beacon, and this interview with curator LJ Frezza on F Newsmagazine!
Farewell Books, founded in February 2013 and run by Travis Kent & Mikaylah Bowman, is a progressive new and used bookshop and art gallery in the city of Austin, Texas.
This project is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Economic Growth & Redevelopment Services Office/Cultural Arts Division believing an investment in the Arts is an investment in Austin’s future. Visit Austin at NowPlayingAustin.com.
Program
House by Andy Birtwistle
03:45 min / digital / sound / 2013
“House aims to follow and subvert the logic of television. Most TV content is banal, but is presented in ways that aim to create a sense of energy and excitement. The piece uses outdated elements of televisual language and analogue technology to foreground the materiality of video rather than ‘content’.” – AB
I Am All Men as I Am No Man and Therefore I Am by Alfredo Salazar-Caro
05:29 min / digital / sound / 2009
“It is human nature to form groups. It is in the essence of this nature that those within our group have attributes that we find desirable. Whether they be physical, mental, regional, political or religious these attributes can unite or separate us. This piece engages in questions of group dynamics versus individuality, alienation versus embracement.” – AS-C
Election/Coverage by Chris Paul Daniels
01:01 min / digital / sound / 2013
“An experimental observational one minute film whereby the acceleration of miles per hour in the artist’s vehicle and frames per second of the video footage converge into a zoetrope like study of the 2013 presidential campaigns in Nairobi Kenya.” – CPD
Cold Blood by Tyler Tamburo
03:24 min / digital / sound / 2014
“Cold Blood is an exploration of “obsolete” technology, mediums and techniques including: -physical manipulation of magnetic tape -video signal processing via 90s era editing hardware -additional sounds provided by a toy chord organ and a Yamaha DX7 (the first commercially successful digital synthesizer)” – TT
Queens Quay by Stephen Broomer
01:11 min / digital / sound / 2012
“Red, green, blue, and yellow grids track the horizon, left and right. The colours collide and mix.” – SB
[phrases] by Ben Balcom
04:24 min / digital / sound / 2013
“Voices heard during sleep tell a story caught between form and void. The body syncopates with the pulsing insects. Two systems intertwine, and this small archive of night is inscribed on the body without organs.” – BB
Doubt #2 by Josh Lewis
05:26 min / 16mm to Digital / sound / 2013
“The second installment of ongoing series of investigations that attempt to penetrate film’s enigmatic materiality in tandem with the vagaries of my own emotional and psychological states.” – JL
Smashed by Emma Varker
03:53 min / digital / sound / 2013
“Smashed is a performance art piece which tests the limits of physical endurance, exploring power and control through fixed gender roles. Performed in an abandoned hospital in Sydney, the two artists Emma Varker and Josh HGK fight each other until they are physically and mentally unable to continue.” – EV
The HandEye (Bone Ghosts) by Anja Dornieden & Juan David Gonzalez Monroy
07:09 min / 16mm to Digital / sound / 2012
“In early 20th century Vienna Robert Musil invited Sigmund Freud to partake in, what he called, ‘a very special séance’. Seated at the table Musil revealed that they were going to summon the ghost of Frans Anton Mesmer, discoverer of animal magnetism and forefather of hypnosis. Musil told Freud about a series of dreams he had which involved a talking flea. Musil, who had secretly become a follower of the imaginationist school of animal magnetism wanted to question Mesmer as to the meaning of these dreams, in which said flea foretold of impending catastrophes all over Europe. It is said that Mesmer obligingly appeared and spoke in a repetitive and oblique manner. Mesmer’s words were transcribed by Freud in several scraps of paper and hidden separately in a series of objects that, owing to the vicissitudes of history, would end up in the collections of three Viennese museums. Legend has it that he who could piece together the text would find instructions for the assembly of a film. We visited these museums and, unable to break away the objects from their glass prisons, have made an attempt to reconstruct the film, hoping that the magnetic force inside the objects would transfer to the film’s silver halide crystals, allowing us to make sense of the single written testimony left over from the séance. In her diary as the lone entry for that date, Eugenie Schwarzwald, the only other known participant wrote: ‘A distinguished flea hypnotizes the ghost of a distinguished man.’” – AD & JDGM
[RGB] by N. Heppding
04:30 min / digital / sound / 2011
“For best results, remove film from context and separate into three parts. Then, splice parts into existing sequence of moving images at randomized intervals: twice a day, every day, until symptoms subside. Always ingest with a full glass of water.” – NH
Seriously Delinquent by Dylan Pasture
06:49 min / digital / sound / 2013
“Robert Miller is behind on his payments. A love letter to late capitalism.” – DP
The Way You Recognize It by Laura Thatcher
01:32 / digital / sound / 2014
“It’s a formal invitation to explore my body. Or let me rephrase that, an informal invitation to explore my body. Yeah that sounds a lot more casual, like a post-it note on your desk, rather than a letter. The letter being mailed with 15 other identicals sent to other mailboxes, only to be displayed on a fridge and debated about until the very date. It’s a simple suggestion, in fact, with a little smiley face at the bottom. Take the whig off of my head yourself, it might feel strange at first but we’ll both get used to it. Soon, I might not even wear the wig around you, and so you won’t even need to remove it. Maybe we’ll both wear them out to party’s and nice family dinners, as a joke. ” – LT
How to Draw Clouds by Salise Hughes
02:20 min / digital / sound / 2006
“A poetic meditation on the desire to make permanent what is ephemeral.” – SH
RIP Geocities by Faith Holland
02:31 min / digital / sound / 2011
“As though on a rollercoaster at an amusement park, RIP Geocities is a ride through what Hollywood envisioned as cyberspace in the 1990’s. This video abstractly represents and mourns the loss of not only the Geocities website, but also the culture it engendered teeming with polyphonic, hand-coded web presences.” – FH
Every Feature Film on My Hard Drive 3 Pixels Tall and Sped Up 7000% by Ryan Murray
03:29 min / digital / sound / 2013
“Comprised of 240 movies, this meditation on the mass amount of media we have at our fingertips creates an abstraction of the color and duration of cinema.” – RM
holiday 13 by Jordan Lopez
01:44 min / digital / sound / 2013
“A relational film from multiple first person perspectives; A forced collaboration fueled by isolation.” – JL
Up by Scott Fitzpatrick
04:47 min / digital / sound / 2012
“A spectral race to the top of a deconstructed department store escalator serves as a mediation between space and color” – SF