Mixed Messages 2009

THANKS TO TONIGHT’S SPONSORS

The Paley Center for Media

MEDIA STUDIES

MIXED MESSAGES

13TH ANNUAL GRADUATE STUDENT SHOWCASE

Friday, December 11, 2009 7:00 p.m.

The Lab-Postworks

An evening of outstanding works created by graduate students at The New School and selected by a panel of distinguished jurors. Mixed Messages celebrates the Media Studies program’s focus on theory, design, and practice across media.

Hosted by

Café Loup

ZE FRANK John L. Tishman Auditorium Alvin Johnson Building 66 West 12th Street New York City FREE ADMISSION No reservations required Reception to follow

Executive Producer Dawnja Burris Producers Amber Benezra, Eric Hopper, Christiane Paul Student Production Assistant Emma Zakarevicius First Round Judging Coordinator Diane Mitchell First Round Judges Dawnja Burris, Lydia Foerster, Brian McCormick Special thanks to all the students who submitted projects for consideration and the faculty members who guided their work.

INFORMATION benezra@newschool.edu

MORE INFORMATION 212.229.8903 benezra@newschool.edu

www.newschool.edu/mediastudies

THE NEW SCHOOL

MIXED MESSAGES 2009 PROGRAM WELCOME Peter Haratonik Chair of the Department of Media Studies and Film Ze Frank Host FEATURED WORKS INSIDE YOUR PIANO Emma Zakarevicius (7 min 34 sec; also exhibited in the lobby)

COCHON MEURTIER Spyros Dahlias (55 sec)

WELCOME Welcome to the 13th annual Mixed Messages, the graduate student showcase of the Media Studies program at The New School. Every year at this time, we share some of the most exciting student work from the past year in film, video, sound, and multimedia. The New School’s core commitment to the bond between theory and practice continues to provide a rich context for imagination, innovation, and social commentary across all media platforms. Tonight's collection of experimental, documentary, and narrative projects exemplifies the creative best of our students and faculty. Celebrate along with us, and enjoy.

Peter Haratonik Chair, Department of Media Studies and Film

I’M NOT SURE IF I’M BEING HONEST WITH YOU (IN FACT, I KNOW I’M NOT), OR CALLING MYSELF AT AGE 13 Sarah S. Laborde (2 min 14 sec)

PASEWALK Angela Anderson (2 min 40 sec)

A HARLEM MOTHER Ivana Todorovic (10 min 30 sec)

LUCY’S TERRACE Caryn Cline (4 min 20 sec)

LEBOWSKI, MY CZECH WIFE AND ME Matt Reynolds (20 min)

DAYTON EXPRESS AMIR HUSAK (website; also exhibited in lobby)

THE REED TRAIN AMIR HUSAK (10 min 30 sec)

PRESENTATION OF AWARDS Ze Frank Host Amber Benezra, Eric Hopper Producers

Tonight’s Host Ze Frank is a digital-era multiplatform performer—a blogger, vlogger, humorist, stand-up philosopher, composer, and artist.

Since his wildly popular 2001 viral video “How to Dance Properly,” Ze has built an enthusiastic following through a host of popular creative projects, many posted on his personal website, including interactive group projects, short films, animations, and video games. He won the 2002 Webby Award for Best Personal Website and in 2005 was featured in Time magazine's “50 Coolest Websites.” Ze debuted onstage at the Gel conference in 2003 and presented at the TED Conferences in 2004 and 2005. He has taught at ITP/NYU, Parsons The New School for Design, and SUNY Purchase. Discussing his own work in the digital medium and the potential of platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, Ze comments, “For me, experimentation is not about the technology.

In an ever-changing technological landscape, where today’s platforms are not tomorrow’s platforms, the key seems to be that any one of these spaces can use a dose of humanity and art and culture.”

FEATURED WORKS

(Listed in Running Order)

INSIDE YOUR PIANO (7 min 34 sec) also exhibited in the lobby

An experimental sound piece resulting from chance operations. Recorded at the home of the artist’s mentor, Arleen Schloss, the piece is a dialogue between the breath in response to the immediate sonic environment. Investigating the primitive desire to vocalize sounds, this piece explores voice and electronic echolocations.

Inspired by the specific sonic texture of Arleen’s piano, which sits heavy on its side, strings exposed, this piece aims to communicate place while making a comment on an internal/external exploration of what it means to experience a particular environment.

Emma Zakarevicius is a multi-disciplinary

artist whose primary interest is how meaning is determined and transmitted through various artistic media in order to incite communication, connection, and participation. Emma is a performer, singer/songwriter, and visual artist.

Drawing heavily on a strong visual art and musical background, her work explores modes of communication through painting, video, music, and experimental sound. It is about movement, composition, and exploring the interplay between abstraction, representation and the exploration of space both as an external environment and an internal emotional space.

COCHON MEURTIER (55 sec)

If you speak some French, you probably know what the title means; if not, you’re about to be surprised. Cochon Meurtier is a short 2D animation (really short—there’s a good chance you won’t be able to follow the plot if you blink) made with After Effects and Photoshop. Dark humor, comic book styled characters, and a noiresque atmosphere were created to best present the story of The Pig. What’s going on with The Pig? If you’re a vegetarian, you probably won’t like it.

Spyros Dahlias is an artist, animator, and a few

other things, most of all an eternal rebel against his and other people’s boredom. “Seven in the morning, again. I finished my clubbing at seven in the morning again. The sun is rising over Athens. Feeling bored, so bored. It is not tonight’s DJ. I guess I won’t be doing the management stuff I studied so far; I’ll do media in New York.

Standard bio on myself not included. Whatever dude, my mom will always think I’m the coolest.”

I’M NOT SURE IF I’M BEING HONEST WITH YOU (IN FACT, I KNOW I’M NOT), OR CALLING MYSELF AT AGE 13 (2 min 14 sec)

The origin of this piece stemmed from a desire to explore my ability to be honest with myself, and in turn with the viewer(s) of the piece. Realizing I had been employing a sort of ‘censored honesty’ in many prior pieces, I felt a need to explain and explore the limits of honesty in my work. Not to say I had been dishonest, but most of my prior work had skirted around or only vaguely touched on self-exploration, with extremely calculated amounts of information being revealed to the viewer.

Sarah S. Laborde is an American video artist and documentarian based in Brooklyn, New York. Largely working in documentary and 1- or 2-channel video installations, she strives to explore the intersection of modern technologies with memory, nostalgia, childhood, self-exploration, and the limits/boundaries/definitions of honesty.

Her work is fueled by and attempts to find “truth” or “truths” in her life and the world around her.

PASEWALK

A HARLEM MOTHER

LUCY’S TERRACE

(2 min 40 sec)

(10 min 30 sec)

(4 min 20 sec)

Pasewalk is a brief but exciting journey through time and space that takes viewers on a digital ride through an analog reality. It was created by manipulating native resolution cell phone video, with its distinct image quality, resulting in mimicry of sorts of the 8mm film aesthetic.

Pasewalk was created for the online course Avant Garde and the Moving Image, taught by Nicole Koschmann.

In 1998, 18 year-old Latraun Parker made a documentary about his family and the harshness of growing up in Harlem. Eight years later, he was shot dead on the street. Today, his mother Jean fights youth gun violence and helps other parents survive the pain of losing a child through her organization, Harlem Mothers. A Harlem Mother tells its story from the dual perspectives of mother Jean and her son Latraun, using footage from his documentary.

Lucy’s Terrace experimentally documents an urban retreat. Comprised of optically printed handmade frames, the film features plants gleaned from the artist’s neighbor’s terrace: blueeyed grass, boxwood, cinquefoil, clematis, rose, salvia, valerian, and verbena. The music, from contemporary composer David Froom, and used with his permission, features the filmmaker’s neighbor, classical flautist Lucy Goeres.

Ivana Todorovic is in love with life and the

Originally from the Ozarks, she lived and worked in Seattle before moving to New York City to pursue filmmaking at The New School. Her films have been screened at several festivals, including Madcat, Women in the Director’s Chair, the Southwest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and New Filmmakers NYC.

Angela Anderson is writing her MA thesis on

Deleuzian perspectives on the underground dance club. A single-screen version of Pasewalk was shown at the Weiterstadt Open Air film festival in Weiterstadt, Germany this past summer.

Angela lives in Berlin, where she works as an editor and videographer as well as being the production coordinator for Forum Expanded, the experimental and installation section of the Berlin International Film Festival.

camera, and thus became a documentary filmmaker. She recently graduated from the Documentary Media Studies certificate program at The New School. Her first short Everyday Life of Roma Children From Block 71 (2007) received the Best Short Award at the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival in 2007, and her second film Rapresent (2008) received Best National Award at XVIII International Festival of Ethnological Film in Belgrade, Serbia in 2009. Rapresent can be viewed online at http://vimeo.com/5227124.

Caryn Cline is a filmmaker, teacher, and gardener.

JURORS Laura Bardier has been the curator of Jonathon Carroll's private art collection since 2008. From 2004 to 2008, she worked as a curator and production coordinator at PAN | Palazzo delle Arti Napoli to create a model for a distributed network of artists, critics, and theorists, integrating media production with training in theory and research. Her personal research is directed toward the possibilities of audiovisual media as a vehicle for exhibition, and communication and an interpretative tool in art museums. She has an MFA degree in New Media Curating from the Transart Institute in collaboration with Donau Universität (Krems, Austria).

Kóan Jeff Baysa, MD is an international medical

LEBOWSKI, MY CZECH WIFE AND ME (20 min)

American journalist Matt Reynolds and his foreign bride seem destined for happiness, but no sooner does their honeymoon end than Matt discovers Lucie hates his favorite movie, The Big Lebowski.

Unwilling to chalk this up to a mere difference in taste, Matt embarks on a mission to change Lucie's mind, in the process testing whether their marriage is on solid ground. Although a comedy, Lebowski, My Czech Wife and Me addresses the very real problem of what happens when you love something your spouse hates.

Matt Reynolds is a journalist and documentary

filmmaker. He covered post-communist central Europe from 2002 to 2008 for a number of British and American media, including Reuters and the New York Times. He makes a living as a freelance editor and cameraman. He is working on his first feature film, The Great Chicken Wing Hunt, about a band of misfits searching for the world’s best Buffalo wing.

DAYTON EXPRESS

THE REED TRAIN

(website) also exhibited in the lobby

(10 min 30 sec)

Dayton Express: Bosnian Railroads and the Paradox of Integration is an interactive documentary designed as a space for examining the nationalist partition in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Combining video, stills, text, and audio, the project uses the country's railway system as a metaphor for social disintegration and the problems of reconciliation.

Taking into account the country’s complex negotiation of real space, Dayton Express turns to virtual space as an alternative domain for public discourse. Employing new media’s interactive capabilities as a tool for intervention, it attempts to mediate in spaces where communication gaps lead to a myriad of misconceptions about both past and present.

A film essay that examines the aftermath of violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina through the prism of railway travel. Once a complex network that provided connections to many European cities, Bosnia’s railroad suffered immense destruction in the early 1990s. The demolition of hundreds of kilometers of rail tracks has left many small towns and villages isolated from the rest of the world. Driven by a largely autobiographical text from one the country’s most promising young writers, Nihad Hasanovic, the film blends the personal and political in a story about trains and coming of age in a city under siege.

Amir Husak

Amir Husak Born in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Amir

Husak left his home country in 1992 due to armed conflict. Being a refugee entailed a slow process of integration and adaptation, which triggered his interest in media making as means of overcoming communication barriers and other borders, real or imagined. His works have been exhibited at such diverse venues as the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (USA), TV Cultura (Brazil), FTV Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Rüsselsheim Kultur im Sommer (Germany), Small Frames (USA), and Detroit Docs (USA). Husak recently received his MA in Media Studies at the New School, where he works in the Documentary Studies certificate program.

Honorable Mentions Joshua Bohoskey The Knoll David Gutierrez Camps 175 Jamey Hadden Binary Conversation Tal Shamir The Spirit Of a School Hui-Fen Yu Can’t Stay Away

curator and advisor who connects art and science, having credentials as a physician, a Whitney Museum ISP alumnus, and a member of AICA. He is a member of the boards of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and the Art Omi International Artist Colony and serves on the special advisory board for the Chelsea Art Museum. He is a creative advisor for 3 Legged Dog, a media and theater group. While conducting clinical research on olfactory stimuli and potential beneficial effects on memory disorders, he lectures about and curates contemporary art exhibitions about the senses.

Maryann DeLeo, the Academy Award winning director of Chernobyl Heart, has been a documentary filmmaker for over 25 years. She worked as a video instructor, grant administrator, investigative producer, editor, camera operator, and soundwoman while reporting and documenting international stories from Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, Russia, Mexico, Guatemala, China, Angola, Korea, and Iraq. She has received two National Emmys and a Cable Ace Award. Her work has premiered at festivals all over the world and been featured at the American Museum of the Moving Image and the Museum of Modern Art and on HBO and NBC. Amanda McDonald Crowley, executive director

at Eyebeam in New York, is a cultural worker, curator, and facilitator, who specializes in creating new media and contemporary art events that encourage cross-disciplinary practice and collaboration. Amanda was executive producer for ISEA2004 (International Symposium for Electronic Arts) and was associate director of the 2002 Adelaide Biennial in Australia and co-chaired the working group that curated the exhibition and symposium conVerge: where art and science meet.

She also was director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT). She writes for journals such as Artlink, RealTime, Sarai Reader, and ArtAsiaPacific.