post memory: makeshift memorials in contemporary art exhibition

curated by yaelle amir, the exhibition features artists investigating alternative approaches to the process of memorializing, representing “various outcomes of remembrance through a mediated history.” using vicarious experience as their source, the artists enlist a variety of disciplinary practices such as performance, intervention, and mapping, to redefine the act of commemoration of people and events that have faded from collective consciousness. Participating artists: Binh Danh, Joseph DeLappe, David Maisel, Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry, Emily Prince, Benjamin Tiven, Anna Von Mertens.
EFA Project Space, 323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10018

reflections in a chinese eye blog

reflections - abrupt change in the direction of propagation of a wave that strikes the boundary between different mediums.

visual art as cultural memory in modern china

Interdisciplinary Symposia
(Oct. 15-16, Oct. 22-23, 1999)

In Conjunction with
Picturing Power:
Posters of the Cultural Revolution

October 6-22, Hopkins Hall Gallery and Corridor,
The Ohio State University, College of the Arts

Organized by
Xiaomei Chen and Julia F. Andrews
Sponsored by the Mershon Center

With major support from The Ohio State
University Office of Research and Graduate School Interdisciplinary Seminar Grant Program

Co-sponsored by The Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities (ICRPH), College of Humanities, College of the Arts, Hopkins Hall Gallery and Corridor, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL), Division of Comparative Studies, Department of History of Art, Department of Art, Department of History, Huntington Archive, and AsianAmerican Student Services.

avoiding myth & message: australian artists and the literary world

7 April - 12 July 2009

avoiding myth & message is primarily an mca collection based project featuring artists whose works have been informed by australian literature. the exhibition looks at some of the major themes within both the literary and visual traditions and considers where the two streams of creativity overlap thematically: the landscape/interior, text and image,urban life, politics and the personal.

writing from art

Memories of a Certain Time: Tate Film Program (2009)

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's film, Atomic Park (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, France 2004, 9 min). Also shown are La Jetée (Chris Marker, UK 1962, 28 min) Spiral Jetty (Robert Smithson, UK 1970, 32 min) Toute la mémoire du monde (Alain Resnais, France 1956, 20 min) (Toute la Mémoire du Monde (All the World's Memory) (Part One) (Part Two) is a short documentary by director Alain Resnais about the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. With its long tracking shots through cavernous library hallways, it imagines the Bibliothèque Nationale as a forbiddingly inhuman landscape in which man attempts to imprison "knowledge" in an effort to counter the limits of his own memory. Only in the act of individual selection -- a single patron choosing a specific text -- is there hope that this undifferentiated mass of knowledge can be redeemed, as the reader makes discriminating use of the collective national memory for the fulfillment of a constructive individual purpose). From BA to Rio, Paris to Kyoto, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster moves through eleven of the world’s most famous cities to create short portraits of urbanism. Filmed in public places like parks, beaches and even deserts, Parc Central (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, France 2006, 50 min), takes the viewer on a visual, auditory and poetic journey through urban spaces. Both films at this screening use monologues as their central device, where the actors' thoughts are voiced over the film and not spoken. Gonzalez-Foerster's melancholy Central (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, France 2001, 10 min) follows a girl waiting at a ferry terminal in Hong Kong, and Georges Perec and Bernard Queysanne's Un homme qui dort (Georges Perec and Bernard Queysanne, France 1974, 93 min), set in Paris, is a classic about a young man who retreats into himself. In Gonzalez-Foerster's Riyo (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, France 1999, 10 min), a teenage girl calls a boy from the riverside in Kyoto. But as the conversation goes on, our focus shifts from the pair to the cityscape around them. Two lovers are also separated in Zhang Ke Jia's Still Life (Zhang Ke, China/Hong King 2006, 111 min), and the film uses their story to reflect on the changes a new dam has wrought on the Yangtze river.

David Blair: Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991)

This was the first video ever transmitted on the Internet in 1993 all 85 mins.

"Wax" is very likely the oddest film I've ever seen. Marvelously, beautifully, lyrically, and profoundly intellectually stimulating in all respects. Breathtaking in its scope and achievement. But very odd. 

I have read medical reports containing sodium pentathol interviews and transcripts of schizophrenics' monologues. I have read memoirs and fiction by schizophrenics and hard drug users. I have read Surrealist and Beat Movement literature. I have read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. I have read the visionary poetry of Charles Williams and H.D.

I have watched films by Kenneth Anger and David Lynch and Maya Daren. I have read Yoruba ethnic literature from West Africa and studied Aleister Crowley's skryings on the Enochian aethyrs. I have read H. P. Lovecraft and also Kenneth Grant's post-Crowleyan magickal writings describing journeys behind the Tree of Life which would have preempted H.P.L.'s usual nightmares had he but known of them.

"Wax" stands tall in that company. A hypnotic, hallucinatory, purely poetic fusion of words, images, political ideas, and mystical transformations, nothing quite resembles it. "Pi" (1998) tried for something as distinctive, but that film gave us a glowering, paranoid, tortured vision shot in deliberately painful close-ups. "Wax" makes a complete contrast in its joyful freedom of eloquence in narration and visuals.

"Wax" enhances life while critiquing it. The film employs early, simple computer graphics. It juggles idiosyncratic desert architecture, prosaic photography, and absurd juxtapositions of common images.

It tells a story of Middle Eastern honey bees along with offering a hard view of the original U.S. military actions against Iraq in 1991 (a time so simple in retrospect as to seem the good old days). It links Los Alamos with transformations in consciousness. "Wax" leaps beyond the merely political in its luminous metaphors for human existence.

You can find stronger films, more beautiful films, more linguistically spry films, but you will probably never find anything quite like this fireworks display of language and image. Think "2001: A Space Odyssey" on a home movie budget. Your grasp of reality (and cinema) may never feel the same.

The movie starts out with James Maker, who is a member of something called the Supernormal Film Society whos goal is to film the spirits of the dead walking among the living. There's some background on this which seems largely irrelevant. Then we meet his grandson, Jacob Maker who is the main character of this story. Jacob is a programmer who works on aircraft simulation programs. He's also a beekeeper of Mesopotamian bees he inherited from his grandfather.

So, after a bit the bees drill a hole in his head and put in a television, which the bees use to start showing him things. About this time, a statue of Kane outside his house kills the statue of Able, and Kane is marked with the X symbol. Then at work, Jacob wonders why his co-workers never wonder what happens to the missiles they launch that don't come back (never mind that a programmer probably doesn't deal with missile launches), and he realizes that they turn into flying saucers which fly to the moon where the dead live.

About this time, the bees start showing him things on the television and he makes a big pilgrimage to the Garden of Eden Cave which the bees tell him is the entrance to the world of the dead. Jacob then realizes that the bees are actually the dead of the future, and goes to the cave. Although it is a 40 miles walk through the desert, he makes the journey a bit easier by becoming a bomb part of the way. He then learns that he has to kill someone to fulfill his destiny, which is to be reborn in a wax body that the bees make in the cave.

When arriving at the cave, Jacob learns that the cave is actually the entrance to a planet inside of our planet where the bees live. There, he dies and goes to join the world of the dead. For a while, he becomes the X symbol. Then he becomes a poem in the language of Kane. Then he travels to some other planets, including the Planet of Television. Next he becomes a rival beekeeper of his grandfather. Then he decides it's time to fulfill his destiny, which is to kill someone. So, he becomes a bomb and blows up two Iraqi soldiers in a tank. Then he becomes the X symbol with himself, his grandfather's arch enemy, and the two soldiers he blew up.

As far as I can tell, this is a movie about a weapons manufacturer who feels haunted by the souls of the people his weapons have killed, and eventually has a schizophrenic meltdown.

To see full move go to filmmakers website Webwax.

Wax Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees is the first independent feature film to have been edited on a digital non-linear system. It is also the first film (independent or otherwise) to have been re-formatted as hypertext and posted on the internet. The New York Times recognized the accomplishment, and ran the article "Cult Film is First on the Internet" in its May 23, 1993 business section.

Waxweb is a hypermedia version of the film "Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees" by David Blair.

The online version of Waxweb has been hosted since 1994 by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. It is an 85 minute movie in 80,000 pieces.

In the story at the centre of Waxweb Jacob Maker is a beekeeper who designs flight simulators. "One day, the past arrives out of the future, and Jacob enters". The online version uses Realmedia format and enables users to watch the sequences in the order determined by choices made at every step of the way through the story. There is also a CD Romversion.
The production has received support from the New York State Council for the Arts. Between 1995 and 1997, technical support (and inspiration for this final version) was provided byRACE Laboratory, at the University of Tokyo. An early version of Waxweb ran as a MOO, technically supported by Brown University Graphics Lab students (Tom Meyer, Suzanne Hader, David Klaphaak, and others). Additional software for that version was provided by Eastgate Systems with additional assistance from Melynda Barnhardt.

In the movie David Blair plays Jacob Maker, Meg Savlov plays Melissa Maker, Florence Ormezzano plays Allelle Zillah, William Burroughs plays James "Hive" Maker and Dr. Clyde Tombaugh is himself.

The movie was created in co-production with Das Kleine Fernsehspiel, a program of ZDF Channel 2 of German Public Television.

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David Blair's Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees is the first independent feature film to have been edited on a digital non-linear system. It is also the first film (independent or otherwise) to have been re-formatted as hypertext and posted on the Internet. The New York Times recognized the accomplishment, and ran the article "Cult Film is First on the Internet" in its May 23, 1993 business section.

"Cult Film Is a First On Internet

As historic moments go, this one, it could be argued, was closer to "Watson, come here!" than to another Saturday night at the movies.

A small audience scattered among a few dozen computer laboratories gathered Saturday evening to watch the first movie to be transmitted on the Internet -- the global computer network that connects millions of scientists and academic researchers and hitherto has been a medium for swapping research notes and an occasional still image.

Yes, the cult movie, "Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees," had to be reduced from full color to a blurry black and white. And true, the spotty audio occasionally went silent. But coming as companies in the cable TV, telephone and computer industries are hot on the trail of 500-channel, all-digital TV, let history record that Saturday night marked the first baby steps in that direction.

The movie, an 85-minute feature by David Blair about a beekeeper who ends up being kept by the bees, has attracted a cult following since its release in 1992. Mr. Blair transmitted it Saturday night from a film production studio in midtown Manhattan. He played it on a VCR and fed it into a computer that converted it into digital form and fed it into the Internet. Promises, Promises."

Director Blair pieced Wax together over a period of six years, writing the film as he edited it, letting creative accidents and "directed random readings at the public library" (as Blair puts it) guide its creation. The result is a work much like the early structuralist films of British director Peter Greenaway, an obsessive, artificial history which has been fastidiously detailed with fragments of real and imagined facts.

The film is set at a flight simulation factory in Alamagordo, New Mexico, where Jacob Maker (Wax's narrator, played by Blair) is a computer programmer. Jacob designs gun sight displays and lives with his wife Melissa near the weapons testing range. He is also a beekeeper, whose "Mesopotamian" bees have been handed down to him from his grandfather, Zoltan. These bees are not ordinary bees; they have the power to put thoughts and images into Jacob's mind, and Jacob soon realizes that he is able to personally identify with the weapons he is helping to create. One day the bees put a special "television" in Jacob's mind. Through the bee television Jacob is subject to a bizarre series of fictions and hallucinations, and is finally lead by the bees to their subterranean home: an enormous cave below the Alamagordo desert. In the cave it is revealed to him that he must actually become a weapon and destroy his "target" in Iraq, before rebirth in a new body.

Wax wears its low-budget origin on its sleeve (it was shot on video) but has enjoyed an art-house reputation due to its wild imagination, its hybrid media existence as part-film-part-Internet-site, and its similarity to works of postmodern literature. Enthusiasts of Greenaway's early films, and readers of Jorges Louis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Thomas Pynchon, should look this one up. all movie.

Jonas Mekas: Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR (2008)

Forces of time, memory, change, and the human condition collide in Jonas Mekas' compelling work Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR (2008). The work's title refers to the historical time when the world watched as Mekas's home country of Lithuania fought for independence from the stronghold of Soviet rule. Comprised of four chapters with a total running time of 4 hours and 46 minutes, it will be presented in four parts with short breaks for reflection, as a chronological overview of Lithuania's birth as an independent nation.