Hallwalls' annual two-day festival of new experimental films, videos, performances, web-based work, and sound art:

overview • on-line • installations • program 1 • program 2 • after-party

on-line:

Alan Bigelow
SAVING THE ALPHABET (www.SavingTheAlphabet.com) is an interactive story created in Flash, with a runtime (depending on the user) of approximately 5 minutes. It has been online since August 2005.

Recording Productions
VIDEO CALIBRATION (www.recordingproductions.com/videocal/) is a "moving" filmstrip that was created by marrying two historical formats: experimental video and the traditional filmstrip. Nearly all the images were captured at The Experimental Television Center/Owego, NY and later assembled using FLASH technology. Visit www.recordingproductions.com for more information.

Dave Pape
IT'S A WONDERFUL PROPERTY (resumbrae.com/wonderful/) explores the difficult-to-describe boundaries between right and wrong, when it comes to modern copyright law and the appropriation of material thought to be part of the public commons. It takes the form of two infinite, automatically generated, real-time video streams. Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE entered the public domain in 1974, when its copyright was not renewed. Nevertheless, Republic Pictures asserted control via copyright on the story on which the film was based (and the musical score). Hence, any derivative work that shows the non-free storyline of this "free" film is presumably a violation. Free (?) extracts a constantly meandering tiny fragment of the frames of It's A Wonderful Life. The fragments are too small to reproduce the storyline. This is what remains of the film's "public-domain-ness" It might be legal. Piracy (?) continuously mixes hundreds of frames from many sequences of the film. The individual sampled sequences reveal the storyline, and so would be copyright violations. It's probably illegal.