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

on-line:
Alan Bigelow
SAVING THE ALPHABET (www.SavingTheAlphabet.com) 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.

VIDEO CALIBRATION (www.recordingproductions.com/videocal/)

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.

Installed at Hallwalls both nights:
Gregg Biermann
SPHERICAL COORDINATES (8:30 min. looped video, 2005)
Spherical Coordinates is a new work in a series of digitally animated pieces that rework iconic Hollywood films. The camera moves in a variety of ways examining the inside of a 3D animated sphere on the inside of which a scene of PSYCHO is wrapped.

Joe Merrell
4 VIDEOS: CORNER, LOS ANGELES; FIRE, SAN BERNARDINO; PIER & BEACH, SANTA MONICA; and DRIVE, LOS FELIZ TO BOYLE HEIGHTS (video of various duration, 2005)
These pieces are very different stylistically but united in the sense that the visual structure of the original material in each video is altered to reveal or imply things about the time and space depicted.

Arzu Ozkal Telhan
UNATTENDED BODY (30 min. video, 2003)
Unattended Body discusses how an existence at its most banal (Heidegger) can be simply perceived as a disturbance or a potential threat if it does not act in its expected way for the society.

Zach Poff and N.B. Aldrich
INTERACTIVE SOUNDSCAPE DESIGNER
was designed in 2005 as an interface for the public presentation of a collective database, or archive, of audio field and found recordings. The goal is to encourage members of a participating community to collect and contribute sound recordings of importance to the individual contributor and to their local culture as a means of artistic expression and mutual reflection.


FRIDAY, JANUARY 27 AT HALLWALLS
(2 performances and 2 videos)

Josephine Anstey, Dave Pape, Sarah Bay-Cheng
HUMAN TRIALS (20 min. VR performance)
HUMAN TRIALS is a networked virtual reality (VR) drama and an environment for supported improvisation.æ A participant is networked into the virtual environment with human actors who lead him/her through virtual locations, moral choices and emotional states. The story-scape is a surreal quest, sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing: imagine TarkovskyÍs Stalker crossed with Alice in Wonderland crossed with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The participant also interacts with computer-controlled characters and smart sets. The participantÍs reactions are logged, interpreted psychologically, and affect the charactersÍ behavior, the presentation of further challenges, and the ending.

// SHORT INTERMISSION //

Liss Platt
LONG TIME COMING (4:35 min. video, 2005)
Long Time Coming is comprised entirely of remixed audio and video clips from the last period of the 2004 Stanley Cup Final (Calgary vs. Tampa Bay). What emerges is the sexualized nature of the dance-„where seductive glances give way to serious bump and grind, and a lifetime of longings are finally fulfilled. This is CanadaÍs national pastime as youÍve never seen it before.

Bill Brown & Thomas Comerford
CHICAGO DETROIT SPLIT (8 min. 16mm projection and performance, 2005)
Brown and Comerford find the common ground of shared street names in their respective cities, yet they employ the unslit 8mm format to juxtapose these like-named tracts of land„the juxtapositions allowing for chance encounters across time and space between these two midwestern cities. (featuring live accompaniment by Bill Brown and Carl Lee)

virocode and Torsten Z. Burns
THE LAUGHING DEATH (15 min. video, 2006)
A mythic fable of political contamination told in a video context. The narrative proceeds through a linked series of reconstructed stories with social overtones.

To view publication, please visit our archives.

Some publications related to this event:
RESOLUTIONS - 2006
January, 2006 - 2006