Wednesday, April 23, 2025 at 7:00 pm
free
This survey of videos includes those that I have made within the past five years. A few older videos are also included that may help contextualize the ideas that animate the more recent ones. I use impersonal techniques (mainly the sorceries of coding) along with AI tools (a strangely ambiguous engagement) in order to create time-based, story-like forms. The Grotesques, as I call them, divide into two categories: first, there are turbulent patterns of images made using algorithmic remixes of pre-existing films and, second, there are the synthetic creatures made using visual AI's simulation engines. Specifically, I write code in th Processing Language to achieve the algorithmic patterns; I use both Midjourney and Runway AI platforms as tools for conjuring creature-like presences.
El pelele, after Goya
year 2024, length 2:18
This film collage is composed of images generated with Midjourney AI. During that generative process the text prompt repeatedly described and directed the AI to reimagine an actual painting by Francisco de Goya titled "El pelele.” The original painting (1791) was Goya's design for a tapestry that was never made.
Sine Wave Grotesque
year 2005-2025, length 4:18
Facial expressions are under the creepy control of a sine wave marionettist.
Storming C
year 2012, length 10:13
This work algorithmically transforms the sampled and processed frames from a YouTube tourist video. Cascading throughout “Storming C” are visual fragments of a mariachi dance publicly performed by a child. The fragments rearrange themselves continuously into dazzling patterns that dance to the sound of Terry Riley's “In C”.
Howl
year 2009, length 4:07
This work is the precise visualization of an act of attention. For it, I utilized my custom software tool, “Unwriting,” to explore a single scene from a classic 1936 Shanghai film by the director Fei Mu, “Blood on Wolf Mountain.” This involved improvising the scene’s playback in real time while recording the resultant temporal patterns.
Probes and Burrows
year 2021, length 3:38
Swarms of individual pixel-sized creatures drift, clump, dash, probe and forage for food. Usually they gang together to burrow into holes that show up here and there. Their behaviors reveal their world as a harsh and mostly unyielding two-dimensional plane.
Cage Match Refractions
year 2021, length 4:50
Sound events populate an MMA spectacle with loud squeaks of skin sweat, startled ahs, gasps, grunts, and exhales. An MMA fighter pose, captured as a frozen snapshot, sinks and decomposes into a watery vegetal state.
Pilgrimage to the Commissure
year 2024, length 7:18
An isolated figure is continually buffeted by nerve-wave movements encountered during an imaginary, internal journey to the corpus callosum of the brain.
The following five animations are part of an ongoing series, “Roberto Matta’s Infinite Painting”. Each work has been developed from AI-generated images and video clips.
Pop Eye
year 2024, length 2:12
This eye-popping painting prefers itself to be a sailing ship, a befuddled sailor, a dancer in delirium, a squeezed accordion, some stamping feet, or a scream out of nowhere in particular.
Change Blindness
year 2024, length 2:18
The situation depicted here is crowded with all sorts of minor details. Nonetheless, an event takes place that you can’t miss.
The Storm in the Painting
year 2024, length 5:38
This painting is a catastrophe! The swollen, sagging canvas is pure expression of flow and nothing but flow.
Restless at the Painting Factory
year 2025, length 1:20
Seizing an opportunity in the brief lull between factory shifts, a limbless creature attempts a glorious escape.
The Graveyard Shift
year 2025, length: 5:00
Factory workers are busy assembling Roberto Matta's infinite painting which is taking an infinitely long time. One night the painting unexpectedly gives birth to a child.
Roberto Matta's Infinite Painting, a Slideshow
year 2024, silent: no audio, length 2:30 that runs as a continuous loop
This slideshow presents, without sound and without elaboration, a selection of thirty images generated by the Midjourney AI. The instructions to the AI were to generate each painting in the style of the renowned Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, and to situate each painting in a decrepit warehouse or factory space.
BIO:
Barbara Lattanzi's art-making roots are in Chicago where she attended the School of the Art Institute, studying with Imagist painter Ray Yoshida and attending cinema lectures of Stan Brakhage. Several years later, she moved to Buffalo to study with Hollis Frampton and Tony Conrad at Center for Media Study at SUNY-Buffalo. During subsequent years in Buffalo, 1980s to mid-90s, she participated in a creative and critical milieu supported by Hallwalls, CEPA, Squeaky Wheel and many other art collectives and community initiatives. More recently, Barbara Lattanzi taught electronic media art (2006-2020) as a tenured professor at New York State College of Ceramics, Alfred University. Her films, videos, Internet art, and generativ software have been screened and exhibited at such venues as Buffalo International Fil Festival, Microscope Gallery (NYC), Rhizome, Whitney Museum of American Art, XCÈNTRIC 2020 (Barcelona), among many others.
