The Blue Plate– Daniel Pillis (Blacksburg, VA, USA)

An animated and interactive experience about the history of computer graphics, virtual humans, and the digital era. This version of the animation is a looping capture of an interactive leap motion controlled environment composed of historical looping computer generated animations. The main character, a A Computer Generated Hand, was the first 3D model and animation made by Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation. The hand travels through a Youtube playlist (https://www.youtube.com/user/VintageCG) downloaded and reconstructed as an interactive environment. 120+ extracted and looping historical animations. The title takes its name from an object in E.M. Forester’s short story “The Machine Stops” written in 1909, telling of a future world where humans live underground and only communicate through a “blue plate”, a tablet type screen that lets you talk to people in distant places.

Daniel Gene Pillis is a queer artist and media archaeologist who works with robotics, computer graphics and large scale installations. They make work about the technology of reality, investigating the phenomenology of computing, the metaphysics of mixed reality, and the contemporary nature of the human experience through a queer, technologically informed lens. Thinking about gender and robots, empathy and virtual reality, and the affective dimensions of artificial intelligence, they investigate the ontological status of objects, images, and data as they relate to time, identity, culture and community. They are a co-founder of Robot Museum, a virtual reality robotics environment and pop up exhibition program for “robotics as art” based in Pittsburgh, PA. Pillis hold a B.A. degree from Rutgers in Cognitive Science and English Literature, and an M.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University, where they worked under the supervision of Ivan E. Sutherland, considered the father of computer graphics and virtual reality. Pillis has exhibited work at the Warhol Museum, (Pittsburgh, PA) the Leslie Lohman Museum of LGBT Art, (NYC), Newark Penn Station, (Newark, NJ) and have performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, (Cleveland, OH), Open Engagement International Conference (Pittsburgh PA) and the Theatre for the New City in the East Village (NYC), as well as numerous other galleries and internet venues. 

Koala at a rebellious age-Mikio Saito  (Sapporo, Japan)

In this video work, we can see 3DCG animated koala, which has an expressionless eye and we can’t tell what he is thinking – and the nails are sharp and ferocious. It looks as though human being zips inside. He notices that we observe him thorough a lens, and suddenly changes his tune unexpectedly in an attitude of threatening.

Mikio Saito (born in 1978) is a Sapporo-based visual artist with a background in literature and cinematography. He studied literature and art history at the University of Waseda in Tokyo, Japan (graduated in 2000) and studied Fine arts at Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany (graduated in 2007) and holds Master of Fine Arts by Prof. Mark Leckey.

Mikio works mostly with video installation. He combines hand-drawn animation, photographed images and computer graphics, all in a highly individual way. “My interest in making art is to explore some common/similar ideas in different cultures. Local ideas are often related to a certain part of universal at the same time. I’d like to highlight the contrast of little difference and commonness between different traditions.”

Fahrenheit 4.33 – Fred L’Epee (Switzerland)

Contemporary mythology as the representation of a catharsis. A thousand variations from human vacuum. Translated by the definition of our identities which became amorphous. Stasis. The alteration of our psyche. Vertigo. An existential schism. The Labyrinth built by Daedalus. Death is not an end in itself. Perhaps an inertia. Without reproduction. Neither transposition.

Fred L’Epee is filmmaker and visual artist. His films and visual works has been shown in several international film festivals, cinemas, symposiums, juried screenings, numerous solo/group exhibitions. He’s working and living between Switzerland, Greece and France. Founder of Helicon Films with co-producers: Ed Alvarado and Jean-Baptiste Lozac’h. Indie Film Label of Cinematography and Sound design.

SELF HELP– Emilie Crewe (Vancouver, BC, Canada)

SELF HELP features close-up images of an assortment of books being “thumbed through” or flipped through. As the video progresses, the object of the book takes on a sculptural and landscape-like characteristic. As pages flip by, fragments of text are highlighted, offering the viewer a spontaneous poetic narrative. The audience may piece together snippets of words, creating a different viewing experience with each screening.

Emilie Crewe (b. 1987, Quebec City, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist working in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her work often takes the form of video installation, single-channel video, multi-channel video and sketch-work (drawings, collections & archives). She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. Her artwork is exhibited internationally in galleries, museums, artist-run centres, experimental film/video festivals, and as public art.

Select exhibition history includes the AC Institute in New York, NY (solo), the Zhou B. Art Center in Chicago, IL, the Khyber Institute of Contemporary Art in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the Governor’s Island Art Fair in New York, NY (solo). Screenings include ‘The Labor Party’ at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA, the Chicago Underground Film Festival ‘Salonathon’, OK.Video FLESH at the National Gallery of Indonesia, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in Hawick, UK, and ‘Accompanied by Image’ at High Concept Laboratories in Chicago, Illinois.

In 2013/14, Emilie was one of ten Canadian artists to receive a City of Vancouver Public Art Commission as part the Reconciliation Platforms series, which was awarded the Americans for the Arts Public Network Award.

Her 2016 public art video, (A Sense of Place), was commissioned by the City of Vancouver and exhibited at Terry Fox Plaza (BC Place), CBC Plaza, TELUS Gardens Video Screen, Robson & Granville DualLive! Screens, The Pacific Cinemathque and Vancity Theatre.

Strings and nāga – Aaron Higgins (Tulsa, OK, USA)

Traditions about nāgas are very common in all the Buddhist countries of Asia. Nāga, is the Sanskrit word for a spirit being that takes the form of a very great snake. In Tibet, the nāga can take the form of a dragon serpent living in lakes or underground streams as a sort of deity that can affect weather patterns and conjure thunderstorms.

In 2010, I traveled to China and Tibet and brought along a book of Buddhist philosophies and teachings that used the nāga, or dragon, as a metaphor for fear. It went on to suggest that we as individuals must meet our fear, we must meet our dragon and find the edges of our self and grow as conscious beings. This was an attractive analogy to me, I saw a truth or value in it that was familiar.

It’s easy correlating this concept to how I experience the creative process. I am aware of the fear that lurks on a blank sheet of paper, a blank canvas, digital or otherwise. The creative process can cause anxiety at times, as do change and life experiences. It takes nerve to leap into what is unknown or unfamiliar, to make that first mark and meet your dragon.

When starting to work with video and moving images, I first was interested in recording somewhat random physical phenomena such as smoke, the surface of water, and dripping paint. In this series, I began experimenting with code and mathematical expressions to introduce additional elements of randomness and unpredictability to the work. I recognize this as a kind of collaboration with the software and view this process along the lines of abstract expressionism and action painting or notions of automatism in terms of automating the “machine” through code.

Born in the U.S. and working in Oklahoma, Aaron M Higgins earned BFA & MFA degrees from The Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Art, Indiana University, in his hometown of Bloomington, IN. Investigating time-based media as an artform through lens-based capture methods, digital compositing techniques, and interactivity, Higgins explores abstracting source material into aesthetic expressions that focus more on experience than representation. His work has exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in: Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, New Jersey, New York, Portland (OR), Tulsa, Korea, as well as film and media festivals in Sweden, and the Netherlands.

Aaron presently serves as Assistant Professor and Area Head of Digital Media in the School of Art, Design, and Art History, at The University of Tulsa, OK

Takayna Hypostasis #2 –  Darryl Rogers (Tasmania, Australia)

Recorded in the depths of Tasmania’s Tarkine Rainforest (Takayna – indigenous name) this video work is an exploration of a deep sense of underlying oneness that is often felt when we encounter isolated places of natural sublime beauty. Neoplatonist’s argue that beneath the surface phenomena that present themselves to our senses are three higher spiritual principles or hypostases, each one more sublime than the preceding. Hypostasis therefore is the underlying state or underlying substance and is the fundamental reality that supports all else.

The  meta-personal experience of being in and at one with nature is said to conceptually provide a growing spiritual sensibility and existential meaningfulness. Darryl Rogers is a new media artist who works with video, installation, augmented reality and virtual imagery. Rogers endeavours to alter the constituent variables of space and time attempting to poke holes in the seemingly impervious materiality of the world around us. On encountering one of his time-based installations there is an immediate sense of disorientation, realizing that what is being observed seems to counter the familiar physics by which the world is known. It is this physical “non-reality” that Rogers explores conjuring characteristics of illusion, miracle, quantum mischief and the metaphysical.

Seeds – Shuvashis Das (College Station,Texas,USA)

Seeds is an audiovisual installation piece that replicates a growth system for ‘seed’ like creatures via interaction with the viewer. The interaction process alters the motion of the seeds and adds to their number until a threshold number is reached after which the number of seeds start to reduce. The idea with Seeds is to create a beautiful and visually attractive atmosphere where the viewer and the system are intertwined with each other by blending the notion of ‘to control’ and ‘to be controlled’.

Shuvashis Das is a multi-media artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in Bangladesh where art is a diverse tapestry of rich, colorful pieces that reflect the vibrant culture. At an early age, he had developed an attraction to technological advancement. After graduating from high school in Bangladesh, he came to the United States of America and was admitted to the prestigious Texas A&M University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering in 2013, and began pursuing an MFA degree in the Department of Visualization. His artwork focuses on generative techniques, sound art and programming based physical installations.

Swell Patterns – Sean Capone (Baltimore, MD, USA)

For the digital animation Swell Patterns, the boundaries of this unique screen act as a container and generator for intersecting systems of algorithmic patterns. Rendered as an ever-evolving 3D contour map, the sculptural textures evoke shifting visual scales: the turbulent flow of tidal forces, cyclical landscape formations and erosions, and fibrous networks of bodily tissues and capillaries

Sean Capone is a visual artist working primarily in digital animation, projection installation, and media art. His interest in “the intersection of moving image and the built environment” has led him to develop a diverse body of work across multiple fields, including public art commissions, artist residencies,  gallery & museum exhibitions, film & video festivals, and event & stage scenography.Sean received his MFA in Time Arts/Art & Tech from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Empyrean – Kalpana Subramanian (Buffalo, NY)

Empyrean is an abstract, meditative film that explores and celebrates the magical quality of cinematic light. This work revisits Brakhage, by studying his films as a source of light in themselves. Shot entirely on an i-phone the imagery is composed of layered images of dancing light on a projection window, captured during screening of various Brakhage’s 16mm film prints. In terms of process I was literally ‘filming’ at the altar of celluloid cinema, (kneeling at the projection booth window, i-phone in hand) intercepting the light from the projector refracting through the glass before it hit the screen. Light mediated is therefore an apt way to describe this intervention. It is also a personal comment/creative interpretation on Brakhagian aesthetics.

Kalpana Subramanian is an artist, filmmaker and researcher, currently pursuing a practice-based Ph.D. at the Department of Media, State University of New York at Buffalo. Her research explores transcultural frameworks of enquiry into the aesthetics of the moving image. Subramanian is also a children’s book author and a western classical vocalist.

Confluence (All the Nations of the Earth)– Michael Hall (Berkeley, CA)

The video depicts a paced compositing of the flags of 241 nations on the Earth joining to create one polychromatic, amalgamated flag, simultaneously representing all nations. In an age of increased isolationism, fanaticism and reactive nationalism, the abstracted design, as well as shared and opposing graphic elements of the flags, confuse and distort any simplistic national ensign and understanding. This project is targeted at blurring the boundaries of nationalism to expose the complexities of immigration and globalism and proposes a global emblem of our shared, planetary existence.

Michael Hall is an artist and educator whose work is concerned with finding empathy and complexity in situations that are often polarized and oversimplified. As an artist whose perspective was effected by his family’s military upbringing, he looks to add a more nuanced approach to necessarily critical but discordant conversations. Through painting, video and participatory works he addresses these dynamics within a larger, multifaceted cultural context: one of complicated family webs and communities, structural pedagogy, systematized aesthetics, quotidian nationalism, and the tenuous space between control and protection.

Hall received his BFA from the California College of the Arts and his MFA from Mills College. He currently lives and works in Berkeley, California. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at California State University, East Bay.

Symbiosis- Jon Chambers (Chicago,Il)

In Symbiosis, 3D scans of my body are rendered beyond their physical possibilities in surreal and nonrepresentational landscapes and spaces using data centers and nebulae as textures and shaders. Formal and perceptual relationships start to develop as we reflect on our own body’s control while interfacing and becoming enmeshed with digital realities: bodies as data are fluid, mutable, influenced and infinite. The video culminates into abstractness, where the parts become vague references of themselves and are integrated in the space.

Jon Chambers is an artist and educator based in Chicago, where he teaches media literacy, media art histories, net art, new media art (software + hardware) and video.  His work responds to experiences of saturation, obsessions and often humorous contradictions that emerge from our relationships with technology, virtuality and remoteness. He’s particularly interested in how we negotiate the duality of our digital and physical bodies within networked systems of consumerism, identity and future histories. Endearing and uncanny feelings in the work urge us to consider the streamlined technological interfaces (both hardware and software) we encounter everyday and where those interactions start to break down.

When The Body Is Present / When The Body Is Not Present- Ally Christmas (Athens, GA)

The antiseptic relationship our culture has with the dead creates the need to distort reality by disguising death’s pallor, involving a ritualistic process of pumping the body full of chemicals and transforming it into an imitation of its former self. Without a living agency, the body becomes a hollow vessel; ready for expelling, filling, and masking. By purposefully creating a fiction of repose, the mortician lures the viewer’s mind away from our finite mortality and toward something more easily digestible, though less tangible.

Ally Christmas (b. 1991 in Northern VA) is a visual artist currently living and working out of Athens, GA. After earning her BA in Photography from the University of Virginia in 2013, Christmas went on to stay at the school for another year as a recipient of the 5th Year Aunspaugh Fellowship. She is an active member of the Society for Photographic Education, from whom she received a Graduate Student Award in 2016 to attend their national conference. She is currently pursuing her Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Georgia in Photo/Video, and she has taught a number of courses at the college level – including Contemporary Video, Intro to Photo & Image Culture, and Art Criticism.

The Knife Cuts Two Ways – Angela Ferraiolo (New York)

The Knife Cuts Two Ways (2017) continues my interests in generative and
systems art. It was abstracted from the pop styles of comic books, music
festivals, and Otaku culture, but also inspired by Korean scroll
painting, flocking algorithms, modular installation, and the city of
Hong Kong. Bright colors, continual motion, and repeating patterns are
meant to engage viewers both up close and from a distance. Nearby,
Knife is full of small surprises, and tries to reward the attentive
viewer with small, continual variation. From a distance, Knife is meant
to feel like a huge, abstract comic book.

Angela Ferraiolo is a visual artist working with systems, noise,
randomness, and generative processes. Her work has been screened
internationally including SIGGRAPH, ISEA (Vancouver, Hong Kong), the New
York Film Festival, Courtisane, the Australian Experimental Film
Festival (Melbourne), and the International Conference of Generative Art
(Rome, Venice). New projects include further experiments in urban
screen, generative art, and ambient media.

Impossible Creature of a Digital Spirituality – Balam Soto (Hartford, CT)

Balam Soto creates contemporary, exploratory artworks that fuse low tech with high tech, including interactive art installations, public artworks, and video.  Balam works independently on the artistic and technical sides of his pieces, incorporating technologies, including custom software and electronics.

Mycolinguistics – Ash Coates (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia)

The languages and symbiotic relationships of plants, fungi and bacteria cultures, give rise to transformations of microorganisms, energy fluctuations, transmigration of cells and the distribution of nutrients within the environment and our bodies. It is these processes that influence and form the shapes, composition and psychedelic tones within my work. The paintings are a process of ritual and meditation on things both massive and microscopic, magic and scientific, internal and external.
Within my animations, the digital and handmade worlds of image making meet in a collision of pixels, molecules and cosmic energy to create a dialog regarding identity, our place within our environment and the impact of a technologically developing world on the way we interact and communicate within the environment. You stand as a voyeur overseeing the processes of the life and death of cells and the language of plants taking on visual forms. The unseen becomes visible and it allows time for contemplation on what it means to be a part of this complex and symbiotic network of cells and microorganisms.

http://ashcoates.blogspot.com.au

Ready, Set – Michael Lasater (Indiana, USA)
Ready, Set started with a snapshot, taken by my mother sometime in the 60s, of my uncle and father standing in a parking lot at the Eisenhower Museum in Abilene, Kansas. Their poses—my uncle stiff-armed, my father a bit more relaxed, hand in pocket—called to mind David Hockney’s subjects in American Collectors, and for that reason I remembered it and eventually took it up as a motif for composition. The piece is entirely self-referential and somewhat formalistic, a time-object referencing cubism and counterpoint, in the direction of Keith Haring.
http://michaellasater.net

Walking Cycle – Wenhua Shi (Massachusetts, USA)
Walking Cycle is an abstract audiovisual piece that celebrates the line, its quality, and its movements. This piece is a tribute to early abstract animation masters Len Lye and Hans Richter.
Wenhua Shi is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at UMass Boston. Originally trained as a doctor in China, Wenhua departed from the medical field and began working in radio and TV in his hometown of Wuhan. In 2009 he graduated with an MFA from Art Practice at the University of California at Berkeley. Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. http://shiwenhua.net

Planning a Starter Castle – Ellen Mueller (Massachusetts, USA)
This animation is a part of a larger body of work examining McMansions, the large ostentatious modern houses that are cheaply built and are often considered lacking in architectural integrity. There are stereotypical markers of affluence that regularly appear in home decor magazines: house plants, novel fixtures, statuary symbols of wealth (pineapples, lions, gargoyles), the latest trending furniture, and so on. These animations, created with Processing, emphasize the repetition and sameness that occurs in much of this advertising material.

Ellen Mueller has exhibited nationally and internationally as an interdisciplinary artist exploring issues related to the environment, hyperactive news media and corporate management systems. She creates experiences that engage with social and political issues through a variety of media.

Recent exhibitions include Americana at The Soap Factory in Minneapolis MN, Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe NM, and Direct Object/Direct Action at Threewalls, Chicago IL. Artist residencies include Ucross Foundation, Santa Fe Art Institute, Nes Artist Residency in Iceland, Virginia Center for Creative Art where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Ox-Bow, Coast Time, Signal Culture, Playa Fellowship Artist Residency, and Künstlerhaus Lukas (full scholarship, Germany, May 2017).

Transitions  –  Aurèle Ferrier (Zurich, Switzerland)
The work Transitions (2017) by Aurèle Ferrier examines the traces left by human civilisation -the conquest of the unwelcoming hostility of the desert ends in the surreal and hedonistic consumerism of Las Vegas. The camera leads us, with a menacing langour, through a backdrop of deserted city-outskirts. The buildings, cars and billboards speak of people’s dreams as they strive for a version happiness. The prevailingly eerie, apocalyptic mood draws you along on this filmic journey. These traces of humanity seem increasingly laughable and helpless, they vibrate with a peculiar melancholy. Where have the people disappeared to?

Aurèle Ferrier (*1975 in St.Gallen, CH) lives in Zurich. With his video and cinematic works, actions and interventions he explores the limits and connections between nature and civilization. „His video works display a calm contemplation and visual precision” (Alexandra Blättler, curator). He has exhibited on all the continents and won prizes, i.a. the Grand Jury Award for Experimental Short at the Slamdance Film Festival. He attained a BA in Theatre and an MA in Fine Arts at Zurich University of the Arts.

Maintenance – Katrazyna Randall and Dawn Nye  (Maine, USA)
This video is a loop designed for the Media Wall at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg VA. This piece shows a mysterious being maintaining a portal between two words. The piece moves slowly, and is meant to be noticed in snippets that form a whole, rather than watched from beginning to end.

Katrazyna Randall and Dawn Nye have been working collaboratively since 2001. They have screened their video and animation all over the United States as well as internationally. Ms. Randall is a combined media artist who uses traditional media as well as new media to explore subjects related to commodification and our relationship with nature. Ms. Nye has worked as a graphic designer, but has maintained a studio art practice for the last 20 years. In her work, she is most concerned with telling stories of conflicting human desires, best intentions, beauty and futility.

Dust_atCam – Tina Willgren (Stockholm, Sweden)

Tina Willgren is a visual artist working primarily with video. She lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden, where she received her MFA at the Royal Institute of Art in 2005. In her videos and installations, she explores the mind and body in relation to the contemporary world.

Recent exhibitions and festivals include “Jingled”, Art Center Haihatus, Joutsa, Finland (solo), “Blaue Stunde VII”, Alte Feuerwache, Cologne, Germany and “Athens Digital Arts Festival”, Athens, Greece.

I based the video imagery of Dust_atCam on a library of visual effects, normally used for adding explosions, smoke, water splashes, dust and blood to action movies. I find it interesting that these special effects often contribute to mere superficial spectacles, but that they simultaneously represent some of the elementary forces of the evolution on the planet.. When working with the video I associated to a speeded up version of the history of the globe; to the big bang, earthquakes and wars, and explored how different speeds, movements and material qualities might affect the mind.

Pink and Blue Compositions – Simon Falk (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

“Pink and Blue Compositions” is a reaction to the presence of social media networks; the desire to be stimulated, rapidly shrinking attention spans, infinite feeds of content and advertising. Computer-generated bubbles, floating iridescent cloth, spinning palm trees, pulsating blobs and other abstract forms are linked together by a pastel pink and blue palette.

Simon Falk is a Toronto based artist who uses both physical and digital media to examine niche visual cultures, digital dualism and abstraction. He holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University.
simonfalk.net

Healers – Selden Paterson (Chicago, IL)

Healers is a series of short videos created as a part of the larger project Integrative Ontological Practices by Beta Plus Sy stems (IOP B+) . IOP B+ is the leading self-help & healing system for modern cyborgs, using the principle of Tertiary Natural Consciousness to help humans achieve a wholer mind and self through healing audio-visual prescriptions. To learn more visit systems.betaplusinc.com.

Selden Paterson is a Chicago-based artist whose work addresses humans’ evolving relationship with technology and with our environments, created and otherwise. She is driven by curiosity about the way humans organize and experience ourselves in physical, digital, and in-between spaces. Ongoing endeavors include Beta Plus Inc., Selden’s lifestyle improvement products company; The City at Newcomb Crater, her all-amenities included colony on the moon; and IOPB+, her self-help & healing system for modern cyborgs.