Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art – Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy (North Carolina, USA)

Inspired by Jim Campbell’s Formula for Computer Art and Tallahassee’s annual sea of tree pollen, this generative animation is intentionally meditative. The diligently recorded data of the National Allergy Board guides the animation down a predictable path and stands in stark contrast to the chaos of everyday life. The project calls into question our obsession with mapping nature, as if grasping its sublimity would be essential to finding lifelong satisfaction.

Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy are a North Carolina–based collaborative art team who met at the University of California San Diego. Selected exhibitions of her work include the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville; Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California; Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago; MCA San Diego; Long March Space Beijing; ARC Gallery Chicago; and Soho20 New York. She has received funding from MacDowell, Künstlerhaus Salzburg, Anderson Ranch, the DAAD, the NEA, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission. Owen’s work is best known for his online interventions that have been reviewed by over 300 international news media outlets including the New York Times, National Public Radio, and Wired UK. Recent exhibitions of his work include solo and group exhibitions in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, London, Berlin, and Rotterdam. His work is in Art and the Internet (2014) and Thinking Through Digital Media (2015).
https://joelledietrick.com

Ohio Skyscape – Kate Shannon (Columbus, Ohio, USA)

In the age of high-definition televisions and state-of-the art advertising, I have become interested in the outmoded advertisements I find in places like Mansfield, Ohio, where I currently work. Mansfield is a manufacturing city affected by a decades-long economic deterioration that has worsened in recent years. In Mansfield, the sky is sometimes interrupted by small, inelegant, desperate pleas for financial fulfillment.
There was one car dealership that captured my attention on my commute to work each day last year, which used a big blue gorilla to attract costumers. Like so many small businesses in my area that quickly come and go, the car dealership eventually went out of business. In this animation, a memorial to the doomed car dealership, a tiny gorilla advertisement penetrates a beautiful Ohio sky and competes for your attention.

Kate Shannon is an associate professor of art at The Ohio State University Mansfield.  The recipient of the 2013 OSU Mansfield Campus Award for Excellence in Scholarship, she has exhibited her creative work across the United States. Selected venues include Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, OH; the Zhou B Art Center Gallery in Chicago, IL; the Contemporary Arts Center in Las Vegas, NV; and TRACTIONARTS in Los Angeles, CA. Shannon received her MFA from The Ohio State University and her BFA from the University of Kentucky. She currently resides in Columbus, Ohio with her husband, son, and cats.
https://www.kateshannon.net

Terre Nullius – Lydia Moyer (Charlottesville, VA, USA)

The imagined flowers that bore witness to a young women’s overland journey back to the captive world from which she had come.  This video is a part of the Terre Nullius project, inspired by the story of Olive Oatman, a young Morman woman who lived among the Mojave people for a significant period in her youth before being conscripted back into the white world by a member of her birth family.
https://goodfornow.net

Tara Youngborg (Virginia, USA)

I have been thinking about the way my brain operates.  Every time we access a memory, our brains overwrite the memory while recalling it. My experiences become the lens through which I see my memories, layering them with time and new memory, but also erasing and modifying that original experience.  When you save a JPEG image, the file becomes recompressed as it tries to find places where it can combine colors to save space. My memories are not so different from these JPEGs, changing over time.

Tara Youngborg is a new media artist working and living in Virginia. She is interested in utilizing the Internet as a space where personal stories can become collaborative, and ways to use code to create interactive and accessible artworks. She is also interested in exploring how identity and memory is formed, performed, and recalled on the Internet. Youngborg has shown her websites, videos, and gifs in publications and exhibitions in from coast to coast in the United States, as well as in Australia, and always online.
www.tarayoungborg.com

Polymer – Scott Turri (Pittsburgh,PA, USA)

By building a variety of animated parts I then work at combining, looping and overlaying these lyrical components by sequencing these passages into a hypnotic rhythm with the intent of mimicking the ebb and flow of nature. The parts have a certain consistency but are modularized and repackaged in a variety of iterations. These transformations provide a formal and conceptual link from one passage to another blurring the boundary between nature and what is human made. By combining this digitally manipulated landscape imagery with pill shaped screen-like passages, scope references, brick walls, and animation sequences my goal is to have the work grounded in place. The experience for the audience is meant to be much more ephemeral and link to the nature of memory and how we construct meaning and identity from our personal and cultural history and how it gets embedded through the natural and built environment.

Hailing from suburban Philadelphia, where he spent his formative years, Turri now calls Pittsburgh home and has become enmeshed in the regional art community. He has had a range of artistic experiences: from punk rock to a performance art band, writing for New Art Examiner, BOMB and Afterimage magazines, work in video, to currently concentrating primarily on painting and animation. Along with these pursuits, Turri is also an educator and holds a full-time lecturer position at the University of Pittsburgh.
www.scottturri.com

Choose a Character – Megan Dickie (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada)
Choose a Character is one video from the project One Way or Another, which uses video games as a platform to explore our fascination with observing human struggle.  A trilogy of video animations pit a character against a series of impediments that she must overcome. Relentlessly, the character grapples with the obstacles but she persistently fails. Her struggle is a spiral of determination and amusement, hypnotizing us with the yearning to be recognized within the fickle world of competition.
Choose a Character  presents all of the characters from the video trilogy transitioning from one into another.
Megan Dickie’s practice uses extreme physicality, choreographed set-ups, and fantastic failures to poke at dominant systems. Recent solo exhibitions include L’OEil de Poisson (Québec City), Open Space (Victoria), Oxygen Art Centre (Nelson), Latitude 53 (Edmonton) and Stride (Calgary). She is also the recipient of projects grants from both the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council and the University of Victoria. She received her MFA from the University of Saskatchewan and a BFA from the University of Calgary. Her works are part of the collections of the University of Saskatchewan, Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Nickel Arts Museum. Megan Dickie resides in Victoria, BC and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria.
http://megandickie.com

Kusama Infinity Loop – Neil Ira Needleman (Katonah, NY USA)
A colorful and lyrical homage to the remarkable, marvelous, wonderful artist Yayoi Kusama. What you see here is a 6-minute(ish) excerpt from a 17-minute(ish) strand of video that seamless loops with itself to form an infinite loop
I was born in Brooklyn, New York toward the middle of the last century. I’ve held a camera in my hand for as long as I can remember. Over the decades, the cameras may have changed, but my passion for tinkering with moving images hasn’t. I LOVE it. And I intend to keep doing it. My videos are regularly screened in film festivals around the world. And, yes, I’ve won a few awards along the way. This both surprises and delights me.
https://www.needlemanart.com/

A day in the bedroom of Laurie Evian – Kostas Makrinos (Chios, Greece)
An audiovisual experience that dilates time and explores the limits of our everyday microcosmos.
Born in 1983. Audiovisual and film studies. Experimental filmmaker and editor usually treating the subjects of time, form and non-linearity through abstract films.
http://kostasmakrinos.com

Twilight Galaxies– Ezra Wube (Brooklyn, NY, USA)

This animation short was inspired by immigrant holiday ceremonies. For the background I painted images of real and imagined galaxies. In the foreground I animated common objects that are found from these gatherings. These objects echo the transitory state of these ceremonies, becoming the new icon that defy a specific cultural association. As banal as they appear or void of originality, these objects can be a transmitter for a possible utopia through interaction, exchange and unstill-ness.

As a person who moved between geographies (Ethiopia, U.S.A.) time and place are no longer singular for me. I am in a continuous dialogue negotiating  These fragmentations are reconciled through the story telling aspects of my work, as means to connects multiple realities. For me, an imaginative relationship is necessary to adapt to a new environment, to embrace the here and now, and to connect with the ephemeral in the everyday. While collaging my past with present experiences, I attempt to make a third entity that is in both the past and the present in which places and time are continuously shifting.

Oracle– Nancy Sepe (Pittsburgh, PA, USA)

Oracle features a unicycle performer who reveals multiple personas as she rides the tightrope.

Nancy Sepe is a multi media artist and educator living in New Hampshire. She works with found materials and time-based media, often incorporating the element of text into her work.

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.