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.

On Surgery– Russell Sheaffer (San Diego, California)

ON SURGERY is an attempt to replicate the physical process of bone surgery on the body of 16mm film stock. By wetting raw, unprocessed 16mm color negative film and then separating out the photosensitive emulsion from the base of the film using a medical scalpel and then reapplying the layers, the only images visible are representative of the scars left on the film. The music for ON SURGERY is taken entirely from the sound of the projection of the 16mm film and from a reading of one of Sheaffer’s post-surgical diary entries. ON SURGERY is a part of a series of collaborative works that explore the intersections of trauma, memory, and abstraction.

Russell Sheaffer is an experimental and documentary media maker and educator who received a Master’s Degree from NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies and is currently working on his Ph.D. in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University.  Most recently, his 60-screen, site-specific work “it’s so easy (the mechanism of power)” ran the length of the Atlanta Film Festival, blending moving image media, interactive technology, and live performance.  In 2014, his short experimental documentary “Acetate Diary” premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was named one of the “12 best shorts” of Tribeca by Film School Rejects.  In addition to his own experimental work, he produces documentary, fiction, and experimental works, including Josephine Decker’s “Thou Wast Mild and Lovely,” which premiered in Forum at Berlinale in 2014, and Daniel Laab’s forthcoming “Jules of Light and Dark.” He is one of the founders of The Magnifying Glass, a granting partnership between six film festivals and institutions that provides micro-grants to short works investigating social injustice.

In the Duplex Across the Street– John C. Kelley (Knoxville, Tennessee)

JOHN C KELLEY is a media artist and musician living in Knoxville, TN. His video work has screened internationally at institutions and festivals including AntiMatter [Media Art] (Victoria, BC, Canada), the Tasmanian International Video Art Festival (Launceton, Australia), the Concordia (Enschede, Netherlands), Edinburgh Artists’ Moving Image Festival (Edinburgh, Scotland), the SIMULTAN Festival (Timisoara, Romania), The Mid-America Arts Alliance (Kansas City, MO), The Arizona International Film Festival (Tucson, AZ), The Front (New Orleans, LA) and many others. Kelley has written original music for award-winning feature-length narrative and documentary films through Gray Picture in St. Louis, MO, released music as a solo artist through King Electric Records in Austin, TX, and has appeared on more than 25 recordings and albums. He is an Assistant Professor of 4D and Time-Based Art in the School of Art at the University of Tennessee.

Stratagem 7– McLean Fahnestock (Sango, Tennessee)

In this video the sky and the sea mirror, shift, and merge. It is this way with all of the works in the Stratagem series. They examine dual natures, the polarity that exists in us and exists in the world. A stratagem is also a fiction — a carefully crafted lie, a strategically disorienting deception. In the series this manifests in the mirroring of the ocean at the horizon. We can accept the placement as sky but know the truth is not that simple.

McLean Fahnestock is a media artist who works in video, sound, sculpture, and digital collage. McLean reclaims material from institutions, seeking out footage, images, and items that intimate place and carry the trappings of exploration. McLean received a BFA from Middle Tennessee State University and MFA from California State University Long Beach. Her work has been exhibited and screened across the United States and Internationally at institutions such as the Black Mountain College Re{Happening}, North Carolina, Technisches Museum Wien, Vienna, Austria, The California Science Museum, Los Angeles, The British Library, London, and MOCA Hiroshima, Japan. Her work was included in a DVD compilation of short videos by the LA Film Forum. She was a finalist for a 2012 Vimeo Video Award and was named “Most Promising New Artist” at MADATAC 5, in Madrid, Spain. McLean is an Assistant Professor of Art at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN. She keeps a studio in Old Hickory, TN.

Cathedral/Grid024- Dan Browne  (Toronto, Canada)

Cathedral | 2015 | 20 minutes | 4K

Cathedral considers the relationship of the screen to earlier forms of mediated light, such as stained glass, an art form designed for quiet contemplation. Through a merger of organic and digital forms, this work seeks to generate a similarly contemplative oasis via a refracted metamorphosis of the Douglas Firs of Cathedral Grove in MacMillan Provincial Park.

Grid024 | 2015 | 13 minutes | HD

Grid024 is part of a series of ongoing video paintings that are each recorded in a single, improvised take in real time using live image mixing software. Pre-existing material is remapped through transformations of density, movement, scale and rotation, generating complex shapes and patterns over time.

Dan Browne (b. 1982) is a filmmaker, photographer and multimedia artist whose works explore patterns, nature, and sensory perception through dense and kinetic forms. Dan’s films and videos have been presented at over one hundred venues worldwide, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen, BFI London, Centre Georges Pompidou, Images Festival, Festival du nouveau cinéma, and TIFF Cinematheque. His practice as a media artist unfolds within a variety of contexts and forms, including installation, with current video commissions in public spaces in Toronto and Vancouver, and live video performances at festivals and events, including MUTEK and Vector Festival. For more information please visit www.danbrowne.ca

Memory and Ritual in Frame Difference- Jason Bernagozzi  (Owego, NY)

Memory and Ritual in Frame Difference is  was produced during an artist residency in Malaysia. The work is a meditation on the complex relationships between ritual and public space at the Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In a space shared by both devout hindus and tourists, the frame difference processing allows the viewer to focus on action and change within the recording. Electronic insights of body vernacular happening in mediated time.

Jason Bernagozzi is a video, sound and new media artist living and working in upstate New York and is the co-founder of the experimental media arts non-profit Signal Culture. His work has been featured nationally and internationally at venues such as the European Media Arts Festival in Osnabruk, Germany, the LOOP Video Art Festival in Barcelona, Spain, the Beyond/In Western NY Biennial in Buffalo, NY, and the Yan Gerber International Arts Festival in Hebei Province, China. His work has received several awards including grants from the New York State Council for the Arts, free103point9 and the ARTS Council for the Southern Finger Lakes.

Sway- Stephen Nachtigall  (Eugene, Oregon)

With an interdisciplinary approach to art making; from video, sculpture, to 2D work and installation, Stephen Nachtigall’s practice explores intersections of ecology, technology and culture from a perspective planted in mimesis, transparency and simulation. Born in 1986 in Calgary, Canada, he received a BFA from the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2011, and an MFA from the University of Oregon in 2016. Nachtigall has exhibited internationally in solo and group shows in Germany, Scotland and across the United States and Canada. He currently lives and works in Eugene, Oregon.

Plants are rooted in the ground, their position relatively fixed. They are headless, receiving their nourishment both from below and above, along the whole expanse of their corpus while also releasing oxygen and providing nourishment in turn. The posture of a plant connects to what lies below, and stretches out above and surrounding itself to connect the various elements that make up its ecological environment. As such, perhaps plants can be seen as a kind of avatar for an expanded notion of consciousness and relationship to the environment. If plants were to demonstrate sentience through technological mediation in much the same way that humanity has embraced it, what might that look like? Sway presents a plant image, mediated and affected by simulated forces that allow it to move and twist its body as if by its own accord. The plant dances across the screen as if striving towards an embodiment of nonhuman expression, and an expanded terrain of coexistence.

Dancing Columns- Devis Venturelli  (Milan, Italy)
Dancing Columns is a floating museum, a virtual hypercollection of vases from the digital archive of Italian Ceramic’s Museums, including: the Renaissance majolicas and the Italian Postwar design by Guido Andlovitz, Giò Ponti, Antonia Campi, Ettore Sottsass, Piero Fornasetti, the  pre-Columbian vases’ collection and the classical-archaeological ceramic; the regional-Italian handicraft and the European manufacture of porcelain; the Twentieth Century’s art ceramic and the contemporary sculpture-vases. The column as architectural element is an endless obsession.  A melting pot,  literally containing every age and every style, generates the hypnotic landscape of an unconscious dance.
Devis Venturelli is an architect and transdisciplinary artist based in Milan, Italy.

Idealized Circulation Cells- Peter Christenson  (Pullman, Washington)
A list of things I might think about while viewing the video Idealized Circulation Cells:

+ Does the universe always follow patterns? Woot woot algorithms?!
+ If clouds were giraffes, could we climb up their elongated necks into the troposphere?
+ Everything is data. Like, whoa.
+ Does ideal mean perfect?
+ Atmospheric circulation patterns, duh.
+ Why does Aristotle get credit as “founder” of everything?
+ Magnified aerosol particles are spherical.
+ Nephology—like coition with dead clouds?

Peter Christenson is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator originally from metro Detroit. He is co-founder of Left of Centre, a guerrilla-marketing firm and interventionist artist collective, and he has lectured, exhibited, and screened his work across the United States and internationally. He is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Washington State University.
http://www.psychologartist.com

Pie in the Sky- Matthew Keff  (New York, New York)
Pie in the Sky is a software driven visual using video game mechanics to express thoughts on fantasy and feelings.  Created with the Unity3D game engine, simulated physics and effects are perpetual and never ending.  Various digital objects are placed into the scene at random and flung about in space.
Matthew Keff is a visual artist currently living and working in NYC.  He received a BFA at the School of Visual Arts with a focus on experimental cinema in 2007.  His recent work has been featured on RNE Radio 3 and Noisey MX and as part of gallery exhibitions at the CICA Museum KR, Matchbox Gallery Houston TX, Diorama Mexico City MX, Amos Eno Gallery, Elements Festival, Keroxen Festival, and The Hollows Art Space in Brooklyn.

At Odds- Alejandro Parra (Los Angeles, CA)
At Odds is an architectural scale video installation that runs continuously with no sound. The image is an aerial view of beach waves crashing–containing qualities of isolation as well as a relentless vitality. Seducing the viewer to transcend time and the reality of landscape, the work can be interpreted as an event that straddles a past world, our current shorelines, or perhaps a fading future terrain.

Alejandro Parra is a media artist from Los Angeles whose work contemplates ideas of time, landscape, and experience to meet at a point of art and philosophy. He holds a B.A. in Visual Arts Media from UC San Diego.
www.alejandro-parra.com

Natural Paradox – Sthef Folgar (Madrid, Spain)
Although the incessant lights are a constant reminder of the formidable presence of the city, the eerie nocturnal silence allows a brief insight into the uncanny and limitless dimension of nature. I attempt to enter into those feeling of vertigo that separates the unknown from the known, and explore this union between the domesticated and the wild where emerges a new territory that refers to, but is not.

Sthef Folgar is a Uruguayan photographer and filmmaker, currently based in Madrid, Spain. Master’s degree in Contemporary Photography from EFTI International School, and recently awarded with a grant to attend a Master of Arts. She has worked as freelance on different photography projects, developed personal experimental films and collaborate with different visual art installations. In March 2016 has co-founded otrocolectivo, an interdisciplinary art collective focused on the development of visual projects.

Catalysts and Aftershocks – Jessica Giacobbe (Brooklyn, NY)
When you’re young everything feels surreal, every place is exciting, and every place contains a story.  These seemingly unscripted moments of my life are the ones that have persistently made their way to the foggy tank I call my memory.  This short is a collection of memory induced explorations of places I once knew.  My interest was not just in the memories themselves but the spacesin which they were born. The approach in these exercises were completely instinctual, tactile, honest, and improvisational (a similar process in all my work).  Through using this unbiased approach, I realized these places were no longer weighted with nostalgia.  They had suddenly been reinvented to contain potential for new and catalytic discoveries.  Catalysts and Aftershocks depicts both a fictional and non fictional representation of my re-encounters with these childhood sanctuaries as an “adult.”

The place I call home has shaped me and continues to resonate with me in the present. Growing up on a dirt road, never wearing shoes in summer, spending time with horses, and knowing nature are aspects I aesthetically utilize.  The importance of tactile experiences is something I can never stray away from.

Leucosis- Anders S. Solberg (Trondheim / Sør-Trøndelag, Norway)
Digital video work, abstract, immersive, can be viewed as fluid or liquid paintings experienced through time. Depicting the metaphorical transformation of silver into gold, enlightenment, the ascension from earthly, crude matter, into a higher, divine state.

Anders Solberg (b. 1984, Trondheim, Norway) is educated as a photographer at the Norwegian School of Photography and currently a student at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, NTNU.

Slices of Clarity- Brooke White (Oxford, MS)
“Slices of Clarity” investigates the ways that Alzheimer’s Disease alters one’s connection to memory and place. By using x-rays of skulls, combined with photographs and 8mm archival films from my personal history these images visually describe my personal interpretations of the disease. By creating confusing visual spaces coupled with holes of tangible ones, I aim to bring the viewer into an Alzheimer’s view of the world.

Brooke White is both a practicing artist and educator specializing in art photography and video art, with an M.F.A. from Cornell University and a B.F.A from Alfred University, New York State College of Ceramics. White has exhibited her photographs and videos nationally and internationally including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE, and was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in India. Much of her work, both photographic and video, is created while traveling in areas such as East Africa, South East Asia, South America and the deep southern United States.
White resides in Oxford, MS where she is Associate Professor of Art and Area Head of Imaging Arts in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Mississippi.

Light Night- Enzo Cillo (Rome, Italy)
Light Night is a project that belongs to a series of works about the darkness. In previous work, the figure of the man was in mind, when making I discovered that the direct human presence had become less noticeable compared to the images that I was making. The body, continuing, in fact, has become something else. What is left in the photograph and the remains of the statues become mainly traces of that presence, shadows.

I searched through old photographs and I chose between these two images. The first is a piece of photosensitive paper without the image imprinted; it had to be, perhaps, a family photo. The second image is a picture of a group of people whom you can not see well the faces. As found documents, they are a snapshot in time, a test of existence, debris orbiting in space.
The work opens and closes in a forest. I think there is a very strong presence in this place and in the individual items. The branches and the stones are isolated fragments, icons in a dark space. In its initial phase the work investigated a place and familiar materials, advancing came to think of these elements in an increasingly internalizing.

Enzo Cillo attended the Arts high school in Benevento and continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, where he graduated in Visual Arts and specialized in Photography. He currently lives and works in both Naples and Rome.

luminous flux – Sarah Janssen (Groningen, Netherlands)

The video installation luminous flux consists of macro recordings of drops of a fluid running down a surface.  Due to reduced use of light, the visuals are very minimalistic.  Sometimes the drops, flowing in a natural movement down the screen, are only visible for a fraction of a second. Luminous flux is a study of our perception of forms and  the physicality of light and its behavior in space.

Multi-media artist Sarah Janssen was born in Nordhorn, Germany in 1986 and is now based in Groningen, the Netherlands. She received her MFA in Interactive Media and Environments at Frank Mohr International Masters in Groningen in 2011. In her work she uses photography, video, installation and new media to explore our visual perception. What is the essence of an image? How do we perceive objects, space and the world around us and what are the boundaries of perception? Based on these questions, she creates concentrated pieces of work which invite the viewer to see things in a different way.
http://www.sarahjanssen.com