2012 Season : FUTURE SEEDS

For 2010 to 2012, ASsociety has been soliciting residency proposals based on the theme, “FUTURE SEEDS”. This initiative derives from our urban/rural farming exchanges and explores media art to connect programming codes and data processing with the natural algorithms of seeding and growth. Through sensing, cultivating and communicating with the soil, fields, seeds, plants, bees and animals via electronic means and devices, FUTURE SEEDS explores a brand new genre of electronic art that situates artists in the farm land.  At the conclusion of “FUTURE SEEDS” ASsociety will produce an exhibition and/or seminar with visiting residents and local artists and farmers reviewing the works created or research generated during the 2010-2012 residency seasons.

For the 2012 season, the ASS residency cottage will be situated on the Michael Kudish Natural History Preserve(MKNHP) adjoined by the Goldenheart Unidiversity Farm(GHU Farm).
GHU Farm is a diversified small farm with livestock, bees and vegetable and flower gardens. GHU Farm and the Preserve are active with honey bee workshops, botanical identification of specimens in the Preserve with Dr. Michael Kudish, and hosting other grouyps involved in wild-crafting and food production.   Resident artists are encouraged to develop projects that tie into the farm and preserve.  Other initiatives might address other aspects of the Catskill biosphere.

About the Host Farm
GHU Farm is a historic former dairy farm and boarding house on 113 acres of Catskill Mountain Land – once mostly pasture, now mostly forest. The GHU Farm family has been re-introducing livestock and produce to the lands and animals again reside in the 100-plus-year old barn. The livestock, beehives and orchard trees have been proliferating through GHU’s natural animal care practices.  GHU also hosts “wwoof” farm enthusiasts in their farmhouse in exchange for helping hands around the farm and offers a sustainable agriculture reference library.

The Michael Kudish Natural History Preserve http://www.mknhp.com

Accommodation Information
Residents living/work space is a 250-square-foot self-contained off grid cottage and outdoor kitchen, bathroom and shower.  The cottage relies on renewable system include solar power and water catchment systems, as well as technological conveniences such as wi-fi and cell phone reception.  Resident artists are welcome to enjoy dinner in the farmhouse with the family and farmhands and will meet with ASsociety and host Farmer once a week to talk about the upcoming week, progress and to orient residents to local resources and points of interest.

Technical Support and Collaborating Organizations
Access to partnering media labs at RPI’s iEAR Studios Facilliites (Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer) and The Sanctuary for Independent Media, Troy, NY are potential resources for residents.  Contribute content to The Farm Hour radio program on WIOX Roxbury Community Radio.  The Farm Hour is a weekly one hour program highlighting regional farmers and agriculture issues.  Additional support, with adequate advance notice, may include ride-sharing to and from residency as well as ‘field trips. Sprouts may also help procure recycled and salvaged materials for projects.

Stipend
Artists awarded longer term residencies will be awarded stipends of $500 which they may apply to materials, travel or other expenses incurred to complete their project and residency. Depending upon availability of the residents’ cabin, suitable artists may be selected for short stays of 2-5 days (without stipends).

Deadline:
Application deadline: March 6, 2012                                                                                 Artist selected for 2012 residency will be notified April 7th.

The application should include:
- Project description (up to one page)
- Short letter describing how the project matches the objective of the call for residency
- Short CV (up to 1 page)
- When you would like to be here and for how long (min 2-4max weeks)

Applications for short stays 2-5 days will also be considered.

SEND Applications to:

andessproutssociety@gmail.com or

Andes Sprouts Society PO Box 243 Roxbury, NY 12474

QUESTIONS???? please ask questions through the comment section on this Page, as a comment.  OR of course you can email questions, comments, suggestions to andessproutssociety@gmail.com

Application Criteria
Eligible residency projects may, among other things, take the form of research or the production of artworks integrating technology or robotics, data visualizations, immersive environments, internet-based art,  electronic art, interactive works, remote/mobile hardware, and open source bio-technology.  The residency artist is expected to collaborate with the host farm, however the level of collaboration is open ended.  Collaboration may include sharing research, presentation of new work, documentation of host farm elements or outreach in the form of a lecture, workshop or publication.

Program runtime: 1 hour 7 minutes

We will be presenting the following films:

O’er the Land by Deborah Stratman, USA, 2009, 51 minutes, 16mm

A meditation on the milieu of elevated threat addressing national identity, gun culture, wilderness, consumption, patriotism and the possibility of personal transcendence. Of particular interest are the ways Americans have come to understand freedom and the increasingly technological reiterations of manifest destiny.

This film is concerned with the sudden, simple, thorough ways that events can separate us from the system of things, and place us in a kind of limbo. Like when we fall. Or cross a border. Or get shot. Or saved. The film forces together culturally acceptable icons of heroic national tradition with the suggestion of unacceptable historical consequences, so that seemingly benign locations become zones of moral angst.

“…captures, as the artist herself put it, ‘iconic representations of how nationhood is defined.’ That nation would be the USA, home of French and Indian War reenactments in Kokomo, Indiana; high school football games in [Columbus, Ohio]; machine-gun festivals; and border policing—both to the south and the north, with a long take of Niagara Falls having a near-hypnotic effect after so much firepower. Yet whereas borders are vigilantly guarded in Stratman’s work, the Images Festival excels by doing precisely the opposite…” – Melissa Anderson, ARTFORUM

Love It / Leave It by Tom Palazzolo, USA, 1973, 15 minutes, 16mm

“Love It/Leave It is a raucous treatment of patriotic color, football, nudity and parades set to a refrain of ‘Love It’ and coalescing into Tom Palazzolo’s nightmare rendition of America the Awful. It sounds the theme song of this program [at the Whitney] and gives you a pretty good start on deciding to ‘Leave It.’” - Archer Winston, NEW YORK POST

Deborah Stratman works in a territory between experimental and documentary genres. In her films and frequent work in other media including photography, sound, drawing and sculpture, Stratman explores the history, uses, mythologies and control of landscapes of varying types and scales: from Xinjiang China to suburban California. Her recent works have variously addressed the milieu of elevated threat, patriotism, sonic warfare, comets, sinkholes and faith. She is currently collecting a decade’s worth of FEAR (call 1-800-585-1078 to participate) and teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

We will be presenting the following films:

Dusted Rays by Kenneth Zoran Curwood, USA, 2011, 5 minutes, 16mm

An experiment using my own footage as an image library for a cut-up piece. I aim to include 15 seconds from every reel of film I ever shot and processed. Culled from other finished works as well as many failed attempts. Developing processes shown in the film will include COLOR: reversal, negative. x-pro (reversal as neg), x-pro (neg as reversal), Black and White: reversal, negative, hi-con. Processing effects shown include solarization, mordencage, tinting, toning. -KZC

Kenneth Zoran Curwood was born in NYC in ’71. He likes to take apart old movie cameras and projectors, and re-purpose them to re-photograph film one frame at a time. He then processes the film in home-made chemical mixtures, with often dismal results. He is currently working on a script for a partly animated feature, based on his days of being a student at SVA from ’89-’95. Some of his work has been transferred to video and edited to songs for his pals in bands, and can be seen here.

Dervish Machine by Bradley Eros & Jeanne Liotta/Mediamystics, 1992, 10 minutes, Super-8 to 16mm blow-up, B&W/color

“M’elevasti! Lift me up.”

Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin’s Dreamachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenousness of the material. The film itself becomes the site to experience impermanence, and to revel in the unfixed image.

Bradley Eros is an artist working in myriad media: experimental film & video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text, contracted and expanded cinema & installation. Also a maverick curator, designer, researcher & investigator. Concepts include: ephemeral cinema, mediamystics, subterranean science, erotic psyche, cinema povera, poetic accidents and musique plastique.

8fps, 45rpm, 3spi by Rachael Guma, 5 minutes, Super 8 and Ektachrome

Super 8 found-footage film of the needle of a sewing machine blown up to 16 mm, hand-sewn, re-photographed back to Super 8, and hand-processed. The image of a pulsating needle as the thread punctures through the surface of the film strip, while the sound of a stylus needle scratches the surface of a rotating record player.

Rachael Guma is a filmmaker and sound artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Through her experiments with Super 8 film and analog sound, Rachael strives to create an engaging live viewing experience that embraces the idiosyncratic qualities of technology, while maintaining a hand-crafted approach to her output. Ever since graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute, her films have screened at the San Francisco Cinematheque, RX Gallery, Mono No Aware, Northern Flickers, Microscope Gallery, and AXWFF 2011 where she was asked to take part in a lively panel discussion on women filmmakers. As a member of Optipus Film Collective, she has performed live foley sound at Participant Gallery, Dense Mesh IV, and the 2011 Index Festival.

Intimate Machine by Shona Masarin, 2010, 3 minutes, Super 8 transfered to video

Two looping frames, side-by-side, cycle through two film-strips that are cut to different lengths. The beginning and end of each loop are lost in all the various narrative and compositional possibilities imposed by the slip-stream of images and sounds that push, touch, and collide – like endless variations of a motif. The machine is able to manufacture an infinite amount of imaginary anxieties, dreams, and stories through the repetition and juxtaposition of images that act as hieroglyphs. Sound by Andrew Hurst.

Shona Masarin is a New York City based Australian film artist whose work involves the physical, alchemic, and sculptural manipulation of found images and materials to create abstract animations. Finished works have taken the form of of Super 8mm or 16mm films, film performances with live music, and installations; presented at film festivals in Australia, including the Melbourne International Film Festival, and at various alternative art spaces and galleries in Brooklyn. She has received funding for her work from the Australia Council for the Arts and the Ian Potter Cultural Trust.

Dagie Brundert I was born in a small town in the middle of West Germany. Beautiful nature, but boring after a while … I moved to Berlin and studied visual arts / experimental film. Fell in love with my super 8 camera (Nizo) in 1988. Since then I try to be a particle-finder, a wave-catcher and a good story-teller. I try to absorb weird beautiful things from this world. Chew them and spit them out again.

Lindsey Castillo is an artist and curator based in New York City. Her art works have been exhibited throughout New York and Europe. She is currently working on ceramic sculptural pieces, zines, and Super-8 films. Lindsey has been curating events for The Camera Club of New York for the past three years, and continues to develop projects that seek to inspire and create new and diverse conversations that pertain to photography and film. To see more of her work and ideas visit her website.

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The Camera Club of New York (CCNY) is one of New York’s oldest arts organizations, the Camera Club (CCNY) has been a home for photographers to develop their craft, providing both a working facility and collegial environment for discussion and the exchange of ideas. The Club is dedicated to continuing its long tradition of welcoming both photographers and devotees of photography and encouraging their participation through memberships, classes, lectures, exhibitions and residency program. Since its founding in 1884, the club has nurtured many talented photographers whose careers cover a wide range of disciplines, including portraiture, photojournalism, fashion, street photography, advertising, documentary and fine art.

“Bruce McClure doesn’t make films, he performs them… Twirling knobs, flipping switches, and adjusting lenses, he coaxes a bank of whirring projectors into producing images impossible to record.” THE BROOKLYN RAIL.

Projector placements in theatrical space symbolically repudiate the camera’s claims on the picture plane by upsetting its hegemony of flattened evidence taken from the outside world. My performances, furthermore, continue to negotiate for real space and real objects on the projector’s side of the movie house in the presence of witnesses. Along the Via Dolorosa, I have erected eight stations commemorating film’s passion and the spirit of projective revisionism. Each of the passion narratives collected in PIE PELLICANE JESU DOMINE (2008 – 2011),* illuminates a unique camera shot, an emulsive grisaille, excised from a documentary treatment of pelican life. I now petition you to recognize another station in construction along this secular pilgrimage. Re-awaken metathesis by walking in its sandals! Although incomplete and untitled, this stopping place is a meditation on “entrusting each to the other” and is celebrated by a song.

Film, redefined as an object of the projector’s discretion, is transfixed by projector headlights, the primary lamp and exciter bulb, and left by the wayside as road kill. Picturesquely martyred in this way gives rise to film as a liberating force rather than an intransigent and anachronous icon to be horded. At the station sprocket time converts matter into energy – a metaphor for consciousness – breaking a reign of filmic re-enactments and broadcasting energy into the vitality of perceptual activity. – BM

* St. Thomas Aquinas, “Lord Jesu, blessed Pelican.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo By: Giulio Bursi, 2009

Bruce McClure graduated with a degree in Architecture in 1985 and worked for 23 years in small offices on residential projects. In 1994 he approached cinema by building simple devices using intervals of light to affect the perception of motion. Eventually the film projector was adopted as a primary tool to organize light and sound into “projector performances” that have been included in many festivals in the United States and abroad. By definition these performances are detached from the necessity of recording. His exploitation of the film projector as both a picture and sound device has enabled him to move from “cinema” to the music hall. In 2009 he was the opening act for Throbbing Gristle in Brooklyn and Chicago. Challenging hypocrisy, “Vouchsafe Me More Soundpicture (Fain Make Glories),” is a vinyl recording available on Olde English Spelling Bee (#36) and was excerpted from a performance in 2009 at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Mia Makela works in the fields of real-time audiovisual performance, experimental video and documentary. Her visual language has a mystical dream-like narrative approach and has been described as a digital version of William Blake’s poetry. She processes her material in real-time and performs in tandem with musicians. Makela, an innovator in the field of live cinema, has shown her work and lectured all over the globe. Her latest project GREEN MATTERS is a scientific art project, an exploration of the possibilities of green algae in the Baltic Sea. Currently she is working on a video manual and the exhibition of algae experiments.

In these works the clandestine nature of the journeys are a given as individuals narrate and configure the relationship of their journey to the places they inhabit and subsequently navigate.

The discussion will address the techniques Khalili uses to convey the porous boundaries of the filmic medium. In what ways do aesthetics transform and reconfigure according to medium (including film, visual art and installation)? To what extent can personal narratives be stretched and adapted to these various forms?

Program runtime: 46 minutes 

We will be presenting the following selections:

Anya, France/Morrocco, 2008, 12 minutes, digital projection

Mapping Journey #1,  2008, 5 minutes, digital projection

Mapping Journey #2, France,  2008, 3 minutes, digital projection

Mapping Journey #3, France/Palestine, 2009, 4 minutes, digital projection

Mapping Journey #4, 2010, 5 minutes, digital projection

Mapping Journey #5, 2010, 11 minutes, digital projection

Mapping Journey #7, 2011, 6 minutes, digital projection

Photo by: Alain Kantarjian, 2006

Bouchra Khalili is a French-Moroccan video-artist, born in 1975 in Casablanca. She has devoted herself to video work, both in single channel and installation form, since 2002. The artist uses this medium for its impurity, which allows her to place her work at the very limits of cinema and the fine arts, documentary and experimental work, blurring the lines between these two practices. Her videos explore the Mediterranean area seen as a territory dedicated to a wandering, nomadic existence. She documents the places she passes through, their images and the images they generate. Khalili produces representations of these spaces’ mental dimension by placing them in an unusual perceptive experience, thus testifying to the contemporary reality of emigration and its stories.

Barrak Alzaid (b. 1985 Kuwait, MA Performance Studies, NYU) is a writer, curator, and artist, and is the Artistic Director of ArteEast. Recent installation and performance work include Seera Kartooniya [Bushwick Open Studios, 2010] and Diwaniya with Fatima Al Qadiri and Aziz Alqatami [Gwangju Design Biennial 2011]. Curatorial work includes antinormanybody [Kleio Projects, 2011]. His article, “Fatwas and Fags: Violence and the Discursive Production of Abject Bodies” is available in The Columbia Journal of Gender and Law.

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ArteEast  presents the works of contemporary artists from the Middle East, North Africa and their diasporas t a wide audience in order to foster a more complex understanding of the regions’ arts and cultures and to encourage artistic excellence. Through public events, exhibitions, film screenings, a dynamic virtual gallery and a resource-rich website, ArteEast supports artists and filmmakers by providing the platforms necessary for them to showcase groundbreaking and significant work. We also give the public the opportunity to learn more about and develop an appreciation for the talent of these established and emerging artists.

It kind of feels like fall here in Brooklyn, but UnionDocs thinks that the holidays are coming anyway. We’d like to party with you. Performances by these awesome bands:

11:15pm – Steer

12:15am – 973 Future Yook

Steer is Chris Abbadessa and Zach Ellis living and breathing music together since childhood. After ten years of collaboration in various projects they now harness the form of Steer; a two piece experimental folk rock band constantly pushing their artistic boundaries. With Chris on the drums, synth and vocals and Zach on the guitar and vocals, the two form a musical bond that can only be found between two life long friends. Likened to bands like Black Keys and Sonic Youth their live show is hypnotizing and constantly surprising. “I’ve seen Steer more then any other band in my life and I am still pleasantly surprised at every show” says fan Marina Razumova. Their self produced, full length is available for listening and Download here.

973 Future Yook is a comic and music project by a member of the sediment club. Ready-made from Garage band, 973 Future Yook deals with melting plastic, Failure, and a Cyber-Pathetic ghost of viral computer file. Yook Embodied. A first hand account of 2011 imperative, floppy disk sales, D. Bowie act-alike Repli-can’ts, B. Dylan tapes, and living with the future.

We will feature selected recordings, ranging from family immigration stories to accounts of the 1975 sit-in at the People’s Firehouse. From July through September, the project was installed at sites throughout Williamsburg, including the McCarren Park Pool and the Triangle Court construction site, a few blocks away from UnionDocs. This event marks the closing of Yulman’s public sound installation and oral history project.

This project is sponsored in part by funding from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts, administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council. The NYC Department of Parks and Recreation and the Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn provided additional support.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Latest tracks by No_Bills

 Nick Yulman works with sound and interactive media in a variety of contexts including musical installations, oral history interviews, field recordings and pop songs. He has shown and performed his work at venues in New York and beyond including the ISE Cultural foundation, Smack Mellon, Flux Factory, The Museum of the Moving Image, the Coney Island Museum and Warsaw Centre for Contemporary Art. Professionally, Yulman spent five years working with the national oral history project StoryCorps, traveling the United States recording interviews, managing the organization’s Recording and Archive department and consulting on a variety of projects. He is currently a student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program.

nbART (The North Brooklyn Public Art Coalition) was formed in 2009 by a group of artists, arts administrators and community members. nbART  is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to collaborating with artists and community stakeholders in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick to produce, present, and support public art. nbART believes that public art plays a vital role in activating space and engaging our neighborhoods, and aims to promote dialogue concerning urban spaces; support artists through local commissions and the provision of resources; and use our voice to advocate on behalf of the North Brooklyn arts community. It is a sponsored project of the arts service nonprofit Fractured Atlas.

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Program length 76 minutes

Guañape Sur by Janos Richter

2010, Italy, 22 minutes, digital projection

A barren island off the coast of Peru is the breeding ground for thousands of sea birds that are its sole inhabitants. Once every eleventh year, hundreds of men make their way to the island to harvest the birds’ dried excrement, which is then used as valuable fertilizer. Through gorgeous cinematography and patient observation, Janos Richter offers an intriguing look at a most unlikely of jobs, in the most unlikely of places.-Sky Sitney, AFI DISCOVERY SILVERDOCS

Wagah by Supriyo Sen

2009, India/Germany/Pakistan, 13 minutes, digital projection

Winner of a top prize at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival and made in commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this short documentary depicts an astonishing ritual that takes place nightly at the frontier outpost of Wagah—the only road link along the 2,500-kilometer border between India and Pakistan. Thousands of citizens, young and old, gather at sundown for the ceremonial lowering of the Indian and Pakistani flags, each side trading taunts of Pakistan Zindabad (“Long live Pakistan!”) and Jai Hind (“Long live India!”) with all the fervency of bitter soccer rivals. Wim Wenders, who headed the Berlin jury, celebrated Wagah as “a convincing manifesto against any wall that divides people.”-MoMA

My Name is Sydney by Melanie Levy

2009, USA, 17 minutes, digital projection

16-year old Sydney is articulate in ways she can never express – a complex woman inside a severely autistic body. Levy captures the sensitive care-giving of her mother and Sydney’s artistic musings.

Arsy Versy  by Miro Remo

2010, Slovakia, 24 minutes, digital projection

Director Miro Remo succeeds in crafting a film that’s simultaneously intimate and epic, pointing a Kubrickian sized lens at small story about an eccentric man, Lubo Mero, and his love of photographing bats. Although his Mother supports his creative endeavours, she also hopes that one day her son will get a real job, find a wife, and maybe move out of her house. She doesn’t seem to hold much hope though, as her opinion of the modern woman seems pretty harsh. In her eyes, Lubo has everything a girl should want, but in this day and age, it’s all about a man’s financial status and fancy cars. Interestingly, Lubo seems fairly unconcerned about such things. He’s too busy exploring the local mining caves taking extraordinary photos of bats.-Jay Cheel, THE DOCUMENTARY BLOG

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doxita is a traveling festival of documentary films that are under 40 minutes in length. The program represents a wide variety of documentary – domestic and foreign, super-short and longer format, serious and funny. It is designed to profile the great content and artistic vision that non-fiction short films provide, but that people don’t often get a chance to see.

Fukushima Infiltrator

7 minutes

An interview with Tetsuo Jimbo, journalist who drove into the Fukushima Daiichi evacuation zone.

Kids + Money by Lauren Greenfield

USA, 15 minutes, 2008, digital projection

A piercing short film by photographer Lauren Greenfield, Kids + Money is a conversation with young people about the influence of money in their lives. Born of the extremes of poverty and wealth that define the Los Angeles landscape, teens and tweens from Pacific Palisades to East Los Angeles address how they are shaped by a culture of consumerism.-GETTY MUSEUM

Here Comes Greatness by Matthew Luem & Greg Fiering

USA, 20 minutes, digital projection

This piece examines a fascinating manifestation of the ennui suffered by suburban kids in Southern California.-Rahul Chadha, STRANGER THAN FICTION

A is for Atom by Adam Curtis

UK, 1992, 60 minutes, digital projection

The film shows that from very early on – as early as 1964 – US government officials knew that there were serious potential dangers with the design of the type of reactor that was used to build the Fukushima Daiichi plant. But that their warnings were repeatedly ignored. The film tells the story of the rise of nuclear power in America, Britain and the Soviet Union. It shows how the way the technologies were developed was shaped by the political and business forces of the time. And how that led directly to inherent dangers in the design of the containment of many of the early plants. Those early plants in America were the Boiling Water Reactors. And that is the very model that was used to build the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Three of them were supplied directly by General Electric. In 1966 the US government Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards tried to force the industry to redesign their containment structures to make them safer. But the chairman of the committee claims in the film that General Electric in effect refused.-Adam Curtis, BBC

Brent Hoff is the editor and co-founder of Wholphin DVD where he films drunk bees, crying competitions, and illegal trans-border volleyball matches. Before that he authored Mapping Epidemics, a book on pandemic disease transmission, made TV at The Daily Show, VH1, and Nickelodeon, and wrote articles about squid. His feature script “El Diablo Rojo” was recently awarded the Tribeca Sloan grant and he has been named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 Faces to Watch” in 2012.

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