Posts Tagged ‘media’
The Future of Video on the Net and What You Need to Know
Open Video is a broad based movement of video creators, technologists, academics, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists, remixers, and many others. When most folks think of “open,” they think of open source and open codecs. They’re right—but there’s more to Open Video than open codecs. Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. Open Video is about the legal and social norms surrounding online video. It’s the ability to attach the license of your choice to videos you publish. It’s about media consolidation, aggregation, and decentralization. It’s about fair use. In short, it’s about a lot of things, and that’s why the first ever Open Video Conference Held on June 19th and 20th here in NYC was a fascinating event for anyone in the business of producing or consuming video.
Final Kinetic Cinema of the Season!!!
Still from danceanywhere
REALITY DANCEVISION: An Intimate Screen Capture of Dance Vloggers
Join us for the last Kinetic Cinema of the season featuring Boris Willis, a dancer, choreographer, video-maker and blogger based in Washington DC. Willis will explore the phemonena of dance vlogs (video blogs about dance) and present works by of some of the most notable and prolific dance vloggers today. In 2007-08 Willis published the vlog “Dance-a-day” in which he made and posted a dance video every day for 365 days. From his first video shot in a parking lot demonstrating effeminate gestures, to an entire month of posts about important sites of Black history in Washington DC, as well as 43 collaborations with composer David Morneau (who also posted a composition a day on his blog 60×365.com) , Willis covered the entire range of styles, experiments, and types of improvisation one can do with dance and a video camera.
Featuring the work of: Ashley A. Friend, danceanywhere, Gesel Mason, Liz Roncka, lee atwell, and Boris Willis, among others.
Kinetic Cinema
Wednesday, June 10th at 7pm
Tickets: $10 (purchase at the door)
304 Boerum St., Buzzer #11
Brooklyn, NY 11206
718.418.4405
Directions
Google Map
Boris Willis
Boris Willis by Paul Emerson
Boris Willis is an Assistant Professor of Computer Game Design at George Mason University and the Chief Artistic Officer of Boris Willis Moves, a movement and media based performance company. He has performed with Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange, Streb, Jacob’s Pillow’s Men Dancers and the Theatre of the First Amendment. He recently completed work on Dance-A-Day, (www.danceaday.com) a year long daily video dance project. He has an MFA in Dance and Technology from The Ohio State University, a BFA in Dance from George Mason University and a Diploma in Contemporary Dance from the NC School of the Arts.
About Kinetic Cinema
Kinetic Cinema is a co-presentation of Chez Bushwick and Pentacle’s Movement Media project, and happens on the second Wednesday of each month as part of a weekly dance, visual & media arts series at Chez Bushwick. For each screening Anna Brady Nuse, Pentacle’s director of Movement Media, invites a different guest artist from the fields of dance and media arts to share a selection of films and videos that have inspired them. These could be works for screen that feature dance, are kinetic-based, or have been influential on their work in some way. The guest curators come from a range of backgrounds as performers, choreographers, critics, video artists, and film-makers.
For more info on Pentacle’s Movement Media project and news about the next Kinetic Cinema season, please visit our website: http://pentacle.org/movement_media.asp
Using Choreography in Cinedance
By Dawn Paap
Given all the possibilities of dance on screen, choreographers for the camera have a multitude of ways to keep us astonished. Fortunately, the creative interaction between film technique and dance are endless. In the emerging field of Cinedance, filmmakers or video artists create works that use dance as raw material, and now, choreographic achievements are being made available to the video artist for artistic exploration.
At the last Kinetic Cinema screening on May 13th at Chez Bushwick, curator Victoria Murphy showed a video by Matt Tarr and Ami Ipapo entitled ‘Little Ease (Outside the Box)’ that was a screen adaptation of Elizabeth Streb’s iconic solo ‘Little Ease’. For the film version of the piece, Streb company member Ami Ipapo reconstructed the choreography off-stage in an urban landscape. The choreography of the live piece on its own is powerful, but the film was able to capture more action and intensity in the piece. I felt more connected to the dancer by being able to hear her breathing, and see her minute facial expressions as she powerfully pushes through the movements. The film took me “inside the box” with the dancer, and I forgot that I was a voyeur watching a choreographed work, something that rarely happens when watching a live performance. My favorite element of this Cinedance was the artistry in editing together of the shots of choreography, which to me added a new specific cinematic “pulse” to Streb’s dance.
Fortunately, other dance icons are lending their choreographed works to video artists to create cinedances. For instance the Martha Graham Company recently released videos of several dances from Martha Graham’s Clytemnestra to be remashed and reedited by contestants in their Clytemnestra Remash Challenge. The contestants displayed a huge range of styles and approaches to remashing the choreographic material, and all of the contest entries are available for view on the Clytemenestra Remash Challenge website at http://clytemnestraproject.com.
I am a personal fan of taking choreographed works made for the stage out into the world to be performed, so I was very pleased to see so many video artists take Martha Graham’s choreography and characters into new environments off stage. To me, it made the characters more appealing and more passionate. As a result, I found myself enjoying and connecting with Graham’s work on another level. The following submission was my personal favorite in the Remash Contest.
The winners of the Remash Contest for Martha Graham’s Clytemnestra have been announced. Check out their videos and look at some of the other contestants as well. Voting is still open for the popular choice awards! Regardless of the winners, I am thrilled to see new film-makers responding to choreography and furthering the development of cinedance.
People all over the globe are now able to share and collaborate on artistic works over the Internet. Dance innovators would be wise to tap into these new possibilities and use today’s networked media technologies to make the works of dance masters more accessible. In so doing, like Martha Graham and Elizabeth Streb, they would ensure the cultural significance of their work over time, while also enabling to new works of art to be made and contributing to new developments in cinedance.
Creating a Lexicon for Screendance
by Anna Brady Nuse
(re)Action by Victoria Murphy
At Victoria Murphy’s talk and screening at Kinetic Cinema last Wednesday, she proposed a set of terms and definitions for classifying and identifying different forms of dance on screen. Murphy’s lexicon had similarities and differences with other proposed frameworks for screendance that have been presented and discussed at various forums and conferences in recent years. There is no doubt that this kind of discussion and debate is extremely important for the development of the genre (or some would say art form), so I would like to point out some of the main theories that exist today, and discuss how they intersect and overlap.
Screendance, cinedance, videodance, dance film… Which term to use?
In most debates about dance on screen, the first question that pops up is what is this genre called? Many different terms are in use, and in some cases they point to different genres while others are a catchall word for all dance on screen.
I think one of the best explanations of the different terms in use is by Karen Pearlman of the Physical TV company in Australia. In her article, “A Dance of Definitions” published in RealTime Arts, an Australian-based art and media blog, Pearlman reported on the dialogue at the first Screendance Conference at the American Dance Festival in 2006 around a question she raised which was: “Is dance on screen a dance art, a cinema art or a visual art?” In her estimation many of the different terms used today describe specific mixtures of two or more of these art forms at play. For Pearlman, screendance is a catchall term which could include any combination of dance and movement with “film, video, new media, installation, and future media.” The other terms are more specific in their focus. Videodance “is based in the thinking of a video art maker, a performance art maker or a visual artist will have its effect through techniques, schools, theories and premises of those disciplines.” While dance for screen “prioritises dance as its central discipline [and] will foreground the composition and exhibition of the danced movement.”
Screendance Venn Diagram by Karen Pearlman
Notes from the March 25th Artist Salon: Dance for Web-an Emerging Genre
(“Maybe we all dream to be………?” by T.A.G.San Francisco, shown at the March 25th Artist Salon with Jaki Levy)
At the last Artist Salon on March 25th at Chez Bushwick, Jaki Levy, a media artist and new media consultant, discussed dance work created specifically for the web. The question of the evening was: Why should artists make dance films specifically for the web? In short, making dance videos for the web is convenient, inexpensive, and relatively easy to do. For dance works in progress, posting videos on the web allows artists to conduct “audience test screenings” and get feedback. Web videos also offer artists the ability to communicate and mix media in different ways.
Jaki Levy compiled a few videos that gave us a peek into the present + future of dance, art, and technology on the web. Some of the work was completely choreographed, others were more improvisational. Jaki shared how videos are created for different purposes, and gave examples of what a digital performance world looks like, including live web casts, web series, and site specific performances.
For example, Tendu.TV is looking for a mass market for dance by offering high quality broadband content of dance concerts and dance for camera works. Jaki showed an example of a show produced for Tendu.TV by Marlon Barrios-Solano entitled “Dance-tech Ep. 1“. In this episode Marlon interviewed various international choreographers talking about their work and intercut the footage with excerpts from their New York performance seasons.
Troika Ranch was exploring a process of editing for their up-coming multi-media show, “Loop Diver”and shared it with their MySpace friends. This process is called “Algorithmic editing” and it assaults the senses. In this experiment (a collaboration between Troika Ranch and Street Pictures), a simple phrase of movement is fractured into thousands of shots in various locations all over Brooklyn, New York.
3rd Rail Projects & Julie Fotheringham both used web video to share their site specific performances with wider audiences. 3rd Rail Projects fully integrated web activities into their recent month long performance series at the World Financial Center by posting videos online and writing about each day’s performance on their blog. In this way, the work had both an online life and a physical life that co-existed and supported each other.
http://www.vimeo.com/3371529Julia Fotheringham makes guerilla-style dances that interrupt normal routines and cause people to stop and observe. The video is both a document and a voyeuristic view of the performer’s journey through the city.
“A Facet of the Real” explored how performance in “first” life and Second Life can intersect, creating a trippy situation in which a live performance is viewed in real time by online avatars in a virtual venue.
Some artists make web videos for artistic purposes, others for marketing purposes, and some have both in mind. The intention of web videos can be to develop audiences by hooking viewers online and enticing them to come to live shows or screenings, or to simply to post a personal video diary from the studio. The web space allows for both anonymous and public modalities and is as broad and rich as the physical world. What is exciting is how dance artists are starting to embrace the web for all its potential. It feels increasingly apparent that we are all media-makers now.
To see all the clips from the screening and read more commentary go to Jaki’s blog post at: http://www.arrowrootmedia.com
by Dawn Paap and Anna Brady Nuse
