The fair-trade ticketing company.

GALAXIAN (curated-shorts) - Chicago Underground Film Festival

Chopin Theater
Chicago, IL

GALAXIAN
Curated by Rebecca Meyers

A popular arcade game of the early 1980s, Galaxian connoted the luminous vastness of outer space as well as the accompanying danger of alien worlds. Each film and video in this program embraces the mediated otherness of video game source material, from Tomb Raider to World of Warcraft, to create ominous realms fraught with human frailty, death, and anxiety, charged by questions of identity, spirituality, and the struggle to make sense of it all. Avatars float, shift, and tremble in unnervingly desolate and preternatural videoscapes as artists redesign digital code and re-appropriate lo-fi gaming imagery, demonstrating the artistic potential for the emerging genre of machinima (where movies are created using video game technologies). Starting with a pair of haunting videos generated from Grand Theft Auto, the program builds in uncertainty and terror but ends with TOTAL POWER DEAD DEAD DEADS moving call for intimacy and hope.

REHEARSALS FOR RETIREMENT
Phil Solomon
Video 11:00 2007

REHEARSALS FOR RETIREMENT is the third part of THE SAN ANDREAS TRILOGY, dedicated to the memory of Mark Lapore: UNTITLED (FOR DAVID GATTEN), FAULTLINE, REHEARSALS FOR RETIREMENT.

The days grow longer for smaller prizes
I feel a stranger to all surprises
You can have them I don't want them
I wear a different kind of garment
In my rehearsals for retirement

The lights are cold again they dance below me
I turn to old friends they do not know me
All but the beggar he remembers
I put a penny down for payment
In my rehearsals for retirement

Had I known the end would end in laughter
I tell my daughter it doesn't matter...

- Phil Ochs, Rehearsals for Retirement

UNTITLED (FOR DAVID GATTEN)
Phil Solomon & Mark LaPore
Video 5:00 2005

Mark and I made this film for our friend David Gatten, as a prayer, an offering, a get well soon card... for all three of us. It was made on the last night that I saw Mark, my best friend of 32 years. Phil Solomon

AND WE ALL SHINE ON
Michael Robinson
16mm 7:00 2006

An ill wind is transmitting through the lonely night, its signals spreading myth and deception along its murky path. Conjuring a vision of a post-apocalyptic paradise, this unworldly broadcast reveals its hidden demons via layered landscapes and karaoke, singing the dangers of mediated spirituality. Michael Robinson

SHE PUPPET
Peggy Ahwesh
Video, 17:00 2001

In a work based on appropriated footage from the game Tomb Raider, Lara Croft, the virtual girl-doll of the late 20th century, is recast as a triad of her personas: the alien, the orphan, and the clone. - Video Data Bank

UNTITLED #2
Valerie Brewer
Video, 13:00 2006

UNTITLED #2 exploits a glitch in the visual landscape of an online community to tease out the vague boundaries and tenuous relationships of virtual identity, property, and body. Valerie Brewer

STRANGER COMES TO TOWN
Jacqueline Goss
Video 28:00 2006

STRANGER COMES TO TOW

Kid Friendly: No

Dog Friendly: No

Non-Smoking: No

Wheelchair Accessible: No

Contact