Événement

video_dumbo FESTIVAL PASS

Eighth annual festival and exhibition of contemporary moving image artwork, curated by Caspar Stracke and Gabriela Monroy. On view from May 16 - 25, video_dumbo will include fourteen video screening programs, alongside eight installation works under the title Re-Return to Sender.

Individual screenings $5
day pass $10 (access to all screenings in one day)
festival pass $20 (access to all festival screenings)
Exhibition entrance is free

video_dumbo presents 106 artists from 30 different countries, championing the diversity of today's experimental, moving image landscape. Screenings include several US premieres and new video works by: Christian Jankowski, Eija-Liisa Ahtilla, Elizabeth Price, Nicolas Provost, Matthias Mueller/Christoph Girardet, Almagul Menlibayeva, Bjørn Melhus, Johan Grimonprez, Mike Hoolboom, Jesse McLean, and Mark Lewis.

The concurrent installation, Re-Return to Sender, speculates about the imagined consciousness of digital and electromagnetic moving image displays and projection apparatus. With the emergence of video art-- its novelty of closed circuit TV and feedback loops-- in the early 70s, video began by looking at itself; early on, Rosalind Krauss detected the narcissistic qualities within it.

Forty years later, moving image technology has multiplied, oversaturated and accelerated to such an extent that we are forced to take a step back to consider its omnipresence. Now, radically stripped of its hallucinatory aura and spectacle, we come full circle to ask fundamental questions regarding the state of contemporary moving image media, including its reflection and narcissism, in an age of increasingly intelligent machines. Re-Return to Sender is an exhibition comprised of apparatus that recognize, investigate and celebrate themselves. Their relationship and interactions with humans-- both passive and active-- becomes less significant as all signal emissions, events, and occurrences are projected back onto its originator-- a historical Re-Returning to Sender.

One artist, UK-based Chris Shen, muses on televisual hardware metamorphoses in his installation Infra, in which hundreds of old, discarded TV remotes join together, transforming and uniting into an enormous electronic image screen. Similarly, RE: by Bram Snijders and Carolien Teunisse displays a mid-size video projector that projects upon itself, covering its entire surface with a single image. This is echoed by Daniel Canogar's installation Spin, in which the copied contents of 100 discarded DVDs are projected back onto their surface. Annica Cuppetelli and Cristobal Mendoza's piece projects the exact representation of vertical columns upon itself until the participant crosses the space between projector and image, causing a destabilization that results in swirling moiré patterns. Christoph Meier assembles a Mondrian-like rectangular puzzle out of various projectors with different aspect ratios and light temperatures. Steina and Woody Vasulka's hybrid portrait series, riffing on 1970s experiments at the origin of the video medium's signal-as-protagonist theme, deconstructs the digital image into simultaneous two- and three-dimensional properties. Bühne by Daniel Kötter mirrors the cinema space (and literally starts a revolution), and The Society of the Spectacle Now in 3D by Pascual Sisto is exactly that.

Other highlights include a video installation by Kurt Ralske at Dumbo Arts Center, a book presentation by Cooper and Battersby and Mike Hoolboom, and a Special Program of New Finnish Video Art, co-presented by AV-arkki, Finland.