Media Arts Preview: Outdoor Movies, Robotic Movement & More
Outdoor movies, robotic movement, alternative art practices and histories of video art make up this week's media art scene in LA.
Thursday, July 21
Holley Farmer, a dancer in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, presents Merce Cunningham: Choreography and Collaborative Technology, a talk about movement, space and technology, tonight at SCI-Arc at 7:00 p.m. with a focus specifically on Cunningham's techniques, chance operations, and collaborations with technology.
A demo of robotic movement will follow her talk, which will be contextualized to some extent by SCI-Arc's Robot House, "a new arena for architects to explore the possibilities of collaboration and interaction."
The Orange County Museum of Art's Cinema Orange Summer Series presents a screening of Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventure with Ant Farm by Elizabeth Federici and Laura Harrison. The film profiles the work and thinking of the 1970s culture jamming media collective Ant Farm. The group, founded in 1968, re-enacted the assassination of John F. Kennedy for The Eternal Frame project, crashed a Cadillac through a wall of TV sets for Media Burn, and buried a row of old Cadillacs in the desert of Texas for a project titled Cadillac Ranch. The screening starts at 8:00 p.m.
Friday, July 22
Kota Ezawa's Home Video 2 screens today as part of the Super 8 show at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica. The show presents a different video Tuesday-Saturday each week, with each week's selections presented by a different curator from a different city. This week is San Francisco, and next is Tokyo.
Saturday, July 23
REDCAT presents State of Independence: A Global Forum on Alternative Practice today and tomorrow. With artists and curators from Asia and Latin America, the conference "engages the relevance and sustainability of alternative practice today in regions where art, commerce and cultural infrastructure are taking new forms." The conference begins at 11:00 a.m. both days, and is free.
Summer brings lots of outdoor screening events. Tonight, you'll find the Outdoor Cinema Food Fest at Exposition Park near USC with music, food trucks and a screening of Reservoir Dogs. Doors open at 5:30 p.m., the band starts at 6:30 p.m., and the movie starts at 8:30 p.m. Movies on the Beach in Newport presents Cats & Dogs starting at sunset, and Movies on the Green presents Back to the Future, with pre-show entertainment beginning at 7:00 p.m. at Warner Park in Woodland Hills.
Tuesday, July 26
Machine Project celebrates the publication of Net Works, "an inside look into the process of successfully developing thoughtful, innovative digital media" with a launch party featuring the book's editor Xtine Burrough and media artists Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Jeremy Rotsztain. The event starts at 7:00 p.m.
LA-based video curator Carole Ann Klonarides, a key figure in supporting, describing, assessing and advocating for video art in Los Angeles, will talk about the history and collecting of video art in LA tonight at Christopher Grimes Gallery at 7:00 p.m. as part of the ongoing Super 8 show.
Artist and filmmaker Miranda July will be at Cinefamily tonight for Show & Tell,a new series that "invites artists, filmmakers, musicians and other cultural heroes to divulge their deepest, darkest media obsessions by opening their closets, digging through their attic and plundering their garages to curate an evening of... whatever they want to share!" Presenters offer a tour of the material that inspires them.
Wednesday, July 27
The Getty Research Institute's curator Glenn Phillips will talk about video art in Brazil tonight at Christopher Grimes Gallery at 7:00 p.m. as part of the ongoing Super 8 show.
Thursday, July 28
Join Zach Blas and Christopher O'Leary, the curators of Speculative, a group exhibition currently on view at LACE, for a conversation with artists and theorists Jordan Crandall, Judith "Jack" Halberstam and Rita Raley, along with Speculative artists Jeff Cain, Micha Cardenas and Michael Kontopoulos. The talk starts at 7:00 p.m., and the exhibition, which "focuses on new modes of art making and of presentation with an emphasis on the experiential, subversive and tactical potentials for art in the 21st century," will be on view through August 28, 2011.
