Media Arts Preview: L.A. Rebellion, IndieCade & Experimental Film in Los Angeles
This week's media arts scene features the beginning of several large events, including Filmforum's 24-show screening series dedicated to experimental filmmaking in Los Angeles, as well as UCLA's excellent series, LA Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema.
Thursday, October 6
British artist Mark Leckey will lecture tonight at the Hammer Museum. Leckey, who won the Turner Prize in 2008, works in sculpture, sound, film, video and performance, and while there's no real description of his talk on the Hammer site, Leckey is known for his terrific and engaging lectures. The talk starts at 7:00 p.m.
Steve Turner Contemporary presents filmmaker Lee Lynch in conversation with Marnie Warner tonight, following a screening of the artist's film The Murder of Hi Good. The screening starts at 7:30, and the conversation starts at 8:30 p.m.
Friday, October 7
Ursula Brookbank and Jordan Biren present Filmic: An Evening of Live Cinema,comprised of image/sound projection and textual reading, at the Velaslavasay Panorama at 8:00 p.m. A reception in the garden follows the performances. Tickets are complimentary, and you're invited make reservations.
The IndieCade Conference kicks off today in Culver City, with two days of presentations and events designed to highlight innovations in the independent game design community. The IndieCade Festival, featuring dozens of games, including Big Games, a Game Walk in which attendees can play new games and meet their creators, and Night Games with - you guessed it - games at night. The Festival continues through Sunday, October 9.
LA Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema is a series of screenings and discussions that highlight the work of a generation of African and African American filmmakers who enrolled in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, and "came to represent the first sustained undertaking to forge an alternative Black Cinema." The event starts tonight with a screening of Julie Dash's celebrated 1991 independent film Daughters of the Dust, the first feature-length film to be directed by an African American woman in the US. The event continues tomorrow with more screenings and a panel discussion on Sunday about Black Cinema at 4:00 p.m.
Saturday, October 8
LACMA presents The Forgotten Space, a new film by Los Angeles-based artist/filmmaker Allan Sekula and essayist and scholar Noël Burch tonight at 7:30 p.m. Sekula is known for his photography, filmmaking and writing, which often focus on the condition of workers, Burch is known for his erudite analysis of cinema. The new film is described as a "lucid and lyrical portrait of workers' conditions, the inhuman scale of sea trade, the imbalance of international trade and the secret lives of port cities."
Sunday, October 9
Machine Project presents Drawing and Drones, a workshop in drawing led by Gail Swanlund, a text and image designer and somnambulist, with a live drone performance by Brian Sala, 11:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.
LA Filmforum launches its new screening series tonight. Titled Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945 - 1980, the event includes 24 shows between now and May 2012. Tonight's show is titled Dream States: The Avant-Garde of the 1940s and 1950s, and includes well-known iconic films such as Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon and Kenneth Anger's Fireworks, as well as other less known works, such as Gregory Markopoulos' Psyche and Sara Kathryn Arledge's What Is a Man.
Monday, October 10
REDCAT and Los Angeles Filmforum present Animation of the Unconscious: CalArts and the Teachings of Jules Engel, a screening of work by Engel and of those influenced by him. The celebrated animator founded the CalArts Film Graphics Program, which later became the school's Experimental Animation program, and was known for creating a new form of animation, "freewheeling, transgressive and imaginative." Animator Christine Panushka, who curated the program, as well as Sky David (Dennis Pies) and Lisze Bechtold will attend in person. The show will take place at REDCAT at 8:30 p.m.
My USC course,Digital Studies Symposium, features Ross Crooks and Jason Lankow, co-founders of Column Five Media, a Newport-based company dedicated to communicating abstract concepts and research through visual design. They will offer an overview of their work starting at 7:00 p.m. in SCA 112 in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. You're invited!
