Dr. Awesome's Bad Tape Night
posted: October 26, 2009
Off the MAP for November
Tuesday October 27th 9pm-11pm $3 cover charge.
Bobo Gallery, 22 Lexington Ave, Asheville
Join Jason Holland from the Dr Awesome show for an evening of the worst video he can muster. Expect the unexpected, but my guess is there will be some bad training films, bad commercials and bad public access shows. But that's just a guess. You'll have to show up to find out what all the hubub is about. Perhaps this Off the MAP event should come with a warning. Side effects may include: offended morals, abdominal pain and cramping, blurry vision, bleeding from the eyes, cluster migraines, irregular heatbeat, and vomiting.
Image from Jonah Bokaer, NYC choreographer and media artist who uses motion capture.
As part of the monthly "Off the MAP" series. Jason Scott Furr and Megan McKisack team up to explore methods of digital capture. The evening will include a screening of films and videos on the history and technology of motion capture followed by a live demonstration and inreactive displays.
When: Wednesday September 30th, 8 pm
Where: BoBo Gallery, 22 S. Lexington Ave, Asheville
Cost: FREE, but you can always make a donation!
Image from Jonah Bokaer, NYC choreographer and media artist who uses motion capture. He performed and lectured last Fall at UNC- Asheville.
FOUND FOOTAGE FESTIVAL comes to Ashevile
posted: September 22, 2008
The Found Footage Festival,
the acclaimed touring
showcase of odd and hilarious found videos, will make a one-night-only
appearance in Asheville
next month as part of its 2008 North American tour. Hosts Joe Pickett and Nick
Prueher, whose credits include The Onion
and the Late Show with David Letterman,
are excited to present their unique blend of video clips and live comedy in two
big shows at the AshevilleArtsCenter
(308 Merrimon Ave.)
on Saturday, Oct. 11th at 8 and 10 pm. The shows are being sponsored locally by
the Media Arts Project (MAP) and OrbitDVD. Tickets are $10 and are on sale at Static Age, Harvest Records, TV Eye and OrbitDVD, or online at www.brownpapertickets.org .
This
one-of-a-kind event compiles more than an hour’s worth of footage from videos
that were found at garage sales and thrift stores and in warehouses and dumpsters
throughout the country. Curators Pickett and Prueher host each screening
in-person and provide their unique observations and commentary on these found
video obscurities. From the curiously-produced industrial training video to the
forsaken home movie donated to Goodwill, the Found Footage Festival resurrects
these forgotten treasures and serves them up in a lively celebration of all
things found.
Among the new video clips to be featured in the show:
Highlights from a cable access talent show called “Stairway
to Stardom”
An all-new collection of exercise videos featuring Marky
Mark Wahlberg, O.J. Simpson and a group of rapping pregnant ladies
An
instructional video for a cosmetic device so frightening that it will forever
haunt you
The Found Footage Festival was
founded in New York in 2004 and has gone on to
sell out hundreds of shows across the U.S.
and Canada, including the
HBO Comedy Festival at CaesarsPalace in Las Vegas
and the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal.
The festival has been featured on National Public Radio, ABC World News,
Jimmy Kimmel Live, and G4 TV’s Attack of the Show, and has been named
a “Critic’s Pick” in dozens of publications, including The New York Times,
Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and The Chicago
Tribune.
To obtain a
DVD screener of the festival or to set up an interview with the curators, please
contact Nick Prueher at 347-255-7350, or via email at foundfootagefestival@yahoo.com.High-resolution photos, stills and video
clips from the festival are also available upon request. Additional information
and a short preview of the show can be found on the festival’s official
website: www.foundfootagefest.com.
ABOUT THE
CURATORS
Nick
Prueher and Joe Pickett began collecting found videotapes in 1991 after
stumbling across a training video entitled, “Inside and Outside Custodial
Duties,” at a McDonald’s in their home state of Wisconsin. Since then, they
have compiled an impressive collection of strange, outrageous and profoundly
stupid videos. Pickett, a former film technician, and Prueher, a former
researcher at the Late Show with David
Letterman, have written for The Onion
and Entertainment Weekly and recently
premiered their feature-length documentary, “Dirty Country,” at the South By
Southwest Film Festival (www.dirtycountrymovie.com).
ABOUT THE SPONSORS
The Media
Arts Project cultivates innovative arts & technology in western North Carolina. The MAP
provides exhibition programming, professional development, outreach, and
education. We are driven by the belief that the media arts are integral to the
vibrant cultural and economic life of the region. OrbitDVD is a fiercely independent
video store in West Asheville stocking 14,000 different titles, including the
best television, horror, music, documentary, and cult selections in Western North Carolina.
ABOUT THE VENUE
The AshevilleArtsCenter
is a school and performance venue featuring music, dance, drama and other
special events. The venue is located at 308 Merrimon Avenue, Asheville,
NC28801.
Tickets to the Found Footage Festival are $10 and are available at Static Age Records, Harvest Records, TV Eye and OrbitDVD
or at the door.
Southern Circuit: Socheata Poeuv's New Year Baby
posted: August 20, 2008
The Media Arts
Project (MAP) presents Socheata Poeuv as part of the Southern Circuit tour of independent filmmakers.
New Year Baby will
screen Wednesday, February 6th at the Fine Arts Theatre downtown at 7 PM.
A discussion with the filmmaker will
follow the screening.
This event is $5 for non-students and free to UNCA and WCU students with ID.
Socheata Poeuv was born in a Thai refugee camp on Cambodian New Year.Each member of the family is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge
genocide in Cambodia, smuggled to Thailand by Poeuv’s father before the family immigrated to the United States.
In her
captivating debut documentary, New Year Baby, Poeuv and her brother travel with their parents back to Cambodia to reconnect with their
past.In this very personal and powerful film, she unveils the enormity of the Cambodian genocide and interviews the generals of Pol Pot’s
Khmer Rouge who never faced prosecution.
Socheata made her filmmaking debut with the feature documentary NEW YEAR
BABY which won the 'Movies That Matter' human rights cinema award (an Amnesty International initiative) on its premiere at the 2006
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.
NEW YEAR BABY is also slated for national PBS broadcast on
Independent Lens in 2008. She is working with several international organizations to take NEW YEAR BABY to conflict and post-conflict
cities around the world.
She left NBC News Dateline in 2007 and previously was on staff with ABC News World News Tonight
Weekend and NBC News TODAY.
She also co-founded Broken English Productions in New York City and has written for City
Limits Magazine, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, DisOriented and the Open Society Justice Initiative. She has spoken at United Nations, both Yale
Law & Divinity Schools, Northwestern Law School, the Harvard Kennedy School and UCLA among others.
Her newest project
is creating Khmer Legacies, a visual history project with the goal of videotaping 10,000 Cambodian genocide survivors while interviewed by their
children.
Socheata is a 2007 Echoing Green Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Genocide Studies Program at the MacMillan Center for
International and Area Studies.
Socheata graduated cum laude with a B.A. from Smith College in 2002 and studied one year at Hertford College,
Oxford.
Southern Circuit: Cathy Crane's Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil
posted: August 20, 2008
The Media Arts Project (MAP) presents Cathy Crane as part of the Southern Circuit tour of
independent filmmakers.
April 09, 2008
7 PM, The Fine Arts Theatre Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible
Life of Simone Weil
This event is $5 for non-students and free to UNCA and WCU students with ID.
This
portrait is not simply an account of Simone Weil’s life, but rather the skein of her ideas.
The film, shot in 16mm
black-and-white, stages the “theatre” of her mind through a mise-en-scene whose rear screen projections of live-feed video and
archival newsreels antagonize the spectacle of biographical reconstruction being played out by actors before it. The screen serves to distance
the viewer from the fiction of fact while also representing Weil’s own definition of a human life as “a composition on several
planes.”
Off the MAP: Who is Bozo Texino?
posted: August 20, 2008
Screening: Who is Bozo
Texino? Bill Daniel presents a show of underground documentary films
Q&A with the filmmaker afterwards
Wednesday Nov 16
Doors open 7pm
Films start at 8pm
Wedge Gallery (see directions below)
$5
Filmmaker and tramp Bill Daniel is back in the van and touring the USA with a
program of new work, including his recently completed documentary on the secret history of hobo and railworker graffiti, Who is Bozo Texino? The film has been wowing audiences of punks, geezers,
foamers and graffiti toughs all over the West Coast this summer. The film was featured in the Viennale International Film Festival in Austria in
October.
“Daniel and Renwick makes some of the
liveliest work on the microcinema circuit, wherein film, video art, and music collide with edgy, confrontational, unpredictable and often
exuberant intensity”
- Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
“I am not going to hold back any enthusiasm… it is the best movie I have ever seen.”
- Josh from Edmonton
Headlining is Daniel’s 56min documentary on the secret history of hobo and railworker graffiti, called
Who is Bozo Texino? Shooting over a period of 16 years, Daniel rode freights across the West, gathering interviews and clues to the identities of
many of the most legendary boxcar artists while discovering a vast underground folkloric practice that has existed for over a century. This
gritty black and white documentary tells the mostly-factual account of the epic quest and unlikely discovery of railroading's most mysterious
artist.
Also screeening:
Waldo Point by Saul Rouda, 1970, 20 min. A stoned and song-filled
documentary shot in Sausalito’s hippie houseboat community. An utterly unique and authentic snapshot of ‘60’s freedom shot by a
young film student who was living moored out in San Francisco Bay in a floating utopia of hand-made houseboats. Shaggy pirate-hippies drink wine,
pass joints, and discuss building boats from garbage.
Britton S. Dakota by Vanessa Renwick,
2004, 7 min. Depression-era children are hypnotized by the camera in this re-discovered imagery from 1938. Score by Johnne Eschleman.
Portland-based filmmaker Vanessa Renwick is Director of Affairs of the Oregon Dept. of Kick Ass. (www.odoka.org)
the SQUID KILLER VIDMIX SHOW
posted: November 1, 2007
November 6th and 7th
BoBo Gallery
highlighting Local MAP artists' work
November 6th and 7th BoBo Gallery
The MAP presents:
the SQUID KILLER VIDMIX SHOW
highlighting Local MAP artists' work...
Screenings of experimental, animations, works in progress.. whatever just keep it under ten minutes (unless it is amazing, then bring it on)
The following formats are acceptible:
VHS
VHSc
DVD
16mm Film,
8mm Film,
digital formats (.mov, .mp4, .mpg, .flv, and some .avi/.wmv files)
I have a DV box if anyone needs to digitize oddball stuff like beta or
Hi8/Digi8.
Also if you or someone you know would like to do a short live set or
small MM installation/presentation during the events... That would be
awesome too.
{mosimage}
In Disappearances, Craven brings a number of these characters to life on the silver screen: Kris Kristofferson as Quebec Bill Bonhomme, a wild irrepressible “feral patriarch†with a history as both a smuggler and abuser of alcohol; Charlie McDermott as Wild Bill Bonhomme, his young son eager to take up the same path as his father; and Genevieve Bujold as Cordelia, Wild Bill’s enigmatic and prophetic aunt who seeks to save her grandson from the terrible fate she sees for him. These characters and others dance through gripping tale of high stakes whiskey smuggling along the Vermont Canadian border, involving mysterious French backers, dangerous bandits, and the Bonhomme family’s mysterious history.
Off the MAP and Southern Circuit
posted: February 26, 2007
The Media Arts Project presents more of the Southern Circuit Film Series at the Fine Arts Theatre on Monday, March 12th at 7 PM.
Please join us for Liberia: A Fragile Peace and Fishers of Dar.
{mosimage}
Liberia: A Fragile Peace begins documenting the Liberian saga with the departure of the tyrannical Charles Taylor in October 2003. The film explores the civil war between the wealthy minority of former American slaves and the indigenous, rural tribes across the country.
Rakumi Arts International writes, “Fishers of Dar is a visually lush documentary without commentary. The film takes the viewer, beginning before dawn, to the pier and the bustling central market, as hundreds of people make their living in this age-old way.” The film has screened internationally winning Best Documentary at the Athens International Film/Video Festival (2003) and Best Cinematography at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (2002).
Tickets will be available at the door and are $5 to general public, free to UNCA and WCU students with ID.
Steven Ross describes his film Fishers of Dar as “A sublime bit of filmmaking.” Although the film presents the issues around development in the Third World and the idea of modernizing traditional markets, Ross states, “This film doesn’t take a position towards its subject. It is Africans being productive and allowing the viewer to take an accurate look at their lives.”
For almost a decade, Ross has juggled the two worlds of professional cinematographer and associate film professor at the Ohio University School of Film. While the traveling was a major benefit of being a career cinematographer, Ross says that he has more chances for travel in the field of academia. Continuing in the vein of making location-specific documentaries Ross is now working on a documentary about a Viking Age archaeological dig in the Mosfell Valley outside of Reykjavik, Iceland.
The Southern Circuit Film Series is a program of the Southern Arts Federation in collaboration with the South Carolina Arts Commission.
The MAP would like to thank all of the sponsors who brought the program to Asheville: The Fine Arts Theatre, Western Carolina University, University of North Carolina Asheville, Advantage West and The New York Times.
Curt Cloninger presents "St. Frank and the Wolf" at Flood Gallery
posted: February 13, 2007
The performances will take place in the cave-like side room of the Flood Gallery between 7-9 p.m. on Friday, February 23. The Flood Gallery is located in the Mechanic Building at 109 Roberts Street in Asheville's River Arts district. For more information call 828-255-0066. Email curt@lab404.com Or visit http://lab404.com/video/francis.html
According to the artist:
"St. Frank and the Wolf" is a series of solo, improvisational multimedia performances that explore the irreducible aspects of faith. Abstractly based on the story of St. Francis making peace with a wild wolf, these performances dialogue with sound and light in order to saturate time and space with the presence of God.
The performances consist of two separate audio/video loops projected onto the artist who uses a theremin, an analog synthesizer, and voice to mix between these two loops. The results blur the distinction between real/virtual, live/pre-recorded, and matter/spirit.
The performances will take place in the cave-like side room of the Flood Gallery between 7-9 p.m. on Friday, February 23. Each improvisational performance lasts between 10-20 minutes, and there will be several performances throughout the evening. Between performances, the audio/video loops will continue running, effectively remixing themselves, functioning as a kind of generative installation intermission.
"It really feels like playing some sort of strange, hybrid instrument that is more than the sum of its parts. The volume of my live instruments controls the mix of my pre-recorded instruments, so it's like I am improvising and remixing two different versions of myself.
The different audio sources will be positioned around the audience in the space, and the room is small and intimate, all in order to facilitate a more immersive experience. Each performance will be 10-20 minutes. Once a performance starts, no one will be allowed in or out of the room.
Some people who have seen the performances describe having a kind of ecstatic experience, and other people describe having a very unsettling experience. It's been compared to Sufi whirling dervishes, puppeteering, and one person said it reminded him of infamous clown serial killer John Wayne Gacy. I'm not trying to control the experience people have. I'm just trying to dialogue with sound and light in a contemplative way. It's a conversation between harmony and noise, and each performance is different. With this particular piece, I've noticed that noise often gets the last word."
The Media Arts
Project (MAP) presents Socheata Poeuv as part of the Southern Circuit tour of independent filmmakers.
New Year Baby will
screen Wednesday, February 6th at the Fine Arts Theatre downtown at 7 PM.
April 09, 2008
Who is Bozo
Texino?
The performances will take place in the cave-like side room of the 
"It really feels like playing some sort of strange, hybrid instrument that is more than the sum of its parts. The volume of my live instruments controls the mix of my pre-recorded instruments, so it's like I am improvising and remixing two different versions of myself.
