Arts Design

10 INCREDIBLE SUNDANCE ART WORKS

Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival. The Source by Doug Aitkin.

The Sundance Film Festival 2014 has an awesome exhibition of art installations and performances. And, given that they are part of the film festival, and film is all about telling stories, these works are beautiful storytelling pieces as well. Here is a selection of works currently on exhibition, as shared by the Sundance Film Festival.

1. THE SOURCE

Where does the creative idea start? What is the journey to the finished creation? These are the questions world renowned artist Doug Aitken explores in an ongoing series of conversations with groundbreaking pioneers from different disciplines who are shaping modern culture.

This astonishing, immersive multi-platformed, generative documentary is presented as a rhythmic six channel projection inside a two-thousand-square-foot pavilion designed in collaboration with architect, David Adjaye.

The Source (evolving) will also take the form of a living archive website, and fragments of the films will be screened in various Festival theatres.

The U.S. premiere of The Source (evolving) at the Festival is made possible by a generous contribution from the Maurice Marciano Family Foundation.

About the Director:

Widely known for his innovative fine art installations, Doug Aitken is at the frontier of 21st-century communication. Utilizing a wide array of artistic approaches, Aitken’s eye leads us into a world where time, space, and memory are fluid concepts.

Aitken has had many exhibitions around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Le Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the 1999 Venice Biennale, where he won the international prize for his acclaimed installation Electric Earth.

Cast and Credits:

Director: Doug Aitken

Producer: Chris Totushek

Editor: Austin Meredith

2. DIGITAL DIASPORA FAMILY REUNION

The innovative transmedia companion to Through a Lens Darkly, Digital Diaspora Family Reunion (DDFR) has reimagined the social network by inviting audiences to upload and share their own family photos, thereby building a “One World, One Family” album.

Thirteen events, five cities, 600 interviews, and 6,500 photographs later, DDFR comes to the Sundance Film Festival. Festivalgoers can upload images to Instagram at #DDFRtv, or bring them to New Frontier to participate in a special live event.

About the Artist/Director:

Thomas Allen Harris's award-winning films include Vintage—Families of Value, That’s My Face (E Minha Cara), and Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela. His work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, Reina Sofia, the Corcoran Gallery, and on PBS, ARTE, and CBC as well as at the Sundance, Toronto, Berlin, Outfest, and FESPACO film festivals. Harris is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Fellowship, and has garnered nominations for several Emmy awards and an Independent Spirit Award.

3. I LOVE YOUR WORK

Jonathan Harris returns to New Frontier (his works We Feel Fine and Universe showed during the 2008 Festival) with this exceedingly intelligent, raw, and authentic portrait of the everyday lives of nine young women who make lesbian porn.

I Love Your Work is a beautifully designed interactive documentary that lets the viewer explore the realities of these fantasy makers’ lives, whether it's in the cozy, intimate comfort of a private viewing booth at New Frontier, or the privacy of one's own home.

About the Director:

Jonathan Harris makes projects that reimagine how humans relate to technology and to each other. His work has been exhibited at MoMA, The V&A Museum, and Le Centre Pompidou. Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art, and storytelling, his projects range from building the world’s largest time capsule—with Yahoo!—to documenting an Alaskan Eskimo whale hunt on the Arctic Ocean—with a warm hat.

Harris is the co-creator of We Feel Fine, a search engine that continuously measures the emotional temperature of the human world through large-scale blog analysis, and has made other projects about online dating, modern mythology, happiness, anonymity, news, and language. His latest project is Cowbird, a community of storytellers working to build a public library of human experience.

4. I WANT YOU TO WANT ME

This alluring and emotional interactive installation explores the world of online dating. A touch screen displays a sky filled with balloons, each containing a human silhouette representing a real person’s dating profile.

Touching a balloon will reveal personal information about the person, and the balloons can be rearranged to highlight different aspects of online dating, including the top turn-ons, the most popular first dates, and people’s biggest desires. Couples are paired algorithmically based on who they are and what they’re looking for.

About the Directors:

Sep Kamvar is an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, and the director of its media lab's social computing group. His research focuses on social computing and information management. Prior to MIT, Kamvar was the head of personalization at Google and a consulting professor of computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford University.

He is the author of two books and over 40 technical publications and patents in the fields of search and social computing and is on the technical advisory boards of several companies, including Clever Sense and Etsy. Kamvar's artwork has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens.

Combining elements of computer science, visual art, and storytelling, Jonathan Harris makes projects that explore our relationship with technology. He is the creator of We Feel Fine, a search engine for human feelings; The Whale Hunt, a documentary about an Alaskan Eskimo tradition; and Cowbird, a public library of human experience. His work has been exhibited at MoMA, The V&A Museum, and Le Centre Pompidou. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

5. MESOCOSM (Wink,TX & Northumberland, UK)

A mesocosm is a tool used by researchers to bring a small part of the natural environment under controlled conditions in order to conduct experiments. In these two generative, animated works, Marina Zurkow algorithmically combines a series of beautifully hand-drawn, environments to create mesocosms of two locations on earth—a sinkhole in Wink,Texas, and the moors of Northeast England.

Over the course of the Festival, these generative, simulated ecosystems will evolve on the walls of New Frontier, opening up vistas that will constantly change, develop, and surprise.

About the Director:

Crossing multiple disciplines, Marina Zurkow builds animations and participatory environments that are centered on humans and their relationship to animals, plants, and the weather. Recent solo exhibitions include Bitforms gallery, New York; the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; and Diverseworks, Houston.

Zurkow is the recipient of a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and has also been granted awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is on faculty at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program (ITP), and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Cast and Credits:

Director: Marina Zurkow

Code Design: Veronique Brossier

Sound Designer: Lem Jay Ignacio

Animators: Marina Zurkow, Michelle Mayer

6. NOT EYE

Artist Lauren Moffat invites you into a 3-D stereoscopic experience: step inside a dark box, take a seat, and meet a French woman who just can’t take the constant violation of being under surveillance by gadgets and devices. She is so tormented that she decides to take action and protect herself from the violating gaze of others. She creates a helmet designed not only to defend herself but also to strike back.

Cast and Credits:

Director: Lauren Moffatt

Producer: Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains

Coproducers: Binocle 3D, PARALLAX

Cinematographer: Guillaume Brault,

Art Directors: Aymeric Manceau, Sven Heck

Sound Design: Léonore Mercier, Josselin Panchout, Olivier Wils

Costume Design: Ian Moffatt

Principal Cast: Danièle Hennebelle, Julien Bucci

7. OCULUS RIFT VIRTUAL REALITY HEADSET

In 2012, 19-year-old Palmer Luckey debuted a virtual reality headset at New Frontier that he handcrafted for Nonny de la Pena’s work, Hunger in Los Angeles. Palmer’s company, Oculus VR, is planning to hit the market with a consumer virtual reality headset. The device not only promises to change gaming but also the way we experience cinematic content.

Their VR Cinema app places viewers inside a stadium-seated virtual theater. Featured 3-D Festival shorts include 130919: A Portrait of Marina Abramović, and samples from 2014 Festival features The Girl from Nagasaki and Under the Electric Sky.

Works that will be presented on the Oculus Rift:

Sound and Vision by Chris Milk

EVE: Valkyrie by CCP Games

Clouds by James George and Jonathan Minard

8. STREET

Using a high-speed HD camera, painter/photographer/video artist James Nares slows down the densely busy streets of New York City to create this fascinating and mesmerizing video installation.

Hot dog vendors, children on scooters, lovers, fighters, pigeons, bike riders, traffic cops, even the flick of a cigarette butt sailing through the air and onto the curb—all take on an ethereal presence. The experience is infused with an evocative acoustic 12-string guitar soundtrack from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.

About the Director:

James Nares’s paintings and projects seek to capture the very moment of their own creation. They are most frequently made in a single brushstroke, recording a gestural passage of time and motion across the canvas.

Using brushes of his own design, Nares repeatedly creates and erases his strokes, over and over again, until he feels he has made one that represents a precision of balance between intent and improvisation. His films and videos reference many of the same preoccupations with movement, rhythm, and repetition, while also ranging further afield in their scope.

Nares's work is included in a number of public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Athenaeum. In 2008, Anthology Film Archives hosted a complete retrospective of his films and videos. In the spring of 2014, Rizzoli will publish the first monograph dedicated to James Nares’s work in all media over the last four decades.

Cast and Credits:

Director: James Nares

Producers: Paul Kasmin Gallery, James Nares

Cinematographer: James Nares

Music: Thurston Moore

Editor: Kelly Spivey

Phantom Technician: Kyle Doris

Sound Design: Bill Seery

9. REIFYING DESIRE ANTHOLOGY

Inspired by his mother’s drawings, gaming culture, Dada, surrealism, Fluxus attitudes, and ballroom voguing, the bold and hallucinogenic works of Jacolby Satterwhite burn with originality, desire, and conceptual density.

Comprised of live performance, custom-made wallpaper, and six computer-generated videos, Reifying Desire Anthology is like a fantastical hyperlink that transcends the brick and mortar we inhabit to explore electronic and biological realms. Satterwhite evokes a universe where sexuality runs hungry and wild through the psychobioelectric matrix in search of transformation and liberation.

About the Director:

Jacolby Satterwhite has an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He also completed a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has recently been exhibited in “Shift: Projects | Perspectives | Directions” at The Studio Museum in Harlem; “First Look: New Art Online: Aboveground Animation: 3D-Form” at The New Museum; a solo show at Monya Rowe Gallery; and two solo shows at Mallorca Landings gallery in Palme De Mallorca, Spain.

Satterwhite's publications and reviews include the New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Modern Painters, Art Forum, and Art Papers. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Cast and Credits:

Director: Jacolby Satterwhite

Animator: Jacolby Satterwhite

Art Director: Jacolby Satterwhite

Editor: Jacolby Satterwhite

Producer: Jacolby Satterwhite

Principal Cast: Jacolby Satterwhite, Antonio Biaggi

10. WHAT’S HE PROJECTING IN THERE?

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Sundance Film Festival, Philadelphia-based 3-D projection-mapping artists Klip Collective have produced this year’s Festival trailer in homage to the hundreds of iconic films that have premiered at Sundance.

In addition, each night of the Festival, Klip Collective will project the narrative 3-D–mapped film, What’s He Projecting in There?, an indie-style salute to the history of cinema, on the upper floors of the Egyptian Theatre.

About the Director:

Klip Collective is a creative production shop specializing in the concept and execution of immersive visual experiences by combining media technology and problem-solving–engineering with a cinematic vision.

In the advertising world, brands have sought Klip's unique ability to use video projection art as a bridge between architecture, lighting, design, and filmmaking for conventional commercials as well as projects unconstrained by the screen. With featured projection installations at New Frontier in 2007 and 2013, this is Klip Collective's third appearance at the Sundance Film Festival.