Program Notes (longer version) for Let's get tested
curated and introduced by Astria Suparak
for 50 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen
/ 50th International Film Festival Oberhausen

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Let's get tested

Let's get tested presents recent video, film and audio by Canadian, American, Brazilian and French artists, young at heart or in age. Playfully adapting public space into personal games, these makers look at architecture, videogames, biology, schoolwork, history and even their own memories with fresh eyes and twitchy fingers. Often sincere, sometimes willfully naive, they project a new optimism and the ability to self-amuse and re-imagine.

Let's get tested frolics under a handmade sun with a few dark cultural reflections. Culled from work I've seen over the past year, it embraces videos made for the Internet, CD-ROM and DVD zines (the new casual pop distribution), crafted with consumer software such as Flash animation, iMovie, Adobe After Effects and Macromedia Director alongside obsolete video formats pried out of dead cameras. Here the coolest nerds hack up a 1980s iconic revelry/reverie [Welcome to my Homey Page]; American Midwesterners romanticize 1970s German political terrorists [Digits]; a Canadian snubs murder commands to peacefully stroll through Grand Theft Auto 3 [My Trip to Liberty City]; and a videomaker refashions his memory into a sweet and disturbing mélange of literature, pop songs, film and news reports [Son of Samsonite] - all trying to make the grade while honoring arbitrary rules. Attempting to keep spirits up in times of strife, this program opts-out of violent spectacle, reckoning that life should be savored and wonder is a calculated state of mind.

As a curator I'm reluctant to make grand statements about the future of short film. The future can only be imagined with what exists in the present. Thus I try to spin intuitive connections into tightly wound shows, letting the audience discover nuance and resonance at their leisure. These artists move fluidly amongst performance, writing, printmaking, music, photography and installation, and one revealed in a disclaimer, "I don't have a preview reel or screening history -- I just make silly movies with my friends, primarily for our own amusement." How novel.

- Astria Suparak, Curator, "Prospektive / Prospective on Short Film", Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen catalogue
- contact: a@astriasuparak.com

Additional text for some of the videos:

3. Scan-Tron
director: Jennifer Schmidt
Boston, MA / 2003 / 3:00 minutes / Digital video

"Referencing the recording and reading of responses embedded within a series of fabricated standardized test sheets, the techno pop graphics of Scan-Tron become mentally charged with viable questions and patterns of decision-making. During the months of November, December, and January 2003, Jennifer Schmidt responded to a series of test forms-- filling in answers with a #2 pencil-- according to a given set of rules and unknown objectives.

A process-based performative artwork, Scan-Tron seeks to draw attention to the relationships between graphic design within a cultural vernacular and the directives for human response. Specifically, as it pertains to the format of American standardized test forms and its rules and methods for recording information. A disconnect exists between the artifact of the printed test answer sheet, the individual act of reading and thinking about the separate test questions, the individual act of recording test responses according to a given mark-making procedure, and the subsequent scanning or fact checking of these responses by a programmed machine.

I am most interested in what can be thought of as the "in-between"-- the identification, reconciliation and abstraction of the thing itself (meaning). What is ephemeral becomes lost in translation.

The sounds for Scan-Tron were recorded within Jennifer Schmidt's workspace while she responded to the test forms by filling in answers with a #2 pencil.

The video animation is a pseudo processing/reading of these sounds and test form responses using technological means.

Scantron Tests: designed and offset printed by Jennifer Schmidt
Video Animation of Scantron Tests: Jennifer Schmidt
Sound co-produced by L.Contra
http://www.jenniferschmidt.com" - JS

7. Hit on the Head with 1000 Anvils
director: Gabriel Fowler
Chicago, IL / 2001 / 00:45 seconds of infinite loop / VHS

"My projects use humor and spectacle to engage the viewer and entice them into contemplation of mass-culture. The spectacular elements arise primarily from entertainment and commercial contexts; the humor develops from the insertion of expressive content to these contexts. I approach each project like a piece of pop music: it must be concise and catchy, and the surface meaning must be clear within a few moments. In addition, each piece contains a built-in self-criticality based on my own perceptions of mass media. Within each seductive artifact lies earnest contradiction between the synthetic and the emotional.

The majority of my work begins with an unresolved pop-culture obsession, which evolves into a research project. If successful, the research culminates in the discovery of an archetype: an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious [Jung]. After isolating an archetype, I begin to scrutinize my relationship to it, focusing on the physical material, literal content, and traditional context of the model. The model then evolves into an existential reinterpretation based on my relationship to the archetype.

The resultant artwork is both familiar and inexplicable.

Since I am interested in the communication methods of mass-culture, I work in diverse media, reflecting the diversity of contemporary experience. The distribution and reception of my work is often an integral part of the work itself. By seeking-out multiple audiences and varied contexts, I can expand the life-experience of an individual project -- mimicking the “all over” experience of ubiquitous pop-culture forms." - GF

8. Welcome to My Homey Page (excerpt from pjvidz#1)
directors: Paper Rad
Easthampton, MA and Pittsburgh, PA / 2002 / 2:30 / Digital Video

"At once affirmative and critical, the videos of artist collective Paper Rad synthesize popular material from television, video games, and advertising, reprogramming these references with an exuberantly neo-primitivist digital aesthetic. As member Jacob Ciocci writes, 'In the '70s and '80s cartoons and consumer electronics were bigger and trashier than ever and freaked kids out... Now these kids are getting older and are freaking everybody else out by using this same throw-away trash.'

The group's far-flung members hail from Texas, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and also work in sound and music, clothing design, photography, comics, hand-drawn books, and writing. In keeping with their emphasis on current pop culture and media, the group presents ongoing Paper Rad activities and output via an eye-popping Web site (www.paperrad.org), which must be considered a work of art in and of itself.

Paper Rad's members are Benjamin Jones, Jessica Ciocci, and Jacob Ciocci. They began making projects together in 2000. Benjamin Jones was born in 1977 and received a B.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art. Jessica Ciocci was born in 1976 and received a B.A. in psychology and art from Wellesley College. Jacob Ciocci was born in 1977 and received a B.A. in computer science and art from Oberlin College." - Electronic Arts Intermix, New York on-line catalogue

10. Digits
directors: JoEllen Martinson and William Scott Rees
Minneapolis, MN / 2003 / 8:00 / Mini-DV

"Digits was constructed as if a CIA investigator's file cabinet exploded and its fragmented remnants were pieced together to illustrate a foreign, distant mystery. Our work is usually more rigidly narrative but with this video we were interested in suggesting a story rather than pounding one down, fact by crystal clear fact.

As if key chapters in the biography about these female terrorists had been burned, what seems to be missing from the story enhances the suspense, we hope, and suggests a world, a reign, and a narrative even larger and atmospheric than what the piece actually presents.

Visually, we were turned on by our newfound access to digital technology, toying with all the ways to take the harsh, banal look of the video medium and create something exotic and rich in appearance. Each vignette is pushed and pulled overtly into potent, almost stereotyped cinematic and news-media styles. What might be missing in dialogue or narrative clarity is replaced by thick, brash visual (and thus), emotional moods, and therefore the very look of the film almost acts as the script/screenplay/structure itself.

As the piece is coated in a self-conscious hipness, we wanted to poke holes in our constructed coolness by adding depreciating doses of humor and banality. Inspired by photographs of the German Baider Meinhoff activists, there was something compelling about images of its terrorists writhing ferociously in the arms of law enforcement in one photo, and then flipping to a previous picture depicting cell members slouching in a drab hotel room, wearing knee socks, munching on snack crackers and loafing like harmless nobodies. Digits, like all our work whips together the dramatically bizarre with the silliness of the ordinary, and becomes something funky but sweetly humble as well." - WSR

11. Untitled (after the visible human project)
director: Patrick Martinez
New York, NY and Besançon, France / 2002 / 3:00 of indefinite loop / Mini-DV / silent

"The Visible Human Project®, sponsored by the National Library of Medicine involves the creation of complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of the human body. It consists of magnetic resonance (MR) images, computed tomography (CT) images, and cryosection images of representative male and female cadavers. The male was sectioned at one millimeter intervals, the female at one-third of a millimeter intervals. The video installation project " untitled (after the visible human project) ", realized in 2002, is based exclusively on the cryosection images produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for the Visible Human Project®. The French visual artist Patrick Martinez employed these images to create two animated movies, one for the female and the other for the male. Martinez also digitally reconstructed a number of images that were missing in the original dataset of the NLM (due to the division of the cadavers into four blocks using a saw before serial sectioning) and added them to the sequence to create a complete journey (head to toe and back) through each of the bodies. The videos are looped and produce the hypnotic sensation of an ebb and flow of almost abstract pictures. They also give one the sensation of traveling through the bodies at great speed The two videos are intended to be shown next to one another, on two distinct screens.

The two human subjects used in the original project of the NLM were of different heights and therefore the time necessary to scan vertically through their respective lateral sections is also different. Consequently, this time difference puts the two videos progressively out of sync until they briefly catch up with each other.

Patrick Martinez' video document/artwork deals with the limits of technological representation of the human body, underlining the paradoxical relationship between high resolution and abstraction and playing with the notions of symmetry, identity and difference…" - PM

13. Anabolite See
director: Kon Petrochuk
San Francisco, CA / 1985 / 14:00 / 16mm film on Mini-DV [ Video format prefered by the artist]

"ANABOLITE SEE is the last film that I made while still trying to create purely personal and expressive art through the film medium. It's a work that was created without any thought of an audience or viewer in the formal sense of 'cinema aesthetics'; it is more attuned to 'poetry', 'conceptual art', and 'photography' in its structures and is a genuine expression of what seemed important to me at the time when its various elements were put together. It has nothing to do with Hollywood or narrative cinema or other commercial forms; it is my most favorite filmic work in that it seems to deal with relationships about reality and "awareness of awareness" which makes what is being hinted at more important than how or through which medium/form the ideas might be coming through. The film's viewability requires experiencing it more as a poem rather than a movie-- the spoken narratives are really poems. I guess the main influences are the classic and original independent filmmakers of the '60s, '70s, and early '80s who were still using film as a truly personal creative medium to produce unique individual visions about life, the cosmos, facts and things that they/we as artists see and document in our own ways and hopefully for others to connect with-- like Will Hindel, Scott Bartlett, Paul Sharits, Hollis Frampton, Gunvor Nelson, Chick Strand, Pat O'Neal, Richard Myers, Beth Block and others. The film was made in the early '80s and remains as my favorite and most successful filmwork about the aesthetic of artistic exploration of the beingness of the then 20th Century, and which now continues in the 21st Century but with additional forms and directions. It's about the fact that Art may be the only reason for Life!" - KP

14 works total
Total Running Time: approximately 70 minutes

contact a (at) astriasuparak .com for more information
or see www.astriasuparak.com