NEW FRONTIER AT SUNDANCE As the media landscape undergoes colossal change, new platforms and models for independent storytelling are becoming increasingly important to filmmakers, media artists, and the evolution of our collective cinematic culture. New Frontier at Sundance is an experiment in platforming the hybrid connections between art, film, and new media technologies. Conceived as a fully immersive cinematic experience within a social setting, New Frontier showcases cutting edge media installations and performances that push cinematic conventions to new limits. Come be a part of this international collective of artists, scientists, and filmmakers in the comfort and sexiness of the installation lounge. Retreat to catch your breath during the Festival madness and recharge your creative energy at the 2009 edition of New Frontier at Sundance. THE CASTING (Artist: Omer Fast) In Omer Fast’s emotionally moving, four‐channel installation, The Casting, a U.S. Army sergeant recounts two incidents: a romantic liaison with a young German woman who mutilates herself and the accidental shooting of an Iraqi. The two tales are seamlessly woven together into a script that was given to actors to perform in silent tableaux. While the actors try hard to keep still, the sergeant’s recollections slip between setting and story as he tries to find relief, if not redemption, in the act of recalling. The Casting artfully reveals how both memory and the cinema arbitrarily remix emotions, images, and words to create our connection to a moment and how the remix might serve to orient, or disorient us in our lives. Omer Fast was born in 1972 Jerusalem, Israel and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. A description and illustration of The Casting can be found here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYfIxEfywKM Additional information on the artist can be found here: http://www.postmastersart.com/ http://www.whitney.org/www/2008biennial/www/?section=artists&page=artist_f ast TAMPER (Media Scientists: John Underkoffler & Oblong Industries) Dr. Underkoffler’s work is an example of media laboratory and technology as art. TAMPER is the demonstration of a gestural driven operating system that allows filmmakers to edit film in a revolutionary new way through a gleeful union of cutting‐edge interface technology and the practice of film production. TAMPER offers an editing room of mild derangement whose visitors become cinema collage artists, using their hands directly to grab and recompose cinematic elements – characters, props, architecture – sampled from different films. Remember, in the film, Minority Report, watching Tom Cruise wear gloves that could grab and move computer images in space? Underkoffler, who invented that trick for the production has now developed the very same idea into a full fledged operating system! John Underkoffler is a founder and Chief Scientist of Oblong Industries. With the g‐ speak spatial operating environment, Oblong brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984. Underkoffler, during a protracted tenure at MIT, was responsible for advances in optical and electronic holography, created novel animation systems, and produced radical human‐machine interfaces. More recently, he has served as science advisor to the films Minority Report, Hulk (A. Lee), Aeon Flux, and Iron Man. For more information on John Underkoffler & Oblong Industries visit: http://www.artinfo.com/galleryguide/exhibition/21140/7658/115165/tamper‐ gestural‐interface‐for‐cinematic‐design/ WE FEEL FINE and UNIVERSE (Artist/Computer Scientists: Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar) Harris and Kamvar are two computer programmer storytellers, who manipulate large databases of information and visual material to tell stories by combining elements of computer science, anthropology, and visual art. We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale that uses large‐ scale blog analysis to create an ever‐changing and expanding work of art that is ‘authored by everyone’. Every few minutes, We Feel Fine takes sentences that include the words "I feel" or "I am feeling" from all blogs that have been published in the last few minutes, and visualizes them in six different movements. Official site: http://www.wefeelfine.org Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone's path through Universe is different, just as everyone's path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information. Official site: http://universe.daylife.com Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art, and storytelling, Jonathan Harris designs systems to explore and explain the human world. He has made projects about human emotion, human desire, modern mythology, science, news, anonymity, and language, and documented an Alaskan Eskimo whale hunt. He was commissioned by Yahoo! to build the world's largest time capsule, and by MoMA to build an interactive installation about online dating. For more information on Harris and his work, please visit http://www.coolhunting.com/archives/2007/03/jonathan_harris.php. Sep Kamvar is a consulting professor of Computational Mathematics at Stanford University. His research focuses on information management in large‐scale networks such as the web, peer‐to‐peer, and social networks. He also is interested in using large amounts of data and accessible media in the study of human nature through art. Kamvar is the founder of Distilled, a premium men's fashion line and art collective, and has created a number of web‐based art pieces, including We Feel Fine and I Want You To Want Me, a commission for the New York Museum of Modern Art. For more information on Kamvar, please visit http://kamvar.org/profile/. EXILES OF THE SHATTERED STAR | TWILIGHT AVENGER | WAGONS ROLL (Artist: Kelly Richardson) Kelly Richardson uses cinematic language to create part real, part imagined landscapes offering visual metaphors for our modern ‘reality’, a wavering hybrid of fact and fiction. More info on the artist and her body of work can be found here: http://www.kellyrichardson.net/work.htm Exiles of The Shattered Star presents a beautiful countryside showered with what appears to be remnants of another place. Inhabiting a place between fantasy and reality, the work evokes trepidation and fascination in equal measures. Richardson’s videos adopt the language of cinematic illusion and suspense, here – not only in the inherent drama of the fiery streaks of matter illuminating the brooding sky – but also in the many contrasting narratives that one is dared to imagine. Twilight Avenger presents a dreamy, dark, enigmatic forest occupied by a lone inhabitant who is very aware of your presence – what seems to be a radioactive deer, or is it some kind of mythical creature? Participating in a long history of landscape art, "Twilight Avenger suggests that as we alienate ourselves from nature, we might also be losing our ability to directly experience the unmediated world” (David Jager, Now Magazine). In Wagons Roll a car hangs portentously in midair against a mountainous landscape, with a plume of dust shooting from its rear. The viewer can only guess as to what events led to its peculiar suspension, likewise they have no idea if it will ever plummet to the earth below, but in this “in‐between” state lies an uneasy calm. endless pot of gold cd­rs (Artists: NASTY NETS) Nasty Nets is an international ensemble representing 25 of the most active artists working online today. Their work both celebrates and critiques the Internet by employing original and appropriated imagery and audio, animated gifs, YouTube hacks, HTML cheat codes, and other found/edited material. All of which offer a humorous and poignant take on contemporary, digital visual culture. You are invited to create visual mischief on the Internet at NASTY NETS: NIGHT OF A THOUSAND MEGABYTES, a Saturday late night digital art making jam at New Frontier on Main (RSVP to [email protected] by 8pm Friday, Jan. 16th). Founded by artists John Michael Boling, Joel Holmberg, Guthrie Lonergan, and Marisa Olson, members include: Peter Baldes, Michael Bell‐Smith, Camille Paloque Bergés, Kevin Bewersdorf, Brian Blomerth, Charles Broskoski, Petra Cortright, Chris Coy, Paul B. Davis, Michael Guidetti, Britta Gustafson, Travis Hallenbeck, Chance Jackson, Lektrogirl, Tom Moody, Javier Morales, Paul Slocum, James Whipple, Robert Wodzinski, and Damon Zucconi. To explore the Internet underground collective, please visit the following links. Users beware – you could spend a lifetime in this endless pot of gold! Nasty Nets http://www.nastynets.com John Michael Boling + Javier Morales ‐ www.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com/ Guthrie Lonergan‐ http://www.theageofmammals.com Joel Holmberg‐ http://www.joelholmberg.com Marisa Olson‐ http://www.marisaolson.com Damon Zucconi‐ http://www.damonzucconi.com/ Travis Hallenbeck‐ http://anotherunknowntime.com/ Olia Lialina‐ http://art.teleportacia.org/ Petra Cortright‐ http://petracortright.com/ Michael Bell‐Smith‐ http://foxyproduction.com/artist/view/5 Kevin Bewersdorf‐ http://www.geartekcorporation.com/ Michael Guidetti‐ http://www.yyyyyyy.info/ Brian Blomerth‐ http://www.dotcomandshit.org/ James Whipple‐ http://www.indoor‐oak.org/ Charles Broskoski‐ http://supercentral.org/9/