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Reel Shorts 
In June 2005, The Arts Center opened a new, permanent gallery for video art and
short film, and Reel Shorts,
a new, juried exhibition program presented by The Arts Council. The gallery is open during regular Arts Center
hours and prior to Film Forum screenings.
For information about submitting to Reel Shorts, scroll down or click here.
On Exhibit February 1, 2007 - April 30, 2007
Natalie Bookchin, Location Insecure 12'00"
Natalie Bookchin is an artist based in Los Angeles. Her work has
been shown widely in international venues including PS1, Mass MOCA, the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, KunstWerke, Berlin, The
Generali Foundation, Vienna, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum
of American Art, and the Shedhale in Zurich.
Location Insecure is a bittersweet global city symphony seen through
the lens of security webcams, which, although probably unintended for
public viewing, were not secured by passwords and found on the
Internet. The video offers a contemporary reinterpretation of the
city symphony, the early twentieth century documentary genre that
celebrated he modern city and industrial development through a
depiction of a day-in-the-life of a city and its inhabitants.
The human recorder of the city, replaced in the late twentieth century
by a human monitor in a control room, is multiplied to infinity with
the proliferation of webcams, everywhere and always on and monitored by
an unlimited number of remote observers. Anyone with an internet
connection can witness life passing by, across and into the far reaches
of the globe, while sitting in front of their computer. Each
step-from human recorder, to human monitor, to virtual
monitoring-further removes the observer from the recoding device and
the space recorded, and in the final instance, the connection between
all three is completely severed.
Location Insecure explores the unhinging of the
boundaries between private and public space, where local, private
spaces expand into a global public network, and then shrink back to the
local isolated space of a sing screen. Viewers are simultaneously
connected and disconnected to a location and can privately watch, but
never act upon, the distance space in real-time.
The video depicts the experience of asynchronous and non-linear space and time of the Internet, where one jumps from continent to continent and from day to night with a single click of the mouse. Locations in the video are both specific and undetermined, potentially traceable only by geographically or architecturally-specific or by domain name or domain registration address. There is an ambiguous beauty in there unnamed locations of real-time remote surveillance, where the camera is everywhere recoding time passing by. Potter-Belmar Labs, Pandora's Bike 12'30"
Potter-Belmar Labs is Leslie Raymond and Jason Jay Stevens,
collaborating artists since 1999, with internationally exhibited work
spanning a variety of media including interactive sculpture,
installation, single-channel video, and performance. In late
2005, Leslie and Jason moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to San Antonio,
Texas.
When we perform together as Potter-Belmar Labs, we are conductors of cinema, live-mixing and audio and video, weaving sampled media and original work, cut-up and stitched back together, on the fly. It has been called the storytelling of the future. Mark Wojahn, of City Club Cinema in Minneapolis says that PBL "blows away your expectations on new media." Pandora's Bike Synopsis: A spectacle of light and sound, with a hint of something narrative, presented in three chapters. A woman needs her bicycle and to find it, she must transcend this earthly realm, its hardship and confusion, and gain a greater understanding of the cosmos, and the true meaning of "bicycle." Potter-Belmar Labs mixes their signature video and sound with images from De Sica and Hitchcock. Patrick Stacey, Mush 5'00"
Mush After looking into the history of the U.S. nuclear testing program I was inspired to make a short film, now posted online (youtube.com - search for Mush). It's called Mush and it includes footage from "Trinity and Beyond," a documentary on the subject I lifted off the TV, as well as sound bites from a lecture by Richard Feynman, a Nobel prize winning physicist who was one of the only direct eye witnesses to the first "Trinity" nuclear test. Feynman's works come from "Los Alamos From Beyond," a commemorative CD include with the book Classic Feynman. Grant Wiedenfeld, Kern no. 2.1 3'00"
Imagine how birds, bees, squirrels, a breeze and a grove of trees might see...
Experimental Video
Vanessa Woods, What the Water Saw 3'00"
Statement: My 16 mm films encompass documentary, diaristic, and fictive universes that push the boundaries of narrative methodology. My films can be see as tales, or poems perhaps, that rely partly on the photographic document as an object of truth, and partly on the animation, I transform my photographs by painting on them, ripping them open and writing on them. This process is filmed, allowing the viewer to watch the narratives continually develop and shift. Animating destabilizes the real reflected in the original photos, and provides a tool for examining the conceptual relationships between photography, time, memory, image, and meaning in art and in life. My films are most often anecdotes seen from internal vantage points that explore notions of identity, personal memory, and dream, working to fuse oppositions through experimental narrative devices. Such oppositions include the animate vs. inanimate and the real vs. fantasy. In many cases, I transform reality through the alteration of my lenses. Using dirt, Vaseline, scratches and into do deform the lenses, space becomes warped and complicated. The finished films thus mimic the effect of looking internally, through layers of memory, or imagined realities. In some cases it is impossible to tell whether a particular detail in a piece is actually part of the film space, or generated by means of the altered lens. This question reinforces the dichotomies within the work of reality/ fantasy, animate/inanimate forcing the viewers to continually question the essence of what they are seeing. Artists and
filmmakers are invited to submit their work for consideration for this
trimonthly exhibition program. Submissions must be on DVD, in NTSC format, under 12 minutes, and may
be documentary,
fiction, animation or art film/video. This is an on-going, open
call; submit work by April 7, 2007 to have it considered for inclusion in
the
exhibit that runs from May - July 2007.
For more information about the program contact Joel Reed at The Arts Council, (518) 584-4132. Submit work for consideration to REEL SHORTS, 320 Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866;
include with your submission a statement about the work, an artist's
bio, c.v., or film company credits, and a self-addressed, stamped
envelope (with enough postage to return work).
REEL SHORTS exists thanks to the generous support of
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