Jam It! A Celebration of Culture Jamming and Media Access examines "Culture Jamming" — a movement that encourages filmmakers to use low-tech, more affordable and accessible media production tools to "raid" mainstream and mass media and appropriate, re-edit and subvert them for new and critical purposes. Jam It! is a co-presentation with Light House, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing young people with access to new film and video making technology, instruction, and exhibition opportunities. Light House launched its first media access class for high school students this past summer.
Jam It! will include a series of workshops with Festival guest artists targeted specifically to young and emerging media makers, and an exhibition of appropriation art entitled "Project*or." The show will feature works by Ed Pollard, Todd Murphy, Michael Fitts and Natalie Fairfax and run from October 1 through 31, 1999.
The following Jam It! events will also take place in the Downtown Artspace on 112 E. Main Street, Charlottesville (804-963-3976):
Wednesday, October 20, 7:30 PM: A Light House Showcase — digital videos made by high school students in the Light House Summer '99 program. The low-cost digital cameras and computer software utilized by students will also be on display and demonstrated by the students on Saturday from 4-6 PM in the downtown Astspace.
Friday, October 22, 11 AM: Kids and Teens making Media — features "Media Duck" with Marie Maciak (co-founder of the Media Studies Program at the Ross Institute in East Hampton.)
Saturday, October 23, 1 PM: Sonic Sampling with Mark Hosler of Negativland, the notorious band of "sonic outlaws." (Hosler also will present the film The Ad and the Ego, a comprehensive documentary on the cultural impact of advertising in America, along with several videos of Negativland's controversial audio collages, on Sunday October 24 at 4PM in the Regal Downtown Mall Cinema.)
Saturday, October 23, 2:30 PM: Press Play to Agitate: Pirates, Parodists and the Prank Documentary with Craig Baldwin (featuring tapes by Phil Patris, rTMark, Guy Debord and others. Baldwin, whose film Sonic Outlaws explores the culture jamming movement, will premeire his Spectres of the Spectrum on Saturday, October 23 at 1PM at Vinegar Hill Theatre.
Saturday and Sunday, October 23-24, 4-6pm: A Light House Open House Teens from the summer video program show their shorts and demonstrate digital editing equipment. Just walk in and ask to see a short video on the computer.
Sunday, October 24, 1 PM: Making Art on the Internet with Kevin and Jennifer McCoy. Creators of the new Airworld site commissioned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for the World Wide Web, the McCoys will discuss and demonstrate their methods of Web art and subversion.
Sunday, October 24, 2:30 PM: Don't Just Watch TV! Make It! With DeeDee Halleck of Paper Tiger TV, this program will sample some of Paper Tiger TV's latest low-tech challenges to the media conglomerates.
Contact Zones: The Art of CD-ROM
The Expanded Festival is joining with the Robertson Media Center to present Contact Zones: The Art of CD-ROM. This exhibition of over 70 artists' CD-ROMs was organized by Dr. Timothy Murray of Cornell University, and is currently on an international tour. The show will be on view at the Robertson Media Center in Clemons Library from October 22 through November 1. This comprehensive survey of an exciting new art form features works by well-known and emerging artists, including Lev Manovich, Reginald Woolery, and Christine Tamblyn.
In conjunction with this exhibit, the Festival, the Robertson Media Center and Digital Directions speakers series will co-host a conference entitled 1900/2000: New Media at the turn of the Century on Friday, October 22, in Clemons Library, Room 201. CD-ROM artists and filmmaker David Blair, director of the pioneering interactive movie Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, will kick-off the conference with a lecture/demonstration at 11:30AM, sponsored by the Digital Directions Lecture Series.
Next, Timothy Murray of Cornell University will discuss his Contact Zones exhibition of CD-ROMS at 2PM.. On video at 3pm, CD-ROM artist Lev Manovish will present a short talk called New Media: A Usesr Guide that will feature excerpts from Little Movies, Monovich's CD-ROM. To end the conference, Johanna Drucker will moderate a panel discussion at 4pm on the parallels between new media at the beginning and end of this century with Festival guests Craig Baldwin, Zoe Beloff, David Blair, Kevin and Jennifer McCoy, Patricia Zimmermann and Caspar Stracke.
Also in conjunction with the conference, Zoe Beloff and Ken Montgomery will perform A Mechanical Medium as part of the regular Festival on Thursday, October 21 at 7PM. The pair will resurrect Thomas Edison and extend his search for a machine to communicate directly with the dead (in his words, "a mechanical medium." Beloff, a moving-image artist, and Montgomery, a sound artist, present their performance for Kodascope B 16mm, Stereo Slide projector, 78 rpm phonograph and other sound making machines.
On Saturday, October 22, new media artists Kevin and Jennifer McCoy will present a live performance of their video Web art work, featuring the new web site commissioned by the Walker Center, Airworld. The McCoy's are video/performance/Web artists whose works address the role of technology in artistic practice and everyday life. The Airworld site is a project about networks, management, distribution hubs, soft architecture and global capital. It is speaks to the issue of the virus-like growth of jargon used to describe these spaces. Software on the site scans the Internet to appropriate the language and images of Business. This appropriated material is combined with audio and video sequences shot specifically for the Airworld project. On the web site, each visitor sees a unique, dynamically generated montage of text and image that speaks the language of business, mimicking the endless monologue of consumer culture. The McCoy's performance is scheduled for Saturday, October 23 at 4PM in the Regal Downtown Mall Cinema.
A full program is available on the Film Festival web site: www.vafilm.com or call the Festival office at 1-800-UVA-FEST.
