Program student edition 13 - 19 November 2009
Wimbledon College of Art
Olga Koroleva
Dentist 01:16
The word Dentist strikes fear into the heart of most people. It is well known that dentists have the highest suicide rate of any profession. What is it like to subject other people to all levels of pain on a continuous basis? What is it like to go to work each day knowing that people will dread the sight of you? Olga’s short film suggests menace. The flicker of the overhead light on the left image determines the rhythm and visual staccato of the right image. Nothing happens except the anticipation of fear. And Pain.Reviewed by Ryan Seslow
Laurence Price
Freida 10:31
What happens when the happy psychedelic experience goes wrong? What happens when a boy becomes Frieda Khalo and he isn’t ready for it? Laurence’s film explores the darkest side of human nature: boredom and more boredom. Once you have experienced the edge of something you often want a more extreme experience. The boy in the film seems to regress into an ill-fitting persona of ambiguity. What starts as playful dress-up from a bored state becomes a nightmare of boredom. The girl can’t hide her ennui. The boy can’t cope with being Freida. With a soundtrack reminiscent of the Butthole Surfers we watch in a mixture of horror and boredom: the very topics of this film.Debra Fear
GSTQ 01:41
Broken Britain. Hoodies, suicide pacts, scary kids, drinking drinking, drinking. GordonFuckingBrown. TonyFuckignBlair. DavidFuckingCameron. Where did it all go wrong? Elgar, Britten, the Beatles and the Stones, the energy and anger of Punk. What happened? Johnny Rotten sells Country Life Butter on television. What is there to have faith(s) in? A fractured flag, depressed bunting and a national anthem of absences are the core components of Debra’s film. An elegy. A funeral march. A death knell.
A beautiful way to say goodbye. Will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?
www.debrafear.co.uk
Digital Immediacy
Maryland Institute College of Art
Gaia
Gaia is a Brooklyn and Baltimore based street artist with a background in Printmaking and Sculpture. Marrying the animal and the human form, Gaia conjures mysterious figures that carry a heavy sense of mythology and recall a past when man and nature were once united. These romantic creatures stand in relief to the urban environment as they lurk and beckon in the city’s forgotten and neglected spaces. The conveyance of their story relies on the chance coincidence with a passerby, and even in that intimate moment, their narrative is precarious and delicate.The works were created at the Maryland Institute College of Art
(Mica) MD, all of the pieces were made in the Spring Semester of 2009. Conversations 09:29
Conversations - was filmed on the streets of Baltimore in which participants were asked to explain a specific street piece that is never revealed. Instead its image is built within the mind of the viewer as the witnesses corroborate and contradict each other’s descriptions. Reviewed by Ryan Seslow
We can only imagine 01:27
We can only imagine - Consists entirely of appropriated footage and audio from the CNN coverage of the Shock and Awe campaign of the second Iraq War. The video attempts to express the distance felt between the atrocities committed overseas and the American citizen. The image attempts to fill the void where the imagination fails. Endless Fields: Endless fields is documentation of an installation produced for Intro. to Sculpture. The plastic barrier and wooden door that divide the viewer from the projected fields are navigated by spectators of the physical installation and then the barrier is deconstructed and struck.Endless fields 02:12
gaia.streetart@gmail.com
| gaiastreetart.com | www.flickr.com/people/gaiastreetart Maryland Institute College of Art
Fine Arts - Long Island University
Nung-Hsin Hu
Nung-Hsin Hu was born 1981 in Taiwan. After completing her bachelor degree in Special Education from the National Hsinchu University she moved to New York to pursue her MFA in Fine Arts at Long Island University. She is a sculptor,installation, and video artist, who has exhibited in the U.S. and abroad.
The works were created at Long Island University
, CW Post Campus, NY, the piece was made in the Spring Semester of 2008. Spinning Universe 01:40
I built a stage on a turntable, which represents the spinning universe. Little found plastic figurines of pin-up girls, a cowboy, and runners are employed as symbolic icons. Also, food is used as an additional element to represent life experiences and relationships that happen in this infinite spinning world. Reviewed by Ryan Seslow
Angel 01:14
Dozen 01:34
Interface 02:00
Meet 00:58Reviewed by Jordan Baseman
Reviewed by Tom
piggy876@hotmail.com
| www.nunghsinhu.com Long Island University
University of Texas
Christi Nielsen
Christi Nielsen is a multimedia artist with a background in photography and video. She received her Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Dallas in Arts & Technology with a concentration in Emerging Media. Nielsen is the Founder and Director of inter.sect Art Collective, a group of artists using new media platforms to explore digital exhibition spaces outside the traditional gallery model.The latest project involving visual translations of text via mobile phones was shown at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dallas Contemporary, and at Pocket Films at the George Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Nielsen participates extensively in new media projects that challenge tradition and explore cutting edge technologies as they provide opportunities for artists. Her interest in digital models includes the development of participatory environments for artists in distributed immersive spaces.
She also participates in photography and video exhibitions internationally. Nielsen currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
The Works were created at the University of Texas at Dallas
, TX as an MFA student 2006 & 2007.Fear Itself - 1:38 - 2007 01:37
Preemptive judgments bombard the female psyche, placing her in the line of fire as she attempts to exist as a human entity that deserves the right of ownership of body and self. What is this focus of blame that places upon her the responsibility of the attacker?Beauty In a Box 4:59 - 2007 04:58
Societal ideals about makeup and beauty are dictated to women in the form of this year’s must-have beauty secrets. As she paints within the lines, she paints herself into a box of conformity. In the end, she is an object of consumerism. Labeled 9:42 - 2006 09:42
Within the context of body image issues and the societal pressure to be thin, this displays the acceptance of measurements and dress sizes as identity. La Mer 1:22 - 2007 01:22
Ambiguity raises questions as we take a look at flesh from the inside. Statement for much of the Beauty Industry inspired work: The body as canvas reveals an internal dialogue that confronts the invasion of personal space, whether physical or psychological. This silent dialogue of identity rests under the surface, but manifests itself on the body as questions are raised that challenge the notion of the ideal. Using time-based and digital media, the work investigates our collective obsession with the ideal,heightening the viewer’s awareness of their own physical presence with performance-based self-portraits that prompt the viewer to consider the plethora of information shaping the psyche and consequently the physical. Tracking the struggle with expectations placed upon women in contemporary society, contradictions in thinking are exposed as we vacillate between the goal of unattainable perfection and self-acceptance.
The psychological effects of trying to reach an ever-changing ideal, whether physical or theoretical, are presented as distorted reality. Unlike performance art of the past, the work places a distance between the viewer and a physical presence, creating personas that perform through text, pose, gesture, and voice, communicating a response to mass media.
christi@christinielsen.com
| christinielsen.com University of Texas at Dallas
NYU Tisch School of the Arts
Raffi Asdourian
The son of a Belgian anaesthesiologist and an Armenian ophthalmologist, Raffi Asdourian oddly enough has been interested in the world of movies from a very young age. Throughout high school, he wrote and directed several plays for the drama programs and strived to make video filmmaking an accessible tool at his high school. Through his efforts, he chartered the first ever video production class, allowing him to make several short films, which were screened for the entire school body.The collected works of his projects were sold on VHS to the school body selling over 400 units for both his junior and senior year. Raffi then attended NYU Tisch School of the Arts
where he continued to follow his dream of pursuing filmmaking as a full time career, making a total of twenty short films. Among the films made, "Kuragannon" a ten-minute short premièred in a Kodak sponsored student screening at the 2003 Cannes film festival. His thesis film Stranger was admitted into a high profile art gallery, the Florence Lynch Gallery, in Chelsea and was made available for sale while touring over twenty galleries around the world as part of a showcase entitled "Rewind".Raffi Asdourian currently works as a freelance tv/commercial/film editor in New York City. He has written four feature length screenplays and has recently completed a new short film "Ai", which was filmed in Japanese.
A scene from the play "The Seagull" by Anton Chekhov.Kurgannon, 12min, 2003 11:45
A man awakens atop his own dead body forced to search his dying mind for clues to his existence.Eternity 25, 6min, 2003 06:33
Visualization music video for "Satellite Anthem Icarus" Boards of Canada. Stranger, 16min, 2004 15:41
Mother died today. Maybe it was yesterday. Based on Albert Camus novel. Reviewed by Ryan Seslow
rasdourian@gmail.com
| www.zaffi.com | raffiasdourian.blogspot.com NYU Tisch School of the Arts
Rochester Institute of Technology School of Film and Animation
Mark Anthony Zuniga
Synapse 19:45
You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action.Reviewed by Femke
www.sample16.com
Exeter College Devon
Robin Whenary
From 2000 to 2002 I did an A-Level Film and Video at Exeter College, Devon, England. It was a mainly practical course, and I made 7 short films for it entirely on my own, with just myself and family and friends in front of the camera. I filmed them all in the countryside near where I live, and edited them at the college.Some of the projects were meant to be inspired by specific concepts (e.g. ’1471’ was meant to be inspired by the idea of ’Time’), but mostly I was left to my own devices. ’1471’ was also different because it had to be edited in one day under exam conditions.
I received 100% marks for all my 2nd year projects. My tutor was Russell Evans, who has since written a best-selling book called ’Practical DV Filmmaking’.
A young man stops at a telephone box to call his mother, but she is busy and takes an age to answer the phone.Reviewed by Jordan Baseman
Blinded 03:35
A young man lies motionless in a country lane. He relives events in his mind, and all becomes clear. Made for an AS-Level college course in 2001.Reviewed by Steve Ceraso
www.thesmalls.com
Geneva University of Art and Design
Matthieu Cherubini
The MA Media Design course is addressed to designers who are principally active in the field of new digital media. Based on the fact that digital technology is a universal intercode making it possible to unify and to create crossovers between the different fields of media design, the programme covers the whole range of visualisation, modelling and communication processes involved with the new media.The teaching, which highlights the importance of the code and programming, encourages convergence of the different media design fields to which the students projects belong: interaction design, dynamic data visualisation, digital fashion design, locative and mobile media, electronic publishing and publications, digital performance and real time.
Structured around an experimentation and prototyping atelier in which students develop their personal work, the curriculum is enhanced by specific and individualised technical instruction, workshops, theoretical seminars and lectures.
Supervision is provided by a versatile and multidisciplinary team of lecturers, media design professionals, creators, researchers and invited contributors.
Sweet 03:37
The idea of this work was to do a video without any pre-ideas/stories/guidelines/..., the only “data” allowed was the song Sweet composed by Alessandro Ratoci. Whole visual part appeared instinctively by listening to that song, in order to create an osmosis and a strong relation between sound and images.Reviewed by Femke
Reviewed by Ryan Seslow
http://www.mchrbn.net
Geneva University of Art and Design