(1) transcript of the curator quotes & artists' statements for the dallas video fest collaboration to show art on the Omni Dallas Hotel
(2) summary video clips of the one time only screening as captured on youtube, vimeo etc. from multiple perspectives
(3) local press coverage of the event & photos & press videos of the display
(1) copied from the the curator Carolyn Sorter's press release which includes artists' statements below -
"The walls of the Omni Dallas Hotel are continuously wrapped with LED bars that function rather like a low-res computer monitor. Only a handful of buildings in the world offer displays similar to this one, and since this particular system was specifically created to fit the hotel's architecture, it is unique.
The company that installed the system provided a small repertoire of videos adapted for it, but not even the person responsible for operating it, Pat Anderson, understood all the details of the system's requirements and display parameters.
So the coordinator of the project, Carolyn Sortor (also an artist in the program), with assistance from Ben Britt, worked with Anderson to analyze and test the formats compatible with the system and the dimensions of the display and its "pixels." Sortor and Britt then created a template designed to make it easier for artists to create works that might utilize the display's full
potential.
used in testing the display.)
All had experience with video, but none had ever worked with anything remotely like the Omni system. The display constitutes a potentially looping screen approximately 193 feet high and 999 feet wide. But while it may be the biggest screen in town, it's very low-res, effectively just 20 display pixels tall and 333 in width or circumference.
The organizers also hoped KXT 91.7 FM public radio would simulcast the program audio, and that could happen only if it were appropriate for the station's listeners; e.g., the works had to have audio, without any excessively long silences or objectionable content. But since many people might also never hear the audio, the videos also had to work without it...
The "expanded" in the program title refers not just to the size of the Omni display, and not just to the seminal 1970 book of the same title by pioneering new media theorist Gene Youngblood, who will speak at the VideoFest on Sunday afternoon, but to the breadth and depth of our viewers, as well as the potential of media to help us not only to define but also to share and expand our points of view....
All works are site-specific video especially designed for the LED display on the exterior walls of the Omni Dallas Hotel, with audio expected to be simulcast by KXT 91.7 FM radio, and were made in 2012.
Curated by Carolyn Sortor, Bart Weiss, and Michael A. Morris. (TRT 52:15 min.)
Works in the program are shown in the order listed below.
Tim Capper with Ryan Hartsell and Wes Martin, Pong Master, 1:49 min.
visionwise.com
"Playing games with each other is the intention of the living. Being nice to each other is the invention of the living. Exploiting each other is the convention of the sinning." Online flaming. Game Over. Concept by Tim Capper, with script, music, and audio effects by Wes Martin and animation by Ryan Hartsell.
Michael Alexander Morris, Monument for Juanita: Candy is the Sun, 2:45 min.
michaelalexandermorris.com
Monument for Juanita: Candy is the Sun is an ephemeral moving light monument to Juanita Slusher (aka Candy Barr), the infamous exotic dancer and Dallas folk hero who performed at Abe Weinstein's Colony Club, which was originally located just steps away from the current location of the Omni Hotel in Downtown Dallas. Over the years, the skyline of Dallas has morphed from the brick and concrete architecture that characterized many cities at mid-century to a sleek, postmodern cityscape of glass, argon, and LED screens. In her own words, “[d]ancing was my greatest pleasure. It was my world. I danced a picture. I just lived it up there, and whatever I was painting came across – charcoals, oils, or pen-and-inks.” Monument seeks to commemorate Juanita in her moments of creative ecstasy, giving her the face of the city as her canvas.
Shane Mecklenburger, OMNEY, 4 min.
shmeck.com
I'm fascinated with perceived value – what we value, and how we value it. I'm also interested in – and often astonished by – the spectacle accompanying symbols of value. This spectacle is a creative activity, like the daily invention of value itself. Nothing has any value until we impart it, so every economy is an act of imagination. My projects participate in these activities to highlight our creative control and the malleability of value. For the Dallas Videofest I chose the format of the dance party, a basic human spectacle accompanying nearly every important cultural transaction. I thought it would be fun to try and make the building dance. The spectacular scale and cost of the Omni's display made it seem like the perfect medium to express the ritual dance of value and exchange.
Mona Kasra, You'll Forget Everything, Soon, 1:28 min.
monakasra.com
Mona Kasra is a new media artist and a PhD candidate at University of Texas at Dallas with a focus in Arts & Technology. Mona's video artworks tend to be poetic autobiographies, revealing her curiosities, memories, fears, and insecurities, and are mainly centered on a process of personal discovery through an open narrative structure. You'll Forget Everything, Soon is about physical and emotional distance. It alludes to the obscurity of human communication, and the curious relation between presence and absence. It explores the state of being and simultaneously not-being, and is occupied with the thoughts of two people who are close, yet far away from one another.
Andrea Goldman, Stop. Collaborate. Listen., 3:07 min.
andreagoldman.org
Andrea Goldman creates videos, drawings, and songs that explore overlapping rhetorics of ideology, common sense, and personal freedom. Her video Stop. Collaborate. Listen. uses the concept of hendiatris, a rhetorical device that conveys a broad concept – or motto – through three terms or phrases, such as "eat, drink, and be merry" or "live, love, and learn."
Jenny Vogel, Save Our Souls, 7:30 min.
jennyvogel.net
My work explores subjective themes as they are experienced in the age of information. I examine the anxiety of alienation, the desires of communication and a sense of be-longing in a virtual world. These traits, attributed to Romanticism, are dealt with in my work through the lenses of contemporary communication technology, the media and historical preconceptions. I am particularly interested in the depiction of the individual and individuality through media technology, with its resulting misrepresentations and miscommunications. Through this juxtaposition of technology and Romanticism I attempt to challenge the image of the Internet as the “global village,” objectivism in the news and the ideology of science. High-resolution photographs of low-resolution encounters, offer a surprisingly intimate reading of a contemporary loneliness. Live streaming video projections of the one-shot-per-second progression of web cameras result in a fireworks-display of light signals as if trying to communicate in some unknown code, some unknown message. Voyeurism and self-induced surveillance through constant online exposure are the desperate desires of participation in the online world, which fails in the colloquial boredom of chat-rooms. Together these practices present a postmodern tableau of the Romantic ideal of solitude, the failing utopia of the global village and the dark beauty of a mediated planet. However, I don’t merely see my subjects as victims whose individuality is crushed by the homogenizing effects of globalization and mass media. They are also heroes in a way, defying categorization, re-instating a sense of humanity, poetry and myth. These themes are expressed through a wide range of practices, including photography, live-streaming web movies, video, drawing and printmaking. In many of my works the medium is used in its original form, providing references to its real world scenarios, while at the same time adding self-reflexive content.
Frank Campagna, Orange you glad I didn't say knock knock, 3:22 min.
franksart.net
Frank Campagna is a fixture in Dallas whose murals are as recognizable as his scratchy voice. But he also has made an artistic mark with Deep Ellum's Kettle Art gallery, which offers a quiet escape amid the entertainment district's music venues. (USA Today 7/ 27/ 2012.) In his video entitled, Orange you glad I didn't say knock knock, Campagna utilizes his experience of working on a large scale, along with his recent fascination of playing with both video and audio editing.
Kyle Kondas, DOTS, 2:30 min.
vimeo.com/kyle1point0
My video paintings have always been a study of how to break down and disrupt the normal image of the video. The original material that I work with has always had to come from various areas of interest that I've been passionate about. First it started with video games, which I still work with, but recently I've started working with media referencing pop-culture. Originally, my pieces were glitched through the use of programs, but now I have started working with the video's code through the study of circuit bending. For the Omni, I decided to go back to one of my very first pieces ever and try applying both forms of glitching together. DOTS has been a new experiment and possible first piece into a new area of work.
Rebecca Carter with Mark Collop, The Eyeballs From Outer Space/Strangers in the Night, 3:14 min.
rebeccacarter.org
My works utilize language, thread matrixes, photography, and video to explore shifting states of intimacy and alienation. The Eyeballs from Outer Space have become a kind of super hero. They are the cosmic gaze of a benevolent Other swarming in layers larger and smaller. Semi-embodied as flickers of light momentarily on the Omni hotel they peer over the city of Dallas. They fix the city for a moment in a shifting gaze. "I love you Dallas." They can't speak it, but the impulse of intention sits there on the edge of seeing and being seen. With audio by Frank Sinatra with Mark Collop.
Carolyn Sortor, Braille, 3:08 min.
c-cyte.com
In Braille, two hands each seamlessly circle the building twice, but never meet, "reading" a visual braille that sets out the name of the alphabet's inventor twice. In the language of dreams, Freud wrote, doubled objects can refer to repetition in time. The text is huge, but could probably be read only by those who can't see it, and be seen only by those who can't read it. The alphabet's inventor, Louis Braille, used an awl to create his texts, the same instrument with which he'd accidentally blinded himself as a child. Braille's invention revolutionized communications for the blind, but the school in which he taught forbade its use. Use of the alphabet spread after he died, but it's now being superseded by automated reading technologies. The sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor that's used in this piece expresses both the paralysis and gorgeous order that can result from conflicting emotions within individuals in an interconnected social group. Within individuals, such conflict can result in abulia; it can also create consciousness. In the moment of conscious indecision, time seems suspended; but it's not. Conflict implies difference. Some handicaps are invisible, yet real.
(above film clip #4 include Braille, Specter City and Owboy)
Edward Setina, Specter City, 3:38 min.
edwardsetina.com
Ted Setina's piece casts the Omni as a giant audio levels display that literally translates music into visual form, with display bars of a size suggesting rising and falling skyscrapers.
jeffgibbons.net
I often find myself with a lack of position, more concerned with the interactions or connections between infinity and a seemingly finite life. I am here in an existence, all of which manifests itself in the perception of a fragile mind, a vehicle of flesh, which resides in a “cause-and-effect world.” This instills a need for attachment, understanding, and meaning (purpose). So I place meaning in the work I do (how I function in society), purpose in my attachments and love, and try to make the best of living, while existing in the knowledge of my own mortality. I see purpose as a coping mechanism that I cannot live without. It is the meaning I place on my own existence and everyone/everything else’s that makes now, before, and after have value. There is a balance between purpose and doubt, existing within life and death, where meaning and futility work as a seemingly polarized constant.
@hdxdvd (Kari Altmann), Omnia XII Ethnique Epic Vista Demo 1280p with Tribal, 2:47 min.
karialtmann.com
A string of mutated, translated, and appropriated terms from the back end and black markets of cultural and biological production. Through proximity, they exoticize and re-brand each other into mythical new territories, textures, and tribes. Displayed and titled similarly to HDTV demo clips full of "ethnic," seductive, and often feminine footage. Kari Altmann is a wifi-based artist currently stationed in Baltimore and New York, with recent residencies and on-site projects in Bucharest, Seoul, Tokyo, Rotterdam, Panama, Bilbao, Berlin, and beyond, as well as several tours inside the U.S. Since earning a BFA from MICA in 2008, she has exhibited in a range of platforms, from "print to real life" showrooms and live stages to filesharing cloud communes, 3d simulated spaces like Chrystal Gallery for Gentili Apri, and editorial arenas like Dis Magazine and Rhizome at the New Museum.
Philip Lamb, Metamorphosis, 2:30 min.
philiplamb.com
As with most all cities, Dallas has a history of replacing old buildings with new ones . .. sometimes for good, sometimes for the worse. In the case of the Omni hotel, Dallas is lucky to have gained a beautifully appointed convention hotel where other buildings have stood. The metamorphosis of our built environment is an ongoing slow process. With intended irony, Philip Lamb’s video symbolizes this evolution by showing the implosion of older buildings on the surface of the new building. After the collapse, the architectural regeneration is represented by patterns of color. The music accompanying the video is "Bat Chain Puller" by Captain Beefheart. It is nonsensical and surreal, and serves to emphasize the organized chaos from which cities evolve.
Expanded Cinema was coordinated and compiled by Carolyn Sortor, and the template to facilitate the making of the video works was created by Carolyn Sortor and Ben Britt. Special thanks to Mark Abuzzahab of KXT 91.7 FM public radio; Pat Anderson of Matthews Southwest, Lighting Producer; the Omni Dallas Hotel, the Dallas Convention Center hotel; the City of Dallas; Bart Weiss with Dallas Video Fest for pushing the idea, and Jeff West for saying yes."
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(2) video clips of the one time only screening as captured on youtube, vimeo etc. from multiple perspectives. The clips embedded above seem to be opportunists with a camera whom I believe got the best shots of the work synched to the audio simulcast on KXT.
I tried to put the individual videos with their artist statement above. My favorite background noise is from a video taken from the perspective of one of the bridges from Oak Cliff shot by chadeg as "omni video #1" which I have posted below. if you listen to the audio
at :23... bystander “you are about to get run over, lol. Like
really, do you want to risk your life just to film this?”
cameraman: “yes ma'am, yes.” His camerawork in the first 2
videos is lacking as he gets his bearings on the busy bridge but the shots get way better & you can hear the KXT simulcast
audio clearly from #2 through video #5. His is the most unusual perspective with a
great view of downtown of all the video I found of the exhibition. The award for best audio and video for capturing this moment goes to youtube poster puddingebola.
snippets of all artists' video without KXT audio by dallasfilmsociety (3:55)
first 11 minutes of program without KXT audio (nice clear footage by JKStudioDFW)-
summary video of event (13
minutes) by pulp lizard
(3)
post event coverage story by pegasus news with embedded video interview by dallas morning news
http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2012/sep/27/expanded-cinema-omni-dallas-art/
http://artandseek.net/2012/09/27/the-biggest-screen-of-all-the-omni-hotel/
wfaa's excellent vantage point for videotaping during event with terrible audio
(faint kxt simulcast, lots of wind on mic, 8 mins. includes work by Vogel & Campagna)
Dallas Video Fest - film opening with credits
http://vimeo.com/49561451
www.videofest.org
more info about the experimental films shown at the 2012 festival in my earlier blog >here<
much gratitude to the artists and organizers who participated in this public art event. the true beauty of the project is that it exposed the general public in this city to video art. people that may have never set foot in a museum were shown this undeniable artwork which used the skyline of the city as a canvas. Art projected on the hotel's exterior as a moving picture screen, synched to the sounds of free public radiowaves for one night only. this writer was emotionally moved to have witnessed it & am glad it was captured by all those cameras so it can be shared again here.
more info about the experimental films shown at the 2012 festival in my earlier blog >here<
much gratitude to the artists and organizers who participated in this public art event. the true beauty of the project is that it exposed the general public in this city to video art. people that may have never set foot in a museum were shown this undeniable artwork which used the skyline of the city as a canvas. Art projected on the hotel's exterior as a moving picture screen, synched to the sounds of free public radiowaves for one night only. this writer was emotionally moved to have witnessed it & am glad it was captured by all those cameras so it can be shared again here.
Thank you Suza for helping us relive the glory
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