[size= medium]Colo(u)r Sound Culture Mash Up[/size]
Geoff Pugen, Jeremy Rotsztain, Collin McKelvey and Kelly
Lynn Jones, Liz Wendelbo, Dana Bell, Alyssa Taylor Wendt, Michael
Robinson, Tom Ruth, Sadek Bazaraa, Jon Santos, Optipus Collective
Millennium Film Workshop
66 East 4th Street, New York
Beyond remixing media, or mimicking messages, these artists present
a clear response towards the fabric of visual culture, and an interplay
between personal and social memory. They are hypnotic and beautiful,
harsh and hilarious, upside-down interpretations of our culture as one
with fresh eyes and an acute sensitivity would see it.
Goeffrey Pugen With theatrical absurdity, Pugen
explores relationships between real and staged performance, the natural
and the artificial, and tensions of virtual identity, through altering
and manipulating images. Working with video, film, and photography in
the digital realm Pugen renders situations that examine our perceptions
of how history, documentation, and simulation intersect. His videos and
art have been exhibited nationally and internationally in places such
as Berlin Transmediale 05, New York, Australia International Digital
Art Awards, Poland 12th International Media Art Biennale WRO 07,
Vancouver, Toronto – Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art , England
Moves 08 Festival
Geoffrey Pugen is an MFA graduate in Film and Video from York
University. He has completed programs in both Theatre Arts from the
University of British Columbia and in Integrated Media from the Ontario
College of Art And Design. His work has been supported by the Canada
Council for the Arts, The Ontario Arts Council, The Toronto Arts
Council, The National Film Board of Canada, and Bravo!FACT. He is a
recipient of the K.M Hunter Award for Interdisciplinary art.http://www.geoffreypugen.com
Jeremy Rotsztain  is a Canadian digital artist who,
taking cues from the practice of painting, works with movies, images,
and sound as a kind of malleable and expressive material. In his work,
popular narratives, pixels, and sound bites are sampled, transformed,
re-arranged and composed in an effort to examine the language and
patterns of contemporary media and the shared cultural experiences that
we have with them. Jeremy writes custom software, enabling him to
collect, edit, and compose with his materials in hybrid and
unconventional ways that aren’t supported by existing commercial
software applications. His work has been screened, performed and
exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt and the New York Hall of Science in NYC,
Urban Screens in Melbourne, Subtle Technologies and InterAccess in
Toronto, Electric Fields in Ottawa, SAT in Montreal, and New Forms
Festival in Vancouver.
Liz Wendelbo is an artist based in Brooklyn whose
practices include photography, electronic music and film. Her
filmmaking predicates resistance to cinema as a virtual medium – this
resistance in film is what she refers to as Cold Cinema. It is a
sentiment and a philosophy which places the artist in a position of
resistance. http://lizwendelbo.com/
Dana Bell Armed with a formalist’s vocabulary, a
painfully bright palette, and a keen eye for the nuances of gesture,
Dana Bell has delved into cinema’s rich history and emerged with a
complex study of physicalized language, and thus a portal into human
behavior itself. She highlights the darker, more ominous corners of
consciousness with a vigorous sense of spacial play. Bell transforms
filmic narrative, refining it into a semiotic language that reveals the
subtle manipulations and extraordinary artifice within human
expression. http://danabell.com
A. T. Wendt was born to latent beatniks in 1969 in
New York City and saw spirits in her childhood. She has been putting
her will into the world ever since and has performed on record, in
films, on stages and as art. After nomadic formative years in Phoenix
and San Francisco and New York, Miss Wendt has returned to the fold to
earn her MFA from Bard College. Currently residing and working in
Brooklyn, she concocts installations and multimedia pieces that speak
about convergent energies using film, large format staged photography,
sculpture, videos and performances. She enjoys fraternal memorabilia,
tap dancing, bees and believers. http://www.alyssataylorwendt.com
Collin McKelvey and Kelly Lynn Jones collaborate
on video and sound installations.  They share an interest in finding
moments of stillness within the constant movement around us.  They use
this agile space of movement to give agency to the transcendence of
reflection. www.kellylynnjones.com  http://www.slaughteringdolphins.blogspot.com/
Sadek Bazaraa  is a multi-media
artist working in the realms of fine art, art direction, and commercial
design.  After studying engineering and industrial design at the
Georgia Institute of Technology he turned his focus to the graphic
arts. In 1998 Bazaraa became one of the founding partners at the
direction and design studio GHAVA.  Working within the overlap of art
and design, GHAVA has brought a
unique artistic slant to numerous commercial projects.Bazaraa’s recent
visual acuity is deeply rooted in esoteric and symbolic form.  Drawing
from a variety of traditions both ancient and avant-garde, from physics
to occult ideologies, his work seeks to crystalize those fleeting
moments where the sacred, mysterious, and psychedelic merge seamlessly
with the sleek deliberateness of modern design.
Jon Santos was born in Detroit,
Michigan in 1973.  He currently lives and works in New York City.Santos
works in multidisciplinary mediums- video, sound, collage, sculpture
and installation. His work often exists outside the context of design
due tothe fragmentation of experience and the dispersion of knowledge
into many self-contained disciplines, each with it’s own ever growing,
increasingly private language.
CURATED BY: Victoria Keddie + Kristin Trethewey
 
This event is part of the Index Festival (August 3-28, 2011)
The Index Festival will transpire in August 2011 in New York City. Our aim is to bring together individuals and groups who cognitively engage
media culture. We welcome the interdisciplinary, shared and
accessible culture we are coming to live in as a result of digital
technology.  Our mission is to focus on projects that blur the
vocabulary of science and art, dissect the media that describes our
culture today, and to disseminate out from the [cultural] institution,
and further into the multi textural international landscape.