“My performance is the telling of a story called, The New Fort, followed by the video, Swimming in There. The two pieces together have a transformative effect on each other. They build into the form of a longer tale about loneliness. In between the two pieces, I will perform the beginning of the video’s whistling soundtrack and ask a few audience members to stream part of the track on their mobile devices in a layered “round” effect. The entire piece should be about 12 minutes.” -MA
A performance that is really just a PowerPoint lecture responding to an e-mail sent from one co-worker to the others suggesting anyone who would cast a pro-union vote should participate in a drum circle immediately following said vote. A live-streamed slide-show of photographs from the past two and a half years looking down from the windows of Chicago’s wealthiest citizens and corporations. An advocacy to re-conceptualize and re-invigorate a new emancipatory class-consciousness: why collective action feels so good and how Unions can be fabulous.
Wesley’s newly required uniform camera for accountability is quite a nuisance. It makes him all self conscious, and that’s not right. Join him in deciding if and when to turn his camera off, I mean, have an equipment malfunction. At what point is he absolutely required to wear pants?
Wesley Wodgers, Camera Cop in When to Shoot, Leslie Rogers
ACRE TV will stage a LIVE event in which the stream will operate as a prop/instrument/soundtrack for the night of IRL performances as part of Direct Object/Direct Action, a livestreamed thematic program also on view at Threewalls, featuring Melina Ausikaitis, Danny Giles, Leslie Rogers, and Neal Vandenbergh.
Programmed by Kera MacKenzie and Andrew Mausert-Mooney
Full Direct Object/Direct Action LIVE program information HERE
Jaime Davidovich. The Live! Show, 1980
A Newcity review of Threewalls’ show Outreach: Jaime Davidovich 1974-1984, which features Direct Object/Direct Action streaming in the gallery, highlights the role of ACRE TV:
“Inescapably the immediacy of Davidovich’s television programs is mediated and dated in a time-capsule presentation at Threewalls. However a screen loops Davidovich’s vintage programming with contemporary, Chicago-based artist television programming made by ACRE-TV (also available online), to demonstrate the continuing legacy of artist-run television and its expanding possibilities through online platforms.”
Read the full review written by Anastasia Karpova Tinari here.
See more of Jaime Davidovich’s work streaming on ACRE TV until March 31!
The Soup Exchange is a blank/black video with subtitles. This video is approximately two hours of conversations between women in Iran and in the US. This conversation highlights the issues of race, gender and sexuality specifically in Iran and in the US. How the West sees the East and how the East sees the West is the production of media and this project’s aim is to challenge this media production in two countries that are in conflicts with one another.
Soup Exchange was a Skype session between ten women in Iran, Esfahan and ten women in the U.S., Chicago. Aush* was a center of this gathering and conversations accrued around it. In this gathering that took place in a private home in Iran, and in the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in the U.S., all women from both groups talked about Feminism in different aspects of their lives. They also talked about misconceptions about women in the east and the west.
*Aush is the most popular traditional Iranian soup that is almost always made by women in women-only-gatherings.
soheilaazadi.com/soup-exchange
soheilaazadi.com
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The Society of the Spectacle (2013, 75 min.) takes infamous Situationist Guy Debord’s film of the same name as a starting point and skeleton for a new video project. Through intensive research and détournement the film is part recreation, part criticism, and part inquiry.
Spectacle can be thought of as a piece of research by way of re-making or re-stating; a research project which makes use of Debord’s work not as a quotation but as an appropriation of a collective inheritance in the cultural commons. My film reflects a complexity in both theory and practice by overlaying emotional, aesthetic, historical, political, and theoretical discourses in a matrix that forces the viewer to engage on multiple registers simultaneously. As much as it is an experiment in video, it was also an experiential act of research that sought to glean lessons from Debord’s film while leveling critiques of its shortcomings; it was an act of translation in an effort to make these lessons and criticisms legible in a contemporary American context.
Public Hearing, 2012. Courtesy of the Artist.
“Michael Guarneri: Is it all about the desire of making something public, then? Public Hearing in Progress is not the content of the tapes, it is the broadcast of the tapes on ACRE TV.
James N. Kienitz Wilkins: Sure, this is where it gets really interesting to me. First, these tapes are originals: they have never been digitized and it is cost prohibitive to do so. Second, ACRE TV will be streaming the tapes “live,” that is, playing them for the first time in their entirety. I’ve never watched all the footage, even though I am in it. I will be tuning in to make sure I didn’t do anything embarrassing. So to me, the event is the playing of the tapes: the finger pushing the button, the broadcast. Moreover, the tapes are very particular because they obfuscate the knowledge of pre-recording through their imagery—they’re security camera footage, which we associate with live or very recent events. Unedited footage, unseen until now, and degrading as well, since VHS as an analog medium degrades over time. The next time Public Hearing in Progress happens—if ever—it will be different. This might be true of any “original,” but I feel there is an added bonus here, because Public Hearing in Progress chronicles a remake. It is a replay of a remake, getting remade. An original that is a copy of a copy through the simultaneity of broadcast. Not to get too deep, man, but it’s at once unique and insignificant, sort of what we were getting at when talking about human beings. So God created mankind in his own image. Amen.”
Read the full BOMB Magazine interview between Michael Guarneri and James N. Kienitz Wilkins here.
Public Hearing in Progress is airing as a part of Direct Object/Direct Action every Saturday and Sunday 12-8 pm CST from Feb 1 – Mar 21, 2015.
The full film is also streaming (Feb 1 – Mar 21) at: public.automaticmoving.
“Evening News draws from local, regional, national, and global headlines in order to select a representative program of the evening’s top reports. I transcribe the reports from the major news channels accessible on Chicago television (NBC, CNN, WGN-TV, FOX) watched back-to-back each afternoon (at the local bar, supermarket, gym). Across stations and over the span of several hours, news channels are relatively repetitive in their reportage. Although the pool of TV news coverage is not overwhelmingly large, some stories stick out more—because of the imagery they provoke, the appeal they generate, the disgust they engender. These are the visceral stories: the ones that broadcast the most tragic or gruesome, the most exciting or triumphant reports. These are factual stories that are written to be spoken—they call for some human intervention—the stories told to you by the rote, yet human voice of the anchor that might cause one to turn around and ask “did you hear about… ?” Evening News pulls these headlines precisely because stories are sensitive, exciting or horrifying to a mass audience, inflammatory, pleasurably fluffy. Each report is transcribed to the tee, inputted into the teleprompter feed, and broadcast via ACRE TV.” -TS
PUBLIC HEARING IN PROGRESS
A REPLAY BY JAMES N. KIENITZ WILKINS
Public Hearing in Progress is the exclusive web broadcast of original videotapes documenting the entire on-set production of Public Hearing, a feature film reenactment of a transcript from a real small town public hearing.
The feature film, Public Hearing (110 min), is an experimental documentary directed and produced by James N. Kienitz Wilkins, using as its screenplay a publicly-available transcript downloaded from the website of the town of Allegany, New York. Filmed entirely in close-up on black-and-white 16mm film, an ensemble cast of actors and non-actors read between the lines in an ironic debate over the replacement of an existing Wal-Mart with a super Wal-Mart.
Public Hearing in Progress is a parallel project to the film, presenting a behind-the-scenes glimpse into its production, and suggesting a perpetual remaking of an otherwise completed work, one based on public material yet privatized through the filmmaking process. During the film’s 2009 re-production of a 2006 public hearing, an aging security camera was installed on set, serving as a functional prop documenting the film’s low-budget proceedings in a silent, murky, decayed, black-and-white image—a sort of bastard cousin to the feature’s cinematic 16mm film image, and notably, the only wide-angle or establishing view afforded by the production. The security feed was recorded on VHS operating in eight hour EP (extended play) mode, mirroring the length of the shooting days imposed by the downtown Manhattan office location, and preserving the discontinuous fourteen shooting days in a practically sculptural mass with one tape per day.
The tapes have remained largely unwatched since their original recording, existing now as one-of-a-kind objects due to the extreme hassle of preservation (over 100 hours accounting for schedule variations and equipment malfunctions), and the generational loss of analog formats (a duplicate would be an inferior copy). As a result, the streaming broadcast is at once a pre-recorded, fourteen episode documentary of a word-based documentary without its words, and a “live” event of certain tapes being played in a certain location at a certain time. The image itself is a security feed (considered at the time a pathetic backup should the 16mm film come out ruined), and the illusion of a security feed: that familiar and always potentially real real-time image which saturates our age.
MORE ABOUT PUBLIC HEARING
The feature film, Public Hearing, premiered in competition at the 2012 Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX), and has since screened in festivals and venues worldwide, including MoMA PS1 (EXPO 1:NEW YORK), IndieLisboa, Camden International, Punto de Vista, Festival do Rio, and Lima Independiente (Winner: Activism Award) and beyond.
“… A play about itself … shows how much people are willing to endure to pretend that a democratic process exists in opposition to corporate manifest destiny.”
– Brooklyn Rail
“… a case study in neither-fish-nor-fowl filmmaking.”
– ARTFORUM
“Public Hearing is a thought provoking x-ray of community democracy as ritualist incantation.”
– Politeken.dk
“… one of the most remarkable not-quite-documentaries of recent years.”
– Toronto Star
Watch the full film for free (Feb 1 – Mar 21): public.automaticmoving.
*The February 1st program will run from 12-3pm CST