ACRE TV

Category: Direct Object/Direct Action

  • “Video Drift” Amanda Gutierrez

    Video drift

    Video Dérive (drift), is a collective project that activates the subjective experience of a walk within an urban context, documenting several group journeys into one single time line and digital map. The Drift will be guided by a video broadcast on ACRE TV, indicating specific instructions for users to follow and document through their mobile devices. The Drift responses will be updated and shared from several locations in Chicago, Illinois and Mexico City via the artist collective Nerivela.

    The videos, photos and sound captured will be edited into a single video which will air on ACRE TV as a part of Direct Object/Direct Action.

    Each drift will begin at Threewalls, 119 N Peoria #2C, and will be held on:

    Saturday, March 7th, 11 am CST &

    Sunday, March 15th, 11 am CDT

    Or, take part from anywhere by following the instructions airing simultaneously on ACRETV.org and using the videodrifts.com app to pin your documentation to the map.

    The collective map can be viewed at: mitchsaid.com/drift/acre_map.html

    The resulting video will air on ACRETV.org TBA

     

    Amanda Gutiérrez
    The concepts of memory, home and landscape are closely related in my current work. This exploration arises from formal strategies in documentary and oral recreation, while media techniques such as photography, video, and sound are the main tools to assembly its narrative processes. It is in migrating to the United States, and in the constant movement between two residences — Chicago and Mexico City — that two important themes arose: migration and the construction of identity through architecture. amandagutierrez.net and pilsenderive.tumblr.comMitch Said is a South African-born digital artist and designer currently residing in Chicago, with an abiding interest in mobile computing, locative art, and online mapping. He’s created interactive digital experiences for a variety of projects and partners, including MoMA and musicians OK Go. He holds a MPS from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and and MDA from the University of the Witwatersrand in Interactive Media. mitchsaid.com

    Nerivela is a conceptual platform that uses alternative methods of thought and production to reflect on the surrounding world. We are a collective of artists developing practices that seek to undermine contemporary models of production, working with possibilities and methods that exist on the fringes of what we are able to see. By transmuting and re-articulating meaning in our artistic interventions, we create multiple possibilities for understanding visual and verbal languages. It’s a question of finding new syntax, dislocating old semantic meanings and creating provocative and novel forms. What emerges from this process of transliteration is a symbol that exists on a sheet of paper, which stands for a surface, a street, or an entire city: this symbol is our point of departure and also our destination. nerivela.org

  • “The Indian Boundary Line” Thomas Comerford

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    The Indian Boundary Line, 2010, 16mm/8mm/super-8mm on digital betacam, color. 41 mins.

    From 2001-2010, Chicago musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford made a series of quietly-observed films that contemplate the entwined social, political, and environmental histories of Chicago (Figures in the Landscape, 2002; Land Marked/Marquette, 2005). The Indian Boundary Line (2010) follows a road in Chicago, Rogers Avenue, that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and “Indian Territory.” In doing so, it examines the collision between the vernacular landscape, with its storefronts, short-cut footpaths and picnic tables, and the symbolic one, replete with historical markers, statues, and fences. Through its observations and audio-visual juxtapositions, The Indian Boundary Line meditates on a span of land in Chicago about 12 miles long, but suggests how this land and its history are an index for the shifting inhabitants, relationships, boundaries and ideas of landscape — as well as the consequences — which have accompanied the transformation of the “New World.”

    thomascomerford.net

    Airing Thursdays and Fridays Mar 5 – 13th, 7 pm CST

  • “Dead (air)” Danny Giles

    it is a real person

    As a direct action, the  die-in has appeared in public spaces to represent unrepresentable loss. In recent months, mass numbers of variously raced bodies have assembled to mimic the death of black men killed by white police. As a gesture meant to incite sympathy for the slain and empathy for their communities, die-ins deploy mimicry and silence as subversive tools to commemorate victims and to reenact the moment of encounter with death.

    Popular media narratives usually focus on the biography and mannerisms of black victims. The character of the deceased is dissected, caricatured and lambasted to justify the taking of life. Dead (air) attempts to redirect our scrutiny, instead angling it back at the purveyors of violence using their own words. This piece asks, what might we stand to gain by attempting to empathize with those who lash out through a tangle of fear and slanted perceptions? Reframing this contemporary direct political action within performative artistic space, Dead (air) offers an alternative to political spectacles and popular perceptions.

    Performing in person for Direct Object/Direct Action LIVE, February 27, 2015, 7 pm at Threewalls, 119 N Peoria, Chicago, with accompanying video/sound airing simultaneously on ACRE TV.

  • “The New Fort and Swimming In There” Melina Ausikaitis

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    “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

    melinaausikaitis.com

    Performing in person for Direct Object/Direct Action LIVE, February 27, 2015, 7 pm at Threewalls, 119 N Peoria, Chicago, with accompanying video/sound airing simultaneously on ACRE TV.

  • “Fuck Individualisierungsschub” Neal Vandenbergh

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    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.

    nealvandenbergh.com

    Performing in person for Direct Object/Direct Action LIVE, February 27, 2015, 7 pm at Threewalls, 119 N Peoria, Chicago, with accompanying video/sound airing simultaneously on ACRE TV.

  • Wesley Wodgers: Camera Cop in “When to Shoot” Leslie Rogers

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    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? 

     

    Performing in person for Direct Object/Direct Action LIVE, February 27, 2015, 7 pm at Threewalls, 119 N Peoria, Chicago, with accompanying video/sound airing simultaneously on ACRE TV.

  • Direct Object/Direct Action LIVE

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    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

    Direct Object/Direct Action LIVE, February 27, 2015, 7 pm at Threewalls, 119 N Peoria, Chicago, with accompanying video/sound airing simultaneously on ACRE TV.

    Full Direct Object/Direct Action LIVE program information HERE

  • “Soup Exchange” Soheila Azadi

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    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

    Airing Thursday and Friday Feb 19 & 20th, 7:10 pm CST

    and

    Airing Thursday Feb 26th, 7 pm CST

     

  • “The Society of the Spectacle” Heath Schultz

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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.

    heathschultz.com

    Airing Thursdays and Fridays Feb 5 – 13th, 7:10 pm CST

     

  • “Evening News” Theo Shure

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    “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

    Airing nightly Feb 2 – 20th, 7 pm CST as part of Direct Object/Direct Action