since 1996

December 15 and 16, 2010

Programme:

With a body of work that consists of relatively few films, videos and installations, Los Angeles-based artist Rebecca Baron has covered a wide span of approaches since 1995: medium-length essay films, digital transmutations of avant-garde and Hollywood classics, and research into the political dimensions of photographic media are all present in her oeuvre. In the framework of this first retrospective dedicated to her films, Baron and her partner, media artist Doug Goodwin, will also present a new “work in progress” (Serios) and hold a workshop at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.

A unifying feature of Baron’s art can be found in her engagement with the fault-lines of memory and history, and with the processes by which they are constructed through modern media. For Baron, the images that connect us to the real and to the past become most compelling – and problematic – around the edges: where fact and imagination intersect (as in her 1995 film The Idea of North, the chronicle of a failed 19^th century polar expedition). Her masterpiece, okay bye-bye (1998), builds on excerpts from letters, found super-8 footage of an unidentified Cambodian man, photographs from the Vietnam War and other partial images, in an effort to find out whether something as monumental as the genocide during the Pol Pot regime can be examined effectively with traditional methodologies. How Little We Know of Our Neighbors (2005) is another strong example of Baron’s “experimental documentary” mode: a study of the British “Mass Observation Movement” during the 1930s and its relationship to contemporary issues regarding surveillance, public self-disclosure, and privacy.

The multi-part series Lossless (2008) represents a new area of study: in collaboration with Doug Goodwin, Baron has arrived at the historical transformation of film itself. Their computer-based rendering and re-imagining of films such as Meshes of the Afternoon or The Searchers is far from “lossless,” of course; yet there is also something to gain: new forms arising from the “materiality” of the digital.

The show has been organized in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts; with thanks to Dorit Margreiter and Constanze Ruhm.

Curated by Ben Russell
7:00pm on Tuesday the 5th of October
at Gallery 400, 400 S Peoria, Chicago, IL
FREE

Like so many smaller robots united to form a larger and somewhat more impressive whole, this program of films and videos culled from the last four decades of mediamaking is a proposition for transformation on both the micro and macro level. Screened in tandem with the Stephanie Syjuco and Dexter Sinister shows at Gallery400, in which throwaway e-art is made material and font choice becomes a locus for meaning, tonight’s selection of moving images is about alteration and transmutation in the broadest sense of the words. Watch in slack-jawed awe as giant lizards metamorphose (SMITH), as men become portals (CAMPUS) and the city becomes a screen (KRANING), as language is emptied out of signification entirely (ROSE), and as an animated red star mutates into our psychedelic everyday (BECKETT). Be it through awkwardly forced connections (RUBY), unlikely Western datamoshing (BARON/GOODWIN), structuralist re-re-rephotography (LEGRICE), or That Force Called Time Which Changes Everything In Its Wake (GOTTHEIM), your sense of your-self-in-the-world will be inextricably altered, to be sure. Not too bad for an evening at the art space – so come one, come all and Do the Transform!

FEATURING: Gargantuan by John Smith (1:00, 16mm, 1992), Three Transitions by Peter Campus (5:00 video, 1973), Forced Inanimate Connection: Climax Modelling by Sterling Ruby (7:00, video, 2002), Secondary Currents by Peter Rose (18:00, 16mm, 1982), Evolution of the Red Star by Adam Beckett (7:00, 16mm, 1973), Berlin Horse by Malcolm LeGrice (7:00, 16mm, 1970), Lossless #3 by Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin (10:00, video, 2008), Vineland by Laura Kraning (10:00, video, 2009), Fog Line by Larry Gottheim (11:00, 16mm, 1970) TRT 76:00

This investigation has revealed two things to us:

1. digital media represent the world very differently than film or video
2. the artifacts are often beautiful in themselves

So write Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, makers of the Lossless series. (See “Why mpeg?”).

“Lossless” (as opposed to “lossy”) data compression is a digital process by which computer files are reduced in size without reduction in quality. Lossless, Nos. 1-5 (2009) is a project by Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin that explores the possibilities of the transformation and distortion of images — and ultimately the creation of new ones — within the digital realm. Among the visuals used by Baron and Goodwin are clips (actually mpeg4 files derived from DVDs of 16mm and 35mm films) from Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity (1970), and Busby Berkeley’s dance sequences from Footlight Parade (1933).
Los Angeles-based filmmaker Rebecca Baron ‘s work has screened around the world at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, the Viennale, the Whitney Museum of Art, and many other venues. Now teaching at the California Institute of the Arts, she has also taught at Massachusetts College of Art and Harvard University.
Douglas Goodwin ‘s films have been exhibited internationally at the Toronto International Film Festival, London Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Frankfurt Film Museum, and many other venues. He has taught at CalArts, MassArt, and Emerson College.

Their daughter Willa was born December 24, 2009, and will be traveling from L.A. to New York to attend her first Orphan Film Symposium.
Resources : Audio recording: “Looking”: An Evening with Rebecca Baron & Douglas Goodwin, CA Conrad, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eileen Myles, and Maggie Nelson , Nov. 1, 2009, Cabinet magazine.
Baron & Goodwin set up a wiki to collect information about the Lossless series >> http://cairn.com/lossless/doku.php

Do You See What I See? New Works from Adele Horne, Rebecca Baron and Doug Goodwin

Egyptian Theater in Hollywood , Sunday March 15, 2009, 7:00 pm

Filmforum is delighted to welcome back some of our good friends with new films. We last hosted Adele Horne with her documentary The Tailenders, which went on to win an Independent Spirit Award. Her new short works investigate realms of vision and interpretation of visual phenomena in delightful ways.

We’ve screened Rebecca Baron’s films in a few different shows, most recently How Little We Know of Our Neighbors. With the Lossless Series, she and filmmaking partner Doug Goodwin look into the small and large changes done to film images through digitization, compression, and digital manipulation, and by extension raise questions of the potential of the de- and re-construction of all images from/of the past.