In 2006, experimental filmmaker Naomi Uman retraced her great grandparents’ emigration from Eastern Europe in reverse, settling in the tiny village of Legedzine, Ukraine, where she still lives today. The result of her adventures is the quietly picaresque quintet of 16mm films, The Ukrainian Time Machine. In capturing the joys and hardships of her neighbors’ centuries-old way of life– traditions that are eroding with the encroaching pressures of modernity–Uman creates a new kind of living history, fresh with curiosity and verve. In this evening’s program, Uman will present Unnamed Film, her keen documentary about life in Legedzine, cataloging its inhabitants’ ...

The Roots & Culture screening series will feature a program of work recently added to the archive of the Video Data Bank. Focusing on acquisitions from the past year, the program highlights eight pieces spanning a variety of genres and styles. This VDB program has recently screened at several major film festivals, and this Roots & Culture event is an opportunity for the VDB to showcase their new acquisitions in Chicago. Work by Jesse McLean, Sterling Ruby, Dani Levanthal, Jim Finn, Pat Steir, Susan Youssef, Wynne Greenwood & K8 Hardy and ...

The Blindness Series is Los Angeles-based artist Tran, T. Kim-Trang’s expansive, fourteen-years-in-the-making tour de force on vision and its metaphors.  Comprised of eight videos, the series draws upon notions of blindness to explore broader political and cultural themes of identity, sexuality, society, and technology.  This evening, to celebrate the Video Data Bank’s release of The Blindness Series in a new DVD box-set, Tran will present five works from the cycle, including a provocative documentary on hysterical blindness and the Cambodian civil war (ekleipsis, 1998); an essay on cosmetic eyelid surgery (operculum, 1993); and a meditation on the phenomenon of word ...

Kissing hats, elephants driving, a man who turns into the sun, and dinosaurs roaming the countryside rarely happen in real life, but at the stop-motion film screening Stop & Go all of this will become ordinary. Established filmmakers and visual artists using stop-motion, tell stories, examine visual phenomena, and make political statements in a collection of short videos. Curated by San Francisco Bay Area artist and animator, Sarah Klein, Klein (who uses hand-drawn images and stop-motion animation in her own work), chose pieces that explore the possibilities of stop-motion processes. The animators breathe life into magazine cutouts, homemade drawings, everyday ...

For the last six years, artist Takeshi Murata and musician Robert Beatty (Hair Police, Three Legged Race) have collaborated on a series of visceral glitch-based animations, setting Murata’s psychedelic imagery to Beatty’s hypnotic compositions. Murata's videos range from hand-drawn animations of fluidly morphing shapes to painterly abstractions of meticulously hijacked digital code. Beatty employs hacked electronics and thrift store cast-offs to craft otherworldly sonic narratives. Together, the duo’s electronic alchemy transforms the detritus of consumer culture into dazzling tapestries of sound and color. This evening, CATE teams up with experimental music and intermedia series Lampo to bring ...

Chasing Two Rabbits is a special event curated by Sonia Yoon and Shannon Stratton that pairs animators with live performances by sound artists and musicians. Inspired by the experimental films of Norman McLaren, who combined abstract imagery (including scratching and painting into the film stock in earlier work, as well as paper cut-outs and live action and dance) with imaginative music and sound, Chasing Two Rabbits, acts to pair artists in both genres to produce a unique event where, rather than leaving art to illustrate a story, perhaps sound and vision will illuminate each other. The program for the ...

New York-based photographer and writer Moyra Davey is known for her finely observed photographs of domestic interiors. Her graceful, straightforward images catalog life’s in-between moments and overlooked objects–still lifes of crowded bookshelves, empty whiskey bottles, and dust.  In recent years, Davey has turned to video, combining her eye for the everyday with a literary voice.  This evening, she will present two of these works. In Fifty Minutes (2006), Davey uses the standard length of a therapy session to examine her own history with psychoanalysis while also raising questions about autobiography, nostalgia, and the ways we all come to know and ...

Shopaholics, rethink and rejoice! Presented in the aisles of THE FREE STORE, Gallery 400's newest (non)commercial wing, here's a film/video treatise on the joys and terrors of cash and commerce, in two parts. Beginning in the mid-80s improvised music / language poetry / experimental dance scene (!) of the East Village and "featuring" John Zorn, Arto Lindsay, Abigail Child, Christian Marclay and over 2500 synch-sound cuts in fifteen minutes, Henry Hills' Money is a montage-barrage time capsule view of $ociety'$ greate$t ill$. With this new-found insight into the essence of bling, German media essayist Harun Farocki takes ...

Presented by Homeroom, hosted by Jon Satrom. The YouTube Assembly is an attempt to capture the phenomenon of viral video in a live event. The event consists of screening web-based video for a live, participating audience. Like karaoke or a traditional performance open mic, the YouTube Assembly creates a situation in which people take turns entertaining each other, in this case, by sharing their favorite Youtube clips. In the spirit of the popular YouTube interface, audience members will be encouraged to comment on the videos they watch, except out loud and in real time with no anonymity Each screening will ...

An evening of new film and video work from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Editing Aesthetics course taught by Michelle Peutz. Featuring brand-spanking-new films and videos from Theodore Darst, Nick Edelberg, Samuel Jacob Eisen, Carlos Enriquez, James Ferguson, Danny Gallegos, Emily Irvine, David Lee, Karina Natis, Matthew O'Shaughnessy, David Olson, Hae Yeon Park, Anthony Rizzo and Heather Shilling.

Hailed as "one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century" by Roberta Smith of the New York Times, Los Angeles-based artist and SAIC alumnus Sterling Ruby is known for his aggressive biomorphic sculptures, defaced minimalist forms, and large spray-painted canvases. His videos are similarly charged, referencing pornography, abstract painting, and evoking states of transience, entropy, and transgression. In Hole (2002), workers in the back room of a chain store surreptitiously and suggestively stuff merchandise into a hole in a plaster wall. Transient Trilogy (2005-09) finds Ruby playing both a drifter, who fashions talismans from the detritus ...

Torsten Zenas Burns works with lots of different mediums and with lots of different people. Collabtronica is a sample of different projects created in tandem with artists, Anne McGuire, Darrin Martin, Christian K. Burns, and Halflifers. Traversing through the worlds of Choregraphy, Performance, Video, and New Media, he explores the realms of performed identity through fantasy characters and has an interest in re-envisioning educational spaces. Often creating animated counterparts of his collaborators, TZB creates spaces where kinesthetics meets virtual life. For example, WHAT IF?, made with longtime collaborator, Darrin Martin utilizes dance software that recreates ...

Thirty years before the ubiquitous YouTube mash-up, artist Dara Birnbaum hijacked television imagery in a series of coolly ironic videos that recontextualized pop cultural icons (Wonder Woman, Kojak, Laverne & Shirley), TV grammar (inserts, two-shots, wipes), and genres (soap operas, sitcoms, game shows) to reveal their ideological subtexts. Birnbaum described her videos as late 20th century "ready-mades"–works that "manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative." Now renowned as a pioneer in televisual appropriation, she is currently the subject of a major retrospective that began at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium, and will tour to Museu Fundação Serralves in Porto, ...

The land is changing, possibly disappearing. But perhaps it was never there to begin with. Perhaps it was a seductive mirage conjured by our cameras. From a deft re-editing of PBS’s The Joy of Painting to futuristic visions of people and places, to stories of exile and immigration, these five recent works re-imagine landscape as a shifting ground, an anxious force and backdrop to live in and move through. Work by Sterling Ruby, Jacqueline Goss, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, Steven Matheson and Brendan Fernandes. Programmed by Crystal Heiden and Christine Negus.

Over the last eight years, local musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford has been at work on 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). This evening, Comerford will present the world premiere of The Indian Boundary Line (2010). The film follows, as Comerford notes, "a road very close to my home 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 ...

Go Fight Win! Experimental Film/Video For-Ever! Hoorah! Hoorah! Here We Go Media, Here We Go! In the sporting spirit of Jinks' exhibition On Sundrun, in which a post-post-colonial game of cricket is re-presented and re-invented, Gallery 400 is foam-finger-waving proud to present a double-header of films and videos that seek to address athletics in all of its art-side incarnations. In the absence of $6 hot dogs and $7 Budweisers, we've got a stadium's worth of bruisers ready to bring the (critical) pain—from ethnographic melon tossing to video art ice skating, close-up baseball to performative competitive swimming, ice hockey ankle-slashing ...

For the past two years Public Media Institute and Proximity magazine have been collaborating with Trendbeheer.com, a Rotterdam-based Arts initiative, to bring artists and projects to each other’s cities. This December Trendbeheer will be mounting a show at C-PS to coincide with issue 6 of Proximity magazine, themed (An)Other Worlds. Issue 6 includes an expansive Rotterdam Section and artists interviewed in the issue will be present in Chicago for the Trendbeheer Meets Proximity exhibition. Trendbeheer will be bringing information about the Rotterdam art scenes displayed in an ad hoc Info Kiosk. They will screen a Rotterdam VHS Film Festival program and ...

A public screening of an episode of Chobits, an animated television series from Japan produced by the all-female group C.L.A.M.P. Presented by Forrest Nash.

Roots & Culture gallery presents a screening of video work by Scott Wolniak. As an artist whose video work grows out of his regular studio practice, Wolniak’s humorous, labor-intensive and frequently metaphysical work is a well-regarded fixture in the Chicago gallery community. This program highlights ten years of Wolniak’s videos, from early pieces focusing on performance, to more recent animation projects. This screening of collected work is a rare chance to see the bulk of Wolniak’s pieces, most originally shown in installation contexts, in one program. Scott Wolniak is an interdisciplinary visual artist working in drawing, sculpture, video and installation. ...

Film and video works curated by Ben Russell. At 20,000 leagues below the sea everyone can hear you scream – that’s the nature of sound and water after all, and (maybe) that’s why we call all those vibrations dazzling our skulls by the oceanic descriptor WAVEFORMS. Just ask Alex Halstead – she was born into water, under water, knows wet and sound better than all of us combined. For the last month in Gallery 400 she’s been humoring our earth-ears with her rhythmic pulses, and now it’s time to return the favor. And so, submitted for her approval: an aqua-opera ...

Presented by Homeroom, hosted by Eric Graf and Alexander Stewart. The YouTube Assembly is an attempt to capture the phenomenon of viral video in a live event. The event consists of screening web-based video for a live, participating audience. Like karaoke or a traditional performance open mic, the YouTube Assembly creates a situation in which people take turns entertaining each other, in this case, by sharing their favorite Youtube clips. In the spirit of the popular YouTube interface, audience members will be encouraged to comment on the videos they watch, except out loud and in real time with no ...

Film and video by Stephen Connolly.

One of Canada's most prominent and most influential artists, Joyce Wieland (1931-1998) has been long overdue for a re-evaluation of her visual art and her stunning film work in the United States. This retrospective of her film work includes a selection of her short films (Oct. 16) that includes the gorgeous Water Sark (1965), the poignant Handtinting (1968) and the playful Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968), as well as a rare screening of her feature-length La Raison Avant La Passion (1969).

The Time Machine is your guide through the fourth dimension! Watch and learn about Real-Time Rendering, Quartz, and Max patches as Sabine Gruffat steers you through the sensory drone of the digital and analog hyperspace. Bill Brown takes you on a guided tour of memory's roadside attractions by way of scratchy records and the hazy glow of 35mm slides, narrating the interspatial monuments of our extemporary voyage.