ETC History 2006 - 2007

History 2006-2007
	The Residency Program offers self-directed creative time to mediamakers from throughout the country. Since 1971 we have assisted over 1400 artists in the creation of works using new electronic video, sonic and digital technologies. Each year about 40 artists are invited to work in the studio, offering in a retreat-like workshop environment, access to an image processing system, intensive individualized instruction and time for exploration and personal creative growth. The system is a hybrid tool set, encouraging artists to create interactive relationships between older historically important analog instruments and new digital technologies, and to explore boundaries and intersections within narrative, documentary and experimental forms. With assistance from mediaThe foundation, we have been able to significantly advance the digital components of the imaging system, incorporating a quad G5 along with 2 G4s, other sonic and control modules by Doepfer, interactive software including Max/MSP, Jitter and Pluggo as well as DVD authoring and editing software. This year's 49 artists represent 9 states, as well as Israel, Norway, Canada and the UK. About 36% are artists from outside New York State and about 25% live in Upstate NY's more rural communities. Applicants this year included 99 Hooker (NY); Mara Alper (NY); Nurit Bar-shai (NY); Matt Biederman (Canada); Kjell Bjorgeengen (Norway); Peer Bode (NY); Tammy Renee Brackett (NY); Debora Brown (MO); Yvonne Buchanan (NY); Carrie Dashow (NY); Andrew Demirjian (NJ); Carola Dreidemie (FL); Monica Duncan (GA); Nic Economous (NY); Brendan Ford (MA); Madeleine Gallagher (NY); Jaclyn Genga (MA); Raymond Ghirardo and Megan Roberts (NY); Nick Hallett (NY); Pamela Hawkins (NY); Kelly Jacobson (NY); Zohar Kfir (Israel); Wojciech Kosma (United Kingdom); Richard Kostelanetz and Matt Underwood (NY); Justin Lincoln (VA); Jason Livingston (NY); Cleoni Manoussakis (NY); Craig Marsden (NY); Kristin Marx (NY); Aaron Miller (MA); Bianca Miller (NY); Branda Miller (NY); Marisa Olson (NY); Rebekkah Palov (MD); Jackie Passmore (UK); John Phillips (PA); Mike Rosenthal (NY); Liz Rodda (MA); Joshua Rosenstock (MA); Luciana Sanz and Amoeba Technology (NY); Jennifer Schmidt (NY); Ray Sweeten (NY); Matt Underwood (NY); Lisellot van der Heijden (NY); Charles Woodman (OH); Roger Wyatt (NY); Necole Zayatz (NY). Tapes produced at the Center were again included in exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe and on the Web. Recent exhibition venues have included Eyebeam, the Corcoran, Art in General, the Museum of Modern Art, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, Bushwick Art Project, Momenta Art, Rochester Contemporary, Monkeytown, Axiom Gallery (Boston), Nexus Gallery (Philadelphia), Anthology Film Archives, Kunstmuseum Solothurn (Switzerland), Reuten Gallery (Holland) and Carnegie Art Center. They have been selected for inclusion in festivals including the Scope Festival, New York Underground Film Festival, the VideoEx Festival (Zurich), Viper (Basel), Valencia International Film Festival (Spain), the Jerusalem Film Festival, Listen with your Eyes Festival and the 10th Annual Dumbo Festival (Brooklyn). Tapes are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, Filmmakers Coop, Drift Distribution, Facets, Microcinema International, Women Make Movies and many others. Artists working at the Center this year have received awards and recognition from State Arts Councils, the National Endowment for the Arts and private foundations and have received numerous awards and citations in festivals around the world. Focused on our commitment to education, we also participate in online salons hosted by NAMAC, empyre and other arts, information and advocacy groups. Through the Media Arts Technical Assistance Program we work with organizations from all regions of New York State to develop the media arts field. We helped organize the New York State NYS Exhibition Symposium at hosted by Colgate University in Spring 2007. The convening is the result of more than 20 years of formal and informal networking among New York State programmers, and discussed the current state of programming and exhibition as it is evolving in the light of new technologies. Discussion also centered around practical ways in which emerging curators and programmers can be encouraged. 2006-07 also marked the formation of the Hudson Valley Programmers' Group. The Center also serves on a working committee along with representatives of American Documentary/POV on Issues of Identity: Mapping the Media Arts in New York State, a comprehensive and interactive portal website for media arts in the State. Also through Technical Assistance ETC assisted organizations to attend the several conferences and festivals including the AMIA Annual Conference, International Documentary Film Festival, the Flaherty Film Seminar and the National Conference on Media Reform among others. The Center serves as a sponsoring organization for artists' projects in the electronic and film arts, providing support services, assistance with development and fiscal and administrative management services. We sponsor about 20 projects each year. In 2006-07 we helped artists to raise over $100,000 in support of independent media projects. Completed projects have seen worldwide exhibition and distribution, and have been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the NYS Council on the Arts, the McCarthy Foundation, Funding Exchange, the Rockefeller Foundation, ITVS, Astraea Foundation, Soros Documentary Fund, Chase Manhattan and many others. Recent participants include Irit Batsry, winner of the prestigious Bucksbaum Award for Neither There Nor Here, with a world premiere at the International Film Festival, Rotterdam and inclusion in the Whitney Biennial 2002; Alan Berliner for The Sweetest Sound, featured on POV and for Wide Awake; Abigail Child for By Desire; Slawomir Grunberg for the Emmy-award winning documentary School Prayer: A Community Divided; Barbara Hammer for Culture Doctor, The Female Closet, and her new work Resisting Paradise; Ken Jacobs for NY Ghetto Fishmarket, 1903; and Kristin Lucas for Supervision. Projects have been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, Funding Exchange, NVR and the Distribution Fund, Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Jerome Foundation, and National Geographic. For 2006-07 the following artists have received awards from the New York State Council on the Arts. Skip Blumberg for Lessons From a Video Master, a video variety show mixes short advice, aphorisms and inspirations that Nam June Paik passed on to more than 65 video artists, curators and acolytes; Peer Bode for History Electronic, a personal and cultural view of the crossings of electronic music and television; Carrie Dashow for Society for a Subliminal State, a performative tour from the Hudson to the Erie Canal; Barbara Hammer for The Diving Women of Jenju-do, a look at a endangered tradition of ocean diving without breathing apparatus by women in the 60s; Jeffrey Lerer for Luck Was His Middle Name, a portion of Manuscript Fragments Found at the Gilbert Hotel, a 3-D computer animated close-up of life in this hotel of the absurd; Aaron Miller for Terminus, an interactive multimedia performance; Megan Roberts and Raymond Ghirardo for Image Stream, an installation of imaginary landscape; Paul Rowley for Uisce Marbh (Dead Water), an experimental documentary made through collaborative workshops with the new residents of Mosney, a former holiday camp in Ireland and now home to immigrant asylum seekers from all corners of the globe; Luciana Sanz for Etcetera, an audiovisual remix of 35 years of video history; Caspar Stracke for Architecture of Piracy, an experimental documentary on replica architecture as a cross-cultural vehicle juxtaposing monumental buildings and their copies, transposed into different continents and cultures. Since 1989 the Film and Electronic Arts Grants Program, has awarded one million dollars to individual artists and arts organizations in the State. Finishing Funds 2007 supported 17 new media, film and sonic art, web projects, performances, site-specific installations and interactive projects. This year's requests totaled almost $500,000. Finishing Funds is supported in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and by mediaThe foundation. For 18 years, the program has provided funds directly to New York State artists to assist with the completion of diverse and innovative projects which challenge the traditional boundaries of the media. This year's awards recognize work which is very diverse, encompassing web projects, animation, generative systems, stereoscopic projection, public art and performances, and include experimental, documentary and narrative cinema and the sonic arts. The works approach a wide variety of topics including issues of war and democracy, contemporary states of panic, language and memory, and the legend of a prostitute in Troy at the end of the Victorian era. The works in progress have received recognition and support from other organizations including the New York State Council on the Art, LMCC Swing Space, Lab HD, Art for Change, New York State Music Fund, the Tank, iEar Studios and Akademie Schloss Solitude. Two awards for new media and intermedia performance supported by mediaThe foundation were made to Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus of LoVid for Gauge Transformation and Chiaki Watanabe for mux. The other recipients are Zoe Beloff for History of a Fixed Idea and a Modern Case of Possession: a psychopathological musical in two parts; Greg Berger for The Gringomobile Diaries; Carrie Dashow for The Subliminal History of New York State; Joe Diebes for Scherzo; Mariam Ghani for Fugitive Refrains; Kelly Jacobson for The Origin of Mouthstones (Part Two); Hey-Yeun Jang for Picture Day: Flip Side; Annmarie Lanesey and Penny Lane for Sitting on a Million; Shawn Lawson for The Death of Sardanapalus; Jason Livingston for Life in a Tiny Town; Cat Mazza for Stitch for Senate; Morgan Miller for One Day in the Life of a Professional Anarchist; Adi Shniderman and Merav Ezer for Body Bug; Ricardo Miranda Zuniga for The War that Our Children Will Learn to Live With; Marina Zurkow for Boom! Darling. This year's peer review panel was composed of Monteith McCollum of Barton and Marisa Olson of New York. Monteith McCollum is an independent artist /filmmaker whose films Hybrid and Lawn have won awards and screened in theaters and on public television screens internationally. He makes music for his and wife Ariana's films with saws, violins, and anything else found around his barn in upstate New York. During the least hospitable weather and times of day, he can be found wondering about the landscape with a hand-cranked Bolex. Marisa Olson is an artist and Editor & Curator at Rhizome. Her own work was recently presented by the Whitney Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Pacific Film Archive, and the NY and Chicago Underground Film Festivals. She has curated exhibits and programs at the Guggenheim Museum, SFMOMA, the Getty, Artists Space, White Columns, and elsewhere. Presentation Funds provides support to New York State organizations for in-person appearances by film and media artists. The program brings innovative cinema programming, including independent film and media art, as well as audio installation works to new audiences and to underserved communities in all regions of the State. In addition, the program assists organizations which serve special constituencies and encourages the development of new presentation venues throughout the State. In 2006-07 we provided assistance to 59 sponsoring organizations in 22 counties across New York State, assisting with appearances reaching audiences of over 100,000 people; cable and web audiences are conservatively estimated at an additional 150,000. These organizations contributed almost $900,000 toward these media exhibition projects. This year's recipients included Anthology Film Archives, Alfred University Institute for Electronic Arts, Apexart, Art in General, Brooklyn Arts Council, Broome County Arts Council, Carnegie Art Center, CEPA, Chelsea Art Museum, Clarkson University, Cornell Cinema, Croton Council on the Arts, Dansology Inc., Dixon Place, Downtown Community TV, Dumbo Arts Center, Edward Hopper Landmark Preservation Foundation, Electronic Arts Intermix, Eyebeam Atelier, Felice Lesser Dance Theater, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Filmmakers Cooperative, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival at Ithaca College, Forward Motion Theater, Fractured Atlas, free103point9, George Eastman House, Hallwalls, Hamilton College, Harvestworks, Here Arts Center, iEAR Studios at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Ithaca College, Location One, Log TV, Loisaida Arts, Margaret Mead Film Festival, Millennium Film Workshop, MIX, New Dance Alliance, New York Media Alliance, Not Still Art, NY Foundation for the Arts, PS 1, Rochester Contemporary, Roulette, RPI, Rural Route Films, Saratoga Film Forum, Schenectady Museum of Science and History, Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center, SITU, Squeaky Wheel, Summer School for the Arts, Syracuse University, The Tank, Theater for the New City and Ti-Ahwaga Community Players. Founded in 1999 The Media Arts Technical Assistance Fund is designed to strengthen media arts organizations in all areas regions of New York State. The Fund assists media arts organizations, their staff and board members in working with outside consultants on issues of organizational and professional development, as well as on research and planning for new program initiatives. The Fund is designed to advance leadership and management skills critical to a sustainable and vital media arts community. provides support for organizational and professional development, assisting organizations to enhance leadership and management skills critical to the vitality and longevity of those organizations and of the media arts community. Organizational Ddevelopment helps offers support groupsto stabilize, strengthen or restructure capacity and services. Professional Development supports training and continuing education, through workshops as well as staff participation in media arts conferences, convening and festivals.. The Fund is supported by the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts, a public agency. Another important component of the Technical Assistance Program encourages the media arts community to convene and discuss issues which have bearing on the field's vitality and longevity. Media Arts Breakfast Meetings and other gatherings Upstate are held on a regular basis to share visions and concerns. In addition to direct support, Technical Assistance helps organizations to attend professional conferences, seminars and festivals including the 53rd Annual Flaherty Film Seminar South of the Other at Vassar College, the Association of Moving Image Archivists Annual 2006 Conference, Urban Visionaries Festival, National Conference on Media Reform and the International Documentary Film Festival. This year's total request to Technical Assistance was over $ 80,000. The program provided about $ 57,000 in support of requests from 37 organizations in 11 counties including the 16 Beaver Group, Anthology Film Archive, Central NY Programmers Group, CEPA, Children's Media Project, Cornell Cinema, Crandall Public Library, Creative Time, Fales Library at NYU, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival at Ithaca College, free103point9, Global Action Project, Hamilton College, Independent Media Arts Preservation, International Film Seminars, LEMUR, Light in Winter, MIX, Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of the American Indian, New York Film and Video Council, New York Media Alliance, Ocularis at Galapagos Art Space, Paramount Center for the Arts, POV/American Documentary, Rhizome, Renssalear Polytechnic Institute, Springville Center for the Arts, Standby Program and Ti-Ahwaga Community Players. The Center is committed to the early history and preservation of media art. Housed at the Center is a collection of over 1000 videotapes which chronicle work produced here over the last 30 years. We are a founding member of Independent Media Arts Preservation. We are past participants of the Regional Cataloging Initiative and the National Moving Image Database project of the American Film Institute. Begun in 1994, the Video History Project is an online research initiative which reflects the complex evolution of the media arts field, the multiple and interrelated histories of the media arts field, and encourages a collective voice in the crafting of our histories. The goals of the Video History Project are: To provide a dynamic vehicle for the creation and dissemination of an inclusive media history, crafted by those who are shaping it; To further the critical discourse among scholars and historians engaged with the study of the origins of media art; To contribute to the continued enrichment of knowledge within the media arts community globally; To capture the cultural environment, technological visions of individuals, and the modes of institutional support present during the early developmental years of media; To document and interrelate information about individuals, organizations, instruments, creative artworks, and events; To raise cultural awareness of the origins of media art; To increase public awareness of and appreciation for media history throughout the State and internationally. Goals are realized in an interrelated set of activities combining research and scholarship, through the enrichment of History Web content, and as collaborative projects supporting issues in electronic moving image preservation through the hosting of conferences and seminars. The first conference, Video History: Making Connections, (1998) brought together over 250 pioneering practitioners and contemporary artists working in new media and interactive technologies. In June 2002, the Center invited over 60 media arts professionals, conservators, technical experts, and artists to gather at the historic firehouse home of Downtown Community TV Center in New York for Looking Back/Looking Forward, a two-day working symposium on moving image preservation. The symposium was organized by the Experimental Television Center, in association with Independent Media Arts Preservation (IMAP) and Bay Area Video Coalition. Focused on the physical preservation of independent electronic media works and related issues concerning tools and ephemera, Looking Back/Looking Forward facilitated an honest and sometimes disturbing evaluation of our progress as a field and informed discussion about necessary and realistic initiatives and partnerships. The edited proceedings and reports are posted on the Experimental Television Center's Video History site. Research and scholarship is an important aspect of our program. We contributed to Playback: Preserving Analog Video, a DVD produced by BAVC (2003) with major support from the National Endowment for the Arts. We provided research into the early commercial video recorders relying on original manuscripts, technical data, and product literature, as well as photo and video documentation of the early equipment. The Preservation area of the Video History website contains two commissioned texts. Video Preservation: The Basics (2000, 2002) by Sherry Miller Hocking and Mona Jimenez, and Reel to Real: A Case Study of BAVC's Remastering Facility (2002) written by Luke Hones, and edited by Sherry Miller Hocking and Mona Jimenez. The Preservation resource area also contains a selection of historically important texts concerning early efforts at media preservation. In 2003 we produced a CD Early Media Instruments featuring a database of significant imaging devices which played a critical role in the historical development of independent media art. The database contains photographs of the devices, examples of product literature, as well as texts and manuscripts describing the tools. The devices include video, audio and computer-based tools, both commercially available and designed by artists and engineers. The CD was featured in a three month long exhibition “Origins” at ArtsInteractive Gallery, curated by Mary Ann Kearns for the Cyberfest in Boston, along with representative tools from the era of the early 1970s. The focus since 2000 has been on the continued enrichment of content on the Video History Web and the development and implementation of collaborative strategies for advancement of electronic moving image preservation resources and tools. Formally launched in 2000, the Video History Web functions as a both a dynamic and interactive on-going research collection and dissemination vehicle for media professionals, educators, and media programmers as well as the general public. Resources include critical essays, manuscripts, interviews, biographies, an extensive bibliography with nearly 3000 entries and information on collections, distribution, tools, preservation, organizations, and individuals. Visitors can generate a timeline of events in media arts history, or view the events within a defined range. Visitors are encouraged to contributed information and texts concerning the evolution of media art and community television. The fully searchable site structure serves information contained in 12 databases holding over 6000 records. Results are reported topically, organized by resource area. The search function allows visitors to search all of the records, encouraging the visitor to discover broad interconnections among people, places and events. Last year the site had over 3.5 million accesses, and over 28 billion bytes were provided. The site last year had over 200,000 visitors. It is a resource used by researchers, historians, artists, archives and video enthusiasts. We routinely respond to queries from researchers, scholars, educators and home enthusiast. The site has been an important tool for a range of activities - including original research for writing of books, catalogs and monographs; a method for locating primary source materials; a way for people to locate others they have lost contact with over the years; a source for preservation information. In 2004-06 the Daniel Langlois Foundation for the Arts assisted with the continued development of the Video History Website. The Foundation supported eight organizations that encourage the meeting of art and science in the field of technologies. The Foundation received 168 submissions in response to its call for proposals within this program, of which eight were selected: four from Canada, two from the United States, one from India and one from Peru. With the assistance of the Langlois Foundation, as well as of the New York State Council on the Arts, we are focused presently on early video/media instruments - those tools designed individually or by artists and technologists working collaboratively, as well as innovative commercial devices. This research links associated texts, documentation, technical data, maker biographies and interviews, and tapes produced on these systems. Content derives from our tool and paper archives. We are also photographing the devices, and scanning associated texts, documentation, and ephemera related to events which include posters, exhibition program notes, exhibition catalogs; and audio and video interviews. The data is being published on the History Project Website. We are collaborating with Kathy High of Rensselaer Polytech and Mona Jimenez of New York University on a companion print/DVD and web publication to be published in association with Felix: A Journal of Media Art and Communication. This project has received support from the NEA. The intent is to draw into the discussion new makers who have a relationship with analog devices either as part of their art practice or as an essential element of their conceptual base, and new media artists whose conceptual approaches are similar to those of early media practitioners. We anticipate publication in 2009. The National Television and Video Preservation Foundation provided in-kind support in 2004-05 to preserve and remaster 10 hours of very early videotapes from the Center's collection; the works were produced in the 1970s and showcase early analog and digital video imaging tools. The project focused on those instruments - tools individually designed by artists and the collaboration of artists and engineers/technologists, modifications to existing technology, and innovative applications of commercial technology - and the collaborative relationships between artists and engineers, and the interdisciplinary nature of early media arts practice. The tapes feature important early video devices designed in the early to mid 1970s, including those created by Nam June Paik (wobbulator or scan processor, and the construction of the Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer and its use with the TV Bed, exhibited at the Everson Museum in 1972), David Jones, Bill Hearn, Steve Rutt and Bill Etra, Dr. Don McArthur, the Vasulkas and Dan Sandin. We have informational materials, technical information, ephemera including early posters and programs, and photographs related to the tools. We are digitizing and transcribing about 30 hours of audiotaped interviews with significant artist/technologists including Woody Vasulka, Steve Rutt, Dan Sandin, Ralph Hocking, David Jones, Walter Wright and others who were actively engaged in the first generation of tool creation. We received an Artist in Residence Award from the Institute for Electronic Arts (2005-06) for the creation of series of DVDs which document the operation of artists' designed instruments, including the Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer, Paik Raster Manipulation Unit, Rutt/Etra, Sandin Image Processor, Jones Colorizer, Frame Buffer, Keyer and Sequencer. We provided an original text for A Closer Look: Hidden Histories, edited by Kathy High and Helen De Michiel, and published by NAMAC (2005), focusing on the history of ETC and tool creation. We are completing work on a multi-set DVD anthology of works from the ETC residency Program since 1970, a project supported by the Digitization Project of the New York State Council on the Arts and mediaThe foundation.
The Center's programs are supported by the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State, Council on the Arts, Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, Media Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, mediaThe foundation, NYS Challenge Grant Program, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Media Action Grant Program of Media Alliance, Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University, Everson Museum of Art, IMAP, BAVC, VidiPax, and by corporate support from Dave Jones Design, Black Hammer Productions , the contributions of many individual artists