IMPAKT INVITES: CARTUNE XPREZ (FEATURING HOOLIGANSHIP)
This programme of contemporary cartoons from North America celebrates the wilderness of imagination. A selection of the best video works from the American underground will be projected in an inflatable backdrop of glowing 3D crystals. Dark Voyage will provide a rare opportunity to see videos by emerging artists as well as internationally known artists whose collective resume includes collaborations with Frank Zappa and major exhibitions at the Whitney Biennial, the MOMA in New York, the Sundance Film Festival, and many other institutions across the world. In addition, Hooliganship will be doing a live performance of their newest cartoon theater.
Junk Spirals – Hooliganship
USA, 2009, video, 6:00 min
Hooliganship is Peter Burr and Christopher Doulgeris, both born in 1980. They live and work in Portland, Oregon. They began collaborating in 2002 creating performances, videos, music, and installations that revel in a hypnotic abundance of digital information. Junk Spirals is their most recent animation, a senseless tumble through a faded cartoon world. At its core they have erected a totem of sad clowns oscillating between benign postures and a desperate marathon crushed by a grid system.
Thing Pit – Taras Hrabowsky
USA, 2009, video, 2:00 min
Taras Hrabowsky, Born in 1981, lives in Brooklyn, NY. He creates videos that explore imaginative possibilities within the urban environment, often screening his work guerilla- style directly on buildings in public spaces. Thing Pit, his most recent animation, is a dense vacuum of detritus: airplanes, automobiles, melted glaciers, innocent bystanders, and atomic dust in and out of a brick wall.
Untitled (Pink Dot) – Takeshi Murata
USA, 2007, video, 5:00 min
Primarily an abstract animator, Murata has gained recent notoriety through his innovative psychedelic videos. His Untitled (Pink Dot) is retina-burning optical trick that melts at the hands of Rambo.
The Comic that Frenches Your Mind – Bruce Bickford
USA, 2008, video 6:00 min
Bruce Bickford, born in 1947, lives in Seatac, Washington. Considered by some critics to be the world’s greatest animator, he first garnered recognition for his collaborations with Frank Zappa in the 1970s. In The Comic That Frenches Your Mind Bickford presents a handdrawn masterpiece comprised of thousands of detailed pencil drawings on a simple white field. Morphing beasts, junkies, and davy crockett tourists take the screen among other puzzling characters in this twisting line animation.
Booty Melt – Jacob Ciocci
USA, 2008, video, 3:00 min
Jacob Ciocci, born in 1977, live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is a member of the artist collective ‘Paper Rad’ and the band ‘Extreme Animals’. In Booty Melt, Ciocci datamoshes a barrage of faceless internet videos, GIFs, and hand drawn cartoon creatures. The resulting few minutes portrays a strange vision of a scary fairy tale.
Meet Me in Wichita – Martha Colburn
USA, 2006, 16mm > video, 7:00 min
Martha Colburn, born in 1971, lives in New York City. A self-taught filmmaker, she began in 1994 with found footage and Super 8 cameras and has since completed over 40 films. In Meet Me In Wichita she uses a combination of watercolors, collage and paint on glass animation. This film fuses Osama Bin Laden into the fairytale Land of Oz with yellow brick roads, oily geysers, wicked witches, and modern day artillery. It is a play between fact, fiction, politics, fantasy, terror and morality.
The Mountain Where Everything is Upside Down – Shana Moulton
USA, 2008, video, 4:00 min
Shana Moulton, born in 1976, lives in Brooklyn, New York. She creates evocative videos and performances that combine new age humor with a low-tech elegance. Her use of subtle video effects and simple animated objects charges the seemingly banal domestic rituals in her videos with supernatural qualities. In The Mountain Where Everything Is Upside Down Moulton stars as Cynthia, an anxiety-ridden hypochondriac who explores a collection of nick-knacks in a surreal workout room. This character`s internal angst and external absurdity untangle through a cathartic release of special effects magic.
Psychedelic Death Vomit – Yoshi Sodeoka
USA, 2008, 5:00
Yoshi Sodeoka, Born in 1967, lives in Brooklyn, NY. He has been making digital artwork since the early 90’s, most noted for his minimal abstractions of highly manipulated video and noise. In Psychedelic Death Vomit he employs an array of digital and analog processing techniques to weave a violent rainbow vortex. Through the use of duration, repetition, and saturation he allows a simple 16-bit scream to decay within the hidden layers of our monkey mind.
At The Heart of A Sparrow – Barry Doupe
Canada, 2006, video, 29:00 min
Barry Doupe, born in 1982, lives in Vancouver, BC. He is a member of the Lions collaborative drawing club and is a recipient of multiple Canada Council Production Grant for his recent films. With seemingly rudimentary animation techniques indicative of early video game design, At The Heart Of A Sparrow presents a series of casual encounters with fractured beings. Sampling dialogue directly from a variety of black holes in pop culture, Doupe conjures a powerful glimpse of the senseless vacancy in our own world.
TRASh – Hooliganship
Performance
Live music, cartoons and video game worlds cross paths in a surreal adventure through a trash landscape. We watch a high-energy hoodie-clad performer musically and physically interact with the cartoon images on the screen behind. Pure absurd rainbow bliss, Trash is a wacky journey into media oversaturation, inspired by a hypnotic abundance of digital information.