University at Buffalo (UB)
PLASMA 2019
PLASMA 2019
PLASMA 2019 Schedule
Feb 4
Dept. Of Media Study Graduate Student Films
Feb 11
Screening: "Video Rib Gets In The Way" by Steve Reinke
Feb 18
Laura U. Marks works on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus. Her most recent books are Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT, 2015) and Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT, 2010). With Dr. Azadeh Emadi she is a founding member of the Substantial Motion Research network, substantialmotion.org. Dr. Marks is Grant Strate Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. http://www.sfu.ca/~lmarks
Feb 25
Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer, filmmaker and educator. His collection of 60,000 ephemeral films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make a subset of the Prelinger Collection (now 7,000 films) available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His 25 Lost Landscapes participatory urban history projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles and elsewhere. He is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives and issues relating to archival access and regeneration. With Megan Shaw Prelinger, he co-founded an experimental research library in San Francisco in 2004, which serves over a thousand artists, researchers and activists each year. He is currently Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.
March 4
Alan Bigelow is the recipient of the Robert Coover Award for Electronic Literature (2017); the Lauréat du Prix Poésie Média, BIPVAL international Prix de Poésie Média (2011); the Judge's Prize, Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition (2017); and First Runner Up, Digital Humanities Awards (2016). His work, installations, and conversations concerning digital fiction and poetry have appeared in the Library of Congress (USA), SFMOMA, La Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris), Turbulence.org, Rhizome.org, The National Art Center (Tokyo), Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, FAD, VAD, FreeWaves.org, The Museum of New Art, Art Tech Media, FILE, Blackbird, Drunken Boat, IDEAS, New River Journal, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and many other places worldwide. He is currently a Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Medaille College in Buffalo, New York, USA. You can see his work at webyarns.com.
March 11
Jodie Mack is an experimental animator who received her MFA in film, video, and new media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. Musical documentary or stroboscopic archive: her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design.
Mack's 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival, Projections at the New York Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at the 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts among others. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times, and Senses of Cinema. She is an Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College and a 2018/19 Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University.
March 19
Spring Break - No Lecture
March 25
FRAMING REALITY: A MECHANICAL APPROACH
A cinematographer's journey, screening and discussion of various projects and films including excerpts from The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty ,The Journey and others.
Duraid Munajim is an acclaimed Toronto based filmmaker and cinematographer whose work has been screened in festivals around the world, including IDFA in Amsterdam, Dokfest in Munich, Hot Docs in Toronto as well as festivals in Switzerland, The Middle East, France, and across the U.S. and Canada. Best known for his work on The Hurt Locker andZero Dark Thirty, though his work as a director of photography and lead cinematographer exceeds 46 titles of feature length and short narratives, experimental and documentary films and TV shows such as Masterminds, Son of Babylon,The Unspeakable Act, You Gotta Eat Here, Manufactured, My Enemy, My Brother, The Seven Last Words, and other projects winning many awards, including the Robert Brooks Award for Best Director of Photography at the Canadian Society of Cinematographers, Best Cinematography at the Rhode Island International Film Festival and the 2018 Best Cinematography in a Feature Length Documentary Award, amongst countless others awards and accolades.
April 1
SPECTRAL LANDSCAPES:
A screening of short experimental documentaries followed by a discussion and Q&A with filmmaker, Laura Kraning.
Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates landscape as a repository for memory, cultural mythology, and the technological sublime. Exploring absence and the fluidity of time, she evokes liminal spaces of neither past, nor present, but a landscape of the imagination. Laura’s work has screened widely at international film festivals, such as New York, Rotterdam, London, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Antimatter, Visions du Réel, and Festival du Nouveau Cinema, among others. She is a recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation John H. Johnson Film Award, the Leon Speakers Award and Jury Awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the Athens International Film and Video Festival and the Jury Award for Short Film at the Rencontres Internationales Sciences & Cinémas Film Festival in Marseiiles, France. Her latest film, Las Breas, had its World Premiere at MoMA Doc Fortnight 2019.
April 8
A screening and discussion of his award winning films:
Slaughterhouse (15 min, 2012)
Vulture (56 min, 2019)
Philip Hoffman is one of the few contemporary filmmakers whose work provides a bridge to the classical themes of death, diaspora, memory, and finally, transcendence.
He has been honored with more than a dozen retrospectives of his work. In 2001 the publication Landscape with Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman, was released comprising some 25 essays. He has received numerous awards including the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Golden Gate Award and the Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Gus Van Sant Award. In 2016 he received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Hoffman currently teaches at York University, and since 1994, has been the Artistic Director of the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm).
April 15
A Screening of Academy Award Nominated Documentary: "OF FATHERS AND SONS"
Followed by a live Skype Q&A and discussion with the director.
After his Sundance award-winning documentary Return to Homs, Talal Derki returned to his homeland where he gained the trust of a radical Islamist family, sharing their daily life for over two years. His camera focuses primarily on the children, providing an extremely rare insight into what it means to grow up with a father whose only dream is to establish an Islamic caliphate. Osama (13) and his brother Ayman (12) both love and admire their father and obey his words, but while Osama seems content to follow the path of Jihad, Ayman wants to go back to school. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, Of Fathers and Sons is a work of unparalleled intimacy that captures the chilling moment when childhood dies and jihadism is born.
The film premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2018, where it received the Grand Jury Prize of World Documentary, followed by many awards and nominations, including the 2019 Academy Award Nomination for Best Feature Documentary.
Intro by Filmmaker & MFA Candidate Shawn Combs
April 22
David Pape and Jason Geistweidt
David Pape has a PhD in Computer Science from the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He combines experience in both the technological and aesthetic sides of computer graphics. He has worked on numerous artistic and cultural VR applications (his own & those of others) that have shown worldwide in museums and at conferences, including the Ars Electronica Center (Linz, Austria), NTT’s InterCommunication Center (Tokyo), The Foundation of the Hellenic World (Athens), the Smithsonian, The International Society for Elextronic Arts Conferences, and SIGGRAPH. He has also worked on scientific visualization at NASA, for both research purposes and for education communication with the public.
He was a key member of the team that developed the CAVE and ImmersaDesk virtual reality technology at UIC, which in recent years have become perhaps the definitive systems for high-end VR research and applications. He has written and presented academic papers dealing with both technical and aesthetic/content issues of visualization and virtual reality.
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Jason Geistweidt is an artist working across the fields of sound art, digital fabrication, installation, physical computing, creative coding, and real-time performance. In practice, he endeavors to build his own tools, incorporating various open source hardware and software solutions in an experimental [rpcess. As researcher, he is interested in the ways artists incorporate technologies into their practice and how these technologies mediate the creative act. He currently serves as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo where hw delivera courses in experimental audio, wearable computing, creative coding, and installation. He also directs the activities of the Extensible Media Lab, a collaborative space bringing media and architecture students together in coordination with the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies. Jason holds a masters degree in music technology from the University of Limerick and PhD in electroacoustic composition from the Sonic Arts Reasearch Center, Queens University Belfast.
April 29
Cinematographer Joan Hutton CSC was born and raised in southern Ontario. She completed her education at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto and immediately began work as director of The Rise and Fall of Nina Polanski, a highly regarded animated film produced by the National Film Board of Canada.
She was one of Canada's first woman cinematographers. She is the first woman to be awarded the prestigious csc by the Canadian Society of Cinematographers. She was president of the Canadian Society of Cinematographers for twenty two years and is currently Editor in Chief of the magazine Canadian Cinematographer.
In 1994 she received the Toronto Women in Film Outstanding Achievement Award. Recipient of the 1997 Blizzard Award for the documentary If Only I Were An Indian. Recipient of the 1998 Gemini Award for best photography in a comedy for The Newsroom. Three time winner of the Canadian Society of Cinematographers Best Photography Award. Recipient of the Fuji Award from the Canadian Society of Cinematographers for outstanding service to the CSC.