Cinema & Contemporary Visual Arts – Film Forum Festival
This year the Cinema and Contemporary Visual Art section of Film Forum Festival will study Analog Media in the Digital Era. The advent of digital technologies in contemporary art production seems to have generated a paradoxical fascination with analog media and devices. Since the 1990s, many artists have started using and combining pieces of out–of–date analog technologies as part of their artworks. As some researchers (Strauven, Huhtamo) pointed out, this tendency to “resurrect technological past” is to be interpreted as a media archeological interest in the life of old devices and apparatuses, also extended to “contemporary technologies [used] as both the terrain and the tool for archeological excavation”. For this edition of Film Forum, the Cinema & Contemporary Visual Art section will address issues related to the use of old analog audiovisual technologies in the digital era, focusing on three main research areas: media art production, media preservation and exhibition strategies. The Cinema & Contemporary Visual Art section is curated by Alessandro Bordina, Vincenzo Estremo, and Francesco Federici.
This year’s rich program offers Screenings, Workshops, and Cinema Expositions.
German artist Jan Peter Hammer will arrive in Gorizia, where a screening of his video works The Fable of The bees, The Anarchist Banker and Monarchs & Men will be hosted as part of the program. Jan Peter Hammer will also hold a workshop together with Ana Teixeira Pinto (Humboldt Universität, Berlino)
, called The Politics of Art and the Art of Politics.
On April 9th, a screening of Kalte Probe – Cold Rehearsal by Austrian artist Costanze Ruhm is scheduled.
The last screening is dedicated to Diego Marcon and his Spool Cycle, shown here in its entirety for the first time.
Erika Balsom (King’s College London) will hold an interesting lecture titled Cheiropoiesis: Film and Obsolescence After Indexicality. Her talk explores an alternative approach to obsolescence, through the consideration of two recent 35mm artists’ films that emphasize the presence – rather than the absence – of the human hand: Tacita Dean’s FILM (2011) and Mathias Poledna’s Imitation of Life (2013). Excavating a pre-digital history of nonreferential and composite images, these works point to the limitations of the category of indexicality when thinking through the obsolescence of analogue film. Giovanna Fossati (EYE Film Institute Netherlands/University of Amsterdam) – The Color Fantastic Project and the Appreciation of the Single Film Frame – will discuss how the restoration and presentation practices of early color films have evolved during the last three decades. Iolanda Ratti (Museo del Novecento Milano and Hangar Bicocca) Inherently Analog. Preserving and Presenting Contemporary Art in the Digital Era.
Film Forum Festival and Gorizia Spring School, Gorizia, April 2 – 11, 2014.
by Droste Effect
in Focus on Europe
Apr 6, 2014