2011 Sundance Film Festival New Frontier

Salt Lake Art Center’s exhibition of Sundance Film Festival New Frontier opens the door to new forms of creativity. The New Frontier artists and filmmakers reconfigure art, technology, film, and performance to explore narrative structure, the three-dimensionality of the cinematic image, and innovations in transmedia storytelling.

All That is Solid Melts Into Air
Mark Boulos, United Kingdom/The Netherlands, 2008, 15 min. loop
Two-Channel Video Installation

All That Is Solid Melts into Air powerfully juxtaposes two documentary videos, which are projected on opposite sides of the room—one depicting a Nigerian guerrilla group battling the colonization of petroleum resources on their land, and the other showing Chicago stock traders speculating on energy futures. The viewer, caught between the videos, negotiates these two scenarios. As the films play, the stakes rise, and the intensity crescendos to an uproar.

RAW/WAR
Lynn Hershman Leeson, U.S.A., 2011
Interactive, community-curated video archive

Lynn Hershman Leeson employs transmedia storytelling to create a seminal history of the American Feminist Art Movement. Expanding the scope of her documentary !Women Art Revolution and RAW/WAR is a live, user-generated, community-curated video archive that documents the achievements of women artists. RAW/WAR reconceives history as an ongoing project of collaborative authorship where participants enter an interactive environment to upload new material and use Wii-powered virtual flashlights to illuminate invisible histories. RAW/WAR is created by Lynn Hershman Leeson in collaboration with Alexandra Chowaniec, Brian Chirls, Gian Pablo Villamil, and Paradiso Projects.

After Ghostcatching
OpenEnded Group & Bill T. Jones, U.S.A., 2010, 13 min. loop
Single -Channel, 3-D Video Installation

In Ghostcatching (1999), Bill T. Jones dances a series of original and haunting choreographic sequences accompanied by his own vocalizations as OpenEnded Group captures and portrays the movement using a customized technique. After Ghostcatching expands this work to incorporate 3-D technology, immersing audiences inside the dance and allowing them to experience this wondrous world of virtual movement with new depth.

Three’s Company: The Drama
James Franco, U.S.A., 2010
Mixed-Media Video Installation

Our prolonged and increasing exposure to dramatic entertainment shapes our imaginations, our aspirations, and the way we reference our memories and structure the time in our day. How does a television show have such an impact on our lives? In Three’s Company: The Drama, James Franco examines the classic TV show, breaking out individual elements of narrative, character, composition, and set design to reconstitute them and create an immersive experience of the story world through which we may consider how this definitive 1970s sitcom connects and organizes our memories.

The Johnny Cash Project and The Wilderness Downtown
Milk+Koblin (Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin), U.S.A., 2010, 3 min. and 5 min. respectively
Participatory Website, Interactive Film

These two participatory, web-based projects are the result of the innovative collaboration between data-visualization artist Aaron Koblin and filmmaker Chris Milk. The Johnny Cash Project invites participants to create individual drawings that are woven into a collective, animated music-video tribute to Johnny Cash, set to his song “Ain’t No Grave.” The Wilderness Downtown is an interactive film that uses HTML5 programming and Google Maps to create startlingly personal videos that accompany the Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait.”

Moony
Takehisa Mashimo, Akio Kamisato, and Satoshi Shibata, Japan, 2004
Interactive Multimedia installation

This sublime and elegant work liberates the pixel entirely from its usual proscenium format and reshapes our encounter with the moving image by using steam as a screen and an interactive interface. Plunge your hands into the steam quickly to touch one of the virtual butterflies projected into the vapor, and it may fly away and disappear. But hold your hand in the steam for a while, and butterflies will flock around and play with you.

Theater III + Edgar
Avish Khebrehzadeh, U.S.A., 2010, 7 min. loop
Mixed-Media Installation

Avish Khebrehzadeh’s works integrate painting and video to evoke fairy tales and dreamscapes, which are often inspired by her own dreams and memories. In Theater III + Edgar, three loosely linked vignettes unfold on a massive painting of a grand theatre with a proscenium screen. The film tells the story of three men carrying a pregnant woman past a village into the desert, where they leave her. She then disappears down a hole with the man who has been digging it. In the last act, the drama transgresses many boundaries, including the very screen where it is being presented.

Hippocampus 2
Daniel Canogar, Spain, 2010
Found-Object Multimedia Sculpture

By transforming electronic detritus into stunning sculptural installations, Daniel Canogar’s work externalizes the hidden structures of media technologies and explores the short lifespan of the hardware that encrusts and defines our modern lifestyles. Hippocampus 2 is constructed from tangles of electric-cable refuse. Light is projected onto the sculpture in such a way that it seems to free the energy stored in the electronic waste, awakening in it memories of the past.

Myth and Infrastructureand Dreaming of Lucid Living
Miwa Matreyek, U.S.A., 2010, 17 min.
Multimedia Performance

Brimming with elevated visions of the ways the human body interacts with its surrounding environment, award-winning animator Miwa Matreyek integrates her own shadow into her whimsical, handcrafted, animated worlds. Her breathtakingly beautiful images mix with dreamy original music to create glistening realms of enchantment. Dreaming of Lucid Living explores domestic spaces, large and small cities, and magical powers in dreamlike vignettes. Myth and Infrastructure expands the scope of the connections to the environment as a whole.

Glowing Pathfinder Bugs
Squidsoup, United Kingdom, 2009
Interactive Media Installation

Pixels become independent creatures that move through time and space in this playful, interactive work. Glowing Pathfinder Bugs uses projection to visualize virtual bugs that participants can interact with in a real sandpit. The bugs are aware of their surroundings and respond to the shapes in the world around them. Viewers can pick bugs up, dig holes, and create mounds that the bugs must react to. If the bugs are squashed, they die, but if they live, they evolve to become butterflies.

Pandemic 1.0
Lance Weiler, U.S.A., ongoing
Transmedia Storytelling

A mysterious virus begins to affect the adults in a small rural town, and the youth soon find themselves cut off from civilization, fighting for their lives. How fast is the virus spreading? It is confirmed—the virus has hit Salt Lake City. Can you survive? Pandemic 1.0, a transmedia storytelling experience, unites film, mobile and online technologies, props, social gaming, and data visualization, enabling audiences to step into the shoes of the pandemic protagonists anytime during the day. Mission Control is the only way to learn where you stand in the face of the spreading pandemic.