2012 Sundance Film Festival New Frontier

UMOCA will again host Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier in Salt Lake City, Utah. New Frontier is curated by Sundance Film Festival Senior Programmer Shari Frilot. Highlighting work that pushes the boundaries of storytelling and the moving image, New Frontier celebrates its sixth anniversary as a convergence of film, art, and new media technologies and is a hotbed for cinematic innovation.

UMOCA is the only location outside of Park City to showcase New Frontier artwork and programs. The Park City iteration of New Frontier, held at The Yard, closes on January 28.

Abacus
Artist: Paul Abacus / Early Morning Opera / Lars Jan (U.S.A.)
Originally Commissioned by The Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center
2009, Residue of Multimedia Performance

Riding the wave of TED talk fanaticism and armed with the latest wizardry in media technology and data visualization, the visionary/prophet/madman/cult icon Paul Abacus comes to Sundance to surf the boundary of what is real and what is hyperreal and preach visions of a world without national borders. Culminating in three performances at New Frontier, Abacus delivers a master class in persuasion for the Screen Age that promises to usher civilization into a new era.

Along the Way
Artist: Hank Willis Thomas (U.S.A.)
2008, Video Mosaic

Along The Way is a 15 minute video mosaic that was originally a public art commission for Oakland International Airport and will remain on view in the airport until 2010. Along The Way was created by the Cause Collective which consists of Bayeté Ross Smith, Hank Willis Thomas, Ryan Alexiev, Jessica Ingram and Jorge Sanchez. This video mosaic includes over 1,500 video portraits of residents of Oakland California and the surrounding area.

Bear 71
Artists: Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison (Canada)
Produced by Loc Dao, Dana Dansereau, Bonnie Thompson and Rob McLaughlin at the National Film Board of Canada
2011, Multiuser Interactive Documentary

Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison’s poignant interactive documentary about a bear in the Canadian Rockies illuminates the way humans engage with wildlife in the age of networks, satellites, and digital surveillance. Audiences from around the world can use their smartphones to become part of an interactive forest environment rich with bears, cougars, sheep, deer, and people as they follow an emotional story of a grizzly bear tagged and monitored by Banff National Park rangers.

Evolution (Megaplex)
Limited Engagement: January 20 – January 28, 2012
Artist: Marco Brambilla (U.S.A.)
2010, 3-D High Definition disc, Color, sound, 03:04 min., loop

In this magnificent, large-scale, stereoscopic, 3-D video collage, media artist Marco Brambilla presents a scrolling mural depicting the history of humankind, illustrating sweeping movements of world conflict through a cinematic lens by seamlessly remixing hundreds of individual channels of looped video gathered from Hollywood’s blockbuster films. Evolution (Megaplex) invites audiences to roam whimsically through the annals of time while casting a satirical look at the bombast of the big-budget “epic.”

Freedom
Artists: Eva & Franco Mattes a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG (U.S.A., Italy)
2010, Online Performance

In Freedom, a performance artwork, Eva Mattes tries to convince the other players to save her because she is trying to make artwork. Visually located in a small desert village overrun with terrorists, the game/performance plays on the violence so common in modern warfare video games and plays on the psychological desire to engage in war against terrorists. However, despite her pleas, the result is Eva being endlessly abused and killed.

Hunger in Los Angeles
Artist: Nonny de la Peña (U.S.A.), User Interface Designer, Thai Phan
2011, Immersive Game Environment

Former Newsweek correspondent Nonny de la Peña is developing a groundbreaking brand of journalism that offers a
fully immersive experience into news reporting. Focused on calling attention to the growing issue of hunger in the United States, Hunger in Los Angeles recreates an eyewitness account of a crisis on a food-bank line at the First Unitarian Church. De la Peña uses game-development tools, Unity 3-D, a body-tracking system, and a head-mounted goggle display, along with live audio she collected during the incident, to construct a fully immersive, simulated world
where audiences can suit up, walk around, and interact with other characters in the scene.

My Generation
Artists: Eva & Franco Mattes a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG (U.S.A., Italy)
2010, Media Sculpture

Hilarious and embarrassingly relevant, My Generation recreates the epic biomechanical failure that players experience when technology breaks down during a computer game and their expectations of gratification are frustrated. An annihilated computer is strewn across the floor but still burns brightly with clips of young people freaking out because technical problems prevent them from playing their favorite computer games. My Generation is a revealing reminder of how much human beings have come to depend on the media technology that surrounds them.

No Fun
Artists: Eva & Franco Mattes a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG (U.S.A., Italy)
2010, Online Performance

Reminiscent of chat-roulette, the reactions of rotating spectators to the apparent suicide of a man hanging from a rope are recorded in No Fun. However, the longer the viewer watches the more implicated he or she is in the act of voyeurism. The action is purported to be in real time with a video of the viewer displayed on the screen within suicide’s room also further implicating their presence and their voyeurism. Some spectators scream while others are skeptical and debate the “reality” of the scene, echoing the ‘reality’ of videos found on the internet on sites such as YouTube.

Question Bridge: Black Males
Artists: Hank Willis Thomas & Chris Johnson in collaboration with Bayeté Ross Smith & Kamal Sinclair (U.S.A.)
2009, Media Sculpture, Online Social Network, Geolocative Hotspots

Dissolving the distinction among subject, audience, and author, the visionary transmedia project, Question Bridge: Black Males, creates a uniquely vulnerable and intimate dialogue among black men nationwide, initiating a new kind of social network. In Question Bridge: Black Males, black men go to a safe space and record their questions, which are then answered by other men who may live miles away. The footage is evocatively presented in various ways, ranging from beautiful sculptural environments to Web forums and geolocative hotspots across the country.

Radical Games Against the Tyranny of Entertainment
Artist: Molleindustria (Paolo Pedercini)
2003-2012, Video games

Molleindustria’s Radical Games Against the Tyranny of Entertainment take on Big Oil, fast food, cell phones, the military and the economy of free ideas.

These works are included:

Unmanned: Pilot an unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) over a war zone while conversing with your spouse in the suburbs.

Oligarchy: Become king of the petroleum era: explore and drill around the world, corrupt politicians, stop alternative energy, and increase oil addiction. Have fun before natural resources run out.

McDonald’s Video Game: Create pastures, lead animals to slaughter, learn restaurant management and branding, and discover the secrets behind the success of one of the biggest companies in the world.

Free Culture: Learn about the struggle between free culture and copyright.

Phone Story: Get in touch with the dark side of your favorite smartphone with this educational game recently banned from the App Store.