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| WAYSTATION IMPAKT FESTIVAL ONLINE CURATION ARCHIVE  |
Sunday, December 06, 2015
Wednesday, April 08, 2015
EUROPEAN MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL VIDEO SCREENING
“The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.”
— H G Wells
This short program of works selected from the historically significant collection of Chicago's Video Data Bank, posits as its theme the notion of irony as subversive intervention. Each work involves a situation that threatens to culminate in disaster. In order to waylay the looming crisis, a negotiation must take place. From individual actions to one-on-one interventions and community responses, complacency is not an option in the face of these pressing predicaments.
Max Almy
Leaving the 20th Century, 1982, 11:00, U.S., Colour
A prescient examination of technology and the future, viewed from the edge of the 21st through a melange of politics, sociology, sexuality and economics.
HalfLifers
Actions in Action, 1997, 10:30, U.S., Colour
An ordinary domestic setting is recast as a psychoactive landscape in which the concept of function becomes situational and fluid.
Martha Rosler
Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, 05:30, U.S., B&W
From A to Z in this mock cooking-show demonstration, Rosler 'shows and tells' the ingredients of the housewife's day.
Videofreex
Nancy's Drug Problem, 1971, 08:35, U.S., B&W
In this short but provocative tape, one woman interviews another about her substance addiction.
Rosa Barba
Outwardly from Earth's Center, 2007, 22:00, Germany/Sweden, Colour
A fictitious narrative about a society on an unstable piece of land that is in danger of disappearance, requiring the population's collective response in order to secure survival for both the individual and the collective.
Joe Gibbons
Final Exit, 2001, 05:00, U.S., B&W
An aged one is confronted with his options in blunt terms. Does he want to drag out his existence, increasingly infirm and a burden to his caretakers, or go quietly before resentment overwhelms sentiment?
— Abina Manning, Video Data Bank
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Saturday, October 05, 2013
HALFLIFERS SCREENING / TORINO, ITALY
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| AFTERLIFERS: WALKING AND TALKING (EXTEND RE-COMMUNICATION EDIT) VISITS ITALY FOR THE FIRST TIME |
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| ARTISSIMA INTERNATIONAL FAIR OF CONTEMPORARY ART NOVEMBER 2013  |
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Monday, June 10, 2013
Friday, June 07, 2013
GALLERY 400 / 2013 HALFLIFERS INTERVIEW
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Existential Slapstick: An Interview with HALFLIFERS
Gallery 400's current exhibition, I THINK WE'RE READY TO GO TO THE NEXT SEQUENCE: THE LEGACY OF HALFLIFERS, will be on view through June 22. Curatorial Assistant Karen Greenwalt recently got the opportunity to speak with Torsten Zenas Burns and Anthony Discenza, the collaborative team that makes up HALFLIFERS. In the resulting interview, Greenwalt learned what HALFLIFERS is, what inspires Burns and Discenza, what underscores the collaborative's interest in speculative fiction and zombies, and much more.
Karen Greenwalt is currently a PhD student in the art history program at UIC and a Curatorial Assistant at Gallery 400.
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Friday, May 31, 2013
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
GALLERY 400 / HALFLIFERS EVENT #3
Loophole Limbo
Wednesday, May 29, 2013 – 7:00PM to 9:00PM
Gallery 400 - 400 South Peoria Street / Chicago, ill
Gallery 400 - 400 South Peoria Street / Chicago, ill
Inspired by the actions and tropes of the HALFLIFERS’ extensive body of work on video,Loophole Limbo delves deep into the archives of the Video Data Bank collection in order to expose, interrogate, and investigate the performative in artists’ video. Featuring work produced across every decade of video’s relatively short history, the investigation reveals that artists’ video is obsessed, alienated, and downright strange . . .
Loophole Limbo - Total running time: 64:16 min.
- Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978, video, 5:45 min.
- Vito Acconci, Pryings, 1971, video, 16:16 min.
- Anne McGuire, All Smiles and Sadness, video, 7:00 min.
- Tom Rubnitz, Pickle Surprise, 1989, video, 2:00 min.
- Tom Rubnitz, Strawberry Shortcut, 1984, video, 1:00 min.
- Laurie Jo Reynolds, Space Ghost, 2007, video, 26:00 min.
- Bjørn Melhus, No Sunshine, 1997, video, 6:15 min.
Friday, May 10, 2013
GALLERY 400 / HALFLIFERS EVENT #2
Eric May and Rimas Simaitis present:
E-Dogz: Zombie Apocalypse Refuge Center
GALLERY 400 / 400 SOUTH PEORIA STREET - MONDAY, MAY 13, 2013 – 6:00PM TO 8:00PM
When the zombie apocalypse goes down, we'll all have to think on our toes—watching our backs as we hit the roads, escaping the ravenous army of undead relentlessly pursuing our cranial tissues. The living will have to eat, too, and the mobile kitchen of E-Dogz will be a beacon of nourishment in these end days. Chef Eric "E-Dog" May has teamed up with Rimas Simaitis to equip the food trailer to travel land and sea, feeding the people in these dire times. The zombie plague actually began generations ago, conjured through black magic by Voodoo priests on island nations during the glory days of the high seas. To honor the zombie resistance of yore, E-Dogz: Zombie Apocalypse Refuge Center will host a tiki party to ward off zombies and serve up doomsday cuisine and circuses. This event may feature, but will not be limited to: Spam nigiri, entomophagy, flaming cocktails, and coconut short wave radios.
Eric May is a Chicago-based artist and the head chef of Ox-Bow School of the Arts in Saugatuck, Michigan. He is the founder and director of Roots & Culture, a nonprofit gallery in Chicago's Noble Square neighborhood. May launched E-Dogz in 2011 as a Mobile Culinary Community Center in order to serve great food, to inform and stimulate people’s relationships and attitudes towards what they eat, and to plant the seeds for a mobile food truck movement in Chicago.
Rimas Simaitis is a Los Angeles-based artist who has exhibited at SOIL, Seattle; the Boise Art Museum; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles. He was a featured artist at Art Platform Los Angeles in 2011 for the opening weekend of Pacific Standard Time, and has completed residencies at the Ox-Bow School of the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. He holds a BA in Music and Business Administration from Seattle University and an MFA in Spatial Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Monday, December 03, 2012
Friday, February 03, 2012
Saturday, August 20, 2011
VIDEO_DUMBO 2011
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Wednesday, August 03, 2011
FILM COMMENT MAGAZINE: HALFLIFERS DVD REVIEW
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FILM COMMENT - JULY/AUGUST 2011
(EXPERIMENTAL PICK)
VDB.ORG - Halflifers: The Complete History, 1992-2010
LIKE Jackass FOR THE GUGGENHEIM,
Anthony Discenza and Torsten Zenas Burns's
collaborative project, Halflifers, is a lo-fi series of Knoxville-esque camcorder stunts wrapped up in arts-grant language. "An ordinary domestic setting is recast as a psychoactive landscape in which the concept of function becomes situational and fluid." Translation: they smear food on each other in the kitchen. With a proclivity for hazmat suits, the media art duo perform poorly staged action scenes that repeatedly disintegrate into accidental slapstick. But their series, Afterlifers: Walking & Talking, with the duo playing zombies in a riff on Romero, achieves real frisson. Footage of the things zombies get up to when no one's watching is interwoven with a dead-on parody of the end-of-the-world panel discussions from Dawn of the Dead. It's proof that while zombie movies may have moved from the grindhouse to the arthouse, no amount of irony can prevent the image of the zombie from instilling viewers with Pavlovian dread. --Grady Hendrix |
Friday, June 24, 2011
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Friday, May 27, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL 2011
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| THE 18TH ANNUAL CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL HALFLIFERS AND FRIENDS: REACTIONS IN REACTION DVD LAUNCH & SCREENING PROGRAM MONDAY, JUNE 6TH @ 6PM
Please join us for a video launch party for the compilation DVD,
HalfLifers: The Complete History (1992-2010), the definitive pixel packet of
tulpoidal activation artists Torsten Zenas Burns and Anthony Discenza. For
one show only, the HalfLifers will re-imagine the Gene Siskel Film Center’s
theater into a saturated fictional exploration curation vehicle, navigating a
journey into the interior reaches of HalfLifers’s “videonic” backlog of afterlife
relationships, psychic sandwich surgery, and rescue rituals. This
manifested spatio-temporal Chicago hub will sync up and collaborate with
other pictographic projection artists including Anne McGuire, Jennifer
Reeder, Joe Gibbons, Bjorn Melhus, Virocode, and Animal Charm. |
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Radical L@TE:Super-Gigantic HalfLifers DVD Mega-Release Party
Radical L@TE:
Super-Gigantic HalfLifers DVD Mega-Release Party
February 18, 2011; 7:30 p.m.; Gallery B - (Doors 5 p.m., DJ 6:30 p.m.)
Programmed by Steve Seid and Kathy Geritz
Join us for a launch party for the compilation DVD, HalfLifers: The Complete History, the definitive pixel packet of legendary activation artists Torsten Zenas Burns and Anthony Discenza. For one night only, the HalfLifers will repurpose Thomas Faulders’s BAMscapeas an omnidirectional, construction-colored exploration vehicle, navigating a 360-degree journey into the interior reaches of HalfLifers’s “videonic” backlog of afterlife relationships, rescue rituals, and psychic manifestations. This spatio-temporal hub will sync up with other portable pictographic projections by longtime friends and collaborators of the HalfLifers, including Anne McGuire, Darrin Martin, Jordan Biren, Ursula Brookbank, Christian Burns, and Animal Charm. The celebration will be consummated with an anthro-engineered dough object—by which we mean a sugar-frosted biomemory conduit activated by physical ingestion.
Special thanks to: Julie Chang (Zombie cake-maker)
Join us for a launch party for the compilation DVD, HalfLifers: The Complete History, the definitive pixel packet of legendary activation artists Torsten Zenas Burns and Anthony Discenza. For one night only, the HalfLifers will repurpose Thomas Faulders’s BAMscapeas an omnidirectional, construction-colored exploration vehicle, navigating a 360-degree journey into the interior reaches of HalfLifers’s “videonic” backlog of afterlife relationships, rescue rituals, and psychic manifestations. This spatio-temporal hub will sync up with other portable pictographic projections by longtime friends and collaborators of the HalfLifers, including Anne McGuire, Darrin Martin, Jordan Biren, Ursula Brookbank, Christian Burns, and Animal Charm. The celebration will be consummated with an anthro-engineered dough object—by which we mean a sugar-frosted biomemory conduit activated by physical ingestion.
Special thanks to: Julie Chang (Zombie cake-maker)
Post-Conceptual Performance: Video, 1977 to 1997 @ LACE (LOS ANGELES, CA) & PFA (BERKELEY,CA)
Post-Conceptual Performance: Video, 1977 to 1997
(PFA - Berkeley, CA)
Sunday, January 23, 2011- 5:30 p.m - Total running time: c. 80 mins
Jordan Biren, Tony Labat, Anne McGuire and HalfLifers in Person
( LACE - Los Angeles)
Thursday, January 20, 2011- 9:00 p.m - Total running time: c. 80 mins
By the mid-seventies, the concept of the artist’s body as medium had evolved from arid performance to effusive provocation. Tony Labat emerged in 1977 with the remarkable series Solo Flight in which the artist’s identity is given sudden form through subtle ethnic gestures. With pithy performances like Laurie Sings Iggy and the Madonna Series, Leslie Singer took on the celebrity industry with an economy of parodic impersonation and food flinging. In These Are the Rules, Doug Hall enacted an authoritarian pose to deflate the power vested in political symbols. Where Cecilia Dougherty dismisses the patrimony of past mentors with her remake of Howard Fried’s Fuck You, Purdue, Jordan Biren reinstates The Body as a nervous engine of desire. Finally, Anne McGuire’s tortured evocation of psychic disarray, I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong, gives way to the frantic activation of domestic space in the HalfLifers’s highly caloric Actions in Action.Solo Flight (Tony Labat, 1977, excerpts, 20 mins, B&W, Video, PFA Collection). Laurie Sings Iggy (Leslie Singer, 1987, 4 mins, Color, Video, PFA Collection). Fuck You, Purdue (Cecilia Dougherty, 1987, 12 mins, B&W, Video, PFA Collection). These Are the Rules (Doug Hall, 1983, 4:39 mins, Color, Video, From EAI). My Life as a Godard Film by Whitney Houston (Leslie Singer, 1988, 4 mins, Color, Video, PFA Collection). The Body (Jordan Biren, 1990, 15 mins, B&W, Video, PFA Collection). The Madonna Series: 1-5 (Leslie Singer, 1987, 4 mins, Color, Video, PFA Collection). I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong (Anne McGuire, 1997, 11 mins, B&W, Video, From the artist). Actions in Action (HalfLifers, 1997, 10 mins, Color, Video, From the artist).—Steve Seid
(PFA - Berkeley, CA)
Sunday, January 23, 2011- 5:30 p.m - Total running time: c. 80 mins
Jordan Biren, Tony Labat, Anne McGuire and HalfLifers in Person
( LACE - Los Angeles)
Thursday, January 20, 2011- 9:00 p.m - Total running time: c. 80 mins
By the mid-seventies, the concept of the artist’s body as medium had evolved from arid performance to effusive provocation. Tony Labat emerged in 1977 with the remarkable series Solo Flight in which the artist’s identity is given sudden form through subtle ethnic gestures. With pithy performances like Laurie Sings Iggy and the Madonna Series, Leslie Singer took on the celebrity industry with an economy of parodic impersonation and food flinging. In These Are the Rules, Doug Hall enacted an authoritarian pose to deflate the power vested in political symbols. Where Cecilia Dougherty dismisses the patrimony of past mentors with her remake of Howard Fried’s Fuck You, Purdue, Jordan Biren reinstates The Body as a nervous engine of desire. Finally, Anne McGuire’s tortured evocation of psychic disarray, I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong, gives way to the frantic activation of domestic space in the HalfLifers’s highly caloric Actions in Action.Solo Flight (Tony Labat, 1977, excerpts, 20 mins, B&W, Video, PFA Collection). Laurie Sings Iggy (Leslie Singer, 1987, 4 mins, Color, Video, PFA Collection). Fuck You, Purdue (Cecilia Dougherty, 1987, 12 mins, B&W, Video, PFA Collection). These Are the Rules (Doug Hall, 1983, 4:39 mins, Color, Video, From EAI). My Life as a Godard Film by Whitney Houston (Leslie Singer, 1988, 4 mins, Color, Video, PFA Collection). The Body (Jordan Biren, 1990, 15 mins, B&W, Video, PFA Collection). The Madonna Series: 1-5 (Leslie Singer, 1987, 4 mins, Color, Video, PFA Collection). I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong (Anne McGuire, 1997, 11 mins, B&W, Video, From the artist). Actions in Action (HalfLifers, 1997, 10 mins, Color, Video, From the artist).—Steve Seid
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
DVD PROJECT - 18 YEARS OF THE HALFLIFERS
"HALFLIFERS:
AND WHO SHALL RESCUE THE RESCUERS?"
AND WHO SHALL RESCUE THE RESCUERS?"
DOUBLE DVD SET WITH CATALOGUE 2011
DVD'S INCLUDE VIDEO WORKS FROM THESE SERIES:
AFTERLIFE SERIES 2004-2008
PIONEER SERIES 1999
I.S.L.A.N.D.S. SERIES 1998-2010
ACTION SERIES 1997
RESCUE SERIES 1994-1997
INSTALLATION DOCUMENTATION 1997-2002
EARLY WORKS 1992-1994
SLIDESHOWS / TEXTS
AFTERLIFERS: WALKING & TALKING - VIDEO/STEREO/23:00/2008
ACTIONS IN ACTION - VIDEO/STEREO/11:00/1997
RESCUE SERIES (RESUE PARABLES / RETURN TO RESCUEWORLD)
VIDEO INSTALLATIONS
(I.S.L.A.N.D.S. CRAFT / BARNLANDERS / UNIVERSAL RESCUECRAFT)
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
(VISIONARY DRAWING BUILDING)
(VISIONARY DRAWING BUILDING)
2009 ONLINE ARCHIVE AND BOOK PROJECT
CURATED BY MATT BUA & MAXIMILIAN GOLDFARB
"MOBILE" CATEGORY
2009 ONLINE ARCHIVE AND BOOK PROJECT
CURATED BY MATT BUA & MAXIMILIAN GOLDFARB
"MOBILE" CATEGORY
2009 CRAFTSPACE (DOUBLER) - HALFLIFERS
2009 UNIVERSAL-RESCUE CLUSTER & GRAVICLE - HALFLIFERS
2009 UNIVERSAL-RESCUE CLUSTER & GRAVICLE - HALFLIFERS
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