Close Your Eyes | Naho Taruishi | 2007 | 3:00 min.
 


"Close Your Eyes" is a single-channel video piece to be seen with closed eyes. By converting eyelids into an internal projection screen that one sees, this piece ultimately questions what "seeing" is. Massive amount of colors are shown like flashlights after the countdown. One sees or feels vibrations of pleasant color changes through the thin and delicate skin of eyelids. At the end, sound of sea wave emerges, giving a rhythm of darkness and calling a poetic sense of illusion in closed eyes.

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Naho Taruishi lives and works in New York. Inspired by interdisciplinary perspectives on visual art and neuroscience, her video and installation works primarily investigate notions of seeing and sensory system.
Her works have been shown at the Visual Arts Gallery, P.C.O.G Gallery, and Brooklyn Artists Gym in New York, Image Forum 2006 in Tokyo and Kyoto, Matadero Madrid in Spain, and art channel in France. Her collaborative video pieces with Tokyo-based video artists have been collected by The Video Art Foundation in London and the Video Dictionary in Barcelona.



The Luminists | Melanie Crean | 2007 | 9:48 min.
 

The Luminist video project is produced in collaboration with animators Kun-I Chang, Luba Drozd Enrique Maitland, and Erik Rasmussen to visualize the content of the phone interviews with three artists who have lost their sight but continue to make art work: Alice Wingwall, a photographer; Carol Saylor, a painter turned sculptor, and Tara Inmon, a painter turned writer. Topics of discussion included the meaning of vision, how the artists continue to visualize the world in their minds eye; how they imaged their work; what they found beautiful; and the effect of a changed sensory palette on consciousness.

Melanie Crean is a media artist and teacher based in Brooklyn, NY. She is an Assistant Professor of Media Design at the Parsons School of Art, teaching production and theory based classes in experimental video, digital media and interface design. As the former Director of Production at Eyebeam (eyebeam.org), she founded and managed a cooperative studio that supported the production of socially based media, working with new forms of moving image, sound, public art and open source software. Previously, Melanie worked at the MTV Digital Television Lab, managing a team of artists while designing special effects, performance animation, motion capture and speech recognition systems. She produced documentaries in Nepal, India and the United States, on subjects that include women trafficking and the spread of HIV/AIDS along trucking routes in South Asia. Melanie received a BA in semiotics and film production from Brown University, and a MFA in computer art from the School of Visual Arts. She has received fellowships and commissions from Art in General, Harvestworks, NYFA, NYSCA, Rhizome and Creative Time.


My Person in the Water | Leighton Pierce | 2006 | 5:36 min.
  A woman moving in the water and the gaze of a man, both seen from beneath the water, elaborated by the vectorizing force of sound, lead the viewer toward an effervescence of feeling – a desire for merge among the knowledge of separateness.

Leighton Pierce uses film, video, and sound to create experiences in transformative time. He creates multi-channel site-specific installations as well as single channel works. His award-winning short films and videos have been exhibited in major art museums and film festivals throughout the world including The Whitney Biennial , The San Francisco, New York, and Rotterdam Film Festivals. He has had retrospectives at The Lincoln Center, The Cinémathèque française, Festival Nemo, and Pompidou Center in Paris, and at The Lisboa Bienal of Contemporary Art. Most recently, Pierce has been working with video installations that have been shown at The Exploratorium in San Francisco, Museé d’art contemporaine in Montréal, and at Boudin College Art Museum. A major 13 channel, 5500 sq. ft. video installation, Warm Occlusion, was presented in 2006 at the University of Iowa Museum of Art. Pierce has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Camargo Foundation.


Jellyfish Tracing (red spotted) | Katy Higgins | 2007 | 1:00 min.
 
This video is part of a project in which I am mapping the undulating motions of jellyfish and other sea creatures using a video effect called motion tracking.

 


An Improbable Waveform | Virocode | 2006 | 9:00 min.
 


"An Improbable Waveform" is a  work that explores the paradigms of quantum physics, and the limits of empirical understanding. A noted and very well respected String theorist inhabits a computer game to test out possibilities. Educational films and physics experiments are observed and then unobserved to exhibit improbable qualities. A small child talks to a bag of water which is said to be her dead uncle and effortlessly refutes rational solutions.

virocode creates art that explores the theories, laws and hypotheses of science which hemorrhage into our culture, and coagulate on the individual. The work exposes scientific tenets to the chilly outside air and recontextualizes them in the full spectrum light of the narrative of everyday living. 


Softversion | Erik Moskowitz | 2006 | 3:18 min.
  A film about editing and “content creation”, SoftVersion is an operetta which presents the editor (and artist Erik Moskowitz) in the process of creating the film. The “editor” not only edits, he stars as himself in his own edit, and makes the edit decisions which deternine the outcome of his own narrative.
SoftVersion uses video to mount an investigation into the ideologies of popular media production.
The TV frame as object, image, and ideological construct collides with traditional cinematic notions of “framing”.

Erik Moskowitz uses the relationship between cinema space and gallery space as a point of departure for installation and film works. Solo installation exhibitions include: Freight and Volume, Holiday (NYC) and Le Sous Salon (Paris). Selected screenings include: Impakt (Netherlands), Antimatter (Canada), Oberhausen (Germany), Experimenta (India), Press Play (Carnegie Melon), Experiments in Cinema (U of New Mexico).


The Widening Gyre | Geoffrey Bell | 2007 | 6:50 min.
  Inspired by William Butler Yeats' poem, 'The Second Coming', The Widening Gyre is an experimental 'dreamscape' that contrasts an age of exuberance within the larger context of strong geopolitical uncertainties and anxieties we are witnessing right now. Although the word gyre means any manner of swirling vortex, Yeats claimed that the image of the gyre captured contrary motions inherent in the process
of history. The Widening Gyre presents unfamiliar beauties emerging from our rich visual history and posits them in relationship to world where the social chaos, and the pressure of information, the 'wreckage', is monumental.

Geoffrey Bell is a new media artist and designer who combines emerging technologies with traditional media. His projects include multimedia theatrical productions, video installation and animation. His works are exhibited nationally and internationally, and have received numerous awards and fellowships including the RTKL fellowship and funds from the Andy Warhol Foundation.


Blue | Sara Ching-Yu Sun | 2006 | 2:35 min.
  A selected dance segment from Swing Time (1936), a famous musical from the Depression Era, was re-shot hand-held style from DVD. Through the process of editing and re-framing the video, a different perception of space and time is created bringing forth new context and meaning to this b/w dance musical.

Sara Ching-Yu Sun lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work involves video, video/photo based installation, photography and drawing. Sara received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles and her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art. She has exhibited her work in solo/two-person show at Gallery 456, New York, NY; Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY; group shows at Triple Candie, New York, NY; Art in General, New York, NY; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; and Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art. Sara received an award in 1994 at the 15th AIM Program-The Bronx Museum of the Arts, a 2001 awarded artist residency at the McColl Center, NC, the 2002 Annual Selection Exhibition at the Asian American Art Center in New York City, NY, a 2003 Honorary Fellowship at the Djerassi Residency, CA, and a 2004 awarded residency at the Ping-Tung Peninsula International Arts Festival and Residency in Taiwan.


In Order of Appearance | Leor Grady | 2006 | 3:35 min.
 

A short video list of people in order of their appearance in my life.
The piece follows the cinematic format of credit scroll, concluding with credits to cities, places and times.

Leor Grady is an Israeli-born visual artist and an independent curator.
His interdisciplinary projects explore themes of home, territory and group-identity. His work reflects his experience and interest in the poetics of the mundane. He was awarded the 1996 Jerusalem Fund Creation Prize for his installation "28 Bezalel St. #9". He is a graduate of the School of Visual Theatre in Jerusalem and of The State University of New York. His works have been shown internationally, and include among others, the B.K. Smith Gallery in Cleveland and Exit Art Gallery in New York City.
He is a current Faculty member at The Makor/Steinhardt Center  Artists-In- Residence Program.