Using the window of the Skyline Room as a screen, The Eye of the Walker watches over Minneapolis from dusk ’til dawn.
Archive for the ‘Film/Projection’ Category
The Eye of the Walker
Wednesday, May 30th, 2012Material World
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012Target’s South Tower lights up with a new project by Jim Campbell, creator of last year’s spectacular Scattered Light installation.
Cloudy Waters: Dakota Reflections on the River
Wednesday, April 18th, 2012Cloudy Waters is a multimedia piece that depicts the Mississippi River from the perspective of the Dakota, using ambient nature sounds interwoven with Dakota voices and projections of video and still images onto the Washburn Crosby West Engine House.
The river has been a site of both loss and strength for the Dakota community, connecting people yet serving as a boundary. It embodies the core Dakota belief “mitakuye owasin” (we are all related), signifying the profound connection among humans (and their thoughts, dreams, and ideas), other creatures, and the land we all share.
An audio version of Cloudy Waters plays every day in the Mill City Museum Ruin Courtyard, free and open to the public during museum hours. For the one night of Northern Spark, Cloudy Waters will be enhanced with projections of video and still images.
Cloudy Waters was developed by award-winning Dakota video producer and director Mona Smith in collaboration with the Minnesota Historical Society’s exhibit media team. It was first exhibited at the Minnesota History Center in 2004 and has been adapted and expanded for the Mill City Museum Ruin Courtyard.
Mona Smith
Mona Smith (Sisseton–Wahpeton Dakota Oyate) is a media artist, educator, and the owner of Allies: media/art. Her work has been broadcast through PBS and other networks and shown at festivals, conferences, and museums in Europe and North and South America. She has received multiple awards from Native and non-Native film and video festivals, and in 2007 she was named Community Artist of the Year by the National Museum of the American Indian. Recently she has turned to new media, developing art pieces for the Internet, creating sites for web distribution of Native-focused media, and making multimedia installations. She and her family live near the Maka Cokiya Kin (center of the earth) in south Minneapolis, overlooking Wakpa Cistinna (Minnehaha Creek).
tuning the sky
Sunday, April 8th, 2012tuning the sky is a pop-in, illuminated cyclorama. It is a “surround-yourself-with-light” environment inspired by subtle and dramatic shifts of color in the sky.
Sometimes energizing sometimes calming, we respond to the changing light of the sky. Do you ever stop to watch the purple cast of a storm cloud approach, pause as blue sky turns to flame orange before daylight becomes twilight, or wake up just as the night sky is suddenly saturated with the warm amber hue of a fair weather sunrise?
Pop into one of the suspended islands of sky and tune the light of this miniature atmosphere to the sky of your dreams. When you enter one of these floating worlds you immerse yourself in a single color, a halo of light that fills the horizon all around your head. Feel the changing light as you bask in a dusk to dawn glow that you can tune to match the spirit of the moment that most inspires you.
Sponsored by the Weisman Art Museum and the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota.
Diane Willow
Multimodal artist and creative catalyst Diane Willow works among disciplines and media: “by any medium necessary” best describes her process. Focused on art as experience, she invites people to engage in multisensory explorations as participants and choreographers. She is associate professor of experimental and media arts at the University of Minnesota and shares her work internationally.
MN Film Shorts
Friday, April 6th, 2012See selections from the best of the MN-made shorts program at this year’s MSP International Film Festival at this late-night outdoor screening.
‘92 Skybox Alonzo Mourning Rookie Card
Jim and Dave, two brothers who don’t like each other very much, are forced to come together when their dad dies in Kansas City. Dave is pretty sure he has an Alonzo Mourning Skybox Series rookie card, but Jim has other ideas.
DIRECTED BY Todd Sklar, 12 min
Little Wolf
While trying to escape from two deadly hillbillies, Lowell and baby Samantha seek refuge in the most unusual place, ultimately being pinned against humanity, empathy, and faith.
DIRECTED BY Christopher Peck, min
det.
A successful businessman just living his life is thrust into a puzzling chain of events. After he returns from the war, as past and present fuse, he is forced to confront a haunting mystery.
DIRECTED BY Darin Heinis, 16 min
The Well
A detached young outsider has trouble interacting with anybody, instead preferring to simply observe. When he follows his fellow classmate into the woods, he discovers a secret of hers involving an old well, and decides to investigate further.
DIRECTED BY Christopher Jopp, 10 min
Seeking Sasquatch
A comedy about famed Sasquatch hunter and TV host Karl Patterson, and his fiery wife, Patty. Upon learning of Karl’s plan to search the Arctic with his sexy Russian co-host in search of Sasquatch’s Arctic cousin, Patty tells Karl the unthinkable: Sasquatch doesn’t exist!
DIRECTED BY Jim Morgan, 8 min
The Pony Collector
A young boy searches for a missing pony figure that was given to him by his absent father. A sensitive, charming tale with some moments of magic.
DIRECTED BY Jason Ho, 14 min
Little Words
A story of disappointment and rejection. Set in the early 60’s, R. M. Brusse is a post-modernist writer who hopes to get her first novel published.
DIRECTED BY Ann Prim, 14 min
White Space
Follows the inner life of a deaf performance poet as he makes his debut at an open-mic night for a hearing audience. Can the language of the heart emancipate the inner voice, transcending the white space between a hearing audience and a deaf man’s soul?
DIRECTED BY Maya Washington, 9 min
Mobile Experiential Cinema
Friday, March 30th, 2012Mobile Experiential Cinema is a multi-location projected cinematic experience seen through the lens of the mystery genre, featuring live performance and explored while biking. Bring your bike, your curiosity, and your wits to this urban exploration of locative cinema. An audience on bicycles will collectively try to unravel a mysterious narrative throughout the city. Beginning under the Central Avenue Bridge on the west side of the Mississippi River with two “screenings,” at 10 pm and 12 midnight, the project then travels to four other locations in Minneapolis. The audience will encounter objects, natural and artificial sounds, and film segments that make up a narrative mystery. You will experience live theater, actors, and installations that will guide you to the meaning of the adventure. Keep your eyes open: there are many moments along the journey to find clues. The story exists not only in the film but all around you as part of the asphalt, the graffiti, the siren in the distance, and the pedestrians dodging out of your way. As you watch it together, you will try to solve the mystery. Your vigilance will help you find the answer—and find your way back to the present moment. The mystery will lead you down undiscovered streets and deep into the cracks of the city. Don’t expect to end up where we started!
Daniel Dean
Daniel Dean produces sculpture, video, and public art projects that focus on public spaces, value, and social systems. He often pursues collaboration that explores social relationships, participation, and issues of public and private space. He has been an integral member of Floating Lab Collective since 2008.
Ben Moren
Ben Moren is a multidisciplinary media artist whose work spans filmmaking and writing custom software for media-based installations. His projects bridge the gaps between digital and natural worlds. He is president of MAW, where his primary activity is creating locative cinema projects.
Yellow River @ Mississippi River :: seeking what a river carries
Thursday, March 29th, 2012Yellow River @ Mississippi River :: seeking what a river carries is a collaborative student project that emerges from an image quest to gather clues to the cultural meanings and histories of the Yellow River in China and the Mississippi River in Minnesota. These rivers resonate, converge, and diverge in the collective imagination. A shifting projection of images sparked by this collaborative visual quest, Yellow River @ Mississippi River will juxtapose these virtual views with those of the nearby downstream flow of the waters of the Mississippi River that shape this site.
Artists and professors Liu Xuguang and Diane Willow are the catalysts for a project that will be created by students at the University of Minnesota and the Beijing Film Academy. The students will communicate with each other and experiment with a range of virtual media before coming together on site to present their vision of these two rivers and the meanings they carry.
Sponsored by the Weisman Art Museum and the China Exchange Program of the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota
Liu Xuguang
Beijing artist Liu Xuguang exhibits his work internationally. He is vice-director of the fine arts department and director of the New Media Art Lab at the Beijing Film Academy. He received his PhD in fine arts at Tsinghua University and studied at the National Institute of Saitama University of Japan and Tokyo University of Arts.
Diane Willow
Multimodal artist and creative catalyst Diane Willow works among disciplines and media: “by any medium necessary” best describes her process. Focused on art as experience, she invites people to engage in multisensory explorations as participants and choreographers. She is associate professor of experimental and media arts at the University of Minnesota and shares her work internationally.
Short Films Inspired by the Word “TRAIL”
Thursday, March 29th, 2012MNKINO is a monthly excuse for anyone to make a film and to meet others who like doing the same. It’s not just for film school graduates, MFA candidates, or videographers: it’s for you. How does it work? It’s pretty simple. At our monthly meeting (and on our website) we announce a word, object, or idea to include in your film. Bring your TRAIL themed video to the screening with your contribution as a .mov or .mp4 on a flash drive, or send us a message if you plan to use a different format.
Mission: Do more with less. Make something move.
We’ll have our first screening at 10PM with a Q&A with all the filmmakers who are present. We’ll repeat the films at 10:45 & 11:30.
Mom’s Cookies
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012Mom’s Cookies is a series of short silent videos showing packaged convenience foods prepared from start to finish by a well-coiffed mother figure. The videos will be projected onto mill buildings near St. Anthony Falls on the Mississippi River.
These videos commemorate this area of the Mississippi River as the birthplace of modern packaged foods. Viewers will have the opportunity to watch the product of the waterfall’s power literally rise in the oven, with the waterfall itself as a backdrop.
St. Anthony Falls and its natural source of energy attracted settlers and industry in the nineteenth century, first as the site of sawmills and later flour mills. The Minneapolis flour mills (many of which later merged into General Mills) developed innovations in flour production, which led to Minnesota flour being the highest rated in the country for fineness and quality. In 1931 General Mills further revolutionized food production in the United States with its introduction of Bisquick, the nation’s first baking mix. With Bisquick, the age of packaged and boxed foods was born, completely changing how Americans, and many of the people throughout the world, eat. Mom’s Cookies reminds viewers of the history of the mills and their importance to contemporary food production and consumption.
Homemade baked goods have a powerful hold over the American psyche. Mythology about mothers and grandmothers baking magical frosted delights in the kitchen play into our ideas of what it means to be loved and cared for. Home-cooked meals represent our greatest desire for comfort and security. Mom’s Cookies asks the viewer to contemplate the technological advances that occurred at this site of natural wonder and power, as well as the depth of the social and economic changes they brought to our society.
Rosemary Williams
Rosemary Williams is a multimedia artist whose work spans video, audio, performance, and installation. She has been awarded the Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists and other grants, and she exhibits her work internationally, including recent shows in Berlin, London, and the Czech Republic. She is now making her first feature film.
whiteonwhite: algorithmicnoir
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir is a noirish film that never ends and never really begins. A computer dubbed “The Serendipity Machine” continuously shuffles 3,000 shots, 80 voice-overs, and 150 pieces of music, creating an ever-changing story involving Holz (Jeff Wood), a geophysicist stuck in a 1970s-era metropolis called City-A. Just as its citizens are subjected to time manipulations, Holz’s own fate is dictated by the machine editing this film. 2011, video.
Artist’s Cinema is made possible by generous support from Elizabeth Redleaf.
Located in the Lecture Room of the Walker Art Center.
The Black Pirate
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012Take-Up Productions presents Douglas Fairbanks’s silent classic The Black Pirate (1926) in this screening of the acclaimed collaboration with The Poor Nobodys, who recorded the score in a live performance at the Trylon microcinema in 2011. The Black Pirate will be shown soon after 9:30 pm and again at 11 pm. Bring your parrots, eye patches, and especially your bike for this amazing pirate extravaganza!
Take-Up Productions is dedicated to screening classic films. Take-Up runs the Trylon cinema and presents screenings in neighborhood theaters such as the Heights and the Riverview. The Trylon at 3258 Minnehaha Avenue features 50 deluxe rocker seats, a 20-foot screen, and our pair of Century Model SA 35 mm projectors.
The Art of iPhone Slideshow Exhibit
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012Hiding within your iPhone is one of the most inspiring, capable, and just plain fun imaging systems in photography. More than a snapshot device, the iPhone is a powerful creative tool, right in the palm of our hand. Imagine—a camera, darkroom, and visual research laboratory, all in our pocket! Liberated from rushing home to our computers, we can capture and process our images anywhere.
This year’s Northern Spark festival provides an opportunity to exhibit your creativity and the stunning output possible from your iPhone by projecting your own photographs on the Pillsbury Silos along the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. This event is presented by Mpls Photo Center with support from its member volunteers.
To be included in the Mpls Photo Center digitally projected slideshow exhibit during Northern Spark 2012, email your iPhoto images at their largest size to Exhibitions@MplsPhotoCenter.com by midnight, May 15. The projections will occur from dusk until 2 am on June 9–10.
Suggested iPhone apps for final editing of your images:
Hipstamatic: The Hipstamatic brings back the look, feel, unpredictable beauty, and fun of plastic toy cameras.
Camera Bag: Camera Bag pairs a full suite of photographic tools with high-quality filters and vintage simulations.
Tiltshift: Create a nice bokeh effect in night-scene photos with the lens blur filter. You can even choose a shaped aperture (hexagon, heart, dollar sign, etc.).
ColorSplash: ColorSplash quickly and easily gives photos a dramatic look by converting them to black and white while keeping chosen details in color.
Soar through the Universe
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012Take an interactive tour of the latest Earth and space science discoveries! We begin at the Earth and travel 13.7 billion years back in time to the earliest limit of what astronomers can detect. We will visit any astronomical object you would like to see along the way.
Located at the Weisman Art Museum in the Shepherd Room
Presented by the Bell Museum of Natural History with support from Gary Smaby. The Bell Museum is part of the University of Minnesota’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences.
Sleepers Awake
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012Inspired by the tall tales of ghostly creatures inhabiting the ruins of the lower landing of the Stone Arch Bridge, Sleepers Awake transforms a crumbling arch into the lair of one of these luminescent beings rumored to inhabit the area . . . but never before seen.
Created by the artists at PUNY as a site-specific user-responsive piece, Sleepers Awake combines animation, action script, flash, sound analysis, and night vision camera to create the illusion of a living creature responding to the environment. Put simply: jump up and down, wave your arms, yell and scream at the creature, see him respond, have fun and smile.
PUNY is an artist-driven, interactive studio based in Minneapolis and Los Angeles. Best known for its animation on the Nickelodeon show Yo Gabba Gabba, PUNY has brought its unique amalgamation of substance and style to film, television, and Fortune 100 companies. From 2009 until 2011, PUNY operated the Pink Hobo Geek Art Gallery, voted “Minneapolis’s Best Art Gallery” by L’etoile and Metro Magazine. PUNY now produces The HUGE PUNY Show, an interactive variety experience combining live comedy, video, and animation.
For Sleepers Awake, PUNY assembles a right-meets-left-brain trust of four of its creative professionals:
Shad Petosky:
PUNY cofounder and creative director. Formerly of Big Time Attic, Shad produced graphic novels ranging in topics from space to paleontology for publishers such as Simon & Schuster and the U.S. government. With PUNY, he specializes in storytelling, ideation, and media experiences, and he has produced TV pilots for Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, IFC, and Fox, as well as animation for the films Super and Big Miracle.
Yuichiro Tanabe:
A graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design with a BFA in interactive media, Yui grew up in Ecuador with a Japanese family and attended an American high school. His truly multicultural upbringing sparked an interest in using visual communications to create engaging moments that can be experienced by all different types of people. At PUNY, he cultivates that passion as a multimedia artist, animator, and interactive designer.
Vincent Stall:
The design director and cofounder of PUNY, Vincent did stints as a visiting artist at Miami Ad School and Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Under the name King Mini (his boutique design studio), he published the beloved book Robot Investigator and the misunderstood book Everyone Takes a Turn. His rock and roll posters have graced the pages of Sonic: Visuals of Music, Meathaus, Rosetta, and Beast as well as music venues and transit kiosks everywhere.
Joseph Beuckman:
Having DJ’ed the world over while earning degrees in computer science and physics, Joe is an object in motion. He has designed interactive classroom software and played the organ at NHL games. He is an accomplished computer artist and cofounder of the art collective Beige. He brings to PUNY his expertise as a Game Physics, Datavis, and CMS specialist. He is also half of Minneapolis’s premier glockenspiel duo, New Kids on the Glock.
Greenway GoPro: Live Video Projection Project
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012Using mobile GoPro cameras and a live feed, bikers will travel the Greenway and capture images, which will be projected on buildings near the Midtown Bike Center. Multiple images will create a collage of visual art.
GoPro helps people capture and share their most meaningful experiences with others—to celebrate them together. Just as a day on the mountain with friends is more meaningful than one spent alone, sharing our collective experiences makes our lives more fun.
Photographer Ellie Kingsbury of south Minneapolis organized Greenway GoPro.
Car Dreams
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012Car Dreams will explore our car-based economy and culture and its effect on our environment and communities. Our largest exposure to our community is often as daily commuters in cars on roadways. As a private space in public, cars create a simultaneous experience of context and displacement. A car’s occupants are observers rather than participants in their landscape, very much like a person viewing a video projection, and the car masks their humanity to those on the outside. As a global community we seem to be traveling through a world we are separate from, aware of how damaging our ride is yet unable or
unwilling to step out and become involved in change. This dialogue becomes even more relevant with cars being targets and weapons for terrorism, fueled by war and environmental destruction.
Car Dreams is an overnight installation of a car on a public street incorporating video projection of the effects of oil on our lives and landscapes. Synchronized video will be projected onto the windows of the car from within, creating the appearance of a single visual space. The video, taken from multiple cameras simultaneously, will consist of static images of household interiors as
well as moving images of landscape. Interior video will be shot inside households affected by oil conflicts, such as those of veterans and refugees or people affected by oil pollution. Video will be taken within a single room, synchronizing the space of the room with the car projection. Landscape video will be taken from a car driving through oil-affected environments and will be synchronized to the windows of the car.
Car Dreams will reverse familiar visual experience. Interior walls become exterior surfaces and surrounding space will be turned inside out, capturing the full horizon of the landscape as an image confined within a car. The visual experience of the roadway landscape passing by on the window surfaces will create an unnerving effect of travel within a parked car, and the random
movements of people within household interiors will create a sense of exposure, emphasizing a private space within a public setting.
Car Dreams explores the car as an intermediary between realms: spaces of personal and private experience become accessible and public; remote lives become immediate; and the connection between our personal dependence on oil and our detachment from its global and environmental effect becomes more visible.
This project was funded by Forecast Public Art with support from the McKnight Foundation. Additional support was received from St. Paul Neighborhood Network.
Tamsie Ringler
Tamsie Ringler is an installation and cast iron artist. She works primarily with cars, using them as vehicles for political and environmental dialogue. Her work can be seen at Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota, Touhy Park and Skokie Northshore Sculpture Park in Chicago, and on the MAX Light Rail System in Portland, Oregon.
Bumps in the Night
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012Bumps in the Night is a visual and audio portrait of the Northern Spark festival night in Minneapolis, revealing nocturnal narratives shaped by people’s stories and the changing environment of the city. The story of the night unfolds in real time, cascading down the silos to the ground, leaving a trail of history. Five alternating dynamic streams tell different data-backed stories and create visual forms that are translated into audio for a complementary immersive sensory experience.
Data are collected from participants at Northern Spark and Eyeo via a mobile application. Festival attendees can add their stories, movements, and moments to streams with their smart phones or through Twitter and Facebook. Other data are gathered about the nighttime of Minneapolis, from nocturnal animal activity to taxicab business to people’s brain waves to the carbon exchange occurring in plants around us. These sources and stories were discovered through research and conversations with local organizations in the Minneapolis area. These historically derived quantitative flows play in time alongside the qualitative data streams.
While these streams play out visually down the length of the silos, the data are translated into audio that plays back through a series of speakers surrounding the installation area. The sound stream can also be experienced via the mobile application.
Bumps in the Night is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy is a artist, designer, and programmer. She focuses on the structures and systems of social interactions, identity, and self-representation and the potential for technology to mediate, manipulate, and evolve these interactions. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS in computer science and a BS in art and design from MIT. Exhibitions of her art blur the boundaries between art, design, and everyday life and have been held at LACMA, the Japan Media Arts Festival, SIGGRAPH, the Conflux Festival, the File Festival, and the WIRED Store. At her current studio, Sosolimited, and formerly at Small Design Firm, she has worked on installations for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, IBM, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello in Virginia.
David Wicks
David Wicks is an artist exploring landscape systems and our relationship to the environment. He uses a combination of manual and computational techniques to produce maps, drawings, animations, and interactive applications. His work has been shown in a variety of contexts, including the Surfing Art Science and Issues Conference at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla; the Dry Immersion Symposium in Joshua Tree, California; the DUMBO art festival in Brooklyn; and a garden-themed group show in a Shanghai warehouse. His art is featured in Written Images, a generative book project initiated by Martin Fuchs. He holds an MFA from the Design Media Arts program at UCLA and an undergraduate degree in architecture from Miami University.
Bicycle Projections
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012Dazzling lights and daring tricks, performed on bikes and projected onto the Midtown Bike Center. See a collage of color and light, created by people who love bikes and art. Words, colors, and motion—projected live in the Greenway.
nightdemons
Monday, March 26th, 2012A microprojection event on the Washington Avenue Bridge near the Weisman Art Muesum featuring tiny demons and nocturnal beasts that plague your subconscious during the night hours. Animating and collaging demons and beasts from across cultures, University of Minnesota associate professor Jenny Schmid, alumni Drew Anderson, and student and alumni members of MAW will roam with microprojectors around the bridge and river to surprise and trouble visitors with a performance designed to elucidate the darker side of your dream life. themaw.org
Ten Second Film Festival
Thursday, January 19th, 2012The Ten Second Film Festival offers a veritable smorgasbord of bite-sized creations sure to appeal to film aficionados and YouTube addicts alike. The Soap Factory collects the top 100 ten-second films into a robust annual festival. These mini-masterpieces are crafted by professional, amateur, and accidental filmmakers from around the world. Our friends at MPLS.TV host the screening and awards for each of ten unique categories. Named the “Best Festival of the Twin Cities” in 2011 by City Pages, this celebration of lo-fi technology and our short attention spans has become a staple of summer.
Under Ice
Thursday, January 19th, 2012Life continues under ice.
Lighting and projection artist Michael Murnane attempts a rare and sometimes frightening glimpse into the living world under ice. After ice has formed on the surface of a lake or river, it becomes an eerie ghostly environment of darkness, with fleeting images of life, and of silence, broken only with an occasional thundering crack.
Using high-resolution projectors, live multilayer playback technology, and stage lighting, Murnane will project massive images on the historic Pillsbury A Mill on Main Street in Minneapolis. These images were collected through the ice and reveal his reflections and feelings from years of ice fishing with his father, as he wondered what was going on through the hole as well as in his own life.
Michael Murnane
Minneapolis lighting designer Michael Murnane loves to point lights and projectors at just about anything in an effort to create a unique environment. A thirty-year veteran of theatrical lighting design, he has lit hundreds of shows in the United States, Canada, China, Tanzania, Kenya, and several countries in Europe. He works in a wide range of theatrical genres, including theater, opera, concerts, galas, architecture, television, and corporate events, and his designs consistently win praise for their powerful emotional tone.
