Brakhage Symposium explores experimental cinema

The Ninth Annual Brakhage Center Symposium will be hosted by the University of Colorado Boulder on March 16 and 17.

Through screenings and discussions the Brakhage Symposium will explore art practices, assumptions about cinema art, the historical avant-garde and the media arts.

For many decades, the parallel development of experimental filmmaking art alongside electronic moving image making has been observed, the symposium’s organizers say. This year’s symposium will play host to perspectives on the relation and poetics of these practices.

This year’s programmers are: Glenn Phillips, principal project specialist and consulting curator at the Department of Architecture and Contemporary Art at the Getty Research Institute; Mark Toscano, archivist and preservationist at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; and Don Yannacito, CU-Boulder First Person Cinema guest filmmaker programmer.

Artists Jennifer Reeder and Jennifer West will be joined by Sally Dixon, former director of the Film In the Cities program; Suranjan Ganguly of CU-Boulder, John Powers of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Tom Gunning of the University of Chicago.

Reeder, a visiting artist at CU-Boulder, is a filmmaker and visual artist from Ohio. She constructs very personal narratives about landscapes, coincidence and trauma.

West is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She is known for her digitized films that are made by hand manipulating film celluloid

Special guests Steina and Woody Vasulka will attend.

The Brakhage Center Symposium is quickly becoming a tradition in the world of avant-garde filmmaking and artistry.

The Brakhage Center Symposium began in April 2005 as a forum to discuss and explore contemporary experimental film. It brings guest contemporary filmmakers, scholars, critics and curators to the Brakhage Center annually.

Guest lecturers add to the resources and programs housed in the center for students, faculty, graduates, and the community. The 2007 Symposium was the first held in the new ATLAS building on campus.

In 2009, the CU Film Studies Program expanded the one-day symposium to a special two-day event, and in 2010 to a three-day program with film/video screenings, special guest lectures and intellectual discussions.

The center’s mission is to promote education and research regarding the historical, cultural and artistic significance of experimental film and media art to students, scholars and the public.

As such, the center seeks to encourage new artistic talent and foster broad institutional collaboration in promoting new perspectives of the avant-garde film and media-art world.

The center seeks to elevate the university’s research and educational mission. In so doing, it aims to cultivate and promote creative research and artistic endeavor nationally and internationally.

The center serves as a national forum to examine the moving image as an aesthetically and socially responsive art form, especially within a culture that has become progressively more visual.

Through symposia, conferences, screenings, exhibitions and other activities, the center features the works of past, current and future artistic innovators. These activities also provide a dynamic platform for discussion among artists, scholars, curators, and those from media art research centers.

Admission to the 2013 Brakhage Symposium is free, but due to limited seating capacity, registration is recommended. Please contact Eric Coombs at eric.coombsesmail@colorado.edu to register.

All events will be held in the 
CU-Boulder Visual Arts Complex room 1B20.

The symposium is sponsored by
The William H. Donner Foundation,
the CU Film Studies Program,
the Center for Media Arts & Performance in ATLAS,
the Donner Canadian Foundation, the
Department of Art and Art History at CU-Boulder, Polly and Mark Addison and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Feb. 27, 2013