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INTRODUCTION
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PROGRAM FOUR |
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 Image: Tony Cokes, “Headphones,” 2004. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. Text: EAI online catalogue: http://www.eai.org. Reprinted with permission by EAI. . |
Tony Cokes: Headphones In Headphones, Cokes investigates the social value of music as a means of channeling violence, before and after its economic profitability. Animating a text by music theorist and economist Jacques Attali, author of Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977), Cokes argues that music “piracy” is not a crime or aberration, but a logical result of the marketing of music reproduction technologies. Biography: Tony Cokes was born in 1956. He received a B.A. from Goddard College, Vermont, participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and gained an M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. He has received grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Cokes’ video and multimedia installation works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and in Documenta X, Kassel, Germany. Cokes currently teaches at Brown University. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island. |
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 Image: Sagi Groner, “Meditation on Violence,” 2005. Courtesy of the Artist. |
Sagi Groner: Meditation on Violence Meditation on Violence is composed from images of precision bombings in Kosovo in 1999. An hour of material and over 100 bombings are compressed into this 13 minute video. Meditation on Violence is a reflection on how we perceive mediated warfare and interpret graphical representations of death. Biography: Sagi Groner was born in Rehovot, Israel in 1971. Groner works with film, video and moving images from the internet. This imagery is both the source and end product of his work. Out of sampled footage of films, documentaries, and historic archival material, he searches, finds and shapes new images and storylines. These stories are often sociological or political in their content. His work has been exhibited internationally in festivals, galleries, and museums. He currently lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Beijing, China. |
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 Image: Jim Finn, “Great Man & Cinema,” 2009. Courtesy Video Data Bank, Chicago. Text: VDB online catalogue: http://www.vdb.org. Reprinted with permission by VDB. |
Jim Finn: Great Man & Cinema Kim Jong Il, the Stalinist David O. Selznick, runs the state film studio as a way of promoting his own and his father’s cult of personality. The film’s title, Great Man and Cinema, comes from a propaganda booklet filled with stories of how the Dear Leader has written, edited, produced and given acting advice in films for the last 40 years. This film succinctly synthesizes the Dear Leader’s directing philosophy with his feelings toward the imperialist beast at his heels. Biography: “Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art,” the New York Times said Jim Finn’s films “often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe.” His award-winning movies have been called “Utopian comedies” and “trompe l’oeil films”. The trilogy of communist features is in the permanent collection of the MoMA, and he has had retrospectives in seven countries. His movies have screened widely at festivals like Sundance, Rotterdam, Sao Paulo, AFI and Edinburgh as well as museums and cinematheques. He has been making films, videos, revolutionary needlepoint pillows and photographs for over a decade. He was born in St. Louis and is currently living in Providence, RI and teaching at Emerson College in Boston. |
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 Image: Rä di Martino, “La Camera,” 2006. Courtesy Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam. Text: NIMK online catalogue: http://catalogue.nimk.nl. Reprinted with permission by NIMK. |
Rä di Martino: La Camera A classic black-and-white image depicts two actors dressed in 1960’s style. The scene is a mere suggestion of a room: a framework with a lamp in an unidentified location. The actors repeat, verbatim, audio fragments from old Italian television broadcasts. For these, Rä di Martino resorted to material from the Cinecitta archives, dating back to 1930-1970, and asked people about their first experiences with television. Via the actors, these memories resurface in the present tense. La Camera is a short video about the influence of mass media and the illusions, dreams, and realities that television and cinema have enabled us to perceive. Biography: Rä di Martino was born in Rome and studied art in New York City as the 2004 recipient of the Italian Academy residence for Young Artists at Columbia University. Martino’s work has been exhibited internationally in festivals, galleries, and museums. La Camera was featured as part of Senso Unico, a group exhibition co-sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute and P.S.1 MoMA (New York). |
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 Image: Sara Rajaei, “Charismatic Fates & Vanishing Dates,” 2006. Courtesy Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam. Text: NIMK online catalogue: http://catalogue.nimk.nl. Reprinted with permission by NIMK. |
Sara Rajaei: Charismatic Fates & Vanishing Dates Charismatic Fates & Vanishing Dates designates a moment of intense and constant deja-vu. In a nostalgically furnished living room, a little girl is hopping around a table strewn with photos, which an adult woman is brooding over. A voice is talking about the death of a grandfather, about two girlfriends from bygone days, about an accident and a disappearance. Background noises from a past era fill the room, in which the girl and the woman are occasionally joined by the characters from the hovering memories. Without being able to see or hear one another, they are, as ghosts, part of a personal history in which various events were linked with each other and keep re-emerging. The past is not a clearly defined line, but rather, a room in which things turn up out of the blue, mingle together and then vanish again. Biography: Sara Rajaei was born in Abadan, Iran in 1976. Since 1998, she has been based in The Hague, the Netherlands, where she currently lives and works. Rajaei began her studies at the University of the Arts in Tehran in 1996 and continued studying at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, the Hague from 1998 to 2002. Since 2004, her work has been shown in various festivals and exhibitions around the world. |
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 Image: Jan de Bruin, “Calling 911,” 2004. Courtesy Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam. Text: NIMK online catalogue: http://catalogue.nimk.nl. Reprinted with permission by NIMK. |
Jan de Bruin: Calling 911 Observing a dramatic break-up encounter between a man and a woman in the streets of LA, Calling 911 sets personal drama into an overly organized city with rescue-networks on standby. Biography: Jan de Bruin was born in Delft in 1977 and lives and works in Rotterdam. He graduated in 2002 from the film department at Art Academy St. Joost in Breda. Since 2005, de Bruin’s work has been shown in international exhibitions. His short videos create psychological mirrors of everyday life and are engaged in the interaction between fiction and reality, often documenting and pointing his camera on real-life individuals in public spaces, particularly in urban areas. This preoccupation with reality reveals the narrative and theatrical quality of life. In his exploration of documentary, de Bruin strives to show us images of ourselves. |
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 Image: The Speculative Archive, “We will live to see these things, or, five pictures of what may come to pass” 2007. Courtesy Video Data Bank, Chicago. Text: VDB online catalogue: http://www.vdb.org. New York Foundation for the Arts website: www.nyfa.org |
The Speculative Archive: We will live to see these things... is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005/06 in Damascus, Syria, the work combines fiction and non-fiction. Each section of the piece--the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, an interview with a dissident intellectual, documentation of an equestrian event, the fever dream of a U.S. policymaker, and a portrait of a Qur’an school for young girls--offers a different perspective on what might come to pass in a place where people live between the competing forces of a repressive regime, a growing conservative Islamic movement, and intense pressure from the United States. Biography: The Speculative Archive is a collaborative effort between Los Angeles-based artists Julia Meltzer and David Thorne. Since 1999 the duo has created videos, photographs, installations, and published texts that rigorously and poetically analyze the use value of documents—classified and not—in the construction of history. The Speculative Archive writes that their current work deals with how documents “project and claim visions of the future.”–The New York Foundation for the Arts |
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