[We Don't Know Yet] What a Cinema Can Do III: expanded cinema
Part of the We Don't Know Yet: What a Cinema Can Do project
Onion City and CCAM co-present the third annual edition of [WE DON’T KNOW YET] WHAT A CINEMA CAN DO, a night of new media live performance with the theme of Disintegrating Archives.
This event explores the resonances of “expanded cinema” today, putting cinematic art to the tasks of resistance, rupture, and reconfiguration of mediatic experience. We ask: how can experimental modes of animating sound and moving images reconfigure the possibility of our relating to one another anew? Re:: mix; vision; mediate; compile; concile; wire; work; enact.
This year WDKY features new works or reworkings by three artists developing distinct technical, aesthetic, and cultural niches: AJ McClennon’s transmedia sound and video work moves through topics of blackness, beauty, personal narrative, and the broad spectrum of femininity. The arts collective Alterotics’ moving-image art, archival research, and event hosting activates public life for trans/queer people. James Connolly’s real-time sound and media performance activates expressive potentials of technical systems sequestered behind consumer interfaces.
These three artists are also joined by special guest Aria Pedraza, who will introduce the Midwest Rave Culture Archive.
AJ McClennon works between sound, music, written, and spoken word, moving image and imagistic experimentation. They will present a new work that builds on the world-building techniques of their afro-futurist VEGA exhibition and performance project as well as their practice of engaging personal narratives.
Alterotics (Avery Jaye and Anaïs Alias) activates and reconfigures media technologies of image capture and sonic production to create windows, filters, scores, portals, and transcodings of feeling. Their assemblages of media signals (sound, video, cameras, sensors) create capacities for exchange between performers, audience, and the subjects of their archival material through gates of intimacy and distance.
James Connolly brings his custom real-time video processing systems (the CRT Flux Phaser and RGB.VGA.VOLT) to dis- and re-integrate lost privacy of personal archives in times of algorithmic extraction and mass surveillance. Connolly revives and re-purposes techniques of manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum cultivated by Chicago video stalwarts like Daniel Sandin in a post-alphabetic society.
Tickets
Tickets Available HereTickets are $35 in advance and $40 at the door.
Tickets must be bought through the Onion City website. Because of zoning restrictions, guests without tickets at the door will be referred to buy tickets through the website.
performers
Alterotics
alterotics is an arts collective devoted to activating public life for trans/queer people led by Anais Alias and Avery Jaye. Moving-image art, archival research, event hosting, and community building make up the broad strokes of our practice.
AJ McClennon
Originally from Washington D.C, AJ grew up in "D.C. proper," Baltimore and New York during the Reagan, Clinton and the Bush administrations. A.J's work sets personal narratives alongside empirical data, leveling the hierarchies of truth. AJ holds a Masters in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a Bachelor of Arts with a minor in creative writing from the University of Maryland College Park. AJ has also studied at Eugene Lang College. AJ has performed and shown work throughout the US, at locations like Steppenwolf, The Promontory, Woman Made Gallery, Echo Park Film Center, Chicago Filmmakers, Terrain Exhibitions, Gallery 400, Compliance Divisions, Fine Art Complex 1101 and Longwood Arts Center. AJ is currently the co-director of Beauty Breaks, an intergenerational beauty and wellness workshop series for black people along the spectrum of femininity. AJ is also a co-founder of F4F, a domestic venue that cultivates a femme community, centers blackness, and expands upon understandings of what domestic space can be.
James Connolly
'James Connolly is a Chicago-based artist, educator, archivist, and developer. His videos, open-source tools, and real-time audio/video performances undermine the interfaces and break through the algorithms of digital and analog systems, examining hidden power structures and liberating latent aesthetic materialities in cathartic and captivating compositions.'
special guests
Aria Pedraza
I mark my identity with these core truths: being from Chicago, a career as an esthetician, and the rave culture I grew up around. Humanity is at the center of these truths, as is belonging, as is brilliant creativity and once-in-a-generation innovation, as is mortality. My vision for the Midwest Rave Culture Archive is deeply sentimental and outwardly expeditious: every participant and collection deserves a long-term preservation plan.
Midwest Rave Culture Archive
CCAM production
Kim Nucci
Kim Nucci is a Chicago-based media artist, composer, and technologist.
AJ Mendelsohn
AJ Mendelsohn is a Chicago-based curator, modern and contemporary art historian, and film/video programmer. He is currently the Program Coordinator for the Visiting Artists Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Muindi Fanuel Muindi
Muindi Fanuel Muindi is a social practice artist, philosopher, and poet, with Lacustrine Bantu roots in the Rift Forests of Eastern Congo and the Mara Wetlands in Tanzania. As a social practice artist, Muindi coordinates assemblages of administrative statements, technical implements, built environments, and dramatic elements, which function as laboratories in the Black Arts and Decolonial Sciences.
grace grace grace
grace grace grace is a Chicago-based sound and media artist, researcher, and theorist. His transdisciplinary work engages Guattarian process theory, politics and the production of collective subjectivity through computational media.
Onion City Film Festival team
Elise Schierbeek
Elise Schierbeek (they/she) is a writer, media archivist, and film programmer living in Chicago.
Nicky Ni
Nicky Ni is a Chinese expat living and working between Chicago and Beijing. She writes and curates exhibitions and screenings. Currently she is Assistant Editor at Newcity, Contributing Editor at Sixty Inches From Center, and Programmer for Onion City Experimental Film Festival. She is Co-Founder of [LITHIUM/TNL.
partners
Onion City Film Festival
The Onion City Experimental Film Festival is one of the premiere international festivals exclusively devoted to experimental film and video. Their mission is to provide local and regional audiences with an opportunity to view a wide variety of contemporary experimental works, focused on artistic excellence, but also with an eye towards representing differing styles, forms, and nationalities.
Public Works
Public Works is an art & design gallery and storefront in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago.
Chicago Filmmakers
Chicago Filmmakers is a not-for-profit media arts organization that fosters the creation, appreciation, and understanding of film and video as media for artistic and personal expression. Their organization is a catalyst for media of important social and community impact.
sponsors
Sketchbook Brewing
Marz Community Brewing
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