Hunt for treasure at the 36th Onion City Experimental Film Festival

Excerpts:

The following night, beginning at 8 PM at Public Works gallery in Wicker Park, the festival will continue its ongoing [We Don’t Know Yet] What a Cinema Can Do project. The live performance program, now in its third year, is copresented by Onion City and the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines. It asks, per the program notes, “How can experimental modes of animating sound and moving image reconfigure the possibility of our relating to one another anew?” Over the last two years, the project has brought together all manner of artists to “put cinematic art to the tasks of resistance, rupture, and reconfiguration of mediatic experience.”

[We Don’t Know Yet] What a Cinema Can Do as an ongoing project shows Onion City’s interest in, as Ni puts it, “work that explores new ways to create and test for visual languages, the intermedial sensibilities that capture our zeitgeist, and the power to document, to provoke, to interrogate the systems, and to evoke empathy.” It’s also a prime example of what Schierbeek says “might set Onion City somewhat apart from both underground and traditional film festivals… . [Onion City has] a strong engagement with sensibilities of the art and gallery world as they intersect with moving image, and an eagerness to curate artists’ moving image.” This year’s program will feature artists James Connolly, AJ McClenon, and collective Alterotics, whose performances “will speak about the disintegrating archives and the culture of remixing,” says Ni. Schierbeek also notes that all these creatives are Chicago-based, “which gives the night a very exciting energy” as a community event.