George Stadnik’s 1975 video Primordial Soup, represents an early building block of video-art-history. Fusing the synaesthetic experiments of Thomas Wilfred (the creator of a form of light sculpture called Lumia) with the pioneering video synthesis techniques associated with Nam June Paik and Peter Campus, Stadnik’s combination of electronically-manipulated imagery and sound references the corporeal as well as the very genesis of video art.

Primordial Soup was created on the Paik Abe Video Synthesizer at WGBH’s legendary program for the creation and development of experimental video art, the New Television Workshop, under a Rockefeller Foundation Grant. An original electronic score was provided by Bill Gangi, founder Kasner Gooch Multi Sensory Arts.

George Stadnik received a BFA in Experimental Studies from Syracuse University in 1972 and began to create Lumia performances for the annual Avant Garde Festivals in NYC. In 1978, he established a Lumiagraph studio in Worcester, Massachusetts -essentially a 10'x12'x8' light-tight room or camera obscura-where he made mathematically-based Lumia or light compositions and recorded them directly as unique still images on film, which were exhibited in galleries in the United States and Europe. During this period, Stadnik was awarded a grant from the Rockefeller foundation to create a piece for the WGBH New Television Workshop in Waterdown Massachusetts, produced numerous Lumia performances for galleries and planetariums and patented a photon light guitar. Due to the logistical limitations posed by the physical Lumia device, Stadnik turned to commercial software as an alternative method of production in the 1980s. Currently, Stadnik continues to create digital Lumia simulations using programs such as Maya 5.0 with Mental Ray, Final Cut Pro and DVD Pro Studio and a Macintosh computer. —from The New York Digital Salon

This exhibition of Primordial Soup is presented in conjunction with a two-part screening at International House Philadelphia:

Center for Visual Music: Essential Visual Music

PART 1: Friday, May 23 at 7pm
Essential Visual Music: Rare Classics from CVM Archive

PART 2: Friday, May 30 at 7pm
Essential Visual Music: New Visions

Center for Visual Music is a nonprofit film archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and avant-garde media. CVM is commited to preservation, curation, education, scholarship, and dissemination of the film, performances and other media of this tradition, together with related historical documentation and other material.

> Digital Lumia
> Center for Visual Music
> International House Philadelphia

Magnetic Movie, 2007, video still

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries. All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, set to recordings of space scientists excitedly describing their visualization techniques. Magnetic Movie delves into Earth’s inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

Semiconductor make moving image works which reveal our physical world in flux; cities in motion, shifting landscapes and systems in chaos. Since 1999 UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have worked with digital animation to transcend the constraints of time, scale and natural forces; they explore the world beyond human experience, questioning our very existence. Their work has been exhibited widely at venues including The Museum of Contemporary Art (Lyon, France), Pacific Film Archive (Berkley), The Venice Biennale and the Ars Electronica festival.

In Order Not To Be Here, 2002, 16mm film still

Deborah Stratman’s In Order Not To Be Here is an uncompromising look at the ways privacy, safety, convenience and surveillance determine our environment. Shot entirely at night, the film confronts the hermetic nature of white-collar communities, dissecting the fear behind contemporary suburban design—a fear of outsiders, a fear of irregularity, a fear of thought, a fear of self. By examining evacuated suburban and corporate landscapes, the film reveals a peculiarly 21st century hollowness—an emptiness born of our collective faith in safety and technology. This is a new genre of horror movie, casting suburban locations as states of mind.

Deborah Stratman is an award-winning filmmaker and artist based in Chicago. She received her MFA from the California Institute of Arts and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1990 she has completed more than a dozen film projects, both on sixteen-millimeter film and on video. These works have been shown at international film festivals—including the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands, and the Vienna International Film Festival in Austria—and at art institutions such as the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Shadworoom II, 2007, video still

Screening is proud to present Adam Putnam’s shadowroom II and III  in the artist’s first exhibition in Philadelphia. Expanding on a diverse artistic practice that includes photography, sculpture, drawing, performance and installation, Putnam’s videos make substantial a nearly erotic tension between interior and exterior space, often depicted in his work as the corporeal and the architectural.

In his shadowroom series, Putnam presents images of static, dark and entirely vacant rooms. The muted images beckon viewers to enter and occupy these spaces, while simultaneously halting one’s gaze at the projection screen itself, where flickering light and digital grain skitter across its surface.

shadowroom II and III  lend an almost physical presence to darkness and emptiness, perhaps referencing the phantasmagoric or the spiritual, while physically situating viewers before an alternate-dimension mirror of the gallery itself.

shadowroom II and III  will be presented as a two-part exhibition beginning with shadowroom III, on view from December 7-30, and shadowroom II  on view from January 4-27.

Adam Putnam was born in NYC in 1973, where he continues to live and work. Since earning a MFA from Yale in 2000, his work has been shown widely, at venues including PS1 Contemporary Art Center and Artists Space (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego), Serpentine Gallery (London) and The 2007 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. His work will also be included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Putnam is represented by Taxter and Spengemann (NYC).

> taxterandspengemann.com
> timeout.com/newyork/articles/art/adam-putnam

Untitled (Pink Dot), 2007, video still

Screening is very proud to present Takeshi Murata's Untitled (Pink Dot) and the artist’s first solo exhibition in Philadelphia. Building on a keen knowledge of avant-garde film history (including a particular affinity for psychedelic auteurs Jordan Belson, the Whitney Brothers and Stan Brakhage) and a staggering command of digital video techniques, Murata creates vivid, lysergic videos that oscillate between damaged representation and pure abstraction.

Untitled (Pink Dot) employs action-hero imagery from Sylvester Stallone's 1982 cult/camp/classic First Blood as fodder for an eye-popping electronic meltdown in which images of our war hero John Rambo collapse under their own weight, transmuted to the point of obliteration, leaving an American icon reduced to a puddle of rainbow pixels.

Takeshi Murata was born in Chicago in 1974 and currently resides in Saugerties, NY. Since earning a B.F.A. in film, video and animation at The Rhode Island School of Design, his work has been shown widely, at venues including the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA) and Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo). Murata’s distinctive approach to the medium most recently earned him a solo exhibition at the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington DC), and can be seen currently in the exhibition Mail Order Monsters at Deitch Projects (NY).

> www.takeshimurata.com
> www.ratio3.org
> Electronic Arts Intermix

28 Years In the Implicate Order, 2007, video still

Pascual Sisto's 28 Years in the Implicate Order is a work based on the concepts of Quantum Theory and Quantum Mechanics. The video consists of a fixed locked off shot of an empty parking lot. A centered sodium vapor light illuminates the desolate landscape. Twenty-eight red balls bounce up and down in a chaotic, random manner—each ball performing as an individual entity bouncing at its own rate and speed. As the video progresses towards its mid point, the balls align themselves in a single synchronized bounce, only to resume bouncing in a random manner.

Raised in Barcelona, Pascual Sisto graduated with a BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and a MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. His film and video work has been shown widely, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Latin American Art (MALBA) in Buenos Aires, TVE (Spanish Television) and the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival. Recent exhibitions include the LA Freewaves at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, USA) Reencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin Festival (Paris, France), Viper Festival (Basel, Switzerland), AKA Gallery (Rome, Italy), Ego Park Gallery (Oakland, USA), MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles, USA), Telic Gallery (Los Angeles, USA) and Bitforms Gallery (New York, USA).

> www.pascualsisto.com

Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana, 2006, video still

In the wake of the 1997 tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales, overwhelmed mourning fans began looking for ultimate meaning and posting their conspiracy theory conclusions out into cyberspace. Perhaps none was further-reaching than the complexity of David Alice's theory linking the fatal accident to another of Britain's cult heroes. Lars Laurmann's 2006 video, Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana, brings Mr. Alice's writings to the screen, dissecting each song on The Smiths 1986 album "The Queen is Dead." The narrative organizes "proofs" connecting the famed singer to otherworldly powers of foresight.

Lars Laumann (b. 1977) is a Film/Video artist and Sculptor based in Olso, Norway. A 2001 graduate of The Royal Norwegian Academy of Fine Art, Batchelor Oslo, he has exhibited internationally since 2001. Solo and group exhibitions include: The Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway; Project 0047, Berlin; Karma International, Zurich; Kling & Bang, Reykjavik, Iceland; and the 1st Milwaukee International Art Fair. Recent and upcoming screenings of Morrissey Foretelling The Death of Diana include: a solo exhibition at White Columns, New York; Maureen Paley. London; Moore Space, Miami; The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; Le Commissariat, Entre Chienne et Louve, Paris; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Lars is represented by WILLY WONKA INC. in Olso.

Daniel Fuller is a 2004 graduate of the Program of Museum Studies at Syracuse University and is an Independent Curator based in Philadelphia, PA. As the Curator of New Media at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, NY he curated various video exhibitions, including the citywide Dead of Winter and Peekskill Project, as well as the acclaimed Only the Paranoid Survive. Previous exhibitions have included It Is The Same Outside (2005) at the Drake in Toronto, Canada, which coincided with a one month curatorial residency; Everything I'd Ever Discovered which traveled from Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles to Vox Populi in Philadelphia; and an exhibition of gallery artists in the Project Space at Peres Projects, Los Angeles, where he worked on projects with assume vivid astro focus and Terence Koh.

> larslaumann.blogspot.com

A change of speed, A change of style, A change of scene; Part II
16mm film, 3:16 min B/W

Philippe Decrauzat’s 16mm film A change of speed, A change of style, A change of scene; Part II creates a matrix of television-culture images, astronomical history and avant-garde film practice.

The film is structured after the first recording of radio signal from a pulsar. Discovered in 1967 by astrophysicists Jocelyn Bell and Antony Hewish, the signal resembled what could have been an attempt at extra-terrestrial communication (the observation was briefly dubbed LGM-1 or Little Green Men-1), but was eventually determined to be a radio emission from a dying neutron star.

Characterized by its visual pulse, Decrauzat’s film flickers between a black screen and images of landscapes from the TV series The Twilight Zone—a landmark of American pop culture as well as a symbol of an era marked by paranoia and fear of Communist and Martian invasion.  Accompanied by a musical score from New York’s sound-art collaborative New Humans, Decrauzat’s stroboscopic film builds and exploits tension between sound and image, object and subject and imagination and reality.

The LP “Undercover” by New Humans, with collaborative artwork by Philippe Decrauzat  and Mika Tajima will be on view as part of the exhibition.

Philippe Decrauzat, was born in 1974 and lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. Decrauzat’s interests lie in investigating the status that images and image-making play in cultural practice throught a variety of media and forms. Adopting and adapting op-art strategies, Decrauzat affects a visceral viewing experience through dense patterning and layering of effects. Manipulating diverse references from Russian constructivism to sci-fi to 1970s post-punk music, Decrauzat’s influences form a subtle network of visual and spatial motifs and create a viewing experience which is both thoughtful and visceral.

Recent exhibitions of Decrauzat's work include, a solo exhibition at Galerie Praz Delavallade, Paris; Komakino at MAMCO, Geneva; General Dynamics at Centre D’art Contemporaine, Delme; Bring War Home at Elisabeth Dee Gallery in New York and NOWHERENOW at Kunsthaus Baselland.

> www.newhumansnyc.com/news

Three hijacked jets on desert Airstrip, Amman, Jordan 12 September 1970 Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Johan Grimonprez, 1997 / Photo: Johan Grimonprez and Rony Vissers / ©1997–2003 Johan Grimonprez

For its inaugural exhibition, Screening presents Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y  by Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez. Produced in 1997, Grimonprez’ comprehensive and prescient chronology of worldwide airline hijackings draws on television newsreels, feature films and other found footage, and the artist’s own reconstructions to examine the development of terrorism as a political weapon and to dissect the language and meaning of the media spectacle. Gripping imagery is combined with narration inspired by Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Mao II  to “highlight the value of the spectacular in our catastrophe culture.”

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y  garnered ‘best director’ awards at the San Francisco Film Festival and Toronto’s Images Festival. Since its acclaimed premiere at Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and Documenta X (Kassel), the film has toured worldwide.

Johan Grimonprez is currently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts (New York). Acquisitioned by Trio NBC Universal (New York), Arte TV (Germany/France), and Channel 4 (UK), his productions have traveled the main festival circuit from Telluride, Tokyo to Berlin. Curatorial projects have been hosted at major exhibitions and museums worldwide including the Whitney Museum (New York) and Tate Modern (London); and work is included amongst collections at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Kanazawa Art Museum (Japan), and The National Gallerie (Berlin). He is published with Hatje/Cantz (Germany) and spends his time between New York and Brussels.

> www.zapomatik.com
> www.othercinemadvd.com/dialhistory.html
> www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/dial-history/video/1/