Curators João Enxuto and Danny Snelson will organize selections from the streaming video archives of the www.ubuweb.com/film website as a means to momentarily “clothe and house” classic avant-garde film and video works. This performance will investigate the characteristics of online versions of media-reflexive works. Through live projections and interventions, the curators will reprogram works designed to address mediums now teetering at the edge of obsolescence. New possibilities will be explored for historical material freed from the properties of celluloid or television. Streaming online, Paul Sharits’ film “Dots 1 & 2” is transformed into a matrix of pixel-squares. And Vito Acconci presages the promise of social networking in “Theme Song”: There’s got to be somebody. There’s got to be somebody watching me, somebody who wants to come in close to me. Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is an idiosyncratic archive of previously scarce avant-garde films and video artifacts. Editors and curators determine the content of UbuWeb, which is one source among many that have “become subsumed in the mechanics of digital redistribution.” Dada films, Structuralist cinema, and early video experiments are all subject to the compressed regimen of flash video formats. This live screening is a cinematic event: an orchestrated celebration of the dereliction affecting these historical gems reconfigured under the logic of digital distribution.
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