Interactivities: Conversations with Media Artists and Theorists
2 pm - CURTIN 175 ** FREE **
GEORGE LEWIS, Composer and Edwin H. Case Professor of Music, Columbia University Living with Creative Machines
George Lewis is a composer, improvisor, performer and computer/installation artist who makes electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and other notated forms. His artistic work is documented in over 120 recordings. He was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, the Cal Arts/Alpert Award in 1999 and has received numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has served as music curator for the Kitchen in New York, and has collaborated in the "Interarts Inquiry" and "Integrative Studies Roundtable" at the Center for Black Music Research (Chicago). A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. His oral history is archived in Yale University's collection of Major Figures in American Music and his published articles on music, experimental video, visual art, and cultural studies have appeared in numerous scholarly journals.
The computer has become an irreversible part of cultural and social histories of the arts, in which improvisation has long served as a site for interdisciplinary exploration, exchanges of personal and cultural narratives, and the blurring of boundaries between art forms. For me, living, working, and performing with creative machines of my own design has led inevitably to the study of how improvisation produces knowledge and meaning. -- George Lewis
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Woodland Pattern Experimental Film/Video Series Beautiful, Wary: The Films of Michael Robinson Filmmaker Michael Robinson in person!
Woodland Pattern Book Center 720 E Locust 7pm, $2
http://www.woodlandpattern.org/gallery/efv.shtml
In a series of films both deftly beautiful and exquisitely suspicious, Robinson has unfurled captivating imagery as a means of surveying the landscape of a possible romanticism. Responding to a particular history of 16mm experimental work, Robinson weighs a certain tendency towards landscape and contemplation, but does so in a manner that is never distanced or merely ironic. His work, in fact, wonders about, and perhaps longs for, the possibility of sincerity as it considers the valence of beauty.
Included in the screening will be his award winning "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" (2005; winner of top prizes at the Images Film Festival in Toronto, and the 2006 Milwaukee Underground Film Festival), which unfolds the pages of old National Geographics to consider the landscapes therein; and his more recent "The General Returns from One Place to Another" (2006), which takes its title from, and weighs the positioning to be found in, a Frank O'Hara play of the same name. (For instance, from the O'Hara play: "I detest poems. Yet I can't deny they exist; indeed it's often relaxing to just leaf through a book of them without paying attention, like walking through a field of flowers.")
Currently based in Chicago, Robinson has presented his prize-winning films all over: at, for instance, the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant Garde, the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, Images (Toronto), the Media City Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Onion City Film Festival in Chicago, and the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival.
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UWM Union Theatre 2007
Milwaukee Asian Film Festival
Friday, March 30 – Thursday, April 5
Experience a diverse collection of cinema at this year’s Asian Film Festival, a week-long showcase of Asian film and video maker’s talents from a wide range of Asian cultures, including South Korea, Japan, China/Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Mongolia. The festival will highlight a number of popular feature films of various genres, including comedy, romance, thriller and gangster drama as well as a visit by a guest filmmaker. To find out more about Milwaukee’s Asian Film Festival please call 229-2492. Sponsored by the Center for International Education, and the Department of Foreign Languages & Linguistics.
7pm ** FREE **
Exiled (Fong Juk)
(Johnnie To, Hong Kong , in Cantonese w/ Eng. St. , 100 min., 35mm, 2006)
Johnnie To's 2006 semi-sequel to his film The Mission is a gritty look into Hong Kong 's underworld. A gangster decides to turn his back on the syndicate and make a new life for his wife and children, so his boss decides to have him killed. In a clash between duty and friendship, two friends arrive to protect him and two arrive to execute him. To, as always, has a brilliant eye for style and a truly unique take on the action genre. To's Milkyway Image Company produced some of the most acclaimed and lauded Hong Kong action films from the mid-90s to early 2000s. This latest is sure to join those ranks.
9pm ** FREE **
Mongolian Ping Pong (Lü cao di)
(Ning Hao , China/Mongolia, in Mongolian w/ Eng. St., 102 min., 35mm, 2004)
A ping pong ball, found floating in a stream, becomes the source of wonderment for three young boys who live in the remote grasslands of Mongolia , a magnificent landscape where little has changed since the time of Genghis Khan. Bilike , the ball's discoverer, assumes it's a bird's egg. His wizened grandmother proclaims it a magic pearl. Unconvinced, the boys take the ball to the monastery, but even the grasslands' most knowledgeable inhabitants are stumped. When a television show (seen on the region's only set) reveals that the object is the "national ball of China ," the determined young scouts decide to embark upon a journey to return the precious talisman to the Chinese capital.
