DIGit Exposition
A Week of Media, Movies, Video Art & Nature.
Best of DIGit 2006
Restate of the Union
Jorge Aguirre, Jr.
Jorge Aguirre, Jr. currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
He continues to make contemporary paintings and create short videos.
Aguirre was born in San Salvador, El Salvador in 1979, and his family
came to the United States in 1981 where Aguirre grew up in a Chicago
suburb. He received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago,
majoring in Studio Arts/Video.
The DIGit jury was in total agreement when they chose Restate of
the Union as Best of Show. The judges have even given very detailed
instructions on exactly how his extraordinary work must be presented to
audiences. Aguirre's work presents a very common image of our collective
social experience - only he has "framed" this material in a most
revealing way.
Best Documentary
Don't Box Me In
Richard Fendelman
The 35-minute movie depicts what director Richard Fendelman calls
"development-friendly" politicians pitted against neighborhood people
fighting to keep Home Depot's "ugly big box" out of Coconut Grove,
Florida. Fendelman, who has a production company in the area, said he
wasn't involved in the battle when asked by a group called "Grove First"
to make a movie.
The film features Home Depot executives at public meetings, though
none gave interviews; Pictured here is well-known artist, Freda Tschumy
with her bronz sculpture of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. Don't Box Me In
depicts an overdeveloped Miami, including traffic and stacks of Home
Depot merchandise, against the backdrop ofthe artsy Coconut Grove
village. The battle rages on - will the the united folks win or lose?
Best Narrative
Dress Up
Karen Lawler
A young woman's past and present meet when a fight with her lover
turns violent. This film brings to light the cycle of abuse that many
women endure and perpetuate as mother, wife, and daughter.
Karen Lawler is a New York/Paris-based moviemaker and installation
artist whose work has been presented at international festivals and
venues including the Melbourne International Film Festival, the Bangkok
Experimental Film Festival, the Splitski Film Festival in Croatia, and the
Darklight Festival in Dublin. Her multimedia installations have been
presented at performances venues including the Interferences Biennale,
the Kitchen in New York and Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, France.
Best Experimental Work
The Subway Show
Nurit Bar-shai & Kleoni Manoussakis
The artists from Nazareth, Israel and Brooklyn, NY worked in
colaboration to create a one-time-only performance for video - doing
so without a NYC Transit permit. The Subway Show frames the familiar
in order to point out both the obvious as a unique event - and the desire
to be swept away by things we encounter in our everyday life.
Best Animation
Little Strong
Kao Kuo-Ting, WangTsai-Pin, Liang Hsiu-Hui
The war between cockroaches and humankind has been going on for
several thousand years. Little Strong is a work in which the team
used hand-drawn techniques. The artists, based in Taipei, Taiwan
and Forest Hills, NY, created this hybrid-art project using
the "paint-on-glass" animation technique for each frame.
Presented in Taiwanese language with english & mandarin subtitles.
Best Student Work
Wal-Mart Comes To Town
Eldred High School - World News Class: Joshua Glantz, Director
This project was created and produced by students from 9th to 12th
grade, and was facilitated by their teacher, Joshua Glaztz. In this
mockumentary, the students shot all the movie content, wrote the
scripts, and did all the production work on school computers.
Best Musical Work
Roebling Resonance
Kazzrie Jaxen
DIGit's second weekend begins on Thursday, August 24, with a singular
outdoor event in the Upper Delaware River Valley. You will stand on the
oldest suspension bridge in America, the Roebling Bridge. Sound wiil echo
off the ridge tops. Broadcast and cybercast by WJFF - the right stereo
sound will come from the N.Y. side of the river, and the left stereo will
come from the P.A. side at the Roebling Bridge. The National Park
Service has granted a "special use" permit for the landmark bridge.
Technology is provided by Woodstock Stage & Screen.
Kazzrie Jaxen has created a 14-minute work for DIGit 2006. In
preparation for the project, she visited the bridge site several times.
She points out that the underside of the Roebling looks exactly like the
inner action of a piano - and it is constructed from wood and metal
strings - just like her instrument.
Jaxen's work will be presented - along with performance and projections
by Bridge Arts, poetry by Upper Delaware Writers Collective, original
music & sound, and audio art by Locus Sonus from Aix-en-Provence,
France.
2006 DIGit Special Awards:
DIGit Jurors Award
James Ruggles Honesdale, Pennsylvania
DIGit Founders Award
Keng-Ming Liu Taipei City, Taiwan
DIGit Directors Award
Ramona Jan & Joan Rafferty Damascus, Pennsylvania
DIGit Best PodArt . . . DIGit 022
Ricardo Hernandez Portland, Oregon
2006 DIGit Official Selections:
Marie-Josee Saint-Pierre Montreal, Canada
Paulina Shur Lathem, New York
Dawn Westlake Los Angeles, California
Keng-Ming Liu Jersey City, New Jersey
Michael Ballou Brooklyn, New York
Sean Devlin Vancover, BC Canada
Jan Philip Safarik San Francisco, California
Skip Blumberg New York, New York
David Khachatorian Los Angeles, California
John Cantino Apollo, Pennsylvania
Diane Nerwen Brooklyn, New York
Blake Carrington Louisvile, Kentucky
Scott Healy Grahamsville, New York
Robert Roe Brooklyn, New York
Mike Fisher San Antonio, Texas
Nathaniel Katz Juniper, Florida
Linda Laundra New York, New York
Benjamin Duke Baltimore, Maryland
Jonathan Zalben New York, New York
...and in the Arts Center Galleries:
[PAM]
Hans-Christoph Steiner
G.H. Hovagimyan
Brian Caiazza
Deven Simunovich
Jim Stratton
Armand Agresti
Stephen Morse
Nika Offenbac
Allan Rubin
John Tomlinson
Talia Segal-Fidler
Lani Sciandra Bullock
Daria Dorosch
Ricardo Hernandez
iPods & more
The art world and the media industry re-unite. Creative disciplines converge. Distribution methods implode and evolve. From
August 19 - 27 media, movies, and video art from around the world will be featured in our galleries, thearters and podcasts.
A powerful conduit for this work!
DIGit will open on August 19 with a reception and media lounge in the Delaware Arts Center on Main Street in Narrowsburg with Perpetual Art Machine [PAM], a living archive of 21st century international video art featuring over 500 videos and over 300 artists from over 50 countries.
[PAM] is one of the fastest growing international community video-art portals on the Internet today. [PAM]’s rapid growth leverages the full potential of convergent media, advanced computing and database technologies not only to stream video artists' work online, but also to exhibit video in large-scale interactive installations. In the Delaware Arts Center galleries for the entire week will be kiosks, large-screen installations, video iPods and other music and media installations along with special events at the Tusten Theatre.
At 8:00 p.m. on August 19, a tribute to Nam June Paik, known as the founder of video art, created by Skip Blumberg, will be presented at North American Cultural Laboratory (NACL) in Highland Lake, NY.
On Friday, August 25, independent filmmaker DeeDee Halleck will speak and show her work at Sullivan County Community College. DeeDee Halleck is a media activist and co-founder of Paper Tiger Television and the Deep Dish Satellite Network, the first grassroots community television network. Halleck is Professor Emerita in the Department of Communication at the University of California at San Diego. Her first film, "Children Make Movies" (1961), was about a film-making project at the Lillian Wald Settlement in Lower Manhattan. Her film, "Mural on Our Street" was nominated for Academy Award in 1965. She has led media workshops with elementary school children, reform-school youth and migrant farmers. Her work has been featured in installations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Austrian Triennial of Photography, the Bellevue Art Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum, among others. She co-coordinated a twelve part series on the prison industrial complex in the United States entitled "Bars and Stripes." Visit www.deedeehalleck.org.
The artists, movie makers, and content creators really dug the event in 2004 and 2005 — and there were sold-out audiences. DIGit 2006 will be held in seven locations around Sullivan County, New York. See you in "The Garden."
Summer is a great time to come to "The Garden." Only 2 hours from NYC — you can climb a Catskill Mountain, visit the site of the original Woodstock event, and ride the Upper Delaware — the only free-flowing, crystal-clear river in the East with eagles flying overhead.
DIGit is reviewed by on-site audits - and is made possible by a major grant from the New York State Council on the Arts
& Etant donnés: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art. Additional support from IN8SKILS, nujus.net, and The Thing.
Produced by Woodstock Stage & Screen & OurstoryMedia, LLC
Made possible in part by:
