Crippled Symmetry (What Would Morton Feldman Do?): Migrating Media: Upstate Preservation Network Project Launch

Friday, April 24

Migrating Media: Upstate Preservation Network Project Launch

From the press release:

Buffalo, New York is the new home of a major media arts preservation initiative, Migrating Media: Upstate Preservation Network. This Friday, April 24th at 8pm, Squeaky Wheel/Buffalo Media Resources will host a public launch of this newly established digitization project that will rescue historic analog video collections. Thousands of fragile videotapes, currently in grave risk of complete decay, will not only be saved but made accessible to audiences for the first time in years. A screening of newly digitized works, which demonstrate the unique video art history of Upstate and Western New York, will follow a description of the project and an overview of the capabilities of newly donated digital migration equipment. The screening will feature works produced during residencies at the Experimental Television Center, previously preserved by the Standby Program (NYC), including works by Gary Hill, Barbara Hammer, Matthew Schlanger, Peer Bode, Connie Coleman and Alan Powell.

Migrating Media was established to offer non-profit arts and cultural organizations in Upstate New York a forward-looking and efficient means to digitize significant older video collections for preservation and access for generations to come. A new partnership project of Squeaky Wheel, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and the Experimental Television Center (Owego, New York), Migrating Media has been made possible by a generous donation of a SAMMA Solo System by Jim Lindner, founder of Media Matters and SAMMA Systems. Migrating Media has also received additional support from the New York State Council on the Arts Technical Assistance Program and RTI, Inc. For more information, please contact Hallwalls' Media Arts Director Carolyn Tennant (carolyn@hallwalls.org)

Friday April 24th 2009 - 8pm, Squeaky Wheel, 712 Main St. $6 general/$4 members. Proceeds benefit the project.

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Who is Morton Feldman? (And Why Should I Care)?

A towering figure in 20th-century New Music, Morton Feldman radically re-imagined the possibilities of musical form through an approach to sound correlated with abstract painting. In 1973, Feldman became the Edgard Varèse Professor of Music at the University at Buffalo, a title he retained until his death in 1987. Feldman's tenure is emblematic of a renaissance period of progressive creative activity that brought Buffalo's cultural affiliations international acclaim.

What Would Morton Feldman Do? situates its speculations on multiple levels, firstly imagining the artist as an angry young man contemplating his social calendar. But WWMFD also addresses a larger crisis of relevance facing experimental culture in the 21st century. WWMFD builds on the city's radical legacy, but views history as a challenge to the present - what are you going to do NOW? WWMFD imagines its avant-classical hero wandering the crumbling streets in search of the new and the now, not through escapist longings for another era's modernisms but in concert with the cause of action necessitated by absence.

In this regard, WWMFD begins where Basta! Or Too Much! (We Will Always Know Ourselves), an avant-pop zine published locally from 1997-2001, left the page for the "stage." Collecting de facto proposals for civic reinvention utilizing the fractured experiments of Buffalo's postmodernist cultural community as blueprints, Basta! concerned itself not with art dialogue per se, but with changing what it means to grow up in a shrinking city. From these proposals (which tended to embrace rather than resist post-industrial existential crises) emerged a series of large scale multi-media events (Murder the Word) and ultimately, the performance program at Big Orbit Gallery. Big Orbit's "Soundlab" series, for which the venue of the same name was founded, was conceived of as a multi-faceted, continuously evolving "workshop" for the exploration of contemporary post-cultural incentives. Coming full circle, WWMFD hopes to re-contextualize Soundlab's explorations, and to include other relevant local sound and performance activities in its critical orbit.

Crippled Symmetry (What Would Morton Feldman Do?)

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Friday, April 24

Migrating Media: Upstate Preservation Network Project Launch

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