Friday, May 10th, 9:00pm
Videopolis
The Metro Gallery
1700 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21201

FREE!

Sight Unseen has teamed up with The Metro Gallery to present an evening of expanded cinema as part of the 2013 Videopolis festival featuring performances by Thomas Dexter, Jeff Donaldson, and Greg St. Pierre.

These three artists reconfigure analogue technologies to create their improvised live performances, often subverting the original functions of their chosen media. Through tearing apart technology, destroying film stock, and re-purposing hardware, these artists defy the conventional modes of how to use their equipment. This practice results in the creation of unique, aesthetically contemporary visuals, allowing the artists to refute the notion that their technologies are becoming obsolete while offering a vision for the media’s future.

BIOS & PERFORMANCE NOTES

THOMAS DEXTER

Thomas Dexter is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. In work spanning film performance, single channel video, sound, and installation, Dexter explores compositional systems which upend normative configurations of image and sound, signal and noise, illusion and material. Through drawing attention to unfamiliar overlaps, folds and breaks in sensory experience, Dexter's work attempts to explore the perceptual structures that frame the commonplace.
Dexter's solo and collaborative projects have been featured at Microscope Gallery, Experimental Intermedia, PS1, Roulette, The New York Museum of Art and Design, Sight and Sound Festival, Issue Project Room, the Mononoaware Festival, The Lesley Heller Workspace, Festival of Ideas for the New City, The Invisible Dog, Splatterpool, and ESP TV.

SQUARE/GETS/THE/CIRCLE

An expanded cinema performance involving light-to-sound synthesis, a prepared projection surface, and the destruction of the film.

Performance at Microscope Gallery 2012 from Thomas Dexter on Vimeo.

JEFF DONALDSON a.k.a. noteNdo

Jeff Donaldson is an audio/visual artist who has been working with feedback systems since the late 1980s. At the beginning of the new millennium, Donaldson began applying the concept of feedback to video game systems, transforming them into generative audio/visual instruments. Since publishing his video work online, Donaldson has exhibited internationally as well as helped to pioneer the fields of video bending and glitch aesthetics. He is currently based in New York.

INFINITE REGRESS

Infinite Regress -
A real-time audio/visual improvisation generated with a Panasonic video mixer. For Infinite Regress, the video output signal is split into two signals: one signal is sent to an audio processing device and the other is
sent back into the video input of the Panasonic creating a feedback loop.
Audio and video are therefore perceived as an abstract continuum which is guided live. What one sees is what one hears and what one hears is what
one sees.

❐ from Jeff Donaldson on Vimeo.

GREG ST. PIERRE

Greg St. Pierre is a video artist and live visual performance artist based out of Baltimore, MD. He works with custom systems of his own design, analogue video equipment, and analogue video synthesis modules to create immersive environments, interactive installations, and video performances in collaboration with the scores of many artists. Greg has collaborated with many different musical acts including Dan Deacon and Animal Collective and has performed with them in many different venues and festivals internationally.

GSP’s performance at Videopolis will involve his newest analogue video synthesizer and a composed experimental score.

Graffiti Weave from Greg St. Pierre on Vimeo.

ABOUT VIDEOPOLIS

In an effort to promote explorations into the tangible boundaries of the moving image the Metro Gallery presents Videopolis, a video installation exhibition with limited selected performances. Held across the street from the Charles Theater during the Maryland Film Festival, Videopolis features work that doesn’t make more traditional festival formats. Videopolis hopes to juxtapose various forms of film and video, along with other mediums that comment upon or investigate the moving image, together in a relaxed environment for the enjoyment of artists, festival-goers and random passers-by. With people on all sides of the lens exploring how different disciplines may work together, the results are expected to be innovative and entertaining. This year May 9th – 11th, 2013, the Videopolis video installation exhibition will open with performances in the evenings, and run through the rest of the month of May.