Submissions are free and can include work in the following categories:
Animation + short form: progressive work of under 30 minutes across music video, animation, motion graphics, narrative shorts, artists moving image, documentary and generative art.
Feature films: onedotzero seeks feature-length work with an alternative aesthetic and distinctive directorial approach for the big screen.
Live audio-visual performances: onedotzero has a passion for presenting narrative driven live cinema, original VJ sets and unexpected collaborations between musicians and artists.
Installations: onedotzero is keen to receive submissions of engaging audiovisual installation and compelling interactive experiences. Both existing work and proposals for new projects will be considered. Please provide details of the technical delivery in your ideas.

Deadline for receiving entries is 30 June 2010.

Popular Unrest, Melanie Gilligan

From 7 May to 20 June Chisenhale Gallery premieres a new film and installation commission by Melanie Gilligan. Gilligan works in video, performance, text, installation and music. Her new film Popular Unrest is a multi-episode drama set in a future much like the present that explores a world in which the self is reduced to physical biology. All exchange transactions and social interactions are overseen by a system called ‘the Spirit’. As a rash of unexplained killings breaks out across the globe, groups of unrelated people begin to come together everywhere – unaccountably  feeling a deep and persistent sense of connection to one another.

Popular Unrest is co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London, Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver and Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre, Banff. Supported by Galleria Franco Soffiantino, Turin.

Melanie Gilligan lives and works in London and New York.  In 2008 she released Crisis in the credit system, a four-part fictional mini drama about the recent financial crisis, made specifically for internet viewing and distribution, commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction. In 2009 she completed a single screen film Self-capital (2009), commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts London as part of the group exhibition Talk Show. In October 2009 Gilligan was the recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists.

Amnesia, Cordelia Swann

A total of 145 works from 40 countries will vie for awards worth 40,500 euros at the 56th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Five competitions will be held this year: the International Competition, German Competition, NRW Competition, Children’s and Youth Film Competition and the MuVi Award for best German music video. Open to all themes and genres, and for film as well as video formats, Oberhausen’s competitions attract entries covering the full spectrum of the short form today. The nominees have been chosen from over 5,400 submissions received from 86 countries.

British entries in the International Competition include:

Amnesia, Cordelia Swann, 2009, 7’30”
Den mörka ön,  Jöns Mellgren, 2009, 9’30”
Electric Light Wonderland, Susanna Wallin, 2009, 12
Flag Mountain, John Smith, 2010, 8’30”
Fly in the Sky, Vera Neubauer, 2010, 5′
Monolog, Laure Prouvost, 2009, 9′
The Shutdown, Adam Stafford, 2009, 10′
Transmission for Year 0,  Emily McMehen / Geoffrey Sautner, 2009, 12′

A complete list of all films selected for the competitions can be found at www.kurzfilmtage.de

ArtSway

Multichannel 2010 is a screening programme of artists film and video, organised and curated by ArtSway and SCAN in ArtSway’s galleries, 2-11 April 2010. This year Multichannel is in association with Animate Projects.

The theme – Variable Economies – implies the current global economic downturn, decreased availability of resources influenced by human intervention in the natural environment, shifts in national and global political emphasis, and formally in relation to the making of artist film and video.

Artists are invited to submit works for selection that touch upon the themes of the programme in terms of the use of the medium/material of film and video. Deadline for submission is 28 January 2010. Details at artsway.org.uk.

Aurora 2009

Dates: 5-15 November | Location: Norwich

Aurora is a unique festival based in Norwich which focuses on artists’ moving image in the most diffuse sense. Under the theme Common Ground, this year’s festival spans ten days, with a Festival Week (5 – 12 November) of films, live music, workshops and talks; and the unique Festival Weekend (13 – 15 November), an antidote to the ever-bigger, ever-faster policy forced upon moving image festivals and attempt to create a temporary community, in which divisions between guest artists and audience are dismantled.

Highlights of the Festival Weekend include programmes of work by artists Jem Cohen (New York), Milena Gierke (Berlin) and Jon Bang Carlsen, introduced by the artists; discussion sessions about the moving image as social project with Beatrice Gibson, Shezad Dawood, Mark Wilsher and Graeme Hogg; and about the moving image and the social network with Jamie King, Richard Wright, Andrew Kotting and Gareth Evans.

The Festival Week features a packed programme of workshops with Alex Mackenzie, Milena Gierke, Richard Wright’s Video Sniffin’ and others, plus live music and film.

For more information about tickets, accommodation deals and online booking, visit aurora.org.uk.

Look out for our upcoming interviews with Festival Director Adam Pugh and artist Richard Wright.

Showing the festival: Gustav Deutsch's FILM IST. a girl & a gun

APEngine talks to Mark Webber about his programming for the London Film Festival.

How – why – did you start programming?

As a teenager I was obsessed with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground and reading books about The Factory and getting a little glimpse into that world, the New York underground. That’s my way in.

I desperately tried to see the films that were not easily available at the time. Definitely the Warhol films were not available. I can never remember whether the first thing I saw was Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle or a double bill of Ken Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures at the Scala. And I was sort of sold on the basis of that screening – as a 17 year old kid.

But it was several years later that you began to pursue that professionally, as it were.

I’m not sure it’s a profession, it’s an enthusiasm.
The first thing I did was a club night at the ICA called Little Stabs at Happiness, which started in October 1997 and ran once a month for three years. Then I did a large film season for the Barbican and LUX Centre called Underground America in 1998. It was a survey of American avant-garde film from the ‘50s to the ‘70s.

You’re not just a fan … you do a lot of research don’t you – and talk especially to the an older generation of film makers. Would you describe yourself as primarily a programmer or curator or historian or what?

I think you were right when you said fan, it’s really just because I’m interested and I want other people to appreciate the films. One of the reasons I started was because I was hungry to see films and no one else was showing them.

Something I think you’ve achieved – maybe not you alone – is to have transformed the approach to presenting what used to be called ‘difficult work’. You’ve built a community and you create ‘events’. Is that what you meant by the appropriate context?  Because it’s not just about making the appropriate context for the work, it’s making an appropriate context for an audience as well, isn’t it?

Well, when I first became interested I would go to screenings and there’d be me, often the organiser – thought not always – and perhaps three or four other people and it was just so appallingly depressing. I just knew that the work deserved better so I tried to find ways to make it more approachable for people.

And you don’t need to do that so much anymore – you’ve conditioned your audience so, so well. Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange they will sit through everything!

Yes, in a way my job is done here. I don’t do much programming at the moment – there’s so much more going on now  that I don’t really need to. I don’t need to bang my head against the wall anymore.

But it always needs sustaining doesn’t it? And there’s always other stuff to show.
How long have you been programming at the London Film Festival?

I organised some performances by Ken Jacobs in 2000, and slowly the situation became more formalised. For the past five or six years we’ve had this curated weekend of screenings.

And it’s a weekend within the Experimenta programme isn’t it?  It’s not the whole Experimenta programme.

It’s not, no.  Experimenta is a broad church.

How would you describe the weekend?  Would you use the words ‘avant’ and ‘garde’?

I have done in the past but the more observant viewers may have noticed that particular phrase was phased out last year. I used to colloquially call it the ‘avant-garde weekend’ and now I don’t. I used to use the phrase ‘in the tradition of the avant-garde’ which is somewhat a misnomer, but by saying that, people could get some kind of handle on the kind of work it might be.

But even Experimenta, and your weekend within it, aren’t pretending to be a kind of survey of this year’s artists’ experimental film are they?

Aren’t they? There are certain restrictions, such as a requirement for UK premieres – which I think it’s a completely obsolete concept – but outside of that, we try to present something like a survey.

Well, within Experimenta there seem to be some quite straightforward films, while people like Shirin Neshat, Kutlug Ataman and Andrew Kötting are outside the Experimenta strand.

I never know what’s in the festival programme until I get the brochure, apart from what I do. So I’m also struggling with the idea that there are these other artists making feature films – and what that means in relation to the people that I show within this concentrated weekend.

It seems a little surprising that there aren’t those curatorial discussions going on within the Festival. I guess it’s hard to deliver a Festival and have space for that as well.

They give me total freedom really to do what I want, which is great, but sometimes I’m not sure how it fits in with everything else. In the beginning, I did fight for this aspect of the programme to have a separate identity, and the Festival resisted. It may be they were right in the end.

That approach gets you an audience, doesn’t it? Because your audience knows where to go, and when to go there. There is this weekend and there is this grouping of work, a particular kind of work.

But what always surprises me is that it’s not very predictable as to who actually comes. I don’t see the faces that I might expect to see at an avant-garde screening. That is a great thing – the Festival effect of bringing in a different audience.

I’ve definitely thought there were people who are from other parts the Festival as it were.

I think that’s good, and it’s not like they leave after ten minutes when they realise they’re in the wrong film. They seem to cope with what’s being put in front of them. I hope they come to other films throughout the year, that this is not just their one attempt.

Hollis Frampton looks like a highlight of the programme.

It’s the one thing that everybody’s talking to me about, and I’m not too sure why because it’s old stuff. These seven films that make up Hapax Legomena were conceived by Frampton to be a single combined film, or parts of the same film. It’s rare that we would get a chance to see them all together, and since the films have recently been preserved,  we can show them in new prints. That will be a nice change from the ropey copies we’re used to looking at.

We can read the books that tell us what films are classics and where they’re important, but it’s good now and then to actually face up to films and make up our own minds. So this is London’s opportunity to make up its own mind about Hollis Frampton.

And a highlight, for me anyway, would be Gustav Deutsch.  That’s quite an easy sell isn’t it – to people who haven’t encountered avant-garde film before?

You would think so … because it’s about sex.

I was thinking of archive and cinema as much as sex!

Deutsch often works with what you might call ‘found footage’, but it’s not really ‘found’ because he works very hard to discover it in various archives. This film is basically about the creation of the earth and the battle of the sexes, told entirely through images from, maybe, the first four decades of cinema, including material from the Imperial War Museum and the Kinsey Institute.

And the rest of the programme – is it a good year for the avant-garde?

It’s not a bad year, though for various reasons I have fewer screenings than previously. There’s still quite a few things to discover.
I’m a big fan of Mara Mattuschka,  and I’ve shown most of her recent work. I’m not at all interested in dance on film, dance on camera, but she’s been working with the Liquid Loft troupe in Vienna, who are quite, I guess, ‘avant-garde’ in dance terms.

Mara’s made four films with them, and the latest is Burning Palace, which also approaches an adult theme. The performers are pretty amazing in the way that they contort themselves, and Mara brings something extra special in the way that she films and edits their performances.

And what’s the state of the British avant-garde?

I don’t know if there’s an avant-garde as such, though there are people working in that tradition. I don’t know what to call it anymore, in the past few years the field has become wide open. There are still a lot of people working with film and video in interesting ways. I don’t think we need to worry over that too much do we?

I think people working in that tradition are making sense in other contexts or to other contexts now as well. Karen Mirza and Brad Butler are in your programme, and they work within a broader art context too.

They do, and they also have a gallery exhibition open at the moment. You can think of the architecture of the cinema as traditional, and maybe this is boring for those that are attracted by the bright lights of the art world, but the cinema is still the best place to watch a film that has a beginning, a middle and an end.  

Artists moving image is everywhere at the moment, but it’s still not very often shown in a theatre, and for me that’s one of the most important things about this part of the festival.

Catch Mark Webber’s Artists’ Film and Video programme at the London Film Festival on 24-25 October.

FILM IST. a girl & a gun, Gustav Deutsch

Dates: 24-25 October 2009 | Location: BFI Southbank, London

At this year’s London Film Festival, Mark Webber presents a varied selection of international artists’ film and video works ranging from the contemporary ethnography of Mirza/Butler to Jim Trainor’s witty, naïve animation of ancient civilisations. Gustav Deutsch introduces FILM IST. a girl & a gun, a battle of the sexes told through footage from early cinema, and a special event featuring new prints of films by Hollis Frampton complements the recent publication of his collected writings.

Established filmmakers Lewis Klahr, Mara Mattuschka and Matthias Müller are shown alongside younger artists Paul Abbott, Jana Debus, and Laida Lertxundi, who are screening in the festival for the first time. Continuous installations by Laure Prouvost and Victor Alimpiev will be presented in the BFI Southbank Studio.

Elsewhere in the festival, look for new features by Johan Grimonperez, Andrew Kötting, Ken McMullen and Sam Taylor-Wood, preservations of The Savage Eye and Far From Vietnam and the rediscovery of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno.

For more details visit the Secret Cinema website or visit the BFI Southbank for tickets.

Dance, Alex Pearl

APEngine talks to artist and curator Kerry Baldry about the One Minute project programmes of sixty-second artists’ films, now showing around the world, and including works by Tony Hill, Tina Keane, Katherine Meynell, Kayla Parker and Stuart Moore, Dave Griffiths, and many others. One Minute films by Alex Pearl and Nick Jordan can be seen in the Engine Showcase.

Why and how did the One Minute project start?

I was working in a group of artists’ studios which had a large and infrequently used gallery space, and which was available to me. This was an opportunity too good to miss and exactly what I had been looking for a while! I set about contacting some artists whose work I was familiar with, to see if they would like to be involved in a group screening called One Minute and got a great response. From this, I was invited by Steven Ball to show One Minute Volume 1 at one of his Cogcollective events in London and the programme gained momentum from there. There are now three compilations: One Minute Volume 1, Volume 2 and 3 and I will soon be compiling Volume 4.

It’s a lot of work, and a lot of artists represented – how did you find it/them – did people make things specially, or did they already exist?

So far well over 50 national and international artists have been represented in One Minute across the three volumes. Generally I contact each artist individually and invite them to send some work – I’m usually already aware of their work – some I know personally, sometimes I go on recommendations. I am however, thinking an open call might be good to do. Some artists make pieces specifically for the programmes and others send existing work.

It’s a very eclectic range of people and work…

That was the intention and there are so many ways the artists have responded to the challenge of working within the limited time frame of 60 seconds.

You’re on Volume 3 now – people must be responding well to the project?

Yes – I have had a good response to the compilations, and the programmes have been screened nationally and internationally at various galleries and cinemas. The Directors Lounge in Berlin have showcased it at Contemporary Art Ruhr and regularly screen the work, as do Hull Film and Nod Gallery in Prague. Most recently Volumes 2 and 3 were screened on all the outdoor BBC Big Screens across the UK. Cogcollective (now recently started up in Australia) also have been very supportive. Last year David Gryn from Artprojx screened Volume 2 during the month of December in his gallery in Kensington. But I am always looking for new spaces for screenings.

You’re a curator and an artist – how do you see/manage those two things – are they separate, or integrated?

For me, being a curator and an artist are both integrated and separate activities. As a visual artist I have my own set of concerns and personal visual language but also my creative process involves editing and selecting visual imagery. As a curator or compiler I select and sequence short films by both established and emerging artists that I feel are appropriate for inclusion in the One Minute programme. I look for originality and highly creative moving image works which are successfully paced for 60 seconds.