H_D Rants: Media Person, Money, Invented God and False Hope
| Brian Caiazza / G.H. Hovagimyan | 2006 | 4:00 min.

HD_Rants are broadcast quality high definition video works. Each piece is a short rant / meditation. Caiazza's brilliant post production editing in After Effects and the HD video puts these works in a realm of their own. Not music but not performance. HD_Rants uses words as repetitive percussive elements. Caiazza picks up on the ideas of sampling but in this case it's self-sampling and repetition.

Brian Caiazza is a young , up and coming, digital artist whose company in8skills <www.in8.com> has quickly gained a reputation as a key innovator in video and digital design and post production for such clients as VH-1, Nickelodeon, National Geographic, TNN, Aveda, Chanel, and DKNY.
G.H. Hovagimyan is a well known media artist whose vlog RANTAPOD <http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod>is an experimental video performance work made for video iPods.


Dark Meat or White Meat?
| Lin + Lam | 2006 | 15:00 min.
Every Thanksgiving since 1987, the US President has pardoned two turkeys so that 45 million may be slaughtered guilt-free. With the President’s sweeping powers, questions of life and death, freedom and imprisonment, hinge upon taste and personal preference akin to the choice of dark or white meat. The video offers counter-narratives to this highly prejudicial process: a humorous history of turkey pardon ceremonies contrasted with tickertape statistics detailing controversial pardons and the plummeting number of pardons granted since the 1980’s.

The artist team Lin + Lam makes multi-media projects including films, videos, installations, photos, sculpture, and actions. Their video Departure was selected for the Asian Vision Competition of the Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival and will be showing at the Rethinking Marxism conference, Amherst, MA, in October. Dark Meat or White Meat? was originally presented as an installation in an exhibition around the notion of forgiveness at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School.


Love Songs # 2 (War Songs): “Civil”
| Art Jones | 2006 | 3:30 min.


Art Jones is practically the Johnny Appleseed of video art, planting seeds at the Studio Museum of Harlem, School of Art Institute of Chicago, and others as professor, artist and lecturer. He knows what he’s talking about. His old skool cred is as a member of media activists Not Channel Zero and working with social commentators Public Enemy.


Love Songs # 2 (War Songs): “Desert For Real”
| Art Jones | 2006 | 3:17 min.



Art Jones is practically the Johnny Appleseed of video art, planting seeds at the Studio Museum of Harlem, School of Art Institute of Chicago, and others as professor, artist and lecturer. He knows what he’s talking about. His old skool cred is as a member of media activists Not Channel Zero and working with social commentators Public Enemy.



Logic | Perry Bard | 2006 | 2:29 min.

Philosopher Nick Pappas expounds on Aristotle’s definition of a syllogism using the Department of Homeland Security’s alert codes as inspiration. Footage of Homeland Security at work in NYC subway systems and airports mix with pure color while the syllogism dissolves into babble.

Perry Bard   has exhibited video and installations at MOMA New York,. PS 1 Museum, the Frac des Pays de la Loire, Sao Paolo Biennial, MOCA Georgia, Reina Sofia Museum Madrid, VIPER Basel amongst others. Her public video installations  are site specific and address cultural history and memory. Working with local community members she has developed pieces for the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, a JVC Video store in Sofia, Bulgaria, the Hotel Cristal in Bialystok Poland, Market Square in Middlesbrough, UK.



The Frequency Of The Sun | Jason | Boughton | 2005 | 10:00 min.

An American paratrooper tries to describe a firefight twice, but becomes confused; a confusion of places (Iraq, Kansas, London), times (1941, 1991, the present) and ways to die.
A gradual collage of Hollywood panorama, propaganda footage and combat reporting, The Frequency of the Sun plays a quotation game which is never fully resolved, tells a joke but the punch line is never entirely spoken. Performing a series of violent displacements of intention between mourning and celebration, the sky and the ground, Frequency is an exploration of the horizon line as the structuring element of American violence – an unreachable end-point, the boundless space which seems to verify a god-like power.

Boughton was born and raised in Washington State. He studied Literature and Studio Arts at The Evergreen State College. Now he lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is a MFA candidate in Visual Art at Columbia.



Coin Toss | Matthew Garrison | 2006 | 3:46 min.
Coin Toss connects a game of chance to ideas of fate and conflict by spinning silhouetted coins against a red background of archival war footage. The color red connects the imagery to violence and a state of emergency, while the choreographed coins represent players navigating a violent past. The game also draws attention to the polarization of conceptual and political issues within a system of heads or tails. The emotional cost of war is acknowledged in Coin Toss through wartime anonymity, intense color and the use of essential forms.

Matthew Garrison is a professor of Digital Art at Hunter College, NYC, and Albright College, Reading, PA. He received his MFA from Hunter College and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Selected exhibitions include the Roger Smith Lab Gallery in Manhattan, The University of Wisconsin’s Foster Gallery and the Waterfront Center for the Arts in Belfast, Ireland.


Flooded | Lisa Dahl | 2006 | 3:30 min.

Flooded employes materials associated with the simplicity and naiveté of childhood: sugar cubes, frosting, tic-tac mints and food coloring. Yet, it addresses serious topics of adulthood in its action: urban planning, dealing with natural disasters and loss. The disparate combination between medium and message creates a hope-filled empathy in the viewer with these child-like creations, even though we know what the ending will be.

Lisa Dahl hails from the suburbs of several states throughout this country, but has lived in the urban environment of New York City for the past ten years. She received her MFA from Rutgers University and a BA from Bowdoin College. Her current work deals with the suburban home as an icon of the ‘American Dream’ and its discontents. Recent exhibitions have included the Bronx Museum of Arts, Kouros Gallery, Nurture Art and PS122 Gallery. In spring of 2006, she was awarded a residency fellowship at the MacDowell Colony.