Thursday, May 7, 2009 @ 7:00 PM
Featured Artist
Talking Points & Talking Ponies: An Evening with Ben Coonley
Artist-in-attendance
Video and new media artist Ben Coonley presents a selection of films and videos, Internet curiosities and avant-PowerPoint. Blending amateur and commercial conventions in seemingly unintended and accidental ways, Coonley dismantles and rearranges texts and subtexts of contemporary media culture. Singing hobby-horses teach the audience about film editing and explain the logic of global currency markets. Otto the Cat ponders the essence of contemporary interpersonal relationships, performed identities and 80’s sitcoms. All this, plus Jar-Jar Binks at Christo’s Gates and the world premiere of a documentary project the artist started in 1990. The presentation concludes with a short lecture delivered by the artist. 3D glasses provided.
Pre-Show slides for an eXperimental Audience
Ben Coonley
PowerPoint loop
A series of slides to edutain the audience while it waits for the screening to start. Customized for PDX, the show includes welcome messages on behalf of the festival, information for visitors to Portland, as well as an “eXperimental Legends” series of slides with intriguing facts about seminal figures from film history and contemporary underground filmmakers and artists.
The Future of Metal
Ben Coonley
24min/Video/1990-2009
Documentation of an ill-fated junior high school battle of the bands videotaped by the artist when he was 13-years-old and edited 19 years later.
Titanic
Ben Coonley
6.5 min/Super-8/1998
Hand-painted structural/materialist interpretation of James Cameron’s celebrated epic.
3D Trick Pony
Ben Coonley
5.5min/Anaglyph 3D video/2002
An audience-interactive demonstration of Lev Kuleshov’s famous editing experiment and a 3D review of loosely related principles of subject/spectator empathy.
Valentine for Perfect Strangers
Ben Coonley
3.5min/Video/2006
A romantic e-card from Otto, a feral cat seeking love from a stranger on the Internet. Otto edits himself into clips from the 1980’s sitcom Perfect Strangers and asks strangers on YouTube to return the favor.
Appropriation Piece
Ben Coonley
4.5min/Video/2008
An adjunct lecturer fields questions from a copyright-violating student.
Valentine for Russian Perfect Strangers
Ben Coonley
3.5min/Video/2007
A sequel/remake (semake? requel?) of “Valentine for Perfect Strangers” that was posted to Russian video-sharing sites on the one-year anniversary of Otto’s 2006 English valentine. Having failed to find love from the English-speaking world, Otto courts a Russian partner by cutting and pasting his head onto bootlegged bits of “Brothers Differently,” a contemporary Russian TV program based on the American “Perfect Strangers.”
Pony Changes Everything
Ben Coonley
9.5min/Video/2003
A man explains global currency markets without the help of his formerly-trusty rockin’ talkin’ pony, who is missing. Without the pony, the world is as disorienting as it is depressing. The audience is invited to help make order of the chaos.
The Best Gifts
Ben Coonley
2.5min/Video/2006
A short conversation between a volunteer tour guide and a tourist visiting Christo’s Central Park Gates installation. 3D model of Jar Jar Binks courtesy of scifi3d.theforce.net.
Remapping the Apparatus: Cinematographic Specificity and Hybrid Media
Ben Coonley
20min/PowerPoint Presentation/2006-2009
A PowerPoint presentation dissecting and recontextualizing the film theory of Jean-Louis Baudry.
