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Escape the heat! Go to Thundergulch!
Every Thursday (through July 31) at 12:30 p.m. you can sit in front of a 14-foot video-wall in the super-air-conditioned lobby of 55 Broad Street, the newly dubbed New York Information and Technology Center. It's a brilliant way to beat the heat, and you get to see some of the newest video art.
Even if you're not in the neighborhood, it's worth picking up lunch and heading on down. Who knows, maybe you'll find a hundred-dollar-bill in the gutter. It is near Wall Street!
On July 3, Thundergulch showcased selections from the New York Video Festival. Among the selections were a hilarious high-speed slapstick toxic adventure by Torsten Z. Burns and Anthony Discenza, and a satire by Anne McGuire of a 1960's cabaret singer who appears to have crossed the line into insanity.
Also featured were the more poetic Window by Nelson Henricks, which examines both perception and time's passing through fragments of text and images glimpsed over the course of many seasons out of one window. Another tape, Once, by Romeo Doron Alaeff, uses the image of words appearing on a computer screen to convey a painful family secret. In this simple form of expression, complete with typos, the pain is acknowledged but the secret is also made humorous and even banal.
George Barber creates an eerie family portrait in Withdrawal, in which he gradually erases both family members and aspects of the landscape they walk through, so that only one lone boy is left walking in the end across an empty expanse of green. In Chris Giradet's Release, a seconds-long clip from King Kong is slowed down and played over and over again, so that the captured starlet first contorts into a violent sexual dance which then releases into an extended scream.
The work on view ranges from the awesomely high-end digital to the doggedly low tech. The ideas behind the tapes are similarly diverse, from the effects of technology to the existence of UFO's.
Coming up this month:
July 17 -- Doree Seligmann from Lucent Technologies demonstrates the Metaphorium, an experimental Web site for exploring new models for virtual communications.
July 24 -- A virtual rehearsal of the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre in the U.S. with the the St. Petersburg Academy of Theatre Arts (live from Russia)
July 31 -- Works from Film/Video Arts
For more info call (212) 634-9660.
MEGHAN GERETY is an artist who lives and works in New York City. She writes about digital art for Tribeca 75, a magazine published in Paris.
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