HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON
Thanks, Gerry Fialka
pfsuzy@aol.com
bio https://www.laughtears.com/bio.html
https://laughtears.com/
"Gerry Fialka is Los Angeles' preeminent underground film curator." - CinemaWithoutBorders.com
GERRY in MICHIGAN and NEW MEXICO, March & April 2014 -
for immediate release
contact: Gerry Fialka 310-306-7330 pfsuzy@aol.com and manager@buckhamgallery.org,
Buckham Gallery presents the interactive workshop MEDIA ECOLOGY with GERRY FIALKA on Saturday, March 22 at 2pm at 134 1/2 West 2nd St, Flint, MI 48502, 810-239-6233, free admission
Artist Gerry Fialka's interactive workshop probes the relationship between humans and the environments caused by our inventions. We examine the hidden psychic effects in order to cope with them. Fialka interconnects the creative process with current events and current inventions. Reinvent Marshal McLuhan's axioms: "we shape our tools, then they shape us" and "breakdowns as breakthroughs." "Great artists are not ahead of their time. They are their time." - Martha Graham. "Artists are engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because they are the only people who live in the present." - Wyndham Lewis.
Fialka probes technology and culture via McLuhan's "the word makes the market" as "the mobile gaming market makes the word." Examine the computer, tablets and cellphones as new art forms, and their content issues. Uncover the psychological and neuromuscular effects of apps, Wii, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, live video streaming and whatever is next. Reshape the LA Times question: "Is it possible to make games meaningful and closer to other media in their potential to reflect the complexities of life rather than smashing zombies all day? " Duh ! Is the mystery of art, technology, and new media to activate or pacify?
"It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter. It's like setting up a distinction between didactic and lyric poetry on the ground that one teaches, the other pleases. However, it's always been true that whatever pleases teaches more effectively." - McLuhan, 1957. The word "pleases" evokes the word "massages," as in Marshall's book The Medium is the Massage.
McLuhan hoicked up mindfulness as a path to cope with media's hidden effects by devising the Tetrad, four questions one can apply to media: 1) What does it enhance or intensify? 2) What does it render obsolete or replace? 3) What does it bring back that was previously obsolesced? 4) What does it become when pressed to an extreme, what does it flip into? McLuhan defined "media" and "technology" as anything humans invent from clothing to computers, from language to philosophy, from toothpicks to cell phones. Prominent digital artist Cory Arcangel credits Pauline Oliveros, with whom he took a composition class, for his "fascination with finding artistic inspiration in unlikely machines."
GERRY FIALKA: Artist, writer, and paramedia ecologist lectures world-wide on experimental film, avant-garde art and subversive social media. Fialka has been praised by the Los Angeles Times as "the multi-media Renaissance man." The LA Weekly proclaimed him "a cultural revolutionary." "Gerry Fialka is a meteor shower in the contemporary media arts discourse." - Filmmaker Craig Baldwin. Fialka bio - https://www.laughtears.com/bio.html
Fialka is a former Flint Institute of Arts student, the first graduate from Powers High School in Flint, and a honor graduate from The University of Michigan. He has lectured at FIA on Pixelvision, Culture Jamming, Advertising As Art, and The Machine As Art. His videos have played in FIA's Fleckenstein Gallery many times in the past. Fialka attends the Ann Arbor Film Festival every year, often presenting workshops there. While in Michigan from his home in Venice, California, Fialka also presents events at Buckham Gallery, Crazy Wisdom Bookstore, and lectures at U of M, the College of Creative Studies, Oakland University, Saginaw Valley State University among many other colleges and venues.
ALSO -
***The Flint Institute of Arts's Fleckenstein Gallery will screen the video installation I Think I'm In Something from March 1-31, 2014. http://www.flintarts.org/ 1120 E Kearsley St, Flint, MI 48503, 810-234-1695
I THINK I'M IN SOMETHING (2012, 8 minutes) Gerry Fialka and Clifford Novey's Pixelvision video installation hybridizes beautiful dancers, psychedelic guitar and cosmic jazz to the randomness of an airdancer's movements in Venice, California. "Mesmerizing to experience" - author/film scholar Beverly Gray. If you can't say it, sing it, and if you can't sing it, dance it
https://www.laughtears.com/FIA_blurb.html
*** Thurs March 20 at 7pm at The Pickle Fort, 1141 Hermitage SE, Grand Rapids MI 49506, 616-753-8381, free admission, donations appreciated - Sean Kenny proudly presents Gerry Fialka's PORTRAIT OF THE POET AS EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKER - Historian/Lit Critter Gerry Fialka's interactive workshop (WITH LIVE POETRY and MUSIC FROM LOCALS) examines the interconnections between film, poetry & music. These artforms expand our notions of reality both inner and outer. How is the interior dialogue (consciousness) the essence of the human condition? How does it inform content vs. form issues? Explore Poe, the Symbolists, Hollis Frampton, Walt Whitman, William Farley, Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, Henry Ferrini, Robert Creeley, and Beat films up to contemporary New Media makers. Drawing on witty and insightful analysis of poet/experimental filmmakers Jean Cocteau, James Broughton, Maya Deren, Marie Menken, Abigail Child, Bob Branaman, Jack Smith, Yoko Ono and Stan Brakhage, Fialka reviews first-person lyrical visions. This multi-media event includes rare film clips of Diane DiPrima, Amiri Baraka, Bukowski, Beckett, Burroughs and Gary Snyder, as well as live readings accompanied by film projections that stir up new metaphors via self-reflexive synthesis. Come into deeper awareness of synesthesia and the non-physical via spoken word and moving image art. "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." - Oscar Wilde. Radically change the paradigms of sense ratio shifting. Turn the eye into an ear ala McLuhan's percepts. Fialka's observations provoke the rascality retrieval of Man (Cine-poem) Ray and Curtis Harrington, who transformed Poe into cinema. "Poets understand texts better than most information technologists." - Jerome McGann. "You don't have to be a communist to be anti-capitalist. It is enough to be a poet." - Jonas Mekas, seminal experimental filmmaker.
***April 2 from 6-9pm, Fialka will host POLITICAL POETRY AS JAMES JOYCE & MARSHALL McLUHAN - Gerry Fiallka's interactive workshop includes local poets. We'll delve deep into timely current issues & events via live readings and new questions. What's the difference between rights & responsibilities? revolution & rebellion? Percept plunder for the recent future. In 2014, book readers across the world celebrate the publications of two books: James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (75th year) and Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (50th year). Fialka will interconnect these with poetry and politics. "World War III will be a global information war with no division between civilian and military participation." and "The police state is now a work of art." and "Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity - Marshall McLuhan. "It is a curious thing how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve." - James Joyce.
AT Crazy Wisdom Bookstore, 114 S Main St, Ann Arbor, MI 48104, 734-665-2757, free admission http://www.crazywisdom.net/
Thank you,
Gerry Fialka
pfsuzy@aol.com
310-306-7330
https://www.laughtears.com/ and http://venicewake.org/
https://laughtears.com/workshops_summary.html
https://laughtears.com/workshops5.html
https://laughtears.com/FIA_blurb.html
"As this modern digital Dark Age of technological advances threatens to drive physical film stock itself -- the very stuff from which dreams are made -- into extinction, this evening of Genuine Fake Films by Gerry Fialka couldn't come at a more propitious moment. One of Los Angeles' great celluloid underworld overlords, relentless cultural provocateur and filmmaker Fialka has been successfully bedeviling our popular consciousness since the late 20th century. A recognized artistic force since his early 1970s breakout as head shot-caller at the notorious Ann Arbor Film Co-op and renowned as the veteran curator of PXL THIS, Hollywood's second oldest film festival, any presentation of Fialka's work is guaranteed to rate as a mind-bending affair. Framed as an evening of "short films and interactive discussion," featured titles include 2009's Eye Am Not a Robot; 2008's All Advertising Advertises Advertising; and Double Duty Interrobang, Fialka's 2003 Pixelvision (read: Fischer Price toy video camera) eyebrow raiser. It's a veritable stampede of visual strangeness, theoretical acrobatics and sociocultural redefinition, all delivered through the singular prism of Fialka's self-defined prime directive: 'exploration of the hidden psychic effects of human inventions.' Topped off by a climactic Q&A between Fialka and moderator David James, the noted School of Cinematic Arts prof, this one is sure to set your cerebellum a-rattle." - Jonny Whiteside LA Weekly 1-11-13
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THE GUILD CINEMA, 3405 CENTRAL AVE. NE, ALBUQUERQUE, NM 87106, 505-255-1848 www.guildcinema.com
http://guildcinema.com/movie/1071
Monday April 21, 2014, two different shows at 6:00pm and 8:00pm - $7 PER PROGRAM, or $10 BOTH
AS PART OF EXPERIMENTS IN CINEMA V9.72! http://www.experimentsincinema.com/
6pm- HOT DOCS AS SUBVERSIVE ART - Filmmaker Gerry Fialka probes the hottest new documentary innovators, including Joshua Oppenheimer, Rodney Ascher, Lucy Walker, Penny Lane, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, Barbara Kopple, Aron Ranen, Ondi Timoner, Alex Gibney and more. Why is there such a rise in documentary popularity? How and why are new documentaries generating and reinforcing mistrust in mainstream media? Do they more activate or pacify the audience? Delve deep into Direct Cinema (Mayles, Leacock, Pennabaker, Wiseman) and Cinema Verite (Vertov, Rouch) by interconnecting the similarities and differences. Sociologist Edgar Morin coined the term "direct cinema" in 1960, and in discussing the difference between direct cinema and cinema verite, wrote, "There are two ways to conceive direct cinema: the first is to pretend that you can present reality to be seen; the second is to pose the problem of reality. In the same way, there are two ways to conceive cinema verite. The first is to pretend that you brought truth. The second is to pose the problem of truth." Investigate how direct cinema and cinema verite reveal underlying truths, ambiguity, mystery and the complexity of the characters. "Chris Marker was quick to rephrase as 'ciné, ma vérité' (cinema, my truth) Rouch and Morin’s quasi-scientific-sounding translation of Dziga Vertov’s kino-pravda, signaling that he had no intention of abandoning personal expression as a means of engaging with the world." - Catherine Lupton. Analyze fly-on-the-wall and fly-in-the-soup approaches. With rare film clips and discussion on how we perceive the world. What is the story, and then, what is the "real" story? How and why are new documentaries generating and reinforcing mistrust in mainstream media? Do they more activate or pacify the audience?
8pm- PORTRAIT OF THE POET AS EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKER - Historian/Lit Critter Gerry Fialka's interactive workshop examines the interconnections between film and poetry. These artforms expand our notions of reality both inner and outer. How is the interior dialogue (consciousness) the essence of the human condition? How does it inform content vs. form issues? Explore Poe, the Symbolists, Hollis Frampton, Walt Whitman, William Farley, Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, Henry Ferrini, Robert Creeley, and Beat films up to contemporary New Media makers. Drawing on witty and insightful analysis of poet/experimental filmmakers Jean Cocteau, James Broughton, Maya Deren, Marie Menken, Abigail Child, Bob Branaman, Jack Smith, Yoko Ono and Stan Brakhage, Fialka reviews first-person lyrical visions. This multi-media event includes rare film clips of Diane DiPrima, Amiri Baraka, Bukowski, Beckett, Burroughs and Gary Snyder, as well as live readings accompanied by film projections that stir up new metaphors via self-reflexive synthesis. Come into deeper awareness of synesthesia and the non-physical via spoken word and moving image art. "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." - Oscar Wilde. Radically change the paradigms of sense ratio shifting. Turn the eye into an ear ala McLuhan's percepts. Fialka's observations provoke the rascality retrieval of Man (Cine-poem) Ray and Curtis Harrington, who transformed Poe into cinema. "Poets understand texts better than most information technologists." - Jerome McGann. "You don't have to be a communist to be anti-capitalist. It is enough to be a poet." - Jonas Mekas, seminal experimental filmmaker.
GERRY FIALKA: Artist, writer, and paramedia ecologist lectures world-wide on experimental film, avant-garde art and subversive social media. Fialka has been praised by the Los Angeles Times as "the multi-media Renaissance man." The LA Weekly proclaimed him "a cultural revolutionary."
"Gerry Fialka is a meteor shower in the contemporary media arts discourse." - Filmmaker Craig Baldwin. Fialka bio - https://www.laughtears.com/bio.html
Laughtears.com
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