Hello
I am very interested in presenting a workshop/lecture/screening. Details follow. I'd be grateful for any suggestions (art, music, film, new media, critical studies professors) who may book me.
Please keep in mind I can also create a customized one, as I did for Jeanne Finley (SF's California College of the Arts) and her Land Art and Documentary students, entitled: Cinema: Fiction, Invention & Reality.
"Gerry Fialka's Pixelvision: Electronic Folk Art As McLuhan is deeply thoughtful and very well planned. This presentation offered an enormous range of ideas and references. His ideas are well integrated and clearly stimulated critical thinking in new ways. I especially appreciate the way he involved the all forty plus students, something rarely achieved in the course of a full semester let alone during one evening. His selection of video pieces is expertly planned, both in terms of variety and in its length within the context of the larger presentation. The evening succeeded in being both a primer on the value and history of Pixelvision but also positioned it within a philosophical framework that gives it far more meaning than the work could have had on its own." - Steve Anker, Dean of Film and Video, California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts).
The most recent additions include: Apps As Art, Christian Marclay As Culture Intercom, The Human Microphone, Psychosomatic Cinema, Bruce Conner As Culture Intercom, Sage Salons With Ed Ricketts & Lionel Ziprin, Live Cinema, Subversive Social Media, Chris Marker As Culture Intercom, Manny Farber & James Agee - Beyond Film Critics, Stanley Kubrick & James Joyce: Epiphanized Percepts, and more.
More details follow and check: https://www.laughtears.com/workshops4.html
I hope to hear from you soon.
Thank you,
Gerry Fialka
pfsuzy@aol.com
310-306-7330
Bio - https://www.laughtears.com/bio.html
https://www.laughtears.com/ and http://venicewake.org/
What the programmers and participants are saying about Gerry Fialka
1- Pixelvision: Electronic Folk Art As McLuhan - Gerry Fialka, Director of the 21 year old film festival PXL THIS, presents a fun interactive workshop on the Fisher Price PXL 2000 toy video camera. Delve deep into the significance of this raw DIY moving image art tool through the percepts of Marshall McLuhan, George Seaurat, Salvador Dali, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Frank Zappa & more. The irresistible irony of PXL is that the camera's ease-of-use and affordability, which entirely democratizes movie-making, has inspired the creation of some of the most visionary, avant and luminous films of our time. #1 at https://www.laughtears.com/workshops.html & https://www.laughtears.com/PXL-THIS-21.html and https://www.laughtears.com/PXL-THIS-22.html
2- APPS AS ART - Fialka probes art, culture and technology via McLuhan's "the word makes the market" as "the mobile gaming market makes the word." Question if the computer, tablets and cellphones are the new art form, not so much their content. Examine 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? " #43 at https://www.laughtears.com/workshops4.html
3- KEEPING UPSET WITH THE JONESES: ADVERTISING AS ART - Fialka's interactive workshop probes the cultural and historical context of advertising as art and Marshall McLuhan's axiom "Advertising is the cave art of the 20th century." Both ads and art eschew rational arguments for symbols, magic and imagery that play directly to our emotions. #3 at https://www.laughtears.com/workshops.html
Fialka & Farina film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShuM7vh011w
4- THE ART OF FAKERY IN EXPERIMENTAL & DOCUMENTARY FILM - "Compassionate tricksters" like Karl Krogstad, Coleman Miller (his slyly uproarious Uso Justo is rooted in Ernie Kovacs and Tex Avery), Owen Land (Wide Angle Saxon), and Firesign Theater transform Picasso's axiom "art is a lie that tells the truth." Fialka probes the fiction/documentary divide, the ethics of reality-based manipulation, and whether documentaries derive from form or conception. From Buñuel's Land Without Bread to Welles's F is For Fake to Reiner's Spinal Tap to Craig Baldwin's faux faux Tribulation 99, fakes dismantle understandings of identity, history, authenticity and authority. #4 at https://www.laughtears.com/workshops.html
5- THE MACHINE AS ART - FROM ARCHETYPE TO CLICHE - Fialka's interactive workshop probes our interrelations with technology, art, music and literature. By flipping McLuhan's From Cliche to Archetype, he sheds new light on Calder, Man Ray, Giacometti, Jean Tinguely, video games, robotics and Sol LeWitt's proposition that "the idea becomes a machine that makes the art." Examine the resonating intervals and inventory the hidden effects of machines as extensions of our human senses. How and why do we anthropomorphize the idea of cyborgian culture? #23 at https://www.laughtears.com/workshops2.html and EYE AM NOT A ROBOT http://vimeo.com/59500786
6 - DREAM AWAKE - JAMES JOYCE AS EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA - Paramedia-ecologist Gerry Fialka's challenging interactive workshop probes how Joyce's 1939 book/epic collage/meta-narrative film FINNEGANS WAKE (and Marshall McLuhan's Menippean Satirized translation of it) presaged experimental cinema. How did the WAKE influence Hollis Frampton, Owen Land, John Cage, Mary Ellen Bute, Peter Greenaway, Evan Meaney, Bruce McClure and Gary Kibbins? How & why does the WAKE tell the history of everything that ever happened and will happen? How and why did Joyce anticipate the Facebook-Google-Wiki-Twitter-YouTube-Blogosphere swirl (social networking), TMZ, Girl Talk and whatever comes after the Internet? Harry Smith, who claimed Giordano Bruno invented cinema, stated that the function of film viewing is to put people to sleep - dreaming awake. With ultra-rare film clips. ReJoyce interconnecting Finneganese: "funny funereels," "allnights newseryreel," "they leap looply, looply, as they link to light," "cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript," and "a ... riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed." Fun for all at Finnegans Wake. https://www.laughtears.com/wakedreamawake.html
BRAND NEW - JUST ADDED:
7 - iM (Matching & Making Millennials Menippean Mashups & Mathematics) - Performance artist/Wikipedirian Gerry Fialka explores the hows and whys of the new generation's math and neuroscience by hoicking up the update of Arthur C. Clarke's famous dictum that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to "any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from its nature" - Warren Ellis. Bruce Sterling observes "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from its garbage." Marshall McLuhan's percepts on "new nature" merge with Retrocasusality and Precognition to being rooted in Edgar Allen Poe's "reasoning backwards" or "effects precede causes." Do the Millennials really care about privacy? Robert Dobbs reinvents Andy Warhol to “in the future, everyone will have privacy for 15 minutes.” Banksy rewords Warhol to "in the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes." Fialka updates Warhol to “in the future, every one will have identity for 15 minutes.”
Words evoke more than their meaning. Is the iM or ME or Mi (Millennials) generation the Meme generation? Recalculate the Millennials math and probe their "hows, whys, whens, whats, whos, wheres" of exponential technologies, media archeology, attachment parenting, Narcissus narcosis, social media, crowd-sourced finance, brand integration, the post-emotional mind, indigo children, Nietzsche's Übermensch and autism in the post-literate electronic environment. Delve deep into framing and understanding the relationships between baby boomers, gen X, gen Y, gen Z, and generation AO (always on). https://www.laughtears.com/ and http://venicewake.org/
8- The Hows & Whys of Correctly Misreading Mike Kelley As Menippean Meme -
Art Historian-performance artist Fialka delves deep into the many layers of Kelly's art, which involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, noise music, performance, film and video. Writing in The New York Times, in 2012, Holland Cotter described Kelley as, "one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion." Fialka probes the interconnections of Kelley with Marcel Duchamp, Donkey basketball, James Joyce, McLuhan, Menippean Satire, Sun Ra, James Brown and more. Examine misreading Kelley as "the artist as nihilistic Bad Boy, unrestrained Monster from the Id, intent on nothing but disturbing the peace" - Steven Stern catalogue essay for Kelley's Hermaphrodite Drawings, Gagosian Gallery, 2007.
As Joyce created language about language, Kelley created art about art. Their profound meditations on the role of language and art rendered propositions that could be considered true, in a permanent stable sense with underlying irony. They did not really trust language and art to present these truths. Their work is ABOUT its own attempt to present the truth in a form that reaches beyond any sort of relativity. Sometimes the effort to say the most simple thing does indeed require the most complex means (memes). There is really no ending to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, just as there is no ending to exploring and rediscovering Kelley's meme anew. More: http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/?issueid=28&article_id=165 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6D6lmIMyyc
9- EXPERIMENTAL FILM & MAINSTREAM - CROSSOVERS & CONTRADICTIONS - Fialka delves deep into the interconnections of avant garde and feature films - from John Smith & Truffaut, Martin Arnold & Judy Garland, Bryan Boyce & Robert DeNiro, Jordan Belson & Kubrick, Bruce Conner & Dennis Hopper, the list is endless. How do they feed off each other? More details upon request.
10 - GENUINE FAKE FILMS by GERRY FIALKA https://www.laughtears.com/Genuine_Fake.html The Jan 17, 2013 world premiere of this program at David James' renown USC series Cinematheque 108 was received with raves and controversy. "Genuine Fake Films by Gerry Fialka is a brilliant show. Truly exciting and memorable. " - David E. James, Experimental film scholar & USC Professor of Critical Studies. The LA WEEKLY - Jan 11, 2013 PICK OF THE WEEK: "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. Includeshttps://laughtears.com/RIA.html - Live Cinema
11- TWO DIDACTIC - Fialka explores the interconnections of Gertrude Stein and experimental film. The "two" probes the duality as the word "didactic" is rooted in "apt at teaching...wisdom, to teach, learn." Author Susan McCabe: "I contend that avant-garde cinema newly illuminates her (Steins') strategies of representation and embodiment; the adjacency of Man Ray's article to "Mrs. Emerson" foregrounds the complicity of the apparently distinct aesthetic discourses of modern poetry and cinema. Film embodies Stein's notion of 'a groping for a continuous present' and 'an inevitable beginning of beginning again and again and again,' what she earlier designates as 'all living as repeating.' Maya Deren refers to this kind of film measure as a 'telescoping of time,' 'a continuous act of recognition,' that becomes 'like a strip of memory unrolling beneath the images of the film itself, to form the invisible underlayer of an implicit double exposure.'" Reference book: Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers & The Heritage of Emerson by P. A. Sitney.
ACCOLADES:
"Gerry Fialka's 'Dream Awake' is a great, entertaining, eye-opening, mind-widening, and provocative event. It amply demonstrated for me Marshall McLuhan's assertion that Finnegans Wake is 'a memory theater for the entire contents of human consciousness and unconsciousness.' Highly recommended." - John Bishop, seminal James Joyce scholar, author of "The Book of the Dark," and author of the intro to the current in-print edition of Finnegans Wake
"Gerry Fialka's energized exercise in creative brainstorming AND critical thinking opens up an interactive space beyond the rote drills of required readings in the college classroom. With good humor and puns aplenty, he posits the daunting media matrix of word, sound, and image as something more like a jungle gym, and then generously invites all to climb on and play the McLuhanesque game of pattern-recognition." - Craig Baldwin
"Upon leaving Gerry Fialka’s Ann Arbor Film Festival Pioneers Workshop my first thought was: where do I go to sign up for another, because one is definitely not enough. This guy has a brain that interests me and a generosity of method that is rare as well as fecund. I watched him coax a room full of people in folding chairs into an intellectual group dynamic that showed just what the Socratic method can yield when led by a skillful master of ceremonies. Intellectual confluences of the widest description were entered into and all participants were not only invited along for the ride but also invited to have their say. I learned a lot. Gerry Fialka: that rarest of species, an original, non-institutionally-based intellect –a thinker whose natural predilections lead him to a connecting of the dots wherein both the dots and the connecting of the dots are illuminations of the unexpected and unconsidered. He makes his own way and invites you along for the ride. Before you know it, he’ll even give you a turn at the wheel." - Fred Worden, award winning experimental filmmaker and Professor of Visual Arts, University of Maryland
"McLuhan talks about media as extensions of our sense organs, and that's precisely what a workshop with Gerry Fialka is like. Gerry extends and enhances our ability to perceive the world. Did I also mention that Gerry is a hell of a lot of fun?" - Award-winning filmmaker Bill Brown
"Before Gerry Fialka walked into my sound studies class at USC, Marshall McLuhan was just a name in a book to most of my students; by the time Gerry was through, McLuhan was a whole-body experience. His round-robin technique brought out people who ordinarily hang back and let the firecrackers pop elsewhere in the room." - Bruce Smith, Author & Professor of English
"Gerry Fialka has a special ability to engage and get folks to think, think, think!" - Filmmaker Ellen Lake
"Gerry Fialka is certainly the most engaging speaker we have had the privilege to host at the gallery." - Jacqueline Leow, Assistant Director, Oakland University Art Gallery
"Gerry Fialka's wide-ranging knowledge and wit are always immensely popular with SVSU students. As a guest lecturer for the past five years in a row, they have easily discerned his love for sharing knowledge and experience. His enthusiasm for teaching is infectious." - Rob Drew, Professor of Communication, Saginaw Valley State University
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Upon reading Fialka's workshop descriptions, LA Weekly Art critic Doug Harvey declared that Fialka should have his own department at Cal Arts. Gerry Fialka has been praised by the LA Times as "the multi-media Renaissance man." The La Weekly proclaimed him "a cultural revolutionary."
Fialka has lectured at universities and art museums worldwide on:
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Fialka's interviews https://www.laughtears.com/mess.html with major cultural figures have been heard on Pacifica Radio (KPFK), published in Artillery Art Magazine and MIT art books, from Mike Kelley to William Pope.L to George Clinton. Many major experimental filmmakers (from Bill Morrison to Morgan Fisher to Cory McAbee to Lynne Sachs) have been interviewd by Fialka for his new book project https://www.laughtears.com/Ann%20Arbor%20Film%20Festival.html
"Fialka's was the most intelligent interview I was ever involved with" - Filmmaker Jay Weidner, who is featured in the Sundance hit Room 237 about Stanley Kubrick
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GERRY FIALKA's Otherzine articles-
Spring 2013 - Nothing & Stay Out (Kubrick doc Room 237) - http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/?issueid=29&article_id=172
Fall 2012 - Mike Kelley And Meme http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/?issueid=28&article_id=165
Spring 2012 - Occupy Awake:Conscious Mapmakers On World Wide Watch
http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/?issueid=27&article_id=148
Fall 2011 - McLuhan's City As Classroom Flips Into All-At-Onceness As Classroom
http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/index.php?issueid=26&article_id=135
Spring 2011 - McLuhan & WikiLeaks: 'Hoedown' and 'Hendiadys'
http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/?issueid=25&article_id=123
Spring 2010 - Looking Glass - Review of Millennium Film Journal #51 http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/?issueid=23&article_id=99
Spring 2009 - Dream Awake -HOW JOYCE INVENTED OTHER CINEMA & DISGUISED IT AS A BOOK http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/index.php?issueid=21&article_id=85
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