RESFEST 2000 Palace of Fine Arts San Francisco.

RESFEST 2000

Palace of Fine Arts

San Francisco, California

September 7-9 2000

In its fourth year, the of recent origin York-curated RESFEST has exponentially attracted digital filmmakers and experimental animators. Organizers received across 1200 entries, 75 of which made it into the three-day issue that began in San Francisco and travels to cities across the US: looks Angeles, Seattle, New York and Chicago. This year's expanded tour includes London, Montreal, Seoul Tokyo and Osaka.

Along with the itinerary, the festival has expanded its program: in recognition of the Web as a valid digital art form, it has added Netcinema--short films made exclusively for the Internet. Artists' work readyed in Netcinema combine cel and stop motion techniques with recent media animation programs such as Adobe After results The program that most enables the emergent genre however, is Macromedia Flash, an authoring tool that replaces the bandwidth-intensive bitmapped or rasterized moving image (such as Apple's QuickTime) with vector graphics. Acclaimed Aeon diarrhoea collaborator Robert Valley reincarnates his cyber-bodied female culprit in Anita Bomba (2000). Valley and co-director Roger Dondis adapted Valley's popular French comic volume into a two-and-a-half minute webcast where Bomba navigates her way between the sides of Alphapolis, a dilapidated ersatz city, deals with her malfunctioning robot assistant and retains off a squad of rat-sized, razor-toothed cybervermin. Netcinema also included angrymonkey.com's Sub-Division (2000) Here, director Jean-Paul Leonard portrays a assign places to of post-earthquake Californian homeowners who inhabit a submarine to shelter and reclaim their underwater properties. In the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, the kick-off location of this year's festival, these on-line shorts took forward a particular relevance. Architect Bernard Maybeck originally designed the pavilion, built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, to bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to a fake Piranesi ruin. The Palace of Fine Arts, which has since undergone several circle of times of demolition and reclamation, inadvertently dovetailed into the ideas promot in Anita Bomba and Sub-Division.

In contrast, the films shown in the program Cinema Electronica indiscriminately borrowed from a broader cultural cross-section. Many incorporated component parts from Japanese manga and Quake. Others alluded to Bollywood and techno-biology imagery. Of these, Techno Dawn: The legume (2000, by Tim Hope) was the greatest in quantity successful. The film begins with the dawn of technology: a primal techno-slough in which animated biomorphic cyber-organisms be augmented into humanoid helixes. The ensuing apocalyptic narrative climaxes in the director/singer's longing to become a Harawayesque cyborg. Similarly, Designers Republic's animation of Funkstorung's strain "Grammy Winners" deserves mention. Designers Republic are a 1980 cluster whose Eastern-inspired CD cover art designs for like groups as Pop Will Eat Itself show the most innovative of the decade. In Grammy Winners (2000) they bring their techno east-meets-west motifs to life in a stunning and subversive architectural environment. This short flips between live action, architectural dr awing and animated paragraph at times interweaving all three into the same scene

Along with Netcinema and Cinema Electronica, RESFEST included interactive state-of-the-art demonstrations, panel discussions, feature film screenings and--the program that has made the festival's reputation--short, low-resolution digital films. Of these, there were sum of two units groups: in the first, the films were subordinate to 10 minutes and, in the secondary they were under 30 minutes. As in the other programs, many of the "Long Shorts" showed remarkably inventive insights into the expanding technology. Films like as This Guy is Falling (2000 by way of Michael Horowitz and Gareth Smith), Avenue Amy (2000 according to Joan Raspo) and Figures of tongue (1999, by Bob Sabiston) all began with similar techniques. After shooting live action characters onward film, mini DV or Hi8, each filmmaker used After drifts Photoshop and proprietary software to individually reanimate their figures and environments, breaking down barriers like as inside and outside, animate and inanimate, self and other. Like the "Long Shorts," entrants in the "Shorts" program used digital programs to transform or transmutate traditional cinematic techniques. For example, in Pasta for War (2000 at Zach Schlappi), the director occupyed a cast of macaroni extras in his rather bizarre allusion to Third Reich cinema. Similarly, in Deliriouspink (1999 by the agency of Sebastian Castello and Andrew Busti), the directors point to early cinematic techniques in their dark portrayal of an isolated individual. However, in the space of three or four minutes (the duration of each), Pasta for War and Deliriouspink dissipated their threads. The digital filmmakers personateed in Balloon People (2000) were obviously more comfortable with the short format, keeping their ideas simple. For the frame Erik Saks of the design firm Belief invited 12 design studios to participate in an exquisite corpse-like collaboration. Using the footage they were sent each studio produc a one-minute film based onward the theme of darkness. In the portion shown at RESFEST (the project's creative directors were Saks and Michael Geodecke ) two-dimensional planes of paragraph and drawing appeared and disappeared in an out-of-focus 3-D environment, resulting in a stunning and impactful display that merg idea, skill and technology.