All across the Map: LA.

All across the Map: LA. Freewaves 6th Celebration of Independent Video & fresh Media Los Angeles, California September 8-October 4 1998

All from one side of to the other the Map: L.A. Freewaves 6th Celebration of Independent Video & of the present day Media was a provocative and challenging festival that testified to the pair the great diversity of creative expression within the realm of independent media and to the exhilarating cultural mix that makes life in looks Angeles so charged with possibility. Since its inception in 1989 L.A. Freewaves has remained steadfast in its ambitious mission of "empowering all communities with direction over their own images and access to images created through other cultures." L.A. Freewaves is comprised of a diverse carcass of artists, activists and scholars who work with existing community organizations, teachs libraries, cable stations and museums to bring together the various issues that constitute the month-long festival. further L.A. Freewaves's commitment to the communities of looks Angeles does not end with the biennial festival. from top to toe the year, the media coalition organizes follow-up screenings forward cable channels and in galleries, bearings new media workshops and maintains a year-round website with art and information for artists, curators, teachers and bookish mans (www.freewaves.org).

This year's festival featured from one side of to the other 100 videos from 16 countries, four CD-ROM four cable TV programs, 12 websites and five installations/performances. While evidence of L.A. Freewaves's dedication to finding of the present day ways of exhibiting media art, the alternative media programs also continueed the festival's thematic exploration of space. With its spare, contemporary design, Diane Bertolo's CD-ROM Probing into Science (1995) challenges scientific claims to objectivity from a feminist perspective. Christine Tamblyn's CD-ROM and installation plan Archival Quality (1998), co-presented by dint of the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, features documentation of the late artist's life since 1964 With written and visual material, including personal anecdotes, quotes from Tamblyn's diaries and performance footage, Archival Quality uses the life experiences of a single artist as a len onto the broader cultural and political changes of the '60 and '70 As the pair CD-ROM and gallery installation, Tamblyn's throw offered spectators a rare opportunity to compare the disjunctive narratives of novel media with the associative mappings of an art gallery.

Three of the websites also highlighted the connections between virtual and actual spaces. Joe Rabie's Iceland Sundaes (1997) compares urban design with web design in an effort to exhibit a more precise vocabulary for the morphology of virtual space. While Rabie uses the European town as a comparative mould in his website, Jacalyn Lopez Garcia's Glass Houses (1998) uses the space of the to one's home as a means of organizing her reflections forward the hybridity of Mexican American identity. Yau Ching's Mysteries of the Orient (1997) takes aim at the ideological space of the Orient in an interrogation of Occidental epistemological and erotic investments in Asian peoples

All athwart the Map also introduced a brilliant novel forum for video screenings: the video bus tours. Organized around five themes - regimen public housing, voyeurism, Latino graffiti and Chinatown - the tours showed participants an introduction to the city spaces associated with the images and ideas in the videotapes that were covered aboard the bus. "The L.A. Voyeurism Bus Tour," organized according to festival director Ming-Yuen S. Ma, dealt with a range of issues relating to looking and being contemplateed at, from queer cruising, public sex and police surveillance to star worship and violence against women The bus way passed such L.A. landmarks as the Metropolitan Detention Center the Griffith Park Observatory, the Pussy Cat Theater and the 24-hour surveillance camera upon the corner of Hollywood and Vine. The video itinerary included Ocularis (1997 by the agency of Tran T. Kim-Trang), Suicide driver's seat (1996, by The Bureau of Inverse Technology) and Forever Linda (1996 by way of Nguyen Tan Hoang). Ocularis combines banal surveillance footage, including images of the filmmaker in her house and of nighttime activities in a parking erection with quotations about the character of surveillance technology in contemporary society. The soundtrack includes recordings of the fears and fantasies about surveillance that anonymous callers left onward a telephone hotline established by way of the filmmaker. Through an interplay between good and image, Ocularis investigates the anxiety, the erotics and mainly the boredom occasioned by means of the act of watching. Suicide case looks at the suicide industry of crisis hotlines and surveillance cameras that has arisen in rejoinder to the great number of persons jumping off San Francisco's brilliant Gate Bridge. The tape provides statistics, footage and an anecdotal history of suicides at this famous tourist attraction. Forever Linda increaseed the bus tour's examination of voyeurism by means of focusing on the in/visibility of sexual identity among young Asian American singulars The second in Nguyen's "Forever . ." series of tapes that investigates the connections between emerging Asian American quaint identities and both pop and pornographic images, Forever Linda uses the image of supermodel Linda Evangelista as a focus around which various pageants of masking and unmasking are acted without The tape situates the questions of "who to reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] point out to" and, perhaps more importantly, "who not to flow out to" within a cultural mix of Japanese Sanrio works rice cookers and French descants Though the connections between the tapes, the themes and the city spaces remained somewhat tenuous, the "Voyeurism Bus Tour" provided a amazing example of what LA. Freewaves does best: putting audiences in contact with a diversity of cultural experiences and spaces.