By Adrian MacDonald

911 Seattle Media Arts Center is reinventing itself as a set of laboratories for innovative projects in media, with 3 distinct components: the Moving Image Lab (film and video), the Next Generation Lab (education), and the Art + Technology Lab/911 Media Arts Gallery. By way of due diligence, we researched 3 more laboratories in Seattle exploring the bleeding edge of art and technology.

University of Washington’s DX Arts

Now in its fifth year of existence after securing a special initiative grant from the University of Washington, DX Arts is arguably the nation’s premiere institution for experiments and research in mixing art and science. With a full-service fabrication shop in Fremont, lavishly fitted classrooms on campus, and course sequences in video, sound, mechatronics, and 3D technology, the program is known for educating students equally to be scientists, technologists, and artists. It has also been one of the first worldwide to pioneer the idea of a PhD not in art history or criticism, but in art creation.

“It’s about creating good art and good science, which is an incredibly difficult thing to do,” says Assistant Professor James Coupe. “The work of scientists is inherently poetic, but their output is not so. It doesn’t translate into an experience. For artists to claim they are mixing art and science, they must take the outcomes of science and translate that into an experience where science ends and the artist begins.”

Faculty projects include director Shawn Brixey’s Altamira (2004), in which he developed a pair of neuro-prosthetic goggles that trigger phosphenes—the little specs we see when we close our eyes—based on radio waves recorded by astronomers from pulsars at the edge of the Universe. The result is a cosmic/biological work of art viewed literally inside the “mind’s eye.”

Coupe, originally educated in Cambridge, England, created (re)collector (2007) for a Cambridge arts festival in which he placed ten video cameras throughout the city programmed to capture street scenes only when they randomly aligned to match scenes in classic old movies like Vertigo and Blow Up. The scenes were then processed through an artificial intelligence engine to create a new composite story based on the images, which he then projected back to the city. Coupe says as the installation continued over the course of a week and people got wise to the locations of the cameras, they began acting out scenes on purpose. “It became this parallel reality,” he says. “Is it reality or is it performance?”

Images from James Coupe’s (re)collector

The artists of DX Arts exhibit worldwide, but have difficulty finding appropriate venues in Seattle for their work. In February, professors Juan Pampin, Eunsu Kang, and Joel Kollin showed the piece Entanglement as a joint exhibition between the 911 Media Arts Gallery and SOIL Gallery in Pioneer Square. The piece connected the two spaces more than a mile apart by an ultrasonic sound beam, enabling sounds from each gallery to intermingle in an audible feedback loop.

“We’ve had our cinema work shown at SIFF, and at the Northwest Film Forum,” Coupe adds, addressing the video aspect of the program. “But a lot of times the appropriate output might not be cinema. It could be Internet, or viral video.”

Hazard Factory

Best known as a creator of “fire art,” Hazard Factory founder Rusty Oliver is quick to disassociate himself from the ranks of artists who typically show at Burning Man. Oliver began creating art while a student at Evergreen College some 10 years ago, when he started hanging around the metal shop to build components for West African percussion instruments. From there, he picked up welding and metalworking, and found there was no turning back from a certain kind of sculpture-based, do-it-yourself, interactive art that seeks to challenge audiences to be more socially conscious and engaged.

Hazard Factory’s Fire on the Duwamish

Oliver has done several pieces involving the use of fire in various capacities—including Conversation With An Open Flame, a row of pipes that lets off flame in time to music, creating a visual representation of sound in fire. But Hazard Factory is also the creator of Power Tool Races, in which teams of ad-hoc engineers create and race modified Skilsaws, drills, sanders, lawn edgers, and any other potentially hazardous electrically powered object they can get their hands on. All of Hazard Factory’s art relates to danger in some way, though Oliver sees people’s greatest fears being related to social interaction.

“It’s minor chances that you take like saying hello to somebody or responding to a phone call or an email, putting yourself out there—those are the kind of things that we as a society should be doing more of,” he says. “We had one gal come, and she raced a Skilsaw she called ‘Lady Safety,’ which was really legitimately dangerous. I mean it’s a Skilsaw with like rollerblade wheels and it’s going about 30 miles per hour. And it was the best time she’d had I think, perhaps in her entire life. And it’s actually developed something of a cult following, so we’re expecting her back this year.

Hazard Factory’s Georgetown workshop space serves as a hub for a loosely structured group of people interested in creating projects with welders, electronics, and other second hand heavy industrial equipment. Oliver’s active roster includes some 30 people, but he says the network of people his group can consult with and involve in a project is vast.

“I don’t know how it works in other areas,” Oliver says. “But in Seattle if you’ve been doing this kind of stuff, and you’ve got an idea for something you want to do, and there are people you’ve been collaborating with in the past, you can rally a lot of people really quickly for something.”

Last New Year’s, Oliver orchestrated a private show at the Hackabot Labs involving road flares, oil drums, and the singularly spectacular destruction of an old Mercedes.

“When you put a car in front of an audience and they suddenly understand that you’re going to destroy the car?” he says. “All hell breaks loose. Every single time.”

Hazard Factory at the Robodock festival in Amsterdam.

Hackabot Labs

Finding Hackabot Labs, an underground collective devoted to do-it-yourself art and technology projects, is not easy. Founder and organizer Eric Johanson specifically doesn’t want to be found. “We don’t need more people,” he says, and expresses apprehension about speaking to a magazine journalist.

Finding nothing about the group on Google, On Screen asked around at Saturday House, another collective of technology heads with a space on First Avenue South. Finally tracking down the elusive Hackabot Labs location via several phone calls and referrals, we were tentatively welcomed to their non-descript, nearly invisible industrial warehouse in south Seattle, as an amiable crowd of individuals alternately tinkered at bench tops and passed around last week’s experiment – a somewhat foul-tasting jug of severely fruit-infused vodka. When at first we didn’t find Johanson at the space, he later strode up and surprised us. “I heard you were here,” he said, eerily.

911 Media’s ties to the Dorkbot organization may have smoothed matters, as we were treated to demonstrations of Hackabot members’ creations, such as a “compass belt,” a ring of old cell phones set to vibrate in the direction of north. “After wearing this for a while you start to get this weird sense of direction,” the creator told us. In another project, a woman was in the process of teaching herself to solder metal decorations around the outside of eggshells.

The group’s most ambitious collaborative project currently is a self-piloting high-altitude glider and balloon they intend to load with cameras and fly to 100,000 feet, capturing images of blue sky against black space. Their first attempt a year ago made it to 10,000 feet, but lost contact and has yet to be found, residing somewhere in a 40-square mile area somewhere in Washington State with its payload of hi-res digital cameras. While not fully successful, the project was featured in the magazine Make and lasted longer than expected. The new version includes a data transmitter to send images back remotely, as well as a compass and GPS. Like scientists, they are documenting their work to make it open and repeatable, and are freely releasing all the software they write.

“We’re working on the challenges of high altitude,” says one member. “It has to be insulated for minus 60 degrees Celsius.” Testing the glider will involve a homemade liquid nitrogen test chamber.

“The idea is not to publicize the [Hackabot] space,” the member adds. “We just give people the means to do stuff themselves. We have a group mentality, but we also do well on our own.” Leaving the space in the dark of night in a rainstorm, On Screen felt unsure how to return.

By Renée Htein

Doc, Connie, and Travis Hatfield, founders of Country Natural Beef, feeding hay in the winter in Brothers, Oregon.

In Good Food, activist directors Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin bring the stories of local farmers, organizations and restaurants to the urban foodie audience. “I hope the film will help generate grass-roots solutions,” says Young.

The film captures the joy and creativity of the Northwest’s sustainable farming community, and the love they have for their work. It looks at the deep human connections created through food, both to other people and to the earth. The result is a film that respects both its audience and, as Young puts it, “the wisdom of regular people in interpreting their own experience.”

Central among the themes of the film is the illusion that a centralized, industrial food system is beneficial. Characters like Doc and Connie Hatfield, founders of Oregon Country Natural Beef, as well as other farmers, restaurants and organizations, point to ways that being part of a local “food web” can generate practical solutions for society, benefiting public health, environment, and the economy.

Billy Allstot and Stephanie Blackstead show off their innovative greenhouse in Tonasket, WA

In the film, these relationships continually show how a love for “good food” brings people together and provides opportunities to make sustainably grown, healthy food accessible to everyone.

Young and Dworkin founded their own production company Moving Images in 1987 after working together on a video of a school building project in rural Nicaragua. For 20 years, the company has served as a platform for their social activism as they make films on topics underrepresented in mainstream media.

Young says their focus is less on dire images of global problems, and more on respecting the subjects of the films and motivating people to find solutions. She remembers seeing a film depicting the massacre of people in El Salvador that left her feeling hopeless. “Such images leave no room for action,” she says. “Critical times and times of real crisis also provide a time of great opportunity to think and work together.”

Another recent film, Argentina Turning Around (2007) about social unrest in that country, centers on the benefits of taking personal responsibility for your environment and community. Others include Another World is Possible (2002), a documentary on the World Social Forum; and two critical looks at US globalization through biotechnology with Environment Under Fire (1998) and Risky Business (1996).

Hilario Alvarez, producer of the colorful peppers that brighten many Seattle farmers’ markets

“Fund raising for making a film is a bit like farming,” says Young. “You have a lot of up-front expenses, have to invest lots of time and money and hope that it will come back. I can’t recommend this for someone who wants to get rich… but what an interesting life!”

At a recent pre-screening of clips from Good Food to raise completion funds for the film, the directors provided an example of how a community can come together around food, presenting a friendly old-fashioned potluck.

Held at Mukilteo Coffee’s roasting house on Whidbey Island, the event featured a long wooden table filled with tasty treats grown and prepared by characters in the film: salad made with emmer, an ancient variety of wheat; crostini with coffee-braised pasture-fed beef; locally grown dark salad greens; and squash soup. On the terrace, farmers from South Whidbey Tilth sold locally grown greens, tomato plants, and herbs. Whidbey Island’s Slow Food group orchestrated the event, pursuing their goal of showing how connections are made when “you know who your food is coming from.”

A farm worker harvests apples near Peshastin.

When everyone had a plate of food, Young and Dworkin introduced their film and with it, the Northwest’s vibrant sustainable farming scene. They dedicated the night to the farmers, musicians, and the wider community behind the film. “Our focus is social justice and environment,” Young said. “We rely on friends and neighbors for the music and narrators of our films.” All of the music in the film is by local Northwest musicians such as Jami Sieber, Mark Graham, Jack Knauer, and Band Los Emocionantes.

During the discussion after the screening, the audience gave strong indicators for the success of the film. A teacher requested the help of the local farming community to teach students about farming and Whidbey Island Nourishes, a program that provides paper-bag lunches for the needy. Mike Hearl from the Whidbey Slow Food group offered the recipes from the food of the evening and stressed the importance of attending farmers markets regularly so farmers can have a good idea of what to plan for.

“We are in the middle of a climate change,” Young continued. “We need to think about the changes that are coming and the changes that we need to make.”

Mark Dworkin films Sam Lucy harvesting wheat in the Methow Valley.

CREW BOX: Good Food
Director & Producer: Melissa Young & Mark Dworkin
Photography and Editing: Mark Dworkin
Associate Producer: Bill Aal

Lynn Shelton in Moving.

This year’s Fly Filmmaking Challenge at SIFF presented some new challenges for 4 local filmmakers working on 3 short films in 3 weeks. Every year the challenge switches up the rules; among the requirements this year was to use one of two local SAG actors, Basil Harris (My Effortless Brilliance, We Go Way Back) or Abby Dylan (appeared in all 3 Fly films in 2005).

That actor Harris has appeared in both of local director Lynn Shelton’s acclaimed feature films seems like a coup for Shelton, especially considering that she herself is cast in the starring role of one of this year’s films, Moving by Megan Griffith.

“With the short time period provided for writing, I made the decision to write for people I already knew and who I wanted to work with,” Griffiths says. “Lynn is someone I know well and I knew she had an acting background—she had auditioned for my feature film The Off Hours and really blown me away. So I created the role for her and luckily she was available to do it.”

Moving follows the story of a woman packing to move cross-country, when her plans fall apart. “I knew that I had very little time to prepare the space that I’d be shooting in, which was an empty living room,” Griffiths says. “So I thought a good work-around for having a bare space would be to have one of the characters be moving.”

Since she had no time for casting calls, Griffiths says she developed all the characters in the film for specific local actors, and built the story around the relationships that she imagined the individuals might have if put in a situation together.

Griffiths is known for a long history working in local film, working as first assistant director for what seems like a rolodex of the Seattle scene’s most important projects, including films like The Spy and the Sparrow, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, True Adolescents, Butterfly Dreaming, Cthulhu, Zoo, and We Go Way Back. She is in the midst of fundraising for her own feature, The Off Hours, which will star Aidan Quinn and Alicia Silverstone.

Other Fly filmmakers this year include the team of Joe Shapiro and Andy McCone, whose film Shut Eye examines a man suffering from the rare disease Fatal Familial Insomnia, literally dying from lack of sleep. Shapiro is known locally as the editor for Police Beat and Zoo, working with the writer/director team of Charles Mudede and Rob Devor. McCone is an actor and director in a number of local shorts.

Rob Cunningham, the final Fly filmmaker, had his short Gustav Braustache and the Auto-Debilitator featured in the Northwest Film Forum’s Local Sightings Festival in 2007. His Fly film, End Zone, depicts a chess showdown between a robot and Death.

This year SIFF has also commissioned director Cheryl Slean to make Creativity in Context, a short documentary about the Fly filmmaking process. Slean was the winner of the IFP/Spotlight Award in 2005, with which she made the short film Diggers. That film has screened at festivals worldwide and is featured on the DVD Seattle Women in Film.“The whole process was pretty magical actually,” Griffiths concludes. “I can’t wait to see the other teams’ projects—from what I’ve heard it seems like it will be a really good year for the Fly’s.”

By Leone Fogle

When film artist Salise Hughes looks at old film footage as raw material for a new film, she turns the sound down so she’s not “sucked in by the plot.” She lets her mind wander and waits for something to “just strike” her. At the beginning she feels like everything is possible. Then she goes through an uncomfortable period of time during which she’s “dangling by a thread.” She says, “I’ll be in the middle of the film and I feel like it’s going nowhere. Then I come to the end—and it works—and it feels like it’s a miracle.”

There is much about Hughes’ work that is enigmatic besides her creative process. Her films are essentially collages of old movie clips transformed by erasure and layering, with images that flicker and figures that float in vibrating negative space. The clips are so transfigured from the original footage that they no longer resemble it or the intentions of the original writers and directors who years ago attempted to realize their visions.

Hughes started as a visual artist; her work has followed a path from labor-intensive drawings in different mediums, into film. The films are time consuming: the rendering on Photoshop takes approximately 5-15 minutes for one second of her film.

“One of the differences between visual art and film is how long something should be—it’s pacing. In painting, everything is there the whole time; it sits with you. In film, things unfold.”

Some time after she taught life drawing classes at Cornish College of the Arts in the early 90s, Hughes became aware of the paradox of trying to capture a moment of the model’s life.

“When we draw, we are holding on to something that no longer exists,” she says. One of her films, How to Draw Clouds, is about the impossibility of holding on to that which is transitory. The effort of drawing clouds before they morph inspires a flurry of sketches on the screen. The clouds, because they cannot be fixed, disappear from the sky and leave only an outline rendering. Then the rendering disappears, too.

In her new film, Shiny Things, the theme is desire. For Hughes, human desire is a constant, but the “object of desire is ephemeral.” She knew early on in the creative process that she wanted footage of a heist.

“Desire is about the feeling that is inspired by an object, but it’s not about the object itself,” she says. “Money itself is not pretty to look at. But the desire is connected to what the money stands for, freedom, comfort… anything you want to attach to it. It works for a while, and then you need more of it.”

Shiny Things incorporates clips from two old films, Violent Saturday and Pete Kelly’s Blues, providing footage of a robbery and of a nightclub singer performing. The three robbers—one is Lee Marvin—hold up a bank while a female vocalist sings Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” The film is mostly in black and white, but Hughes uses blue—“an ethereal color”—to highlight the bags of money and the singer who is desirous of finding love. The blue bags are lost or dropped as the robbers engage in a gunfight.

Hughes says she deliberately kept the hero out of the film. “The gun fire comes from out of nowhere. I didn’t want the film to be about good versus bad. I am a little sympathetic towards the misplaced ideals of the thieves.”

As they are hit and spin to the ground, the thieves’ bodies turn black and their desires are “voided out.” The blue female singer sings on to the strains of music played by indifferent musicians. A curtain of twinkling blue beads, recycled from footage of the chandelier from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film Blue, appears near the beginning and end of the film and is a stand-in for the object of desire that the thieves never attain.

Hughes wants the singer to serve more than one role in the film; she is a “torch singer expressing her own desires, as well as an ethereal being giving commentary.” But she would like her female singer’s motivations to remain unclear.

“We don’t know what she means by searching for ‘a heart of gold’— maybe she’s searching for a heart that’s made of gold.”

Salise Hughes

CREW BOX
Creator: Salise Hughes
Music: Jason Staczek and Alicia Dara

By T. LaBee

Brady Hall

“If you need someone to take off their shirt and show their tits in a movie, just give me a call.” This was a statement from Wendy West, an actress in Brady Hall’s horror film short Tits and Blood.

West’s lack of inhibition proved to be a perfect fit with the relaxed and informal tone of the rest of Hall’s pre-production. On acquiring actors, he says: “They were just friends of mine.” Finding a location: “A friend’s mom’s basement. It used to get flooded all the time, so she didn’t mind us shooting down there.” His motivation: “I just wanted to learn how to use After Effects better and work on my gore.”

Even with his lackadaisical approach, in Tits and Blood, Hall has managed to make a short that will leave an imprint on audiences’ consciousnesses. It amuses, shocks, disturbs, and with a running time of five minutes and 20 seconds, it suits the sensibilities of the You Tube generation.

The inspiration for the film came in the form of a filmmaking challenge sponsored by the Northwest Film Forum. After another short Hall produced and edited called The Rambler made it into the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, Hall was invited to make a film for local film critic and filmmaker Andy Spletzer’s Spletz-o-Rama Invitational.

“[Spletzer] just gave me a reason to make a dumb short. So I just took it and ran with it,” he says.

Shot with the Panasonic AG-HVX 200, Hall’s story essentially comprises behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the fictional film Tits and Blood. Though the short seems meant to be light and humorous through most of it, from the very first frame there is a sense of something unsettling. Even as Carlos Lopez, who plays the director in the film, runs through a funny monologue about his preparation for the shoot while fellow actors Wendy and James Herman toy with props behind him, there is a feeling of impending doom. This is in no small part due to the location: a moldy basement in West Seattle with dark lighting and faded pink wallpaper that looks like the set of a snuff film.

Censored scene from Tits and Blood.

“I’ve shot three shorts down there,” Brady says about the basement. “It’s my friend’s mom’s basement. Since it’s always getting flooded they were going to destroy it, so they don’t care what we do down there.”

The eerie lighting of the basement that helped set the ominous toned turned out to be more trouble than expected. “I didn’t realize that the power was bad so the lights would flicker and dim,” Hall says. This resulted in the lighting in the footage not being consistent. “I had to basically take each piece and bring the brightness to blend in post.”

Although it looks like the film was shot in one long take, it was actually a series of shots carefully cut together by Hall himself, who also did the special effects. “The final scene was about 25 takes composited together,” Hall adds to provide a grasp of the level of tedium the project was in post-production.

It would be understandable to assume Hall is a devout horror film fan but he admits, “I don’t really watch horror movies at all. There’s really nothing new to be done. That’s why it seems everything is a remake. I haven’t even seen the new movies like Saw or any of that crap.”

Hall has lived and shot films in Seattle his “whole life” and shows love and appreciation towards the film community here.

“I find it very easy to make films here, even if you’re trying to do it legit,” he says. “In LA everyone knows about the movie business so the cops will mess with you about permits and everyone wants to charge for a location and everyone is SAG.”

Next Hall wants to shoot a feature film sometime between the end of this summer and early fall. “I’m trying to get financing. I have a few companies in LA who are interested in distribution.”