<nettime-ann> COURTISANE FESTIVAL 2010

COURTISANE FESTIVAL 2010

17 - 21 March 2010

Ghent, Belgium

The 9th edition of the Courtisane festival presents a unique blend of film, video, audiovisual performances and media art. Discover the work of today's and tomorrow's most adventurous filmmakers and media artists in various locations across the city of Ghent. A five-day long cinematic experience 'on the edge'.

A taste of things to come:

ARTISTS in FOCUS

Three artists/filmmakers will present a selection of their own work, as well as works that have inspired and influenced them.

Morgan Fisher

Fisher’s films are an exploration of the film apparatus and its physical material, as well as of moviemaking production methods : from film’s standard gauge (35mm) to the use of production stills, the narrative role of inserts and the invisible importance of the projectionist. Fisher plays with the concepts of film, cinema and filmmaking, creating a unique and intimate view of cinema and its physical representation. ” One thing my films tend to do is examine a property or quality of a film in a radical way,” he says. “Being radical is a modest form of being extreme. They each examine an axiom of cinema and say, ‘What if ?’”

David Gatten
Over the last ten years Gatten’s films have explored the intersection of the printed word and the moving image, while investigating the shifting vocabularies of experience and representation within intimate spaces and historical documents. Through traditional research methods (reading old books) and non-traditional film processes (boiling old books), the films trace the contours of both private lives and public histories, combining elements of philosophy, biography and poetry with experiments in cinematic forms and narrative structures.

David O'Reilly
“animation, computers, internet, 3d, cats, chronic depression, stories, independent film-making, more cats, trauma, low-art, Berlin, talking animals, theory, dreams, drama, compression, nonsense, rendering, artificiality, aesthetics, suicide, symbolic representation, narrative, experimental, cats, paper, computer, software, bsod, error, mspaint, lofi, sss, author, auteur, pop culture, fine art, narcissism, pretentiousness, dramaturgy, love, hallucination, jpeg, mov, mpeg, Ireland, Kilkenny, 1985, serial gen, crack, torrents, cinema, anarchy, color-space, z-space, real time, anti-aliasing, aliasing, xxx, walt disney, simulation, distractions, internet etc.”

EVENTS

Two thematic evenings will be filled with performances, installations and screenings.

Night Vision

Thursday 18th March will be devoted to ‘Night Vision’, exploring the dynamics between visibility and invisibility, light and darkness, seeing the night and seeing in the night, with among others Paul Clipson & William Fowler Collins, Phantom Limb & Earth’s Hypnagogia, Disinformation (Joe Banks) and Pieter Geenen. We'll also be screening films by Deborah Stratman and Jeanne Liotta.

As always, Courtisane 2010 will present a broad selection of recent Belgian and international film and video works, bringing together an exciting mix of up and coming young talent and established names, including Duncan Campbell, Phil Solomon, Otolith Group, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ben Rivers, Adele Horne, Luke Fowler, Rosa Barba, Lewis Klahr, Mary-Helena Clark, Bas Devos, Peter Rose, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Janie Geiser, and many others. Apart from the selection of recent works, we will present the video and film programme ‘Vital Signs’, which will focus on the the formation of the meaningful, exploring the edges of meaning and the boundaries of communication. With works by Katarina Zdjelar, Imogen Stidworthy, Gary Hill, John Smith, Guy Sherwin, Pavel Medvedev, Kathrin Resetarits, Peter Sulyi and others.