Flinching Eye Collective
Flinching Eye Collective screening and performance
March 12th, 2018
8:00pm (not punk time) screening.
$10 or pay what you can. No one turned away.
Q&A after the screening
The Alamo Draft House Sloans Lake
4255 W. Colfax Ave., Denver, CO 80204
Originating in Colorado in 2011, the Flinching Eye Collective is a group of interdisciplinary media artists who work collaboratively at the intersections between sound, performance, and technology. This screening will span the better part of the last decade of the groups individual and collaborative video pieces.
At the end of the screening Flinching Eye members Adán De La Garza, Ryan Ruehlen, and Tobias Fike will perform in the theater and have a Q&A.
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Artist: Ryan Ruehlen
Title: Mouth: a compression document
Year: 2015
Statement: "Mouth" came about through a series of procedural experiments based on the nature of "lossy" data. lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data encoding methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content, or involving the dissipation of electrical or electromagnetic energy. This video was shot from a close up of a subject's face in realtime. The artist then re-shot the document off of the computer as well as a CRT television next to the subject over and over, producing a glitch-y, highly saturated and frenetic scene, both on the auditory and visual elements of the work. Originally just a test, Mouth became an accidental finished work.
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Artist: Tobias Fike, Matthew Weedman, Max Bernstein
Title: Art is hard
Year: 2009
Statement: Before FEC and while in grad school, Weedman and Fike collaborated for the first time taking on the challenge of making art in between elevator doors. The difficulties attempt with constant frustrations, was not unlike grad school itself.
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Artist: Adán De La Garza
Title: Protest Etiquette
Year: 2018
Statement: Examines the argument that there are proper and improper methods of dissent.
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Artist: Ben Gale-Schreck
Title: Water Walk
Year: 2016
Statement: Water Walk draws from Gale-Schreck’s attempts to maintain a connection to his place of origin, the Mackinaw River Valley in central Illinois. Telescoping memories of his past through the employment of Google Earth, is a direct connection to the precision and inaccuracies of the human memory. Just as Google Earth renders a skewed simulation of physical space, the mind draws from mental satellites within our physical form to create our own perception of memory.
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Artist: Tobias Fike
Title: When I’m Gone
Year: 2017
Statement: The simple thought of just being "gone" one day is what led to this video. That realization has had a significant impact on me, now that I have children.
In this disappearing act, you can see the continued existence of my shadow, a memory of me, and a ghostly figure left behind from imperfect erasing with digital residue and color. This image reminds me that we continue to affect lives, even after we have faded into the unknown.
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Artist: Scott Ferguson
Title: Objects and Thoughts and the Spaces They Inhabit
Year: 2018
Statement: Objects and Thoughts and the Spaces They Inhabit is a collection of video, sound, and photographs gathered between 2015 and 2018. The work draws connections between the mundane and the extraordinary of the everyday through the use of synthesized sound and text.
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Artist: Tobias Fike
Title: Cloud Bike
Year: 2013
Statement: I ride around and past my mother's childhood home in Loveland, CO on a cloud bike.
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Artist: Adán De La Garza
Title: giving myself a reason to scream but not cry #2
Year: 2015-present
Statement: giving myself a reason to scream but not cry is part of a larger body of work that examines the correlation between catharsis and protest. Part self-help exercise, part coping mechanism, part instruction set for the inept protestor, this video depicts how both protest and catharsis have potential to be moot points. The work was born out of a deep distaste for the contemporary political state, as well as feeling stifled by my own anger and the inability to feel as though I can enact positive influence beyond myself. The Governing body has an alienating hold that pushes its subjects toward a sentiment of hopelessness. As a result, our hopes shift away from changing the system or building a new one and more toward “something” being able to change what’s around us. Our culture’s obsession with notions of the apocalypse, collapse or disaster is the single tangible way we see the ability to witness dramatic change, so we fantasize about "acts of god" as the only possible way we will ever see any transformation. I am convinced that people don’t actually want to witness the apocalypse, but that they want to witness change on a scale Governments would never allow for. Our bureaucratic processes slow down and remove us from any all direct elements of change and, as a result, a boiling over of frustration becomes the dominant ideology. This piece deals with the willingness to break and destroy as a vital part of implementing change while indulging in the catharsis of witnessing that action.
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Artist: Ryan Ruehlen
Title: dysfunctional street lamp composition
Year: 2013
Statement: one night, by chance, I came across a field of street lamps that were flashing off and on at various speeds for inconsistent durations of time. I happen to have my camera with me so I captured it. While the camera was rolling I couldn't help but think that there was some sort of internal, secret rhythm to this malfunctioning unit. I later composed and assigned a single tone with each lamp, and played that tone for the length of time that the lamp would emit light from it. What is witnessed by the viewer/listener is an actual documentation of the lamps flickering with constructed tones to highlight the musical, and potentially purposeful, quality of infrastructural failure.
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Artist: Matthew Weedman
Title: Freeman
Year: 2012
Statement: Freeman interrogates the objects we create to build relationships with the unknown and mysterious aspects of our existence. Using light as the only animated aspect of the film, the objects exude their own materiality and fight their destiny as objects of identification, science and fantasy.
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Artist: Ryan Ruehlen & Adán De La Garza (R/A)
Title: drumset situations 1: strobe
Year: 2016
Statement: Drum Set Situations are a series of video loop compositions by R/A, constructed to disrupt any form of auditory or visual continuity in the performances. Each situation conjures up a specific method for fracturing the musicality within the performance and manifests a dialogue surrounding the schisms between utopian and dystopian impulses. The performers oscillate between conflict/struggle and cooperation/exhaustion. Harmonies rise and collapse throughout, encompassing the feeling of disorientation, rupture, and endless copies. "strobe", 1/3 of an ongoing series, consists of 16 unique drumming arrangements, spliced into 1/16th of a second clips and organized in a linear fashion to create an analog form of "strobing". WARNING: this video may effect certain viewers more than others, leading to seizure for those sensitive to strobes.