WASTE LAND

Our second film of the year in the "Art That Moves" series will be WASTE LAND.  Released in 2011, and filmed over nearly three years, WASTE LAND follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world's largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic band of “catadores”—self-designated pickers of recyclable materials. Muniz’s initial objective was to “paint” the catadores with garbage. However, his collaboration with these inspiring characters as they recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives. Director Lucy Walker (Devil's Playground, Blindsight, and Countdown to Zero) and co-directors João Jardim and Karen Harley have great access to the entire process and, in the end, offer stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit. 

Vik Muniz was born into a working-class family in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1961. As a young man he was shot in the leg whilst trying to break up a fight. He received compensation for his injuries and used this money to fund a trip to New York City, where he has lived and worked since the late 1980s. He began his career as a sculptor but gradually became more interested in photographic reproductions of his work, eventually turning his attention exclusively to photography. He incorporates a multiplicity of unlikely materials into this photographic process. Often working in series, Vik has used dirt, diamonds, sugar, string, chocolate syrup and garbage to create bold, witty and often deceiving images drawn from the pages of photojournalism and art history. His work has been met with both commercial success and critical acclaim, and has been exhibited worldwide. His solo show at MAM in Rio de Janeiro was second only to Picasso in attendance records; it was here that Vik first exhibited his “Pictures of Garbage Series” in Brazil.  You can visit his website by clicking HERE.

Below is a trailer for the film:

Please join us in Room 131 of the Dickey Fine Arts Building at 7:30 PM on Thursday, March 15, for a powerful film that showcases the ability of art to change people's lives!

Rip!: A Remix Manifesto

Thursday, February 2
7:30 PM
DFAB Room 131

The first film of the new year in our "Art That Moves" series is the controversial mash-up film Rip!: A Remix Manifesto.  Released originally as an open-source film (meaning it was only offered on the Internet--and a few festivals--and could be downloaded and altered by anyone without penalty), Rip!, directed by Brett Gaylor, explores the nature of copyright rules in a new and constantly changing digital world.

Of particular interest to Gaylor is how the Internet has been the arena for the explosion of a global, cross-cultural, creative pastiche which builds largely on the sharing of ideas, concepts, and media and the remixing and re-contextualization of those ideas.  This creative process, according to Gaylor, is the exact same creative process used by human beings throughout history, only supercharged and accelerated by the Internet.  However, those who own the copyright to the ideas being remixed have begun to threaten this free exchange of creativity.

As you read these words, Congress is debating two bills with bipartisan support, called SOPA ("Stop Online Piracy Act") and Protect-IP, that would, if passed, essentially give corporations the right to block--or shut down altogether--any website that they even BELIEVE to be guilty of copyright infringement.  Laws like these threaten the very type of creativity that Gaylor is talking about in his film.  As a result, Rip!: A Remix Manifesto is every bit as relevant and timely today as it was when it was released in 2009.

The film's website offers this description:

Immerse yourself in the energetic, innovative and potentially illegal world of mash-up media with Rip!: A Remix Manifesto. Let web activist Brett Gaylor and musician Greg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, serve as your digital tour guides on a probing investigation into how culture builds upon culture in the information age.

Biomedical engineer turned live-performance sensation Girl Talk, has received immense commercial and critical success for his mind-blowing sample-based music. Utilizing technical expertise and a ferocious creative streak, Girl Talk repositions popular music to create a wild and edgy dialogue between artists from all genres and eras. But are his practices legal? Do his methods of frenetic appropriation embrace collaboration in its purest sense? Or are they infractions of creative integrity and violations of copyright? You be the judge by watching RiP: A remix manifesto.

Below is a trailer for the film:

Please join us in Room 131 of the Dickey Fine Arts Building at 7:30 PM on Thursday, February 2, for an in-depth and entertaining (and admittedly one-sided) look at creativity in the new digital age and the forces that threaten it.