SPECIAL EVENTS

Aurora Picture Show presents the 8th Annual Media Archeology Festival Thursday, September 15 through Saturday, September 17, 2011 in Houston. Taking place at venues across the city, including Downtown and the Museum District, the festival is presented in collaboration with the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. This multi-media festival showcases artists who use, manipulate, recycle and reinvent electronic media to create live multidisciplinary performances.

This year, the festival explores the ideas of games and play from the past and present. Games are social tools for interaction, community building, and entertainment that have traditionally permeated media in various ways—all the way from chess, charades and hula-hoops, to role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and now to the World of Warcraft, one of the most successful multi-player role playing video games of recent times. This year’s festival Rewind – Play – Fast Forward examines new forms and contexts of performance-based art informed by games through visuals, interactivity and strategy.

Commissioned specifically for Media Archeology, media artist Eddo Stern presents Wizard Takes All, for the final night of the festival. This is a live computer game performance that explores the relationships between scripted time and space, role playing, acting, audience/performer relationships, computer simulation and the boundaries between narrative and game-play. A single player/performer plays an all-powerful wizard who possesses boundless audiovisual powers. The wizard stands above a large group of avatar minions, uses hand gestures and chants which are analyzed by software and activated into visuals representing “magical powers” for the purpose of the game. Members of the audience, through the use of simple custom game controllers, control the actions of the mob. The wizard and the mob are engaged in an epic computer game battle that gradually builds in intensity as the performance develops towards a spectacular synesthetic climax.

Refreshments available from food trucks at the site Saint Arnold Brewery. Special thanks to The Orange Show and H-Town StrEATs.

Artist Eddo Stern holds a Masters of Fine Art from the California Institute of the Arts. He is an Associate Professor in the Design, Media Arts department at UCLA, and he founded the pioneering Los Angeles art and technology cooperative C-Level (now BetaLevel). In 2005, Stern was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship; and is the recipient of numerous other awards including a Creative Capital Grant in Emerging Fields and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship.

This festival is presented in collaboration with the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, with additional support provided by IKEA Houston and The Downtown District. Media sponsors include 29-95.com, KUHF 88.7 FM, Glasstire and Saint Arnold Brewery. Gift bag sponsors include: Katz Coffee, GHCVB, Whole Foods Market and others.