Cinema Software: An Evening with Barbara Lattanzi

Barbara Lattanzi is a media artist whose current practice involves the construction of "cinema software." This evening she will present a screening, performance/demo and discussion of her latest software, “Unwriting,” which uses an uncomplicated interface for elaborate improvised, keyboard-triggered riffing of video, sound and graphics. She will also show portions of her O.D.E. (Optical De-dramatization Engine) series that applies software to early historical melodramas. These early films are sampled and dynamically-manipulated across extended durations, in cycles between 15 and 40 hours long.

Also to be presented are earlier works of cinema software that derive from "open sourcing" structuralist films by Hollis Frampton and Ernie Gehr, several early interactive applets based on F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, and video documentation of her "C-SPAN Karaoke" software that reexamines the sing-along genre as ideology critique. Barbara Lattanzi currently teaches in the Expanded Media Division of the School of Art and Design, Alfred University (Alfred, New York).