Dallas VideoFest's founder and Artistic Director Bart Weiss says his artists will tackle the Omni Hotel's lighting system later this year, programming it to run self-designed works in another public offering. This will be the second time DVF has tackled the 20 story-tall screen, reclaiming it as a display medium for large-scale video art.
Really large-scale.
Like, 198,807-square-feet-of-navigable-space large-scale.
The date for the 2013 Expanded Cinema event is tentatively scheduled for Friday, October 4. The curator is named and the stable of artists is nearly finalized.
See also: - City Artists to Hijack the Omni's Lighting System. Dallas Gets more Bladerunnery. - Last Night, on the Omni Hotel, "Expanded Cinema" Opened Art to Everyone
Last year's code-writers built from the ground up, creating the Omni-compatible MP4 base program and predictively trouble-shooting the building's many visual obstacles, like the stretched-out pixelation along its wavy, wrap-around shape. There was also an unaccounted-for number of finicky and burned-out lighting segments that tormented several artists' projects.
This year's crew has the luxury of building on those experiences, filtering what did and didn't translate from idea to final display for an evening of public art. But they won't have it too easy: most of 2013's video artists are new to the Omni project, with only about one-third of the names repeating from last year's roster.
Mona Kasra, a UTD PhD Arts and Technology candidate, Centraltrak artist-in-residence and organizer of the incubator's "Next Topic" lecture series, is curating this installment. She's pulling a bunch of familiar names, locals and former-locals, that you'd hope to see involved: Dallas Observer Mastermind winner Carolyn Sortor, Biennial-bound archival tech-tinkerer Michael Morris, Tiny Thumbs art game collective leader Kyle Kondas, former UNT professor Jenny Vogel, video guru, filmmaker and programming wizard Bart Weiss, and arts activism heavy lifter, Morehshin Allahyari. Kasra's also invited New Orleans artist, Nina Schwanse, who's currently participating in Centraltrak's look at body talk, That Mortal Coil. Others brought in include Michele Jaquis, a RISD grad whose work focuses on communication and its missteps; computer animator and 3D printing specialist Jonathan Monaghan will take a turn; long-stay Austin visual artist and projector hoarder Luke Savisky, a man known for getting handsy with unsuspecting canvases adds his efforts; Houston's collage film format experimenter, Kelly Sears will jump in, and bringing it back home: a yet-to-be-named student representative from Booker T. Washington will also have a go.
It's an exciting and diverse talent list assembling this year's offering with a larger emphasis on national collaboration, a push reiterated by this edition's event title "MultipliCity." Of course, we'll have to wait until Dallas VideoFest 26 (October 9 to 13) to see their big ideas merge in Dallas and materialize on the city's grandest canvas.
