VIDEOTANK #18: ARCTIC PERSPECTIVE INITIATIVE (API)
October 18 – December 15, 2018
The Arctic Perspective Initiative (API)
The Arctic Perspective Initiative (API), 2008
Overview
The Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) is a non-profit, international group of individuals and organizations, founded by Marko Peljhan and Matthew Biederman, whose goal is to promote the creation of open authoring, communications and dissemination infrastructures for the circumpolar region. Its aim is to work with, learn from, and empower the North and Arctic Peoples through open source technologies and applied education and training.
By creating access to these technologies while promoting the creation of shared communications and data networks without costly overheads, continued and sustainable development of autonomous culture, traditional knowledge, science, technology and education opportunities for peoples in the North and Arctic regions is enabled. Incorporating 16mm celluloid images, digital desktop captures and 3D CGI, the film also maps a technological trajectory: from historical methods of optical navigation to new algorithms of locating, from singular projection to multi-perspectival satellitic visions. Registering these technical advances progressively through the film’s materials and means of production, Sunstone creates “a cinema of affect, a cinema of experience – an Op film.”
Artists
Matthew Biederman is a transdisciplinary artist working across media and millieus, who has been exploring perception, data systems, media saturation and politics since the mid nineties. His installations have been exhibited in the US, South America, Europe and Japan, in a variety of festivals and venues such as 7 ATA Festival Internacional (Lima, Peru), the 11th Lyon Biennale, the 2011 Quebec Triennale, 2014 Montreal Biennale (Musée d’art contemporain), Biennale of Digital Art (BIAN, Montreal), Artissima (Turin, IT), Moscow Biennale, Art and Alternative Visions (Tokyo) and Sonic Acts (NASA, Amsterdam). As a film and video maker, his works have been included in the FILE festival (Sao Paulo), New Forms Festival (Vancouver), the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Paris/Berlin International Meetings, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Biederman is currently represented by Art45 and lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.
After theatre and radio studies at the University of Ljubljana, Marko Peljhan founded Projekt Atol, an organisation working with visual arts and communications technologies, in 1992. In 1995 he co-founded LJUDMILA (Ljubljana Digital Media Lab), now one of Europe’s most significant cultural and tactical media labs. In 1997 Peljhan’s ongoing Makrolab, launched at documenta in Germany, provoked artistic and scientific reflection on sustainable technologies and energies. Radio is key to Peljhan’s research: he founded and coordinates the Insular Technologies initiative, which proposed an autonomous high frequency radio network long before wireless internet. His work was exhibited internationally at multiple biennales and festivals (Venice, Gwangju, Brussels, Manifesta, Johannesburg, Istanbul), at the Documenta X in Kassel, several ISEA exhibitions, several Ars Electronica presentations and major museums, such as the P.S.1 MOMA, New Museum of Contemporary Art, ICC NTT Tokyo, YCAM Yamaguchi and others. Peljhan is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Media Arts and Technology Program, California Nanosystems Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA; he is also a licensed radio operator and trained pilot.
Documentation
Produced by the Foreman Art Gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the City of Sherbrooke and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
