Last night’s Monkeybook event was a big hit. Thanks to all who came. Very soon, we’ll be announcing the relaunch of IT IN place with its fancy new archive interface. Just fixing a few last bugs. In the meantime, here’s a little clip from last night shot by Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick:
Alex Itin night at Monkeytown on Vimeo
Vimeo user Alex Itin presented a show last night at Monkeytown, screening videos from Vimeo as well as paintings, animated GIFs, and HTML experiments.
It was an inspiring, relaxing night … just laying around, eating food, drinking wine, and enjoying some commercial free video for a few hours.
Thanks Alex!
Category Archives: monkeytown
monkeybook
New York readers save the date!
Next Wednesday the 28th the Institute is hosting the first of what hopes to be a monthly series of new media evenings at Brooklyn’s premier video salon and A/V sandbox, Monkeytown. We’re kicking things off with a retrospective of work by our longtime artist in residence, Alex Itin. February 15th marked the second anniversary of Alex’s site IT IN place, which we’re preparing to relaunch with a spruced up design and a gorgeous new interface to the archives (design of this interface chronicled here and here). We’d love to see you there.
For those of you who don’t know it, Monkeytown is unique among film venues in New York — an intimate rear room with a gigantic screen on each of its four walls, low comfy sofas and fantastic food. A strange and special place. If you think you can come, be sure to make a reservation ASAP as seating will be tight.
More info about the event here.
carleton roadtrip begins at the institute
On Wednesday, we had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with a group of 22 students from Carleton College who are spending a trimester studying and making digital media under the guidance of John Schott, a professor in the Dept. of Cinema & Media Studies specializing in “personal media” production and network culture. This year, his class is embarking on an off-campus study, a ten-week odyssey beginning in Northfield, Minnesota and taking them to New York, London, Amsterdam and Berlin. At each stop, they’ll be visiting with new media producers, attending festivals and exhibitions, and documenting their travels in a variety of forms. Needless to say, we’re deeply envious.
The Institute was the first stop on their trip, so we tried to start things off with a flourish. After a brief peak at the office, we brought the class over to Monkeytown, a local cafe and video club with a fantastic cube-shaped salon in the back where gigantic projection screens hang on each of the four walls.
Hooking our computers up to the projectors, we took the students on a tour of what we do: showed them our projects, talked about networked books (it was surreal to see GAM3R 7H30RY blown up 20 feet wide, wavering slightly in the central AC), and finished with a demo of Sophie. John Schott wrote a nice report about our meeting on the class’s blog. Also, for a good introduction to John’s views on personal media production and media literacy, take a look at this interview he gave on a Minnesota video blog back in March.
This is a great group of students he’s assembled, with interests ranging from film production to philosophy to sociology. They also seem to like Macs. This could be an ad for the new MacBook:
We’ve invited them back toward the end of their three weeks in New York to load Sophie onto their laptops before they head off to Europe.
(photos by John Schott)