L.A. in motion - LA Freewaves biennial festival

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1999 by Marc Siegel

All Over the Map: LA. Freewaves 6th Celebration of Independent Video & New Media Los Angeles, California September 8-October 4, 1998

All Over the Map: L.A. Freewaves 6th Celebration of Independent Video & New Media was a provocative and challenging festival that testified to both the great diversity of creative expression within the realm of independent media and to the exhilarating cultural mix that makes life in Los Angeles so charged with possibility. Since its inception in 1989, L.A. Freewaves has remained steadfast in its ambitious mission of "empowering all communities with control over their own images and access to images created by other cultures." L.A. Freewaves is comprised of a diverse body of artists, activists and scholars who work with existing community organizations, schools, libraries, cable stations and museums to bring together the various events that constitute the month-long festival. But L.A. Freewaves's commitment to the communities of Los Angeles does not end with the biennial festival. Throughout the year, the media coalition organizes follow-up screenings on cable channels and in galleries, conducts new media workshops and maintains a year-round website with art and information for artists, curators, teachers and students (www.freewaves.org).

This year's festival featured over 100 videos from 16 countries, four CD-ROMs, four cable TV programs, 12 websites and five installations/performances. While evidence of L.A. Freewaves's dedication to finding new ways of exhibiting media art, the alternative media programs also extended the festival's thematic exploration of space. With its spare, contemporary design, Diane Bertolo's CD-ROM Probing into Science (1995) challenges scientific claims to objectivity from a feminist perspective. Christine Tamblyn's CD-ROM and installation project Archival Quality (1998), co-presented by the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, features documentation of the late artist's life since 1964. With written and visual material, including personal anecdotes, excerpts from Tamblyn's diaries and performance footage, Archival Quality uses the life experiences of a single artist as a lens onto the broader cultural and political changes of the '60s and '70s. As both CD-ROM and gallery installation, Tamblyn's project offered spectators a rare opportunity to compare the disjunctive narratives of new media with the associative mappings of an art gallery.

Three of the websites also highlighted the connections between virtual and actual spaces. Joe Rabie's Iceland Sundaes (1997) compares urban design with web design in an effort to develop a more precise vocabulary for the morphology of virtual space. While Rabie uses the European town as a comparative model in his website, Jacalyn Lopez Garcia's Glass Houses (1998) uses the space of the home as a means of organizing her reflections on the hybridity of Mexican American identity. Yau Ching's Mysteries of the Orient (1997) takes aim at the ideological space of the Orient in an interrogation of Occidental epistemological and erotic investments in Asian peoples.

All Over the Map also introduced a brilliant new forum for video screenings: the video bus tours. Organized around five themes - food, public housing, voyeurism, Latino graffiti and Chinatown - the tours offered participants an introduction to the city spaces associated with the images and ideas in the videotapes that were screened aboard the bus. "The L.A. Voyeurism Bus Tour," organized by festival director Ming-Yuen S. Ma, dealt with a range of issues relating to looking and being looked at, from queer cruising, public sex and police surveillance to star worship and violence against women. The bus route passed such L.A. landmarks as the Metropolitan Detention Center, the Griffith Park Observatory, the Pussy Cat Theater and the 24-hour surveillance camera on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. The video itinerary included Ocularis (1997, by Tran T. Kim-Trang), Suicide Box (1996, by The Bureau of Inverse Technology) and Forever Linda (1996, by Nguyen Tan Hoang). Ocularis combines banal surveillance footage, including images of the filmmaker in her house and of nighttime activities in a parking structure, with quotations about the role of surveillance technology in contemporary society. The soundtrack includes recordings of the fears and fantasies about surveillance that anonymous callers left on a telephone hotline established by the filmmaker. Through an interplay between sound and image, Ocularis investigates the anxiety, the erotics and mainly the boredom occasioned by the act of watching. Suicide Box looks at the suicide industry of crisis hotlines and surveillance cameras that has arisen in response to the great number of people jumping off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. The tape provides statistics, footage and an anecdotal history of suicides at this famous tourist attraction. Forever Linda extended the bus tour's examination of voyeurism by focusing on the in/visibility of sexual identity among young Asian American queers. The second in Nguyen's "Forever . . ." series of tapes that investigates the connections between emerging Asian American queer identities and both pop and pornographic images, Forever Linda uses the image of supermodel Linda Evangelista as a focus around which various scenes of masking and unmasking are acted out. The tape situates the questions of "who to come out to" and, perhaps more importantly, "who not to come out to" within a cultural mix of Japanese Sanrio products, rice cookers and French songs. Though the connections between the tapes, the themes and the city spaces remained somewhat tenuous, the "Voyeurism Bus Tour" provided a wonderful example of what LA. Freewaves does best: putting audiences in contact with a diversity of cultural experiences and spaces.