Field Mic (Documentary, 2011, 3 min) from Ani Pandit on Vimeo.
LOCATION: The Nightingale, 1084 North Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60642
DATE: Wednesday, May 18th
TIME: 7PM
PRICE: $10 non-members, $5 members
The IFP is pleased to launch a new salon/discussion series for media makers in the Chicagoland and Midwestern region: MEET YOUR DIGITAL PARTNERS. The goal is to bring together people from a broad array of fields related to media making, to exchange ideas and talk about developing visual and aural stories in a variety of cross-platform arenas.
With the convergence of technology, there is a lot of talk of making work that can be relevant across a multitude of platforms. Yet media makers may not know where to meet potential collaborators outside their usual circle. Stay relevant and make new connections by attending this open forum, whether you’re a game developer, filmmaker, social media producer, advertiser, audio artist, or cross-platform media maker.
Round #1 of this experiment features the following media artists:
Ian Pottmeyer graduated college prepared to be an opera singer. From there he became acomposer, then a composer of video game soundtracks. Now he creates the games themselves at Studio Cypher, a game design studio based in Bloomington, Indiana. As part of the three-man team, he takes on numerous design roles, from game to graphic to web to audio. Ian’s games are often marked by his desire to help players be as personally creative as possible. On May 18th, he’ll be giving a crash course in game design to help ensure that everyone who comes across your experience feels like they can participate and have fun.
Ben Groenevelt makes fast, robust websites for non-profits, artists, musicians as well as smallbusinesses and larger corporations. His tool of choice is Drupal, an open-source contentmanagement systems (CMS) used to build sites like the whitehouse.gov and grammy.com. He also, along with other open source devotees, spends his time giving back to Drupal’s open source community. He will be presenting, “What is this Drupal Thing?” giving a brief overview of what Drupal is and some of the powerful tools it provides to build dynamic, content rich web sites.
Cole Pierce is a Chicago based artist who makes paintings, video installations and audiomultiples. He earned his MFA in Art Theory & Practice from Northwestern in 2007 and has exhibited work at Antenna Gallery, Old Gold, Vega Estates, and is curating a group show at the Milwaukee Avenue Art Festival for the third consecutive year. He co-authors Field Mic, a sound art and music blog, and contributes music mixes to Headphone Commute’s podcast series. He is currently a videographer and educator at the Chicago Teachers’ Center of NEIU.
Jon Satrom is a new-media artist, educator, designer, and organizer. He performs realtime audio and video, celebrates obsolescence, and cultivates glitches. Satrom operates a production company called studiothread http://studiothread.com and teaches in the Department of Film Video New Media Animation at the School of the Art Institute. He will discuss “Strategies for Shattering Through Glowing Rectangles.” Riffing on Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970), Satrom will discuss new-media art’s potential to sculpt stories, transcend technologies, and remix our relationship(s) with cinema.
Able Parris is a designer, art director, and illustrator. He learned graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design before opening his own niche design studio in Providence, RI. His collage art has shown nationally, and has been published internationally. He co-authors Field Mic, a sound art and music blog, and contributes to We Love Typography, the beloved typography site that’s like an FFFFound for type-related content. Currently, he spends his days at McKinney in Durham, NC practicing design and art direction in the context of advertising.
The music blog that I co-author was just named 'Best Amateur Music Blog' by the Chicago Reader. If you haven't spent time with Field Mic, please do.
Chicago-based monolith Pitchfork has a profound influence on the gravitational field of the indie-rock universe, not to mention its own festival. But what about the little guys, who don’t pay attention to release cycles and aren’t driving the zeitgeist—the folks who don’t share the blogosphere’s obsession with being the first to cover the next new thing? Instead of slathering adjectives all over Best Coast seven-inches, Field Mic collects what it calls “sound from the field.” That means several posts a day that range from performances of music by little-known contemporary composers to video of oddball circuit-bent instruments and elaborate mechanical ensembles that play themselves, along with the occasional dude-and-guitar clip or actual music video. The blog is ecumenical in its tastes, though it leans a little toward the electroacoustic and ambient—and there are absolutely no reposts of clubby remixes of popular indie bands. Founded in April and curated by three far-flung editors—Chicago audiovisual artist Cole Pierce, Brooklyn-based New York Times blog specialist Jeremy Zilar (who also runs Silence Matters), and North Carolina collage artist and designer Able Parris—Field Mic doesn’t offer deep analysis, usually just a sentence or two of enthusiastic explanation. It’s heavy on reader submissions, and every page is charged with the thrill of someone with a brilliant new discovery he’s aching to pass along to the wider world.—Jessica Hopper