Wave Energies FeedBack:
30 Years of Electronic Media
at Kansas City Art Institute

Lloyd Schnell started Kansas City Art Institute’s Photography Department in 1970 and soon thereafter Richard Matthews began teaching 16mm filmmaking. In 1975 Gary Sutton joined the Photography Department, and in 1976 Mitch Deck began offering video elective classes with three Sony PortaPaks and a color studio camera.  Enrollment was primarily from the Photography and Sculpture Departments. Deck also taught single frame or stop motion 16mm film animation classes.   In the late 1970s Larry Hope began teaching beginning and advanced 16mm filmmaking, and departmental equipment at that time included movieolas, edit bins, a flatbed editor, a film chain, an optical printer, Bolex H-16 cameras and Nagra audiotape recorders.  In 1983 Deck worked with Douglas Davis in establishing the Kansas City component of the International Art Network funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, a project that Davis initiated whereby several schools including KCAI utilized video technology as a creative and communicative medium of expression.  This made it possible to incorporate a 3/4 inch video-editing system in the video studio with Deck serving as technician and instructor.  At this time 16mm film was discontinued and Reed Estabrook replaced Lloyd Schnell as Chair of the Photography Department.  In 1986 Patrick Clancy was hired as Chair of the Photography & Video Department to begin a new program emphasizing camera arts, sound and emerging technologies.  It was clear that digital technology would eventually become the norm and that although analog technology would still be relevant, a dialog between the camera arts, light, sound, wave energies and interactivity emphasizing emerging technologies would shape the future of this new program.  Since that time the faculty has developed a unique undergraduate multidisciplinary department that emphasizes three primary components: photography, video and sound. The re-structuring of the curriculum also allowed the faculty to teach a broader range of elective courses in performance, installation, computer modeling and animation, contemporary art theory and history of media arts.  There continues to be a strong dialog between analog and digital technologies, performance and installation art, the still and moving image and all aspects of the camera arts.

Wave Energies FeedBack emphasizes recent works produced by graduates of KCAI’s Photography & Video/New Media/Digital Filmmaking Department who attended KCAI between1980 and 2010.  Full-time faculty during this time included: Mitch Deck, Gary Sutton, Patrick Clancy, Wendy Geller, Kenvin Lyman, Kristine Diekman, Christopher Burnett, Sheldon Brown, Celia Dougherty, Magaly Ponce, Dwight Frizzell, Ellen Zweig, Andrew Wells, Cyan Meeks, Andrea Flamini, Rebecca Dolan, Diana Heise, and Tom Lewis.  Part-time faculty included: Gwen Widmer, Tal Wilson, Martin Arnold, Gene Cooper, Isa Gordon, Tony Allard, Caitlin Horsmon, Frank Hamilton, Hesse McGraw and Jeff Witt.  Departmental Technicians have been Marc Deckard, Jeff Brown, Hafiza Capehart, and Tom Livesay. – Patrick Clancy

October 22

Atkins Auditorium, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art — Free tickets available online

Tiger Flower Circle Sun, Christopher Willits, (USA), Live Performance with guitar, computer and video projection, 30 min.

Willits morphs melodic guitar loops and DSLR video into layered patterns of sound and light using custom-built software.

Shelf Life, Don Bernier (USA), 2008, video, 29:30 min.

Everybody collects something. Raymond “Bones” Bandar collects skulls – 7,000 and counting.

Los Angeles, Derric Eady (USA), 2009, video, 9:44 min.

Los Angeles is a reconstructed vision of the city sampled through the lens of contemporary video game technology.

Center of the Universe, Timothy Hutchings (USA), 2003, video, 3:47 min.

Four records are visually combined on screen and heard simultaneously, each song recounting a creation myth about the beginning of the universe. 

Celestial Spheres, Timothy Hutchings (USA), 2008, video with original score by David T. Little, 6:16 min.

Celestial Spheres tracks motion from pornographic films and maps it onto otherwise abstract shapes, imbuing them with a humor and viscerality which betrays their historical references.

Toyboat, Heather Brown (USA), 2010, video, 5 min.

Shot in Yelapa, Mexico, Toyboat observes the interactions and exchanges that occur through movement and language within a fixed frame. A common tongue twister, the title refers to the limits of verbal communication.

Chorégraphie Impromptue, Audra Brandt (USA), 2007, video, 3:56 min.

This dance improvisation in collaboration with Soline Pillet was filmed in a church in southwestern France.  All of the lighting and music happened unexpectedly as the filming began.

Spiders, Audra Brandt (USA), 2007, video, 2:02 min.

A single pan across a field of bluebells is interrupted by the presence of a body and the unexpected inhabitants occupying this intimate space.

I Want to Love You, Cortney Andrews (USA), 2010, video, 10 min.

This video is a series of choreographed performances in which the central female character repeats dramatic and intimate gestures, generally associated with love and suffering. Through duration and repetition, the performances reveal a more violent subtext that comments on the nature of romantic relationships.

Other events in series:

October 8
October 15
October 22

Credits: All videos, performances and image stills courtesy of the artists. Shelf Life image still courtesy of Tina Erickson © 2008. Shelf Life image courtesy of Tom Butler ©1965. Christopher Willits image courtesy of Jan Kruml. Electromediascope is curated by Patrick Clancy and Gwen Widmer.