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The annual iMAPPENING show, featuring works-in-progress, performances and presentations by students in the Media Arts and Practice doctoral program, kicks of on Friday, May 10, 2013, from noon to 8:00 p.m., with an opening reception at 6:00 p.m. in the School of Cinematic Arts Gallery. The show will also be open May 11, 10:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m., and on Monday, May 13, students and faculty will engage in a series of round-table discussions between 11:00 a.m. and 3:45 p.m. at Kerckhoff Hall, located at 734 West Adams Boulevard.

The show includes the following projects:

• Locus Swarm, a virtual space visualized by the creatures that inhabit it.

• The Book of Luna, a transmedia metabook, a physical, illuminated manuscript merging sculpture, film and literature.

• Preview of Marquee Survivals, a multimodal exploration of contemporary conceptions of repurposed movie theaters.

• We Already Know and We Don’t Yet Know: Autonets, a performance which asks, “Is sexual, gendered and racialized violence global or translocal?”

• Penumbra: A Novella, creates a haptic reading experience for the iPad as the reader’s gestures expose the protagonist’s memories.

• Polyangylene: Robot Aesthetics and Super-Objects, an interactive installation that involves gallery visitors, a small herd of hexapod robots that compose electroluminiscent wire poetry, and a tumbling junk pile of found objects.

• Miralab: Experiments in Responsive Data Viz Worlds: a cloud-based ecosystem for display and interaction with a retrofuturistic aquatic world.

• Museum of the Microstar, a satirical narrative game and technology demonstration.

• Matricide, a Lacanian love letter to the filmmaker’s Mother(s) combining intimate drag performances, disturbing childhood images revisited and probing testimonial sessions with the Mother.

• ImMobility, a performed score about mobility

• Memory Cellars, an interactive tour of the new building in the School of Cinematic Arts complex.

• Leimert Phone Company, a collaborative community design studio that repurposes pay phones into cultural portals to local history and arts in South LA.

• Divergent Shadows and Daily Image, experimental videos.

• Visions of Aleph, a recombinant narrative video game.

• The Seoul of Los Angeles: Contested Identities and Transnationalism in Immigrant Space, an interactive online cultural history.

• Not Your Baby, a mobile app that builds community to challenge sexual harrassment whenever and wherever it may occur.

• So Help You God, a documentary database cinema game that dissects the confluence of circumstances leading to a violent crime.

• a question of CHARACTER, a documentary meta-game for the Women and Girls Lead comprehensive collection of gender justice films by the Independent Television Service.

• Experiments in Representational Animism, which allows audiences to communicate with a public speaker by aggregating their live input as a datastream for an animistic object.

 All events in the iMAPPENING Showcase are free and open to the public – please join us to see this amazing work!

Rhythms + Visions: Expanded + Live 2 will light up the School of Cinematic Arts Complex in an evening of large exterior projections and animated sonic performances. Innovative artists Quayola, Miwa Matreyek and Charles Lindsay will perform an eclectic program of contemporary visual music and audio-visual art.

Quayola’s time-based digital sculptures and immersive audio-visual work have been presented worldwide. Using huge projections and sound, he will perform Partitura and other animated sound visualizations.

Miwa Matreyek creates magical animated illusions in layered, multi-projection performances. Matreyek performs as a live actor within her animations, which are akin to George Méliès or an animated storybook. She will perform a new animated audio-visual work.

Charles Lindsay, the artist in residence at the SETI Institute, combines science and astronomical visions with accompanying live vocal and electronic musicians. Their piece Trout Fishing in Space envisions a future when humans will leave Earth for good. The work features extraordinary images from the Cassini space mission and earthbound images of nature.

In addition to these performances, the exterior spaces will come alive with multimedia works by faculty and students from USC’s Digital Arts and Animation and Interactive Media divisions.

Organized by Michael Patterson (Cinematic Arts).

Photo: Scott Groller

Image: Miwa Matreyek, Myth and Infrastructure

A graduate from CalArt’s Experimental Animation program (MFA 2007), Miwa Matreyek is an animator, designer, and multi-media artist working in Los Angeles. She creates animated short films as well as works that integrate animation and live performance/installation via projection. Matreyek is interested in how animation transforms when it is combined with body and space (and vice-versa) and takes on a more physical and present quality, while body and space take on a more fantastical quality. On one hand, Matreyek’s performance can be viewed as a cinematic experience taking place on a screen. On the other hand, what is seen on the screen is a collapsed product of multiple layers of animation, objects and body, rhythmically unfolding. Her work exists in a juxtaposition of illusion and non-illusion.