Holly Willis

One of the rear projection screens featuring the work of 76 international media artists

Dark Victory

Holly Willis
Museums and galleries usually command a kind of reverence — for the artist, the institution and for Art itself — through the austerity and apparent neutrality of their spaces, with their placid white walls and respectful displays. Imagine an exhibition that not only creates an environment for an audience but......

5 Transmissions From the Post-TV Frontier

Holly Willis
Television has been getting a much-needed makeover this year, thanks in part to the advent of new portable video-playing devices. The networks are scrambling to jump on the bandwagon by offering to sell episodes of various existing shows, and new companies like Lime are forming to create “next generation” media......
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The Human Stain

Holly Willis
Black Hole opens with a hole, a white gash sliced into an all-black page. It’s a long, narrow slit that, on the next page, widens ever so slightly until, on the third page, it’s a gaping, throat-to-genitals wound in the soft belly of a frog splayed and pinned to a......

Digital Universe

Holly Willis
“I’m going to put the phone down now — just hang on.” Media artist Michael Naimark was at LAX one morning a few weeks ago, on his way to the Banff Centre’s Refresh Conference on histories of new-media art. Another artist, Simon Penny from UCI, was up ahead, also on......

Juxtaposed

Holly Willis
Are we angry? AIDS activist Gregg Bordowitz asked this question last year during a lecture at LACE, and Dont Rhine of the Ultra-red political collective reiterates it now. But he answers it, too, saying that while many people will say they’re sad or anxious, few will acknowledge outrage. So how......
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Time Machines

Holly Willis
“I’m not a very linear person,” says Doug Aitken, the Los Angeles–based video artist and photographer whose work has been celebrated internationally for close to a decade but who is just now receiving his first solo gallery show in L.A. Not very linear? The comment may resemble the sort of......
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The Blob

Holly Willis
On a Sunday afternoon three weeks ago, denizens of the neighborhood surrounding Watts Towers were confronted with a peculiar sight: a huge, silver, blobular thing dented with gentle folds and cavernous holes. The first investigators were kids, who approached with a mix of curiosity and awe. Inquisitiveness trumped uncertainty, and......

Only Connect

Holly Willis
Feminists have made much of the right to say “No.” In her latest film, British writer-director Sally Potter, a key figure in the feminist avant-garde cinema, says “Yes,” affirming the radical potential of desire by telling a cross-cultural love story, inspired by the events of 9/11, through a script composed......
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The Military Games People Play

Holly Willis
The war in Iraq began almost exactly two years ago, but seven months before that, you could play a video game — America’s Army: Operations. As the violence in the Middle East increased, so too did the number of games designed to help us experience it, such as Uday and......

Cinema du Dots

Holly Willis
“How can I talk about it?” asked John Whitney Sr. in 1975, pondering how best to verbalize an essentially ineffable visual experience, one that, like music, organizes patterns of space and time into immediate emotional affect. His only recourse was analogies to music. The moving-image abstract art form he and......