Liza Bear

Liza Bear is a New York-based filmmaker, writer, photographer, and media activist. Shortly after her arrival in New York from London in 1968, she co-founded and edited Avalanche magazine, with Willoughby Sharp, producing 13 issues from 1970 to 1976. Devoted to conceptual art and other new forms of art making, Avalanche privileged the artist's voice, with its editorial content featuring only interviews with artists done by Bear and/or Sharp, documents of artists' work and an extensive news section, replacing critical reviews with factual information.

From print to video

After Avalanche, Bear continued her investigation of the creative process in video with the sculptor Jackie Winsor. She then collaborated with Keith Sonnier and several other artists to stage the two-day project Send/Receive Satellite Network, an interactive video link set up via a NASA satellite between participants in New York and San Francisco. The live feed was relayed directly by infrared link to via Manhattan public access cable in New York, and to a Bay Area public access station.

Telecommunications

In 1978-79, following the Send/Receive project, Béar pioneered the use of Slow Scan and QWIP technology as a means to continue interactive visual exchanges between individual artists and artist groups, but using the phone lines rather than a satellite connection. The largest of these demonstrations included eleven cities in the United States and Canada. Among the participating artist groups in New York City was Collaborative Projects (originally named the Green Corporation) of which Béar was a founding member with forty to fifty other artists. Subsequently, Béar co-founded a public access artists' TV show, which debuted as the 10-week series "The WARC Report", providing coverage of the 1979 World Administrative Radio Conference at which frequencies were allocated for various uses of the spectrum by broadcast and other technologies. The series included a Slow Scan feed from Geneva, Switzerland as well as live studio interviews with telecommunications experts. Of the WARC report programs, Rachel Wetzler has written that they "were fundamentally concerned with the intermingling of governmental, corporate, and military interests that determined and regulated access to information on a global scale."^[1] The show continued uninterruptedly on Manhattan Cable's access channel but changed its name to Communications Update and diversified its focus to include experimental programs by artists and filmmakers, including satire and comedy.^[2][3]

Film

Bear has also made a number of films, including the shorts Oued Nefifik: A Foreign Movie, Lost Oasis, and Earthglow, and the feature film Force of Circumstance.^[4] Her films and videos have been exhibited at the Festival of the Other Avant-Garde, the São Paulo Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, "American Independents", Berlinale, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK and the Cinema Arts Centre, Huntington, Long Island.

Publications

Her short stories have been published in Between C and D and Bomb Magazine". As a freelance writer, her feature stories, interviews and filmmaker profiles have appeared in Variety, ""Bomb Magazine", Newsday, the New York Times, "The Boston Globe", Ms. Magazine, the Village Voice, the New York Daily News, indiewire, Salon.com, and Artforum

Bear is the author of "Beyond the Frame: Dialogues with World Filmmakers," Praeger, 2007.

Awards

Bear's awards in film and literature include:

• 1983 National Endowment for the Arts, Video Artist Fellowship
• 1984 Jerome Independent Filmmaker Fellowship
• 1985 National Endowment for the Arts, Film Production Award
• 1990 NYFA Creative Non-Fiction Fellowship
• 1994 Edward Albee Writing Fellowship

References

• "Artists Gain Access to Cable," by Kathleen Hulser, Videography, Vol. 10, Issue 1, January 1985

External links

• "LIZA BEAR". THIS LONG CENTURY. Retrieved 2014-02-07.