LA Freewaves

The LA Freewaves logo

Freewaves is a Los Angeles based nonprofit organization that advocates for and exhibits uncensored independent new media from around the world. The group sees itself as a media arts magnet currently building one of the largest online archives of streaming new media art works. Freewaves also provides information on media resources on its website.

Artists

Freewaves exhibits works that are generally not taken in by Hollywood, big business, networks or cable television. Works are frequently eccentric and unconventional, favoring content and concepts over aesthetic gimmicks, representing voices not normally heard from in more mainstream festivals. Media artists including Bill Viola, William Basinski, Yes Men, Brad Neely, CrimethInc. and Jennifer Steinkamp have shown works in Freewaves programs.

History

Freewaves was founded in 1989 by Anne Bray. Bray serves as executive director and has been working in the field of media arts since the mid-1970s as an artist and teacher. With representatives of other communities, she founded Freewaves and has administered the program since it was launched at the American Film Institute's National Video Festival in 1989.

Festivals

In 2000, Freewaves hosted Air Raids, a citywide festival of experimental, documentary and new media works by artists, activists and media makers. The festival featured an opening at MOCA, thematic video bus tours, "TV or Not TV" a 10-year LA media arts retrospective that aired on KCET, online exhibitions, as well as 50 additional screenings and installations at over 30 Southern California venues.

Freewaves' eighth festival, TV or NOT TV? was held in 2002. It presented over 300 works in panel discussions, performance events, exhibitions, outdoor community screenings and television broadcasts that dealt with the line between daily life and televised reality. The ninth festival, How Can You Resist? was held in 2004, with over 150 works of video, film and digital media chosen to addres the question "How Can You Resist?"

The 2006 festival, Too Much Freedom posed the question of freedom and attempted to answer that question by showcasing work that examined freedom. In 2008, the 11th festival, HollyWould transformed Hollywood Boulevard into a multi-faceted screening room for experimental videos, films and media art from every continent. Selected works were projected onto buildings, displayed on LCD screens inside stores and installed in storefront windows.

Events and projects

In 2009, Statues Unfrozen for One Hour - Clothed Women and Unarmed Men was shown at rooftop of eighteen-thirty on Sunset Blvd in Echo Park, Los Angeles and at the Moscow Film Festival. The two-channel screening featured 18 short videos on actions in public space by artists from USA, India, Kazakhstan, France and Dubai. Also in 2009, Hotbed - Video Cultivation Beside the Getty Garden projected 20 artists' videos onto the exterior walls of the Getty Center court yards, exploring the theme of the body as nature or culture.

In 2010, Freewaves celebrated its 20th anniversary at the LACMA Late Night Art Event, animating the museum’s north plaza with over 20 experimental media art works produced over the previous two decades. The videos presented spanned perspectives from identity politics of the 1990s to post-9/11 reality checks, from deep inside the mass media landscape to observations from media makers in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Since 2011, Freewaves’ project Out the Window has presented hundreds of artists’ videos on L.A. Metro buses to daily commuters, creating a wired tapestry among the many social, cultural, economic and creative constituencies of Los Angeles. Two thousand metro buses are equipped with Transit TV’s 2 screens and speakers inside, providing a creative platform to showcase innovative media art in a distinctively public space.


References

    External Links