In San Francisco in the early 80s, filmmaker Jeffrey Skoller helped found a “mobile” cinema that showed movies in different locations every week: art galleries, clubs, community centers. Some of the films were experimental, but what Skoller was really interested in experimenting with was venue. By the 1970s most screenings of any kind were arranged by salaried professionals, and Skoller’s project represented a return to the early days of avant-garde cinema, the period after World War II, when artists initiated their own screenings.
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Now associate chair of the department of film, video, and new media at the School of the Art Institute, Skoller is still interested in alternative venues. “If I’m encouraging students to make experimental work, they also have to think about the ways it gets exhibited,” he says. “Artists have to teach the aboveground institutions how to show their work.”
The discussions should include some lively disagreements: there will be Web advocates, and while Skoller isn’t anti-Web, for him “the social experience in the theater” is important: “With the emergence of video and computers, everyone is alone and isolated.” And panelist Brian Frye, a New York curator, hates projections at raves, decrying their “subjugation of the individual to some undifferentiated mass.”
