Curated by Laura Splan

Onion City Film Festival and the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines (CCAM), in collaboration with Public Works Gallery co-present a live performance program adjacent to the festival exploring “expanded cinema” in an attempt to put cinematic art to the tasks of resistance, rupture, and reconfiguration of mediatic experience. We ask: how can experimental modes of animating sound and moving image reconfigure the possibility of our relating to one another anew?

A suite of experimental 360 films shot in Wilmington, NC by participants of The School of Making Thinking‘s annual residency on the Jengo’s Playhouse campus

Ripples Across the Latent Space delves into the hidden zone in our technologically-entwined epoch. The term 'latent space' often finds its root in the realm of machine learning, specifically in generative models. It represents a mathematical space where potential realities exist, to be translated or 'decoded' into comprehensible forms for the human observer.

How does the digital (re)animate our environments? How do we imprint our humanness upon the digital, and how does digitalness imprint upon us humans? Ruminate on your human/digital reflections with the anthropomorphic inventions of Marisa Fulper-Estrada, Jon McCurley, Kristin McWharter, Lorna Mills, Sunny Nestler, and Seth Scriver.

OVERRIDE | A Billboard Project is a citywide collaborative public art initiative between EXPO CHICAGO and the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) in collaboration with the Chicago Digital Network to exhibit artwork on all CDN billboards and City Information Panels 'CIPs' in the Central Business District from April 3—23, 2023. Participants included both emerging and established artists from Chicago and around the world. Placing artwork within this public context and the broader presentation of billboard advertising, OVERRIDE takes its name from industry terminology referring to the continuation of an outdoor advertising program beyond a contracted period. Fully integrated into the language of advertising and local familiar signage, each of the works included within the OVERRIDE program present the opportunity for local and international artists to intercept and push the boundaries of how visual culture is disseminated in our increasingly image-based environment.