Gridlords is a narrative arts and performance-based monthly live experience. Its roots are in Portland’s underground and art comics community, starting in April 2012 at the Waypost. With a strong love of interdisciplinary performance and storytelling, and a desire to marry sound and vision in new ways, Gridlords inventor Sean Christensen felt a void of a live experience in the world he knew was possible. He felt its echoes from fragments in memories and saw its potential in his future. Gridlords wishes to be the lectures of Lynda Barry as an explosive inspirational devotional performance piece or the performance pieces of Laurie Anderson as a universe! The world has become used to facing a device that is feeding you animated images and audio messages while your friend is virtually talking to you and your other friend is talking to you in person while facing their own device with a whole other set of stimuli. Gridlords is the stimulus presented all at once for a unified audience with an attention span. Gridlords wants you, the audience, to feel a part of something.
Gridlords #22
is presented as part of the 2014 Northwest Animation Festival.
MSHR
MSHR is a collaborative audio-visual project by Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy. The duo works across digital, analog and organic media to build synthesizers, installations, recordings and rituals. "A hand tracing a spiral in the wet sand, meshing with the sky to form a nano chip." The piece being shown is MSHR's musical and visual collaboration with Rick and Jackie Stewart aka Ju Suk Reet Meat and Oblivia of The Tenses and Smegma.
Daria Tessler
Daria’s animation features a character exploring a world in which natural elements creep and grow amidst scattered ruins of an ancient civilization. Born in Finland and raised in Los Angeles, Daria Tessler currently lives in Portland, Oregon where she draws and screenprints characters of all shapes and sizes who adventure through jumbled, mysterious worlds.
Dylan Jones
Dylan Jones hails from New England in 2011 and Is currently a student at PNCA studying animation. In his work Jones tries to explore the phenomenal space between ambiguity and fear. This has been primarily through comics and animation.
Jacob Ciocci
Jacob Ciocci is a founding member of the Paper Rad art collective and the performance group Extreme Animals. His work is concerned with the relationship between popular culture, popular technology, and collective experience. He is showing excerpts from The Urgency, a 45-minute collection of recent "music videos" by Ciocci and the band Extreme Animals. The videos combine digital animation, found footage, and camera-based footage shot by Ciocci into a fast-paced, paranoid investigation of contemporary America's obsession with technology and personal freedom. Can we ever go back now that we have eaten the Apple Macintosh from the Tree Of Internet? Will we ever be able to escape from Pandora's Big Box Store? We need to drink from the Monster's Energy Elixir of Truth so we can finally WAKE UP!!!
Sally Cruikshank
Sally Cruikshank Is an American cartoonist and animator whose work includes animation for the Children's Television Workshop program Sesame Street, and whose short "Quasi at the Quackadero" (1975) was inducted into the United States National Film Registry. Cruickshank will be showing a series of early flash animations that were works to tests of what was supposed to be the future of animation.
Zach Erickson
Zach Erickson likes experimenting with paper cut outs from drawings or books, and making short sequences with audio. He uses a three layered glass table for animating which gives him three dimensions of depth for each layer, and is inspired by low-fi 70's and 80's synth sounds and creepy sci-fi absurd funny imagery. Erickson will be debuting a new short animated film, as yet untitled.
Andrice Arp
How am I spending my time? Am I doing something worthwhile? Is it a result of a conscious decision I made or is it something I just do because I have always done it? If I decide I'm on the wrong course, can I change it? Or are the grooves worn too deeply? What if I try to change something and I fail? Do I get up and try again, or do I give up and go back to the comfort of familiar behavior? Have I learned something? Have I learned what I can do, or have I only learned what not to do? Andrice Arp will present a new series of loop animations that dangerously break the barrier between our reality & her world.
Cari Vander Yacht
Past life as an advertising art director, working with Wieden & Kennedy. Present life as an illustrator, animator, party guest(?). Cari Vander Yacht will be showing a series of animated loops. Some of which are made of vintage photographs brought to life the way only Vander Yacht could. They feel playful & nuanced like a child prodigy who spends long hours staring at things waiting for them to perform for her.
Ian Obermuller
Ian Obermuller has been creating the Self Absorb animated series since around 2009. He also makes music called Snowman Plan. Obermuller will be at the show in person to present new episode material from Self Absorb his ongoing animated epic, that could only be best compared to a cross between British television's The Prisoner & Aeon Flux—if you can imagine that!
E*Rock & Mumble Boy
E*Rock has recently remastered cuts of futuristic Mumble Boy collaborations from years past & will be presenting them with their fresh new coat of virtual paint.
Marsuplala
Marsuplala is a collaborative performance project between artists Wally C. and Alex Chiu. The project can be described as a collage of creative vomit—some of the best there is to offer in the world of Weirdo Art Theater. Expect to see full body monster costumes, animated violence, and drippy cuteness. Marsuplala will be performing live with a new performance built around animation.
ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
NW Animation Fest celebrates the best new work from independent animators around the globe. With over 200 films, it’s now the biggest animation festival in the USA.
This year's fest includes six Guest Shows, the Oregon Animation Industry Showcase, and five International Short Film Blocks.
See it all for only $60 with an All-Festival Pass | BUY HERE.