September 2006

Five years ago The MacDowell Colony initiated MacDowell Downtown, a public outreach program aimed at enabling MacDowell artists-in-residence to interact and share their work with the local community on a monthly basis. Modeled on the open studios offered at the Colony’s Medal Day celebration since 1960, MacDowell Downtown has now hosted presentations by 46 artists, including filmmaker Jennie Livingston, composer Alvin Singleton, performance artist Deke Weaver, and visual artist Joe Girandola. Heading into MacDowell’s Centennial in 2007, this year’s MacDowell Downtown series will open with a screening and Q&A offered by Los Angeles-based film/video artist Eric Saks.

The idea of combining two different elements to create a third is a driving force for this innovative filmmaker, who considers the notion of collage to be one of the most important creative concepts of the 19th and 20th centuries. “Collage is a collision of styles creating a new voice,” explains Saks, who uses a note cards, pictograms, thumbnail images, and other forms of media to generate a “topological view” of a subject with his films. “We see this combination of disparate elements to create meaning in all of the arts,” he claims.

Operating from “a worldview that sees everything as being recombinant,” Saks has a special interest in technology and its impact on life and human interaction. With his 15-plus years of telephony investigations, he has explored a variety of relevant issues such as telephone salesmanship and marketing, illegal phone calls, and the problems of representing one’s identity over the phone. “We’ve lived with this technology for 50-plus years, and we sort of ignore it and don’t think about it much anymore,” he explains, “but confusion and ambiguity constantly arise. We are merging with the technology as a species.”

Though Saks acknowledges that advances in technology have made it easy to create media work, he is always looking for a way to be challenged within this realm. “For me, the challenging part is turning something very interior into something exterior. It’s about translating things that are very difficult to represent pictorially.”

Saks will screen excerpts from three films at MacDowell Downtown, including his 2001 video Dust, which is composed of recorded cell phone conversations orchestrated to filmed dust particles. Saks, who will be in residence at MacDowell for two weeks working on a feature-length screenplay entitled Material Witness, will also show parts of Nation Elevated, Part 1: Steak Knife (2003), a series of single-channel videos investigating a National Security Agency electronic eavesdropping device; and Dirt (2004), a video essay and narrative created from a collection of telephone answering machine tapes that were obtained from local thrift stores.