Cartune Xprez is a gang. They are a smart, talented, visually dangerous gang. Described, by themselves, as "a curatorial project for animated videos and multimedia performances" that have "birthed a couple epic tours, many scattered screenings, and one DVD publication" with tons of animators and artists. That list includes:
Film/Video Artists:
Michael Bell-Smith
Bruce Bickford
Philippe Blanchard
Peter Burr
Martha Colburn
Dearrraindrop
Christopher Doulgeris
James Duesing
E*Rock
Eric Dyer
Adrian Freeman
Gretchen Hogue
Hooliganship
Cassandra C Jones
Timo Katz
Jeff Krischen
Amy Lockhart
Corey Lunn
Josh Mannis
Luke Meeken
Shana Moulton
Mumbleboy
Takeshi Murata
Andrew Negrey
Paper Rad
Drew Pavelchak
Ara Peterson
Nicolas Pittman
Joanna Priestley
Russian Tsarcasm
Francine Spiegel
James Sumner
Ola Vasiljeva
Chel White
Stephen Wichuk
Performers:
The Blow
Dites Donc
Friend of the Family
Heartland Hardland
Hooliganship
Lucky Dragons
The New Jedi Order
Slow Dance Recyttal
Universe
YACHT
Unfortunately we couldn't get them all on the phone, so I got hold of the very nice artist Peter Burr via e-mail, who was kind enough to answer some questions about this beautiful gang.
Blank Screen: Can you introduce yourself? Can you describe the color blue?
Peter Burr: Peter Burr. I grew up in the east and moved to the west after 24
years. I live in Portland, OR now with fig trees and blackberry
bushes for neighbors. We have a couple pull-out couches and a couple
loaner bikes if you ever wanna come visit.
Blue..... Did IKEA trademark the blue they use?
BS: What exactly is Cartune Xprez?
PB: Cartune Xprez is a curatorial project for animated videos and
multimedia performances. So far we have birthed a couple national
tours, many scattered screenings, and one DVD publication with a slew
of inspiring artists. My longtime Pittsburgh heart-warmers Christopher Doulgeris and Cassandra C Jones planted the seeds for this project with me at the
Drake Hotel in Toronto back in 2005. At the time we were living there
and working together on a project called Slow Dance Recyttal. This
was a live music performance that involved a cluster of giant
inflatable gems, regal forest costumes, and a narrative animation that
we unraveled with our musical instruments. Before we left Toronto we
really wanted to present this piece in a coherent swirl of other
radical DIY artworks, so we decided to create a movie theater-style
event to premier Slow Dance Recyttal. We ended up turning this funny
five star hotel into a magical little movie-watching-world that really
highlighted the earnestness and beauty of these amazing videos. It got
us really pumped. At the time it was a breath of fresh air for us,
staring beyond so much irony and coolness that we had grown tired of
in popular culture.
BS: Who curated the DVD and decided to take it on tour?
PB: Cassandra and I were the main force behind organizing the line-up of
videos that we toured with. The idea to publish a DVD came out of our
desire to have something our audiences could take home with them after
the show. We didn't want to spend so much time and energy reaching
out to new communities of people, boggling their minds only to let the
magic evaporate when we left. So we tried to make something a little
more permanent than the live show we were doing each night.
BS: I saw the movies at Brooklyn's Monkeytown. Most of them were pretty
surreal. Was there a theme or concept behind it all?
PB: That show at Monkeytown was the first program that we ever organized. We put that one together pretty intuitively.... trying to make the most exciting movie night we had ever seen. All of that work was really imaginative and technically experimental. We liked how that program polarized approaches towards digital tools. There was the really fresh and flashy computer-gernerated animations of Paper Rad
and Takeshi Murata presented alongside Jim Trainor's sharpie animations and Martha Colburn's super tactile collage films. It seemed to flatten out any dogmatic conversations about material to get straight into the mythical energy and wonder that these pieces evoke.
BS: Politics played a big role in various of the shorts I saw.
Experimental video has rarely been seen as a bastion of political
criticism, hence thats another reason I enjoyed Cartune Xprez so much.
How political do you think animation is, currently?
PB: Drew Pavelchak is an example of an animator in one of our past
programs who directly addresses political situations from current
events. I think his work is so powerful because of the way it is
animated - his human touch is deeply embedded in that work. His
newspaper collages are twitching and dancing all over the page in a
playful way, really acknowledging how he is working out this game
making up his own newspaper headlines. It gets me thinking about
these global events from his personal perspective, coping with such a
boggling invasion of information to sift through just to begin knowing
what is happening around the world. That kind of intimacy can
translate really nicely through animation and allow a work like his
THE MONKEY WRITES to remain somewhat timeless despite the fact that
SARS and Saddam are not the hot topics they once were.
BS: If you could make an animation to for any song, what would it be? Why?
PB: All of the animations I have been doing lately are through
Hooliganship, my band with Christopher. We really enjoy animating to
our own music and making music to our animations. Creating both
elements simultaneously allows the piece to grow like a natural
crystal with all of the parts fitting in place invisibly.
BS: What are the advantages and disadvantages to doing a DIY animation
DVD like yours? Would you guys accept corporate sponsorship?
PB: We operate a business called The UniBros that just does work-for-hire
jobs. We keep projects like Cartune Xprez and Hooliganship separate
from those commercial hooks since that art comes from a deep
mysterious place. Money can blow a haze over it if we don't watch
out. A long time ago Camel cigarettes approached our friend who runs a
video label called Peripheral Produce about sponsoring a tour. At a
basic level, the artists he works with didn't want to do it so he
turned the offer down without much more thought. If a corporation
approached us about sponsoring an event or a publication we don't have
any dogma in place that automatically accepts or rejects that. So
ultimately it seems like our community of artists would get to decide
with us.
BS: How important is community for you? Cartune Xprez seems to champion
a sense of getting together and putting your art out there for the
most people to see. Do you prefer that over just doing something
individually?
PB: Fostering a sense of community is really important to me. Ironically,
many artists I am discovering lately I only know via email and DVD....
a strange way to sense any community. Going on tour and having videos
to share with awesome artists is a nice way for me to step outside
that pixel-place and actually interact with other living minds. Its a
whole new inspiration! If I were going around the world just focusing
on my own work I think I would get lonely and bored.
BS: What are the future plans for Cartune Xprez?
PB: Right now I am organizing a series of events for the TBA festival in
Portland, Oregon that kick off on September 9th. I' really psyched
about that. Two of them are Sunday morning movie theatre events with
cushy seats and cocktails. The other event is an all-out party that
includes performances by some of my favorite artists (Lucky Dragons,
Mean Age, Universe, and Hooliganship). In just a few days there will
be a Cartune Xprez screening that I organized called SMALL XCAPE at
Galleri F15 near Oslo, Norway. There are a few other scattered events
after that, but really I am putting my deepest energies into a spring
tour around North America and a summer tour around Europe that will
include publishing a new DVD compilation.
Cartune Xprez will be showing in Portland, Oregon on November 4th. Check their http://cartunexprez.hooliganship.com/ for more details and to learn how to purchase their terrific DVD.
