21 August 2016

3C-Screens Launch! (Third Century Screens Project)

PRESS RELEASE August 15, 2016

For Immediate Release:

Contact: Peter Sparing petespar@umich.edu; 734-647-2288

Third Century Screens (3C-S) launches a dynamic interdisciplinary project that celebrates on multiple screens of every shape and size University of Michigan’s bicentennial theme of creating and inventing. It also announces the 3C-S Competition and seeks submissions from UM students, faculty and alumni to create works for the 5-screen Pop-Up Projection Pavilion. Finalists will have works screened in the Alumni Center Founder’s Room during the Third Century Expo on homecoming weekend, Oct. 26-28, 2017. The 3c-S Colloquium, February 17-19, 2017 at UM Dance Building and Alumni Center Founder’s Room, will gather together artists and scholars to explore and propose new technologies, applications and designs of multi-screen projection systems. The 3C-S website is now on line at 3c-screens.com.

Conceived and implemented by four UM faculty members from Architecture, Art & Design, Dance, and Screen Arts & Cultures, 3C-S extends the 120-year old tradition of making motion visible on the screen by envisioning projections of moving images of bodies in motion: of dancers, athletes and people from all walks of life captured by cameras and edited by UM alumni, faculty and student video artists for a multitude of screens. This project coincides with the extraordinary proliferation of video and screens on social media, iPhones, laptops, billboards, in education, engineering, medicine, the arts, the entertainment industry, advertising and surveillance. Indeed, the interconnectedness of human bodies to screens of every scale bridges and breaks down barriers between UM’s academic and artistic disciplines, the campus and the world, and between communities of diverse geographic or cultural locations and orientations.

3C-S will offer two vehicles for screen artists to imagine works that address the Bicentennial Committee’s challenge under the theme of Creating and Inventing. It will attract talent from among the UM global community with the 3C-S Competition open to UM students, alumni and faculty. Entrants to the TCS Competition would propose works specifically for the Pop-Up Projection Pavilion (PUPP), which features up to five screens that act as video panels or transparencies for in-depth, multi-image creations. Finalists (two in each category of faculty, student and alumni) will have their works screened during the week of Third Century Expo on October 26-28, 2017, when the PUPP will be installed in the UM Alumni Center Founder’s Room. Three prizes will be awarded, one in each category of entrant. The panel of judges will be made up of the TCS Team’s four faculty members, four students on the “mirror” team, and 2 invited guest judges from outside UM who are scholars and practitioners in movement, projection, and the representation of images on the screen. Alison Griffiths, author of Chills Down Your Spine: Cinemas, Museums and the Immersive View, has already agreed to participate.

These distinguished guests will also participate in the 3C-S Colloquium February 17-19, 2017, designed to provide a comprehensive overview of the traditions and contemporary creative practices involving the moving body, video and screening technologies. Team members will combine their classes and invite UM alumni, faculty and students from across campus and from neighboring universities to join them at the UM Dance Building for a weekend generative workshop. Teams will propose highly flexible and mobile designs that embody and engage issues of personal and civic identities and spaces, of single vs. multi-authored content, and of the new meanings and authority given screens as they assume the power of representation of art and/or “the real”.

3C-S Team Members:

Peter Sparling, Project Director
Rudolf Arnheim Distinguished University Professor of Dance
Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Dance
UM School of Music, Theatre & Dance

Robert Adams, Project Designer
Associate Professor of Architecture, Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning/Stamps School of Art & Design

Cynthia Pachikara, Project Associate
Associate Professor, Stamps School of Art & Design

Terri Sarris, Project Associate
Senior Lecturer, Screen Arts & Cultures

“Mirror” Team of 4 MFA or upper level undergraduate students, one each from Dance/Screendance Track, Art & Design, Screen Arts & Cultures, and Architecture & Urban Planning —selected by faculty team.

3C-S is funded in part by UM Bicentennial Committee, UM Alumni Association and UM School of Music, Theatre & Dance.