Videofreex members travel across the country and around the world to introduce screenings of their work, lead workshops, and present on panels. When the prodigal member returns, he or she emails a candid report to the group.

Videofreex.com will feature these event reports from time to time, complete with a unique Videofreex style, winks to fellow members, , and mentions of mutual friends and collaborators. Find all past event reports in the Events page.

14^th Media Art WRO Biennale: Alternative Now

Wroclaw, Poland, May 10-15, 2011

By Skip

Slide show not playing? Find it at http://www.youtube.com/embed/R_AOhRVFgJk

The WRO trip was a success for Freex exposure and me having fun. Our tapes were well received by a healthy-sized audience in the cavernous movie theater with stadium seating. The screening had a good feeling in the room. I don’t know if there were curators or programmers in the audience. But there were certainly many video artists from all over Europe who now know about the Freex. WRO and its artistic director Piotr Krajewska are fans of the group and it’s possible that there may be future showings there.

Abina, who highly values the Freex Archive, is very motivated to further restore, package and distribute the videos! Yay! As you can see from the prominence of the Freex Archive on the brand new VDB.org home page, VDB is committed to support the work. She also mentioned the goal of a DVD box set! She is as committed or more than Kate Horsfield, who you’ll remember was VDB director who initiated the collection at (and drove it in a snow storm to) VDB.

I tried to take her out to dinner but she was steadfast in hosting me for a delicious dinner (see her dessert and her visibly loving guy – who lives in Berlin). I did bring her one of those little yellow Freex tape catalogs with the magician on the cover that’s probably from 1972 or ’73 for our file at VDB and she appeared tickled.

I communicated to her the importance of restoring edits, which we put on our “show tapes” as we used to call them, which are most accessible and appealing, indicative of their importance (if we edited them we must have liked them) and are additionally evidence of the value of restoring the longer raw tapes. These are likely candidates for future Freex screenings and the potential DVD box set.

I also expressed as a priority at Nancy’s request, “Aunt Betty’s Birthday Party” raw tape, which is a tape I remember as being decently shot and features Lena Horne and other notables.

I looked at the tape list on the 9½ hour flight back to JFK from Polan dand was daunted at how much work it is to select our priorities. There’s a lot to go through.