Diva Art Fair brings video to Chelsea’s streets

Volume One, Issue 24, March 2 - March 8, 2007

By Randi Cecchine

The DiVA Digital and Video Art Fair transformed the streets of Chelsea last weekend by turning industrial shipping containers into mini-movie theaters. A project of FrereIndependent, an international organization providing visibility to digital and video artists (tagline: The Next Art is Here), the fair complemented its downtown showcase at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Battery Park by reaching out to the Chelsea community and offering pedestrians a unique opportunity to interact with video and digital art in unusual locations.

Richard Reichbach, a 24-year-old Pace University law student, and Elana Smith, a education student of the same age, stumbled upon a container on 24th street west of Eighth Avenue. Inside they watched a short video entitled “When I Look Up, I Fall Down” by Robyn Voshardt and Sven Humphrey. The video shows images of a forest to explore the relationship between nature and consumption.

After seeing the video, Reichbach commented, “I’m intrigued by the concept of nature not as a forgiving or sheltering space, but as a consumable. Being in a box, on the street, I’m thinking about how much we take nature for granted, how much we consume it.”

A few blocks away on Tenth Avenue just below 23rd Street, legendary avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas’ 16mm films were being projected digitally inside another shipping container.

Mekas’ work represents almost 60 years of engagement with an artform that has undergone unimaginable technological changes during that period. In his film entitled “Cinema is not 100 years old!” Mekas reads his typewritten manifesto: “...the real history of cinema is the history of friends getting together doing the things they love. For us, cinema is beginning with every new buzz of the projector, with every new buzz of our camera and our hearts.”