L.A. in motion.

All Over the Map: LA. Freewaves 6th Celebration of Independent Video & New Media Los Angeles, California September 8-October 4, 1998

All Over the Map: L.A. Freewaves 6th Celebration of Independent Video & New Media was a provocative and challenging festival that testified to both the great diversity of creative expression within the realm of independent media and to the exhilarating cultural mix that makes life in Los Angeles so charged with possibility. Since its inception in 1989, L.A. Freewaves has remained steadfast in its ambitious mission of "empowering all communities with control over their own images and access to images created by other cultures." L.A. Freewaves is comprised of a diverse body of artists, activists and scholars who work with existing community organizations, schools, libraries, cable stations and museums to bring together the various events that constitute the month-long festival. But L.A. Freewaves's commitment to the communities of Los Angeles does not end with the biennial festival. Throughout the year, the media coalition organizes follow-up screenings on cable channels and in galleries, conducts new media workshops and maintains a year-round website with art and information for artists, curators, teachers and students (www.freewaves.org).

This year's festival featured over 100 videos from 16 countries, four CD-ROMs, four cable TV programs, 12 websites and five installations/performances. While evidence of L.A. Freewaves's dedication to finding new ways of exhibiting media art, the alternative media programs also extended the festival's thematic exploration of space. With its spare, contemporary design, Diane Bertolo's CD-ROM Probing into Science (1995) challenges scientific claims to objectivity from a feminist perspective. Christine Tamblyn's CD-ROM and installation project Archival Quality (1998), co-presented by the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, features documentation of the late artist's life since 1964. With written and visual material, including personal anecdotes, excerpts from Tamblyn's diaries and performance footage, Archival Quality uses the life experiences of a single artist as a lens onto the broader cultural and political changes of the '60s and '70s. As both CD-ROM and gallery installation, Tamblyn's project offered spectators a rare opportunity to compare the disjunctive narratives of new media with the associative mappings of an art gallery.

Three of the websites also highlighted the connections between virtual and actual spaces. Joe Rabie's Iceland Sundaes (1997) compares urban design with web design in an effort to develop a more precise vocabulary for the morphology of virtual space. While Rabie uses the European town as a comparative model in his website, Jacalyn Lopez Garcia's Glass Houses (1998) uses the space of the home as a means of organizing her reflections on the hybridity of Mexican American identity. Yau Ching's Mysteries of the Orient (1997) takes aim at the ideological space of the Orient in an interrogation of Occidental epistemological and erotic investments in Asian peoples.

All Over the Map also introduced a brilliant new forum for video screenings: the video bus tours. Organized around five themes - food, public housing, voyeurism, Latino graffiti and Chinatown - the tours offered participants an introduction to the city spaces associated with the images and ideas in the videotapes that were screened aboard the bus. "The L.A. Voyeurism Bus Tour," organized by festival director Ming-Yuen S. Ma, dealt with a range of issues relating to looking and being looked at, from queer cruising, public sex and police surveillance to star worship and violence against women. The bus route passed such L.A. landmarks as the Metropolitan Detention Center, the Griffith Park Observatory, the Pussy Cat Theater and the 24-hour surveillance camera on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. The video itinerary included Ocularis (1997, by Tran T. Kim-Trang), Suicide Box (1996, by The Bureau of Inverse Technology) and Forever Linda (1996, by Nguyen Tan Hoang). Ocularis combines banal surveillance footage, including images of the filmmaker in her house and of nighttime activities in a parking structure, with quotations about the role of surveillance technology in contemporary society. The soundtrack includes recordings of the fears and fantasies about surveillance that anonymous callers left on a telephone hotline established by the filmmaker. Through an interplay between sound and image, Ocularis investigates the anxiety, the erotics and mainly the boredom occasioned by the act of watching. Suicide Box looks at the suicide industry of crisis hotlines and surveillance cameras that has arisen in response to the great number of people jumping off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. The tape provides statistics, footage and an anecdotal history of suicides at this famous tourist attraction. Forever Linda extended the bus tour's examination of voyeurism by focusing on the in/visibility of sexual identity among young Asian American queers. The second in Nguyen's "Forever . . ." series of tapes that investigates the connections between emerging Asian American queer identities and both pop and pornographic images, Forever Linda uses the image of supermodel Linda Evangelista as a focus around which various scenes of masking and unmasking are acted out. The tape situates the questions of "who to come out to" and, perhaps more importantly, "who not to come out to" within a cultural mix of Japanese Sanrio products, rice cookers and French songs. Though the connections between the tapes, the themes and the city spaces remained somewhat tenuous, the "Voyeurism Bus Tour" provided a wonderful example of what LA. Freewaves does best: putting audiences in contact with a diversity of cultural experiences and spaces.

This thematic linking of issues across sexual, racial and ethnic identities was further exemplified by two video programs, "Imperso/Nation" curated by Rita Gonzalez and "Boy" curated by Erika Suderberg. "Imperso/Nation" illustrated how performance and parody could challenge excepted notions of identity and two videos in particular attest to the ingenuity and strength of women's resistance. Etang Inyang's Badass Supermama (1996) is an autobiographical chronicle of the videomaker's identification with and developing attraction to Blaxploitation star Pam Grier. Manipulating footage from Grier's films, Inyang contrasts the star's strength and resourcefulness with her own awkward adolescence. In one hilarious moment, the film cuts from a scene of Grier rescuing herself by pulling a gun out from the back of her bountiful afro to an image of Inyang earnestly reaching into her own afro only to find a variety of incidental objects before landing upon a fake gun. Jennifer Reeder's Law of Desire (1997) mimics the style of "reality TV" to document the continuing adventures of White Trash Girl, a cross between Richard Wagner's Brunhilde and Diane DiMassa's homicidal lesbian terrorist, Hothead Paisan. In the screened episode White Trash Girl helps out a friend and fights back at patriarchy with all that her body affords her - her fists, her feet, her spit and her piss. Reeder's gritty sound mix of white trash rock, police radio noise and the protagonist's voice-over adds a multi-layered vibrancy to her images.

Suderberg's program "Boy" addressed the frivolity, sensuality and unattainability of boy(ness). In Steve Reinke's Andy (1996), a static image of a dean, crisp middle-class living room is interrupted by the occasional fading in and out of the title character, who, clad only in a jockstrap, proceeds to masturbate throughout the course of the tape. The soundtrack consists of an incessant commentary on the living room's interior decorating scheme. In Rene Broussard's Fatboy Chronicles, Part 1 (1997) a first-person voice-over announces the adult speaker's childhood love for a fat boy, not coincidentally named Rene. The commentary is kept to a minimum here as much of the tape is devoted to a sort of catalog of movie images of fat boys and images of young boys being whipped or paddled. Suggesting a connection between the ridicule of the fat boy and the punishments enacted on the youths, the sheer accumulation of these idiosyncratic images also attests to the erotics of the power imbalance between adults and boys and among boys themselves. Unfortunately, some of the possible connections suggested by the tape are foreclosed by a final voice-over that reduces the speaker's alienation as a fat boy to discomfort with his budding homosexuality.

In fact, many tapes in the festival suffered from an overreliance on earnest first person voice-overs to explain away or reduce the range of possible meanings in the images. The prevalence of this problem among tapes dealing with history and personal memory made the few exceptions all the more rewarding. Particularly innovative and poignant were two works that were part of the program entitled "Insubordinate Memories." Ernesto M. Foronda's A Letter for Lisa (1998) mourns the loss of the director's cousin, a childhood companion who died in the Philippines years after Foronda's family had relocated to the United States. Despite the distance between the two relatives, the peculiar resonance of Lisa's death inscribes itself in Foronda's everyday activities. The film sparingly utilizes scrolling text to provide a background for a repetitive series of sensous, hand processed, black and white super-8 images. Another video by Tran, Ekleipsis (1998), focuses on a group of Cambodian women who suffer from hysterical blindness after having experienced and witnessed firsthand the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. Tran's video solicits the spectator's interest through a compassionate evocation of the women's situation, figured most strikingly in a series of close-ups (a pineapple, a bowl of rice, a cloth stain) that appeal to the spectator's sense of touch, taste and smell rather than that of vision. Though dealing with distinct personal tragedies of differing magnitude, the works by Tran and Foronda are each exemplary of the expressive possibilities in contemporary experimental imagemaking.

Although All Over the Map brought a much-needed close of experimental video work to Los Angeles, it also showcased some more formally traditional documentaries. Djamila Sahraoui's The Other Half of Allah's Heaven (La Moitie du Ciel d'Allah, 1995) mixes archival footage with talking head interviews in a moving and informative retelling of recent Algerian history from the perspective of women's oppression and resistance. Tania Cypriano's Odd Ya! Life with AIDS (1997) investigates the impact of AIDS among marginalized communities in Brazil and highlights the sex-positive approach to the crisis among followers of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble. These compelling works suggest the international scope of L.A. Freewaves, which through its festival manages to combine the experimental and the traditional, the global and the local in an ever-expanding framework that echoes the cultural and ethnic development of the city of Los Angeles itself.

MARC SIEGEL is a doctoral student in Critical Studies in the Department of Film and Television at UCLA.