Open Air Media Festival 2022 invited Iowa-based artists to create time-based projects, video projection works and performances in outdoor locations. This year's festival will be a one night program of installations and performances running simultaneously in exterior spaces surrounding Public Space One's Close House at 538 S. Gilbert St. in Iowa City.

The inaugural OAMF was created in summer 2020 at the height of the pandemic to provide exhibition opportunities for media artists. The public is invited to come in person to explore communal, larger-than-life experiences. We hope to illuminate the Close House property with inspiring, challenging, and thought-provoking works.

2022 Participating Artists:

Aaron Longoria, Monica Sanguino, Devlin Caldwell, Ramin Roshandel & Nima Bahrehmand, Jacob Smithburg, Izaak Thompson, The Parking Space Project, Antifahorn + Emily MacWilliams, Hannah Bonner, Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, Lex Leto x CBE, Michael Springer, Jason Smith & Jarrett Purdy, Jae-Hyun Jason Uhm

Curated by Zen Cohen & Dana Potter Contact: openairmediafest@gmail.com

the 2022 festival is generously supported by the City of Iowa City Public Art Matching Grant Program!

Listen to the festival live on KRUI.fm

KRUI Iowa City is proud to be working with Public Space One and the Media Arts Co-Op to amplify local art and music through community-based radio. The director board, made up of UIowa students, is thrilled to have experimental radio programming that contribute to KRUI as Iowa City’s Sound Alternative. Tune into 89.7 FM or online at KRUI.fm to listen to the sounds of the Open-Air Festival!

Artist Bios

Aaron Longoria > BRIM > VR experience where the viewer will explore various chambers within a waterlogged labyrinth. Each space will represent different connotations of “overflowing.” The visual language will be inspired by the suit of cups in the minor arcana. This experience will explore themes of mental health like depression and anxiety through motifs like cups and water. The labyrinth will function as a manifestation of the subconscious and each chamber will represent various degrees of anhedonia. https://aaronlongoria.format.com/

Antifahorn with Emily MacWilliams > Poem Zine Reading > An experimental rock music combo featuring effected electric guitar, analog synthesizers, drums, and percussion will improvise sounds to interact with a live poetry performance by a poet based in Iowa City. Viewers are welcome to engage with the performance by accepting a copy of the zine, which will feature at least one of the poems that we perform. While Antifahorn and the featured poet will play and record together on several occasions, each performance is an unrepeatable experiment with no expectation of pre-planned perfection. Rather, we seek to spontaneously collaborate with various poets to discover each musical performance as we listen to and create with each other. https://antifahorn.bandcamp.com/releases

Devlin Caldwell > Isolation | SelfSpeak

Devlin Caldwell > Isolation | SelfSpeak > a continuously running time based sculpture that explores the inner thoughts and feelings expressed during a period of Isolation—not only during a pandemic, but also during a period of relocation to a new city. Reminiscent of the conversations that one holds by themselves, the work captures three audio clips that have been organized into three primary emotions that the artist has felt during this period of isolation: Anxiety, Depression, and Inspiration. devlincaldwell.io

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder > Glass Pane Redaction > “In ‘Glass Pane Redaction’ I listen to overlapping narratives while I write on a pane of glass, approximately the size of myself, with a paint marker until it completely obscures me. The viewer hears two narratives playing simultaneously from a speaker: an oral history I’ve conducted in both English and Spanish of my mother’s migration story from Colombia to New York City in 1980. The audio is almost unintelligible, one can pick up words and phrases but it is difficult to follow along; the dialogue is interspersed with nostalgic music that I associate with these moments. What I hear blends with what I remember; I write rapidly so as not to become attached to any narrative. The audience must really listen to try to understand the migration narrative, and they must look carefully to see what I write. When I fill the glass pane with words, I start over, writing on top of what I have already written, until the glass is obscured completely with paint and I am no longer visible.” Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder is a queer Latinx scholar, writer, dancer, and parent based in Iowa City. Her critical writing focuses on art activism, performance, migration, and queer of color critique. She is assistant professor of English at University of Iowa and teaches young dancers at the University of Iowa Youth Ballet. Her scholarship has appeared in scholar journals such at The Global South and Crossings: A Journal of Migration and Culture and her writing and interviews has been featured in places such as Asteri(x) Journal, Iowa Humanities, and St. Sucia zine. https://english.uiowa.edu/people/elizabeth-rodriguez-fielder

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder > Glass Pane Redaction

Hannah Bonner > Can You Care for Me? > “This durational performance will involve me sitting in a room for an hour with a table of objects behind me that complement or complicate our ideas of what it means to care for another human being including, but not limited to, a hairbrush, body oil, a pitcher of water, a razor blade, a jar of prompts to elicit confessions from audience members, etc. The audience may choose to approach the table and utilize any of the objects on my body if they wish to engage with the concept and act of care. My hope is that an epiphanic moment occurs when an audience member chooses to care for me in that they realize they are both giving and receiving care through their gesture. In caring for others, sometimes, we also care for ourselves." @hannah__bonner/

Izaak Thompson > Boney Circuitry > The installation would be various audio and visual electronics projects I've created—for example, a synthesizer I built, the audio from which which would be fed into a video mixer I also built, mixed with imagery from VHS tapes and other miscellany, all displayed on CRT TVs. The result would be a chaotic and transfixing intermingling of audio and visual elements in an improvised performance

Jacob Smithburg > 2tah > this piece acts as a window into a virtual recreation/draft of a utah-esque landscape with a bespoke soundscape in attempt to transport the audience to an environment geographically out of reach here in the midwest. A microphone will be used for the audience to interact with the piece, affecting/controlling different aspects of the video feed (lighting/time of day within unreal engine, triggering audio cues such as; desert animal effects, desert foley work, alternate drafted sound pieces, etc.). https://jacobsmithburg.myportfolio.com

Jaehyun Jason Uhm > Please let me go (The Horse in Motion) > “The title “Please let me go” is a project for the people who feel lethargic and depress. It is an homage piece from “The Horse in Motion” by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878, a first ever ‘animation’ with photograph cards in sequential that makes an illusion of a horse to move. Also, collaborated with a poetry by Rumi (13th-century Persian poet), hoping to evoke some to leave and live free from something that holds them down.” Jae-Hyun Jason Uhm graduated at University of Iowa with a BFA in printmaking. An emerging artist based in Iowa City. Jason likes to incorporate works from both physical and digital, such as color pencil, watercolor, intaglio, monoprint, ipad, and 3d modeling. The focus of his work consists of feelings that come from an individual thought to another through life that are yet to be defined. He has a love and interest in the ideas of surrounding space, conceptual drawings, color combinations, geometric shapes, organic shapes, lights, jars, tiles, chairs, philosophy, and environment.

Jason Smith & Jarrett Purdy > Jim Song #1 > Video of artists coming together over a weekend to create visuals from two individual songs.

Lex Leto x CBE is a pile of friends who like to make noise together. While they are all “classically” “trained” musicians, they depart from their roots in favor of aleatory, noise, and song. Though each member’s individual work is distinct from the next, they share the value of creative exploration. What results is a process-based, improvisatory, experimental, cathartic, collaborative, theatrical, energetic, honest, intimate yet loud, weird yet accessible, fun-loving, and compelling performance that will make you say “Wow, I never thought I could sing along to music this weird!” In “Inside/Out”, Lex Leto x CBE will first perform three songs based around insular and isolating experiences. Viewers will then be invited to join the ensemble in a fourth song by performing/improvising on their own instruments or provided found sound objects, resulting in a joyous celebration of community artmaking, song, and improvisation. Instructions for manner of participation will be distributed amongst the audience and projected. https://www.burkechristine.com/Christine-Burke-Ensemble/

Monica Sanguino > a body//who are we without these limbs? > A video/performance artist who recently graduated from the University of Northern Iowa with her Bachelor in Fine Arts degree in Studio Art. They are currently based in Waterloo, Iowa. https://sanguinomonica.wixsite.com/website

Michael Springer > Kingdom > a sequence of ten animated poems traveling through a lightly mythologized prairie landscape. Michael Springer is a poet working in print, performance, and electronic media.

Ramin Roshandel & Nima Bahrehmand > Walking on Sol & Status of Pietà > Status of Pietà is a video-sound art collaboration between Nima Bahrehmand and Ramin Roshandel; it examines the notion of machine vision in the context of the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East. On one level, across the region, networks of decentralized wars have ebbed and flowed, determining what the region should and can be. On the other hand, the lives of its people are under surveillance 24/7 by mechanical eyes - drones and satellites - that capture them from a distance. So, how can a Machine/AI read, process, and represent the shattered and repressed bodies and lives of people in the middle east?
Walking On Sol is a two-channel synchronized video art. To create the project, I've asked locals to record their walks on the fortress's ruins, then I incorporated the fortress’s video footage with a 3D form of the fortress that has been made by processing the Google Earth data, the photogrammetry software, and Unity game engine. The 3D environment of the project contains the 3D elements of the fortress’s mythical life to simulate the twisted mechanism of an uncertain future. https://nimabahrehmand.com/ https://soundcloud.com/ramin-roshandel

The Parking Space Project > PARKING SPACES > PARKING SPACES is a continuation of “The Parking Space Project” created by Stephanie Miracle, Steven Willis, Ramin Roshandel in 2020. The project is a constellation of listening experiences using sound, storytelling and participatory invitation to transform everyday locations into spaces of rest, activation, and imagination. PARKING SPACES includes a diverse range of artistic voices and centers inclusivity and accessibility in its design. What does this look like? Much like the original project, we will create a map of 10 “Parking Spaces”, short interactive listening experiences dotted throughout downtown. Participants can engage with any of the locations/tracks through the project's interactive website and a personal devices or by checking out headphones and a preloaded mp3 player with a printed map from one of our partner locations (i.e. Public Space One). The audio tracks will be a range of sonic landscapes, stories, movement invitations and instructions that promote heightened awareness of the environment, senses, and the history of Iowa City. The ten contributing artists (see attached pdf) will expand beyond the original collaborative trio to include a greater range of demographics and styles. https://www.stephaniemiracledances.com/the-parking-space.html

About the organizers:

Zen Cohen is the founder and curator of Open Air Media Festival. Her art practice uses video, digital imaging, performance and installation. She received an MFA in Art Studio at the University of California at Davis and BFA in Film, Video and Performance from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. Her work has been exhibited throughout the San Francisco Bay Area at the deYoung Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, SOMarts, The Lab, The Montalvo Center, and nationally at ARTSpace New Haven in CT, Vanity Projects in NY, Public Space One in Iowa City, and internationally at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in the Canary Islands. Her photographs have been published in Hyperallergic, Art Practical, Routledge and Southern Illinois University Press. She also teaches as Assistant Professor of Media Art and Film Studies at Coe College.   zencohenprojects.com

Dana Potter is an assistant program director for the Open Air Media Festival and an Assistant Professor of Interactive Digital Studies at the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa. She received her MFA in printmaking at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Her work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the United States at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis,Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, GZ Gallery in Chicago, Disjecta Gallery in Portland, Foley Gallery in New York NY, and internationally at “Global Print 2016” in Douro Portugal, Arts Quarter Budapest in Hungary, and CTRL Gallery in Wroclaw, Poland. Her experiences working professionally in mobile applications, interface design, and digital marketing greatly influenced her artistic direction which primarily combines traditional printmaking and biometric technologies.