Michael Robinson, Victory Over the Sun, 2007, still image from 16mm film in color, 11:00. Via Light Industry.

The Blazing World
8pm Tuesday 25 March 2008
Light Industry - 55 33rd Street 3rd Fl., Brooklyn NY
$6

Next Tuesday marks the opening event for Light Industry, Sunset Park's newest venue for experimental film and electronic art. Manifesting initially as a weekly cinema series set to run through spring and summer of 2008, Light Industry is a project founded and developed by curators Thomas Beard and Ed Halter. The two inaugurate the space with a self-reflective program of 16mm films that make parallel movements at utopian ideals and a "search for new ground." The films presented tonight span just about 30 years of work and chart a kind of strategic lexicon for Industry's own development as a supporting institution and platform for moving image art. The Blazing World presents work in this vein that ranges from the phenomenological trailblazing of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson's Swamp, Michael Robinson's landscape study of former World Fair sites, and a costumed historical reimagining of a 19th century failed upstate utopian project in Michael Gitlin's Bernice.

From the press release: "Light Industry's inaugural event brings together a group of films that ponder the vicissitudes of utopian scheming and the search for new ground. Juxtaposing the heady, exploratory optimism of the Aquarian age with the more sobering observations of contemporary artists, The Blazing World attempts to embrace the complexities inherent in what Light Industry sets forth to support: the ongoing social experiment in community that undergirds moving-image art-making."