Shana Moulton, "Whispering Pines", still image from digital video in color, 2007. Via Bellwether.

Rhizome 2008 Benefit
9pm Thursday 15 May 2008
Participant Inc - 253 Housten St, New York NY
$35+

Film-Makers Cooperative Benefit Screening
8pm Friday 16 May 2008
The Stone - Avenue C and E. 2 St, New York NY
$5

This Friday, 16 May, the Film-Makers Cooperative hosts their annual benefit screening downtown at The Stone. The Cooperative, since it's inception in 1962 by a group of some 25 New York based Filmmakers (including by now some highly visible figures like Anthology Film Archives founder Jonas Mekas, filmmakers Jack Smith, Rudy Burckhardt, and Ken Jacobs, among others), has been one of New York's primary distribution centers of avant-garde and experimental cinema. The organization has been archiving, preserving, storing, distributing, and exhibiting work that has for many years, by consequence or design, kept a distinctly separate existence from the commercial art distribution system and its attendant reserves of capital, glamour, media apparatus, and intricate social networks. Things certainly have changed since then – most art spectators with a rudimentary orientation to the international exhibition scene will today be able to prattle off countless prominent and commercially successful contemporary artists who produce, and sell, works on film and video. The Film-Makers Cooperative regardless continues its important work, affirming its no-contest film distribution policies, artist owned and operated status, regular screening programs, and legacy as one of New York's historic cultural institutions. The screening program for the evening is TBA.

Meanwhile on the preceding night, Thursday 15 May, Rhizome hosts its own annual benefit with an exciting schedule of live music and events, including the indelible performance work of artist Shana Moulton, a DJ set by MEN, live music by High Places, and more. This year the vanguard New Media organization honors Joshua Schatchter, the software engineer whose wildly popular social link aggregation system, del.icio.us, has become embedded in countless new collaborative creative practices taking form on the web. Rhizome also honors artist Lynn Hershman Leeson for a long-standing record of creative output and experimentation with new genres and media.