you never know

Retold Journeys from Amber Cortes on Vimeo.

NOTE: This video is 6 minutes long but is looped into a half hour piece. Repeats after six minutes.

Retold Journeys is a video and sound installation by Amber Cortes. It was created for the exhibition The Arctic Book Club: Artists Respond to An African in Greenland, curated by the Flux Factory and EFA Project Space in NYC.

Interleaving text from Tete-Michel Kpomassie’s travelogue “An African in Greenland” with footage from one the earliest documentary films ever made, Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty, Retold Journeys casts personal impressions and experiences of a culture directly into romantically stylized, ethnographic narrative.

The sound piece that accompanies the video projection is an imagined arctic landscape found simultaneously above and below the surface of ice: linking the film images to an internal atmosphere of reflection that comes with traveling and encountering new cultures and places.

“I had started on a voyage of discovery, only to find it was I who was being discovered.”

–Tete-Michel Kpomassie

“One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.”

–Robert Flaherty

For the past few months, I’ve been participating in a kind of art experiment: a book club in which artists of all different genres first discuss, and then respond to the book by creating a project. The book, ‘An African in Greenland,’ is about a man who travels from Togo to Greenland- and the adventures he encounters along this unique journey.

Our gallery exhibit opens next Thursday, September 17th, from 6-8pm at the EFA Project Space in Manhattan, featuring all kinds of art: sculptures, paintings, installations, photographs and videos- each piece inspired by the book. My installation, ‘Retold Journeys,’ is a video and sound installation that mixes text from ‘An African in Greenland‘ with footage from one of the earliest documentary films ever made, Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty, set to a strange arctic soundscape of isolation.

This my first ever installation featured in an actual gallery! I’m so excited.

Arctic Book Club Presents: An African in Greenland

This year people all along the Hudson River are celebrating the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s historic journey of discovery. Over the summer, I got to spend some time along the Hudson and learned that the river is in a state of recovery from years of pollution and damage.

I produced this radio piece for National Radio Project’s Making Contact about the controversial General Electric dredging to remove PCB contamination in the Hudson River, one of the largest national Superfund environmental cleanups in history.

Give a listen.

Or, check out the entire show, Swimming Upstream: Can Our Rivers Be Saved?

There you will find some of the contact information for the organizations featured in the piece, as well as more information on PCBs in the Hudson.

Also, a great article called “Hitching Rides Up Henry Hudson’s River” came out in this week’s New York Times about getting up the Hudson by kayak, tall ship, yacht, and Lincoln Town Car (hey, not fair!).

best frenemies: is an audio installation created for the Megapolis Audio Art Festival in Boston as part of the Ladio (Ladies+Radio) sonic slumber party. The installation was based on a series of handwritten notes exchanged between two fifth grade girls in reading class.
Friends? Enemies? Welcome to girls’ world age 12.

The notes were read by Lulu Hamilton-Janak and Sam Meyer.

Click on the link below to listen:

Best Frenemies

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My entry for the Third Coast Festival’s ShortDocs Radio Ephemera Audio Challenge:

The idea behind the challenge is to create an audio story from two books archived from the Prelinger Library and include the voice of a stranger. I ended up combining these two books: Trees as Good Citizens (a civic-minded planting guide), and Control of Body and Mind (a kind of science book with a moral hygiene edge).

The voices of strangers are: Dr. Simon Evans, Neurologist and Cleve Backster, Polygraph Expert

Check out all the imaginative Radio Ephemera stories on their archive.

I was inspired by Psychobotany’s experiments with primary perception in plants, as developed through the research of Cleve Backster, who used a polygraph test to determine electrical resistance in the organism. The idea that plants can somehow sense our emotions or thoughts appeals to me: communication on another, more basic, more energetic level. What do we have to learn from other species?

Check out Psychobotany’s experiment here.

Monumental Movement in Brooklyn

Every year, men from Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn hoist a four-ton, 68-foot statue called the Giglio into the air and move it six blocks while dancing ‘the Giglio’ under the sweltering sun. The event commemorates the San Paolino de Nola Feast, which originated in Nola, Italy. This year, Weekend America correspondent Amber Cortes took us to the festival.

Check out the slideshow above, or just listen to the piece on Weekend America:

Radio Diaries
Produced by Joe Richman
June 15 | 7 pm

Suggested Donation $8/ students $5

The award winning Radio Diaries empowers people to “become reporters of their own lives”–then airs their stories on National Public Radio. Finding voices that often go unheard- teenagers, prisoners, AIDS patients- Radio Diaries trains people to share their stories by keeping audio journals, interviewing the people close to them and recording their daily life.

Thembi’s AIDS Diary documents a year in the life of a South African teenager who has AIDS.

And since 1996, Teenage Diaries has worked with teenagers across the country to report on their own lives and unique circumstances, eventually airing them as radio documentaries for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

Please join Radio Diaries producer Joe Richman as he plays selections from Thembi’s AIDS Diary and Teenage Diaries, as well some other recent work, as part of the Audio Series Doc Bodega at UnionDocs.

Learn more about Radio Diaries and listen to some stories.

Here is an event I am curating at UnionDocs as part of their Documentary Bodega Series:

Will the Real NPR Please Stand Up?

Neighborhood Public Radio

Monday April 14 | 8 pm

@UnionDocs
$5 suggested admission.

Meet the new NPR on the block: Neighborhood Public Radio. An artist run radio project now broadcasting live from a former shoe storefront at The Whitney Biennial, NPR provides an alternative media platform to community artists and musicians, activists, and local residents. By opening up the channels of communication through both internet streams and a micro-powered signal, Neighborhood Public Radio creates a kind of open radiophonic space: one free of FCC rules and regulations, corporate underwriters, and, well, any editorial involvement whatsoever. The motto for NPR is: “If it’s in the neighborhood and it makes noise .. we hope to put it on the air.”

For their current production, titled “American Life” in association with the Whitney Biennial, NPR broadcasts live from the Madison Avenue storefront and invites anyone passing by to tell stories, perform, interview, or just talk. They have also developed boxed broadcasting kits that they will distribute in cities across the country. NPR founders Lee Montgomery and Jon Brumit will be on hand to discuss their project, recall some memorable locally-produced radio moments and respond to a piece about them recently aired on that other NPR . They’ll also play audio from other recent community-based transmission arts projects including State of Mind Stations and Talking Homes.

After the presentation there will be a casual collaborative talk in the yard over snacks and beer about the future of transmission arts with free103point9 in Brooklyn, NY.

I just got a job at UnionDocs. UnionDocs a documentary arts collective and studio space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (and in fact only blocks from my place!). They also run a residency program, six documentarians live upstairs and collaborate in curating screenings every week of feature length documentaries, with the director around for a post screening discussion.

There is also a studio space and loads of resources for artists and filmakers in the community.

I am proud to be representing this totally unique documentary arts organization!!!

I just finished up an amazing internship at The Brian Lehrer Show at WNYC in New York City. The Brian Lehrer Show is a live, daily, two-hour long call in show that covers issues and news in New York and beyond. Working in live radio was an exciting challenge and I got to pitch and help produce several segments featured on the show, including:

Facebook and Lifeat.com–Social Networking for the Young and Not-so-Young

Spooky Spots

The Mexican Model

Young, Homeless, and Gay

Youth Culture Capitalism