Ithaca College

The Dismantling War Remix project for the First-Year Reading Initiative announces an on-going collaboration with the Human Studies Film Archive of the Smithsonian Institution. A live performance of the remix is slated for Monday, September 12, at 8 p.m. in Park Auditorium. It is free and open to the public.

The Human Studies Film Archive is one of the most important archives of ethnographic and anthropological film in the world. It houses one of the largest collections of amateur film in the United States, and is a leader in the acquisition, preservation, and advocacy of amateur film internationally. The archive has provided the remix project with over 12 hours of rare archival amateur film shot in such Japan, Cambodia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma, Taiwan, Yugoslavia, Tibet, Iraq, Greece, Germany, Korea, France before they experienced wars and atrocities.

Dr. Jake Homiak, director, Anthropological Collections and Archive program, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and Pamela Wintle '68, senior film archivist, Human Studies Film Archive, Smithsonian Institution, have served as collaborative consultants on the remix project.

"Dismantling War: A Cantata in Five Movements" is a live multimedia remix with multiple screens, VJs, spoken word, and an original electronic score performed with laptops and turntables. The remix is a critical dialogue with Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and the historiography of what the Vietnamese call "the American War." The Things They Carried was selected for the 2005 First-Year Reading Initiative.

"Dismantling War" features Distinguished Visiting Artist Art Jones (VJ); Simon Tarr, cinema and photography (VJ); Erik Spangler (composer and performer); Changhee Chun, cinema and photography (lighting design); Caetlin Benson Allott, cinema and photography; Lisa Patti, cinema and photography; Dale Hudson, cinema and photography; John Hochheimer, journalism/television-radio (research and spoken word); and Patricia R. Zimmermann, producer and director.

Art Jones's films and videos, CD-ROMs, live audio and video mixes, and installations deploy popular music and mainstream media culture as raw material to be sampled and re-combined in an effort to explore, destroy or re-orient popular music, visual culture, history, and power in the rhythms and beat of rap music. As a VJ Jones has performed with Soundlab, DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, DJ T-Ina, Amiri Baraka, Femmes with Fatal Breaks, and Alec Empire and Phillip Virus. A member of the ITEL Media group and a former member of the Not Channel Zero television collective, his work has been exhibited internationally in festivals, museums (including the Whitney Museum of Art), bars, galleries, and living rooms.

Composer Erik Spangler (a.k.a. DJ Dubble8) is a composer/DJ working within a wide range of musical cultures and listening environments, including chamber and orchestral concert works, ritual theater music, hybrid electronic, turntablist performance, and ensembles with live electronic mixing. His acoustic compositions have been performed across the United States and Canada. His electronic and acoustic compositions have been performed at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and several concert venues, as well as in improvisational settings. His score for "Dismantling War: A Cantata in Five Movements" is a special commission from the Office of the Provost and the First-Year Reading Initiative at Ithaca College.

The Dismantling War project is sponsored by the Office of the Provost and Cinema on the Edge. It is part of an on-going, interdisciplinary collaborative research and performance initiative entitled The Onward Project. Now in its third year, The Onward Project explores the relationship between critical historiography, archival film, music and digital technologies. The research initiative has performed at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, the Museum of Modern Art, and the University of South Carolina, and is also engaged in research and publication on soundscapes, technology and archival film for journals such as Senses of Cinema, The Moving Image, and Afterimage.