Minneapolis, MN, April 6, 2012—The Walker Art Center will present whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, a film installation by Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation, from April 18-July 8, 2012. Free screenings begin at 1 pm in the Lecture Room and continue during gallery hours.

This seemingly self-generating sci-fi film never ends and never really begins. Drawing on more than 30 hours material that has been converted into digital files—each tagged with terms to identify the contents—whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir is a media piece that selects the order of those files based on an algorithm. The connections, generated from the so-called “Serendipity Machine,” are displayed on the monitor on the left-hand side of the screen. Never the same, the formula develops the story of a mysterious Mr. Holz, an informant traversing a failed utopian country in post-Soviet Central Asia.

Continuously shuffling 80 voice-overs, 150 pieces of music, and 3,000 clips shot in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Dubai, whiteonwhite offers fascinating insights into genre filmmaking. This is multimedia artist Eve Sussman’s third in a series that expands upon the images and implications of well-known paintings. Her first, 89 Seconds at Alcázar(2004), imagined the space and time surrounding Velázquez’s Las Meninas, and her second, The Rape of the Sabine Women (2007), takes inspiration from the Sabine paintings of Poussin, Rubens, and David. In this piece, Sussman—with her ad hoc think-tank collaborators, the Rufus Corporation—looked to Kazimir Malevich’s emblematic 1918 painting White on White as a starting point, building a narrative onto the Russian artist’s ideas about abstraction and transcendence to create “a gorgeous, hypnotic montage of blasted utopianism” (Art in America).

Eve Sussman

Eve Sussman was born in 1961 in England and currently lives in New York. Her workhas been shown at festivals and museums worldwide, including the Museum ofModern Art, New York; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the MuseuPicasso, Barcelona; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is therecipient of grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, theJerome Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among manyothers.

Rufus Corporation

Rufus Corporation is made up of artists, actors, musicians, dancers, writers, and programmers who come together under the direction of Eve Sussman to make film, video, installation, and photography.

Acknowledgements

Artists’ Cinema is made possible by generous support from Elizabeth Redleaf.