This is a first dreaft of a tentative review

This year parallax moved to the American Youthworks space due for demolition downtown on East 4th in Austin. It was far superior as a venue to the university auditoriums we'd been using for the last couple of years and had the same feel as the old Mexican American Culture space (since demolished) we used before then. The event is free to the public and is a program of Cinematexas, an international short film festival based in Austin for the last 9 years.

Friday night opened with two Palestine movies, both still works in progress. We had seen trailers for these films last year and expect both to see general distribution in ‘05. Obstacle by Nida Sinnokrot was the first one screened. We saw the first act of a feature length doc about the wall the Israelis are building in the West Bank. It starts out as a recollection of the Iron Wall proposed by Jabotinsky in the 30's. He assumed that Palestinians were unlikely to embrace the creation of a Jewish state that would dispossess and disenfranchise them and so proposed a wall to lock them out. The film accelerates as it engages the new wall, a wise farmer introduces 6 or 8 different citrus fruits he grows in his ancient orchard from which he will soon be isolated. Bulldozers raze olive trees to make way for the wall as it snakes though the land. Resistance is introduced via scenes of local organization and a rich social ambience. Its beautifully shot and delightfully measured.

Bi Dam (with blood) by Juliana Fredman and Dan O Reilly Rowe meets the wall in similar circumstances. This film gets behind Palestinian health care. It’s a grim scene with shot-up ambulances, chronic shortages from military blockade and inveterate preventable morbidity. Smooth Arab hip hop licks a la France and extraordinary sequences of dialysis patients commuting by donkey through the mountains allow some light in. Both films self consciously understand occupation in all its degeneracy as if they were made in the last 5 minutes. Following the screenings there was a robust discussion among the audience who were a very diverse group of all ages with many immigrants and Muslims.

The place is an old theatre, lately a charter school. The space is still used for art classes and workshops by students but the main school campus has moved elsewhere. It been run down as the plan is to redevelop or sell the lot which is right downtown. They were kind enough to let us have the place free of charge for the weekend. Its huge with a theatre good for 130 people or more. There is a massive basement where Kens last ever radio extravaganza ran all weekend. And there are 10 or 12 other spaces of varying size where we put photos, video projections, installations and the rest. We wanted a torture chamber with a spy hole but it didn’t happen. A local coffee roaster showed up with coffee for the weekend. We’ve been promised a compound near downtown Austin for next years Parallax as its presumed the Youthworks space will be erased by then.

Saturday kicked of with Persons of Interest, an exceptionally fresh doc of testimony by people interned in the round ups after 9-11. Their experiences and those of their families are pretty heavy but the film exploits their shy frankness and nervous laughter to great effect allowing an intimate and disturbing picture of extreme state repression to come into focus. Scary stuff. Like the night before there was a big crowd from the get go. More people arrived for the Steve Kurtz program. Steve had come down with another Critical Art Ensemble member, Steve Barnes.

He began with a preamble asserting that in this era if one is prepared to engage critically through popular or artistic culture with the state and capitalism then one should be prepared to go to prison. He added that we are currently in a period of military fascism, something he didn’t concede lightly. Everyone accepted the validity of his opinion considering the case being taken against him by the FBI which could put him in jail for up to 20 years.

He and CAE had thought about the event and decided to present a survey of the various state bureaucracies they had been challenged by during their 20 years of making work. It was sometimes hilarious and sometimes shocking but it was a great way of following the groups’ prodigious output and broad interests. CAE have done some incredibly smart and subversive stunts over the years. He regaled us with numerous instances like one in Germany where the group spliced the DNA of ‘Eve’, the woman who donated her DNA to the human Genome project, into wheat and made beer with it. The German beer police stopped them giving the stuff out on the streets. Another project in Halifax, Canada involved saying ‘sorry’ for bad public art. A statue of lord Halifax (the first scalper) in the towns park had a new plaque attached saying ‘sorry’. Another public art commission is a tribute to the sea. Its a piece of marble that looks like a paint drip or a poorly inverted skateboard ramp (its supposed to be a wave, and if you are told that you can see the resemblance). Its quite horrible. So they dug out some ground beside it and poured a concrete plaque, sorry. Finally they placed small LCD screens on ferries and around the harbour saying sorry for all the shit dumped into the sea by the city. One of these was noticed by a keen eyed ferry worker and passed to the captain who called the police who closed down the harbour, Canadas biggest, for the day (terror alert number 5).

This story provided the segue into a Steve Barnes led discussion about the case being taken against Kurtz for mail and wire fraud stemming from an investigation under the Patriot Act into a biotech project CAE were undertaking in Mass Moca. Readers can familiarize themselves with the story at caedefensefund.org. Again the audience was fully engaged in considering the significance of the case and the chilling effect it is designed to have on scientists and artists.

Following the CAE presentation Tyler Nordgren from the Yes Men screened clips from their new movie. He also surveyed the world of critical art pranks both on and off line. One of the most interesting was a project he had created with a collaborator. Recode.com allowed users to create new bar codes for commodities which gave the consumer control over pricing. Using a ripped version of the priceline.com site users could create the bar codes with their corrected price in a few easy steps and then proceed to the store and simply stick the new barcode over the old. The site was ultimately driven out of business and forced to close. He also introduced peoplesjeans.com, a project of the carbon defense league. This one allows users to purchase jeans already broken in by real people. Users can choose whether they want their jeans worn for a few days by 3rd World sweat shop workers or 3rd World prisoners to get that lived in feel of the real world. The Yes Men have also been busy bees disrupting socio-capital flows with vicious satire and impersonation. Their film is showing in NY and LA now and should be on everyones list.

On Sunday another big crowd showed for the Iraq war panel. We had brought 3 guests to town, David Martinez spent 3 months in Iraq including time in Falluja during the American siege. David showed an excerpt of about 20 minutes from a work in progress shot there. It’s a verite film and has a very immediate kind of strategy that takes viewers into a frighteningly visceral experience of the place; darkness, noise, confusion and terror. Heady indeed, it also recounts his experience of being taken prisoner by resistance fighters. Rob Eschelman is an independent journalist from the Bay Area, he also spent a few months in Iraq this year. He showed slides and talked about counterinsurgency and the occupation as a primarily disruptive force. Rob Sarra is a Marine Sergeant who returned from fighting in Baghdad and helped set up Iraq Veterans Against the War (ivaw.net). He and the other two led an audience discussion about the war and he related some really spine chilling experiences he had with his band of marine killers. The audience was quite shocked at times. At one point he invited people to close their eyes as he recounted in first person the reality of shooting children to death. The audience included several other older veterans for peace. Guys who had fought in Korea and Vietnam. One of them was a retired Airforce Brigadier General which was pretty ironic given the number of anarchists and other revolutionaries in the audience. Overall the tone of the event was very radical but with the stakes being played with currently it was also very mainstream. There were more than a few disillusioned republicans in the crowd.

Following the war discussion we screened a video from Pink Bloque, a Chicago based womens dance troupe who bust out hip hop routines in public as a means of communicating political messages. That was a joy and very, very funny. 2 cute 2 b arrested. Following that there was a discussion about the RNC with some videos. There were a good number of people present who had gone to NYC for the demonstrations and the discussion considered where to go beyond election time as well as considering what had been learned, if anything, in New York.

That discussion closed Parallax for another year. Overall this was one of the strongest events we’ve done. I assume that has to do with the increased level of general unease with the wars and the escalating repressive creep stateside. But it also indicates an expanding terrain of opportunity to exploit media and social gatherings to insert critical ideas into mainstream discourse. We may try to take it on the road this year.