Flatlands
Video by Benton-C Bainbridge and David Last
Music by Steve Nalepa
© 2007

Spring comes to the south shore of Long Island. On the first warm day of the year, Suffolks gather at the beach to show off their cars and soak up the sunshine. The visual imagery of Flatlands could easily be seen as a portrait of American automobile obsession. It could also be seen as an exploration of the particularly American connection between travel and the concept of freedom. Freedom to go where you want and do what you want... a particularly sticky issue in the time of international oil wars. But this video is, first and foremost, a celebration of spring, and the sense of a world opening. Flatlands is a portrait of people doing what they love amidst blossoming trees and warm breezes at the seaside.

From the upcoming CD/DVD Flatlands on Native State Records.

Flatlands will have its theatrical premiere at Dallas Video Festival on August 5, 2007 at 6:30 pm in the Video Box in Beat It: Music and Video.

Link to video online:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4418395686877601575&hl=en

Bios:

Benton-C Bainbridge
http://www.benton-c.com
Benton-C Bainbridge is a Bronx artist who has made video as a painterly and performable medium for 25 years. Using custom digital, analog and optical systems, Benton-C's movies are a dialog in an emerging global language. Benton-C has performed and screened worldwide in venues including SFMoMA (San Francisco), Hayden Planetarium (NYC), Lincoln Center, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Teatro Colón CETC (Buenos Aires), EMPAC (Troy, NY), Sonic Light (Amsterdam), Dallas Video Festival, Madison Square Garden, CELCIT (Managua) and LUX2006 (Sevilla). Currently, Benton-C Bainbridge is designing curricula to teach the art of the VJ as Eyebeam Atelier's inaugural Education Fellow.

David Last
http://www.davidlast.net
David Last is a sound and light artist living in Brooklyn New York. Over the span of 13 years, his video artwork has metamporphosed with technology. The basic elements of his work have remained the same through this shift. Footage of places and things, hand drawn imagery, and an abstractly graphic approach to image composition. His work as a light installation artist and sometime VJ has been performed in a wide variety of venues, from a massive warehouse installation in Amsterdam, to a cavern in Kochi Japan. In 2004, with Benton-C Bainbridge, he curated "Synaesthesiologists," a festival of video audio artworks for Lincoln Center. He is currently making artwork and music videos for a variety of projects including Slow Motion Video Festival and Foundsound Records.

Steve Nalepa
http://www.stevenalepa.com
LA-based electronic musician, multimedia artist and mad scientist collector Steve Nalepa combines deep dub bass, glitchy breaks, bioacoustic atmospheres and beautiful sinewave melodies to create his patented brand of ambient glitch dub. Known for his vast and eclectic array of artistic collaborators — cultivated and acquired through years of producing spectacular audiovisual events and sharing bills with some of the worlds best electronic musicians — Nalepa is considered a key node in the west coast audiovisual scene. Nalepa has produced tracks with legends such as Bill Laswell and Pharoah Sanders, rocked it at Flavorpill's Friday's Off the 405 series at the Getty Museum, and shared a bill with Amon Tobin, Cut Chemist and DJ Spooky at Walt Disney Concert Hall. His Flatlands CD/DVD drops in October on Native State Records featuring groundbreaking videos and remixes from a diverse, all-star lineup.

Contact:
Steve Nalepa nalepa@stevenalepa.com
Benton-C Bainbridge bcb@benton-c.com
David Last david@davidlast.net

(This text as a Word Document available here.)