2022 CFA Media Mixer!

On June 30th, 2022, CFA will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of its annual Media Mixer event with the premiere of three new Media Mixer pieces at Constellation.

The Media Mixer project started in 2012 as a way to open up CFA’s vault of archival footage to artists working in media, and to support the creation of a new video work by pairing visual and sound artists. At the heart of the Media Mixer is a desire to give CFA’s archival collections new life through the creative interpretation of contemporary artists. As a result, three new collaborative videos will be made using footage from the Chicago Film Archives collection.

This year’s event will be hosted by Amy Beste, curator of Conversations at the Edge over at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and the Director of Public Programs and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The 2022 Media Mixer artists are (video and sound):

Kishino Takagishi and Daniel Knox

Tempestt Hazel and Azita Youssefi

Janelle Dowell and Sen Morimoto

Sen Morimoto will perform live, and all artists, with the exception of Daniel Knox, will appear in person for an on-stage conversation!

Please join us at Constellation on June 30th for the premiere! Tickets are available for advance purchase here.

More on this year’s artists:

Daniel Knox is a songwriter and composer. His most recent release was Won’t You Take Me With You (Jan 2021). Knox’s work has inspired a diverse cast of admirers and collaborators that lie inside and outside his realm of alternative Americana, such as Jarvis Cocker, Thor Harris (Swans, Freakwater), Ralph Carney (Tom Waits, The B-52′s), Nina Nastasia, David Lynch, and The Handsome Family, with performances including Rufus Wainwright, Andrew Bird, Rasputina, and Swans. Additionally Knox has provided songs and score for Hubbard Street Dance Company, a Russian production of Annie Baker’s The Aliens, The Chicago Film Society, and Hans Fleischmann’s production of The Glass Menagerie. Until, recently he was a projectionist at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre projectionist.

Kishino Takagishi is a multi-media artist originally from Evanston, Illinois. She received her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. While an undergrad, she specialized in creating experimental documentary and installation works; exploring concepts of memory, dreams, and psychological histories. In Kishino’s work, she utilizes the ambiguous, phantasmagorical nature of video in order to better interpret time and understand truth. Since graduating, Kishino is continuing her practice in Chicago while additionally doing performance videography for local artists and organizations such as Asian Improv aRts Midwest. Her work has been exhibited by SAIC’s annual Exfest, Zhou B Art Center, and the Experimental Sound Studio. She has also been a visiting artist at universities such as Concordia University in Montreal and SAIC.

Tempestt Hazel is a curator and writer born and raised in Peoria, Illinois. She’s also co-founder of Sixty Inches From Center, a collective of writers, editors, artists, curators, librarians, and archivists who have published and produced projects about artists, archival practice, and culture in Chicago and the Midwest since 2010. She’s still smiling about the fact that she was the 2019 recipient of the J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists. You can read her writing, explore her curatorial projects, and learn about her love of archives by visiting her website at tempestthazel.com.

Azita Youssefi is a Chicago-based composer and performer, whose disparate work over the last three decades has explored a shifting array of styles and approaches, yet behind everything is a sincere yearning for expression. From her earliest work leading the squalling post-punk trio Scissor Girls to her latest solo effort, the critically acclaimed Glen Echo (2020), Azita has continually pushed against the boundaries of whatever form or tradition her music has inhabited, opting for expression–sometimes primal, sometimes eloquent–over formal convention.

Janelle Vaughn Dowell is a Chicago-based artist who uses multiple technologies and media platforms to tell inspirational stories. Each work contributes to a larger narrative—an experimental film, poetic digital broadcast, faith centered publication design, or new media experiment. Her work in expanded digital media is rooted in research on historically African-American resort communities of the 20th Century. These epicenters followed a simple and effective formula; they provided a transformational space for people to simply, rest.

Dowell served as a civilian director within the Chicago Police Department before channeling her advocacy toward artistic pursuits. Her poetic film, 30 Minutes Before Sunrise, was screened at the Moving Pictures Festival in Antwerpen, Belgium, and Los Angeles Cinefest. She is an inaugural awardee of the Chicago Digital Media Production Fund and an MFA graduate of Columbia College of Chicago with a degree in Interdisciplinary Arts & Media. Dowell works for the City Colleges of Chicago as a Media and Communications Design Adjunct Professor and is the founder of REST Global Media, Inc.

Sen Morimoto is a Chicago based multi-instrumentalist producer, composer, and songwriter born in Kyoto, Japan. His family settled in Massachusetts when he was a kid, and Sen began a life-long study of jazz saxophone. Picking up any instrument he could get his hands on, a teenage Morimoto cut his teeth as a songwriter and performer in the DIY hip-hop community of Western Massachusetts. But it was a 2014 move to Chicago that inspired Sen Morimoto to start his solo project, drawing on a lifetime of experience as a cross-genre collaborator. Playing out in his new city’s multidisciplinary scene led to producing and collaborating with artists like Joseph Chilliams (Pivot Gang), KAINA, Qari, Akenya, Resavoir, Lala Lala, and many others. It also led to a friendship with like-minded polymath NNAMDÏ, who encouraged Morimoto to record an album for his label, Sooper. That release, Cannonball! (2018), incorporated Morimoto’s many discrete interests, and its unique fusion led to critical accolades and international festivals. Morimoto soon became a co-owner of Sooper Records, and in addition to working as a full-time solo artist and producer, now also works as a label head to support and give voice to other emerging artists. He released his most recent full length record Sen Morimoto in October of 2020.

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