Action Lines is a production company founded in 2020 by Xavier Nunez, Eric Grant, and Dylan Gutierrez. A trio of Chicago transplants, Xavier and Dylan are dancers with the Joffrey Ballet, and Eric is a writer and film producer. They created Action Lines as a company by and for independent performing artists. Their goal is to bring new perspectives to dance films, and provide opportunities to strengthen the bonds between the performing arts and digital media.

Interim Avoidance seeks to provide a sense of closeness during the waning days of the pandemic. The dancers of the Joffrey Ballet have found themselves all dressed up with nowhere to perform. Six dancers emerge in a void, unsure of their purpose. A beam of red light beckons them like a stage manager on opening night, offering a moment of respite from their collective solitude. Never ones to give up an opportunity, they launch into the movements and shapes for which they have trained so long. A determination to bring joy, to excite, to spark inspiration with dance, the performers urge us all to remember that even in the darkest times, loneliness is nothing more than an Interim Avoidance.

Read interview here.

Panel conversation on Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 150 N. Riverside Plaza in Chicago

Moderated by Brendan Fernandes, Joffrey Board Director 

Panelists:
Eric Grant, Action Lines Co-Founder and Producer
Dylan Gutierrez, Action Lines Co-Founder and Joffrey Company Artist
Xavier Núñez, Action Lines Co-Founder and Joffrey Company Artist
Yuge Zhou, 150 Media Stream Curator, Video Artist

“Out To Lunch” is a site-specific video installation by Sarah Brophy with sound design by Zheyu Pi that imagines screensavers as the computer’s conscious dream-state and uses imagery to frame daydreaming as a valuable and generative function. Familiar screensaver themes from the past are fused with new illustrations inspired by the screen’s surroundings to create a painterly dreamscape. The project, selected via a student competition, was produced in partnership with the Video Installation class taught by Peter Burr at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (The Film, Video, New Media, and Animation Department).

Read interview here.

To celebrate the 2021 Year of Chicago Music and its citywide festival, 150 Media Stream presents the debut performance of a multimedia concert by animation artist George Berlin and the Mind Exchange Music.

The work entitled Spectrum is a journey of exploration and celebration through a rainbow of colors that comprise the visible light in our lives from sunrise to sunset. This adventure transports us around the wheel of hues that paint our perceptions of the physical and emotional life experiences in our world, portraying the unending cyclical nature of our entire universe – days, seasons, orbits, and especially feelings.

‘Spectrum: Reimagined at 150 Media Stream’ is a multi-media live performance in the lobby of 150 N Riverside Plaza that took place on May 3rd, 2022 as part of the Chicago Returns Week. The performance features Urban Jazz by Joel Hall Dancers (choreography by Jacqueline Sinclair), accompanied by instrumentalists from Mind Exchange Music and against the backdrop of George Berlin’s animation ‘Spectrum’ on the uniquely structured 150 Media Stream. Renowned floral designer Zac Hall transforms the lobby area into a lush natural landscape. The performance aims to reinvigorated an iconic urban space by placing focus on community and energetic exchange that happens when we interact with each other.

OOzy is the newest work in Zurkow’s ongoing series Oceans Like Us.

OOzy brings into view a sensual—but harsh—mix of kelp, marine organisms, human aquanauts, mermaids, plastics, and oil, who cycle and snake through the 150 Media Stream along the riverside.

An ocean is not a body—and it is. It is also a shipping superhighway; a resource for food and minerals, and rare earth; a space of mystery, adventure, fantasy, dream, and myth; a space to be mapped, measured, and known; and “Earth’s” greatest engine—that maintains, reflects and affects the regulatory systems of the planet.

The works in Oceans Like Us aim to parse these often conflicted frameworks for thinking with and about oceans, offering opportunities to both make strange and increase affection for these complex liquid spaces, to offer contemplative connection time to the ocean as a fundamental life-source, a system in dire need of love and protection.

Sound design by Scott Reitherman and animation assistance by Ewan Creed.

Public reception with a conversation between Peter Burr and Marina Zurkow
Friday, October 8th, 2021
6:30-8:30pm at 150 N Riverside Plaza
Moderated by Ye-Bhit Hong

An infinitely scrolling landscape of construction and collapse, THE CONTINUOUS MONUMENT depicts a self-generating world of disassembled body parts as a site of spectacle. Tourists mingle, stare, and idle within a landscape of scattered oversized limbs in candy-colored variety. The artwork employs a collection of algorithmic systems in the development of this tableaux including crowd simulation, building assembly, and music generation. What emerges is an endlessly expanding vertical landmark in constant limbo.

The title pays homage to a 1969 artwork by the experimental architecture group SUPERSTUDIO. Their anti-architectural proposals used grid systems as a way to mediate space, often critiquing the dehumanizing tendencies of urban planning in the modern age.

Music by John Also Bennett, and Technical Direction by Oren Shoham & Jeremy Rotsztain.

Read interview here.