ITO MEIKYU by Boris Labbé
THE CONTINUOUS MONUMENT by Peter Burr
On View: April 9th, 2026 – July 4th, 2026
150 Media Stream hosted the opening reception for the 2026 Onion City Experimental Film Festival on Thursday, April 9th!
During the reception, which took place 5:30-7:30pm in the lobby of 150 N Riverside Plaza, our unique media wall featured two works guest-curated by digital and new media artist Peter Burr. Burr’s own The Continuous Monument, commissioned by 150 Media Stream in 2021, alternated with French animation artist Boris Labbé’s newly adapted Ito Meikyū, which originally premiered as a virtual-reality work at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival.
The opening reception was followed by Onion City’s opening night screening at 8pm at the Gene Siskel Film Center — USEFUL FANTASY — a program of repertory animated works on 35mm and digital video also curated by Peter Burr and sponsored by 150 Media Stream.
150 Media Stream also presented Ito Meikyū in its original VR format, a 20-minute experience that visitors joined by headset during the following time windows: Wednesday, April 8, 11:30am – 1:30pm, and Thursday, April 9, 11:30am – 1:30pm & 5:30pm – 7:30pm.
ITO MEIKYU IN VIRTUAL REALITY:
Wednesday, April 8th
11:30am-1:30pm
Thursday, April 9th
11:30am-1:30pm & 5:30pm-7:30pm
Open to the public, these rare opportunities to experience ITO MEIKYU in its original format were unmissable! We had four VR headsets available with attendants ready to immerse participants in the world of this transformative artwork.
ABOUT THE CONTINUOUS MONUMENT
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.
ABOUT PETER BURR
Peter Burr is an artist from Brooklyn, NY who transforms complex computational systems into emotional, sensory experiences through large-scale immersive environments. Drawing from early experiments with computational graphics in the mid-nineties, Burr’s practice has evolved to incorporate techniques that merge fundamental computing operations with modern real-time rendering systems. His work frequently explores the relationship between human-machine interfaces and the underlying systems that drive them.
Previously Burr worked under the alias Hooliganship and founded the video label Cartune Xprez through which he produced hundreds of live multimedia exhibitions and touring programs showcasing a multi-generational group of artists at the forefront of experimental animation. His practice has been recognized through grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship. His work has been presented at major cultural institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, The Barbican Centre, Documenta 14, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Centre Pompidou. Throughout his career, Burr has maintained an active presence in the computational arts field, with exhibitions in over 25 countries. He regularly presents his research at institutions including past keynotes at Yale University and Ars Electronica. He is a current PhD candidate in video games at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
ABOUT ITO MEIKYU
Originally a virtual-reality work that premiered at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival, Ito Meikyū develops around references from Japanese art history and literature (the Fukinuki Yatai, The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book) and unfolds as a large sensory fresco. A heterogeneous set of drawn, animated, and sound scenes are taken from digital material; they recreate a kind of subjective world (inner and outer) in the form of a labyrinth composed of fractal architectures, inhabited by plants, objects, animals, men, women, motifs, and calligraphy. Presented at 150 Media Stream in a new adaptation for the media wall as well as in the original VR format.
ABOUT BORIS LABBÉ
Based on his drawing activity, Boris Labbé‘s work is characterized by hybridization, combining the use of digital moving image techniques with those specific to animated film. Boris Labbé’s work forms a cinema of multiplicity. Repetition, re-presentation, collages, patterns, metamorphoses, perpetual movement, as well as constant citations of art history, literature and philosophy, have all become essential resources of his audiovisual language.
Trained at the École supérieure d’art de Tarbes and the École de cinéma d’animation d’Angoulême, Boris Labbé (1987, FR) quickly exhibited art around the world, whether at contemporary art exhibitions, international film festivals or audiovisual concerts. His latest short film La Chute was selected for the Special Screening at the Critics’ Week of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. In 2020 he collaborated with the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj and signed the video scenography of the show Swan Lake. His films and video installations have earned him some seventy awards and distinctions around the world, including the Golden Nica Animation at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz and the Grand Prix at the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo. Between 2023 and 2024, he developed and directed two landmark projects: Ito Meikyū, his first virtual reality project (produced by Sacrebleu Productions and Les Films Fauves) and Glass House, a video scenography in collaboration with composer Lucas Fagin (produced by the Ensemble Cairn). In 2024 Ito Meikyū was awarded the Venice Immersive Grand Prize at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.