This event celebrates the 20 year anniversary of Cartune Xprez who pressed its first DVD in 2006, when YouTube was barely a year old and Netflix was still putting discs in envelopes. Experimental animation mostly lived on shelves, in festival queues, and in boxes shipped between friends. Cartune Xprez took it on the road instead, operating as part video label, part live theater, part psychedelic insurrection, carrying hand-burned compilations into basements and cinemas across twenty countries. Over two hundred events and twenty years later, the algorithm has swallowed most of the room. USEFUL FANTASY celebrates this anniversary by insisting there’s still something that only happens when the strange and the uncompromising share a physical space in the dark.

What fills that dark is fantasy, the useful kind.

Most fantasy is useless. That’s the point. It’s the space we reserve for what doesn’t have to justify itself. USEFUL FANTASY insists on having both of its ways, gathering films that build worlds through their psychic accumulation, letting meaning emerge so indirectly it might not emerge at all.

Performance by Matt Romein
Most game engines want you to forget they’re there. That’s the design. The interface recedes, the avatar responds, and the illusion of control holds. Matt Romein’s performance refuses this courtesy. He puts his body inside a game engine and waits to see what it does with him.  As the boundary between what’s real and what’s rendered begins to slip, the performance asks: who is actually in control?

Cartune Xprez Screening
details TBA

Performance by MSHR
MSHR builds instruments that don’t distinguish between sound and image. For this performance, the duo improvises through a handmade sculptural interface linked to a digital system of their own design, where every sonic parameter reshapes something visual and every visual shift alters the sound. What unfolds is a kind of live cinema where every decision the players make ripples through the whole system and comes back changed.

Peter Burr‘s MAINTENANCE VESSELS is a slot machine at the mouth of a dungeon. Participants spin up hybrid avatars and send them into a decaying subterranean world where they perform quiet, endless acts of repair on architecture that may not want to be saved.

Featuring a pre-show and post-show reception.

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.

Peter Burr is a Brooklyn, NY–based artist who transforms complex computational systems into emotional, sensory experiences through large-scale immersive environments. Drawing from early experiments with computational graphics in the mid-1990s, Burr’s practice has evolved to 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, producing hundreds of live multimedia exhibitions and touring programs that showcased a multi-generational group of artists at the forefront of experimental animation. His practice has been recognized with awards and grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship. His work has been presented at major cultural institutions such as 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 currently a PhD candidate in video games at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.