2026 SPECIAL EVENTS
ONION CITY OPENING RECEPTION AT 150 MEDIA STREAM
Co-presented by 150 Media Stream and Peter Burr
150 Media Stream (150 N. Riverside Plaza) | April 9, 2026 - 5:30PM
The Onion City Experimental Film Festival opens on Thursday, April 9, 2026 with a digital art installation and reception in the lobby of 150 N. Riverside Plaza from 5:30pm to 7:30pm, hosted and sponsored by 150 Media Stream. Digital and new media artist Peter Burr, known for his large-scale installations in locales such as Times Square, will curate the lobby’s unique media wall. Burr’s Continuous Monument, commissioned by 150 Media Stream in 2021, will alternate with French animation artist Boris Labbé's newly adapted work Ito Meikyū. Originally a VR work, Ito Meikyū, which premiered at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival, 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.
150 Media Stream will also present Ito Meikyū in its original VR format, offering visitors the rare opportunity to experience this interactive 20-minute artwork through a VR headset during the following time windows:
Wednesday, April 8, 11:30am - 1:30pm
Thursday, April 9, 11:30am - 1:30pm; 5:30pm - 7:30pm
The reception will be followed by Onion City’s opening night screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center — USEFUL FANTASY — a program of repertory animated works on 35mm and digital video curated by Burr.
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150 Media Stream is a public digital art installation located in the lobby of 150 N Riverside Plaza in Chicago. Uniquely divided into 89 LED blades, it stretches over 150 feet long and reaches 22 feet high, the largest structure of its kind in the city. Launched in 2017, the installation has showcased over 50 commissioned artworks by emerging and renowned local and international media artists. Curated by Chicago-based video artist Yuge Zhou, the 150 Media Stream Arts Program forges strategic partnerships with many of Chicago’s major academic and artistic institutions. Through educational initiatives, public lectures, and performances, the program provides a dynamic forum for cultural practitioners to share their work for a wide audience at the intersection of the art and business communities.
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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.
ONION CITY OPENING NIGHT — USEFUL FANTASY
Co-presented by 150 Media Stream and Peter Burr
Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State Street) | April 9, 2026 - 8:00PM
The 36th Onion City Experimental Film Festival opens with USEFUL FANTASY, a special shorts program at the Gene Siskel Film Center curated by artist Peter Burr and presented in partnership with 150 Media Stream. The program features a 35mm print of Suzan Pitt's iconic ASPARAGUS (1979) restored by the Academy Film Archive, as well as Peter Tscherkassky’s avant-garde masterpiece OUTER SPACE (1999, 35mm). Accompanying these prints are digital presentations of Peter Burr’s ALONE WITH THE MOON (2012), Vince Collins’s MALICE IN WONDERLAND (1982), Shana Moulton’s THE MOUNTAIN WHERE EVERYTHING IS UPSIDE DOWN (2005), and Boris Labbé’s LA CHUTE (2018). Peter Burr will be in attendance to present a work-in-progress preview of his generative artwork MAINTENANCE GAME (2026). Co-presented by 150 Media Stream. The program will take place at 8pm on April 9, 2026 and will be preceded by a reception and installation hosted by 150 Media Stream at 150 N. Riverside Plaza from 5:30pm–7:30pm.
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. Not all fantasy does the same work. Some fantasy simplifies, promising escape into the manageable and known. The fantasy gathered here moves in the opposite direction. It opens doors rather than closing them. It intensifies uncertainty rather than resolving it. In an era where imagination is constantly recruited for branding, forecasting, or visioning corporate futures, these works practice a different kind of thinking. They construct environments that resist extraction, realms that can't be converted into actionable insights or reassuring narratives. Their allegories feel urgent and specific without ever declaring what they're allegories of. This is fantasy as a form of refusal: not escape from reality but escape from the demand that reality be simple or weirdness eventually resolve into something we can use. These works stay strange precisely because they don't owe us anything. They hold open space for thinking that might circle its target forever and refuse to land. (Peter Burr)
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150 Media Stream is a public digital art installation located in the lobby of 150 N Riverside Plaza in Chicago. Uniquely divided into 89 LED blades, it stretches over 150 feet long and reaches 22 feet high, the largest structure of its kind in the city. Launched in 2017, the installation has showcased over 50 commissioned artworks by emerging and renowned local and international media artists. Curated by Chicago-based video artist Yuge Zhou, the 150 Media Stream Arts Program forges strategic partnerships with many of Chicago’s major academic and artistic institutions. Through educational initiatives, public lectures, and performances, the program provides a dynamic forum for cultural practitioners to share their work for a wide audience at the intersection of the art and business communities.
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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.
Malice in Wonderland (1982)
Asparagus (1979)
The Mountain Where Everything Is Upside Down (2005)
[WE DON’T KNOW YET] WHAT A CINEMA CAN DO
Co-presented by the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines (CCAM)
Public Works Gallery (2141 W. North Ave) | April 10, 2026 - 8:00PM
Doors Open at 7:00PM & Show Starts at 8:00PM
Onion City and CCAM co-present the third annual edition of [WE DON’T KNOW YET] WHAT A CINEMA CAN DO, a night of new media live performance with the theme of Disintegrating Archives.
This event explores the resonances of “expanded cinema” today, putting cinematic art to the tasks of resistance, rupture, and reconfiguration of mediatic experience. We ask: how can experimental modes of animating sound and moving images reconfigure the possibility of our relating to one another anew? Re:: mix; vision; mediate; compile; concile; wire; work; enact.
This year WDKY features new works or reworkings by three artists developing distinct technical, aesthetic, and cultural niches: AJ McClenon’s transmedia sound and video work moves through topics of blackness, beauty, personal narrative, and the broad spectrum of femininity. The arts collective Alterotics’ moving-image art, archival research, and event hosting activates public life for trans/queer people. James Connolly’s real-time sound and media performance activates expressive potentials of technical systems sequestered behind consumer interfaces.
These three artists are also joined by special guest Aria Pedraza, who will introduce the Midwest Rave Culture Archive.
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CCAM is an artist-run platform programming, performing, and producing at the nexus of art, technology, and contemporary thought.
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AJ McClennon works between sound, music, written, and spoken word, moving image and imagistic experimentation. They will present a new work that builds on the world-building techniques of their afro-futurist VEGA exhibition and performance project as well as their practice of engaging personal narratives.
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Alterotics (Avery Jaye and Anais Alias) activates and reconfigures media technologies of image capture and sonic production to create windows, filters, scores, portals, and transcodings of feeling. Their assemblages of media signals (sound, video, cameras, sensors) create capacities for exchange between performers, audience, and the subjects of their archival material through gates of intimacy and distance.
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James Connolly brings his custom real-time video processing systems (the CRT Flux Phaser and RGB.VGA.VOLT) to dis- and re-integrate lost privacy of personal archives in times of algorithmic extraction and mass surveillance. Connolly revives and re-purposes techniques of manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum cultivated by Chicago video stalwarts like Daniel Sandin in a post-alphabetic society.
Advance ticket purchase recommended. Admission increases to $40 rush tickets at the door.
BEYOND RESOLUTION: FILMS BY SABINE GRUFFAT
Sponsored by the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Cinema (1326 W. Hollywood Ave) | April 11, 2026 - 6:00PM
Join us for a screening and conversation with artist Sabine Gruffat, who is touring a selection of her extensive filmography this spring. This special program favors ambiguity and resists resolution. The nearer the gaze, the more obscure the view. Illegibility here is not an escape from politics, but a way of inhabiting it differently: as a site of tension, friction, and possibility. These films draw from a range of genres and layered techniques. Images are processed to draw attention to the hidden logics in software, hardware, and materiality. In repurposing media, the works call attention to the histories from which meaning’s fragile frameworks emerge.
Lineup:
Disclaimer | Marseille, France | 2025 | 5 min | Digital
The following film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen.
Headlines: BOMB PARTS | Detroit, MI | 2007 | 3 min | 16mm film to digital
A semi - automated animation process of a New York Times article results in sentence recombinations that sometimes made sense while emphasizing certain words and images. The writing from February 27, 2007 is about bomb parts found in Baghdad that the newspaper speculates were planted by Iran.
A Return to the Return to Reason | Chapel Hill, NC | 2014 | 3 min | Laser etched 35mm film to digital
A tribute to Man Ray's 1923 film Le Retour à La Raison. In this film Man Ray’s “original” film was digitized with its scratches, and splices, then compiled into digital filmstrips. These filmstrips are used to output a dithered image that the laser engraver may etch onto black film leader.
Brave New World | Chapel Hill, NC | 2015 | 7 min | 35mm film to digital
In 1927 Henry Ford bought land in the Amazon for a rubber plantation and called it Fordlandia. In this video, 35mm archival silent documentary film footage shot by Henry Ford’s own filmmakers is reworked and given a soundtrack revealing the colonial lens through which the filmmakers apprehended unfamiliar nature.
Black Oval White | Owego, NY | 2009 | 3 min | DV to digital
A video recording of a computer-generated abstract animation that is keyed, wiped and matted by electronic oscillators and feedback. The sound of the electronic oscillators is delayed and pitched to produce modulations.
Take it Down | Chapel Hill, NC | 2019 | 13 min | Solarized color positive 35mm film to digital
A last stand for the silent guardians of the old order. Take It Down is a filmic day of reckoning for the Old Confederate South. What is up must come down, like the Confederate soldier monuments standing in court house squares across the South. Solarized film makes positives bleed into negatives.
Framelines | Washington, DC and Chapel Hill, NC | 2017 | 10 min | Laser-etched color negative to digital
Framelines is an abstract scratch film made by laser etching abstract patterns on the film emulsion of negative and positive 35mm film. The strips of film were then re-photographed on top of each other as photograms then contact printed. The soundtrack layers the noise made by the etched optical track.
Moving or Being Moved | Chapel Hill, NC | 2021 | 11 min | Digital
Post-modern dance theory by Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer is put to work while a woman cleans the house in a motion capture suit. The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers.
Souvenir Statuette | Ménerbes, France and Sante Fe, NM | 2024 | 11 min | Digital
Souvenirs of souvenirs. Souvenir Statuettes were animated in real spaces with a custom made augmented-reality application. Whether they be cast from a mold, or 3d scanned and propagated online, Souvenir Statuettes aim for virality. Some of the quasi-objects in this video were once objects, others are non-objects or computer model imaginaries.
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Sabine Gruffat is a French-American artist born in Bangkok, Thailand. She co-founded and co-programs the Cosmic Rays Film Festival in Chapel Hill, NC with filmmaker Bill Brown. Currently she lives in Marseille, France. She works in experimental, animation, and essay forms and exhibits her work as installations, performances, and single-channel screenings. By actively engaging with both current and outmoded technology, Gruffat’s work questions our standardized and mediated world. Gruffat’s films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, Migrating Forms, the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Chicago Underground, Cinéma du Réel, 25FPS, Transmediale in Berlin, and The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. She has produced digital media works for public spaces as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, and Hudson Franklin in New York. Her collected video works are distributed by the Video Data Bank.
Souvenir Statuette (2024)
Gangsterism (2025)
OFF CENTER: GANGSTERISM (ONION CITY CLOSING NIGHT)
Co-presented by OFF CENTER, Gene Siskel Film Center
Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State Street) | April 12, 2026 - 7:00PM
Celebrate closing night of Onion City Experimental Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center with Isiah Medina’s latest feature. GANGSTERISM (2025, Canada, 84 min) updates the gangster film as the tale of director-gangster Clem, who ponders the politics of film circulation, financing, and representation while his artist cronies track down an old comrade rumored to be a leaker. Isiah Medina and composer Kieran Daly are scheduled to attend for a post-screening conversation.
“There are few filmmakers working today, who are more committed to the inordinate possibilities of the cut and the transformative power of montage than Isiah Medina.” —Daniel Turner, ICA London
“Taking his recondite method into consideration, we ascertain that Medina is himself a student, but one who has graduated to the ranks of the Canadian greats.” —Craig Keller
“If classical shot-reverse-shot form observes conversational propriety, Medina’s flickering approach demonstrates a cinema capable of moving at the pace of thought—ideas which fit jaggedly into one another, not flowing so much as butting heads.” —Dylan Adamson, In Review
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Isiah Medina is a Canadian experimental filmmaker who directs and produces films with his company Quantity Cinema. His feature films include 88:88 (2015), Inventing the Future (2020), Night Is Limpid (2022), and He Thought He Died (2023). His films have played at the Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Berlin Critics’ Week, Jeonju International Film Festival, and the Viennale.
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OFF CENTER is a basement. OFF CENTER is a backyard. OFF CENTER is a place to come hang and experience weird films together in the spirit of DIY filmmaking and the microcinema. Programmed by Michael Wawzenek at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
Medina's visit is sponsored by Employees Only and The Neu Lithium.
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Employees Only is an itinerant curatorial project focused on experimental documentary and short-form video from both emerging and established filmmakers in Chicago and beyond.
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The Neu Lithium is an online platform for time-based art, experimental web-based curation, digital residencies, and a multimedia editorial section that promotes time-based artists and exhibitions mainly in Chicago and occasionally abroad.
Tickets for the Closing Night film need to be purchased directly from the Gene Siskel Film Center. Advance tickets can be purchased online below.