Supernova Fest burns bright in Denver Theatre District
Leave it to artists to once again transform the giant LED billboards of the Denver Theatre District into glowing canvases for digital animation.
“The screens created this opportunity to do something positive and artistic,” said Ivar Zeile, founder and director of the Supernova Outdoor Digital Animation Festival, taking place in and around the Denver Performing Arts Complex on Friday and Saturday. “Denver Digerati (which runs the event) formed with a light bulb going off in our heads saying, ‘These are awesome, and perfect to consider for a whole new form of public art.’ ”
Indeed, in Supernova’s second year, the free festival will take full advantage of these impossible-to-miss fixtures of commerce, such as the 25-foot-high, 60foot-wide screen at 14th and Champa streets, or a similar one along the heavily trafficked 16th Street Mall.
The main event runs 3-10 p.m. on Saturday, when seven hours of digital animation and artworks will be presented simultaneously on the screen at 14th and Champa streets, and within the DPAC on a temporary outdoor screen with seating, a cash bar and competition screenings offering cash prizes (starting at 7 p.m.).
Regional talent is mixed in with national artists and selections from the U.K., Canada, Australia, Russia, Iran, Korea, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Venezuela and elsewhere.
“No other city, anywhere, has managed to bring genuine cultural value to those giant, flashing LED screens that have become so ubiquitous (and obnoxious) in urban areas,” wrote Denver Post critic Ray Mark Rinaldi in 2015.
“It’s in our bylaws to take (our adver-
tising) revenue and invest it in arts and culture,” David Ehrlich, executive director of the 10-yearold Denver Theatre District, told The Denver Post in May. “We’re basically the only public media district that does that, and it doesn’t cost the public a dime.”
From 2017-19, the district has increased its art funding with a budget of more than $800,000, which includes this year’s Supernova event. And Zeile, who has been programming digital art on the district’s screens since 2011, said 2017’s Supernova is the most focused offering yet.
Zeile, who founded Denver’s Plus Gallery in 2001 and formerly worked as presentation manager for the Sundance Film Festival, counts 140 shorts being presented in the Sept. 23 window, with the juried competition as the focal point.
“When I look at digital animation, it’s no different in terms of its development than any other form of art,” he said, comparing it to the emergence of video art, which has since found a permanent place in galleries and collections around the world.
Selections for this year’s Supernova include Peter Burr’s “Pattern Language,” which will also be shown at the Projections section of the 55th New York Film Festival next month. Burr was last year’s Grand Prize winner at Supernova.
Zeile is particularly excited about the work of New York City artist Jeremy Couillard, who will be one of 10 out-of-town artists in attendance (compared with none in 2016) and whose work will be highlighted in the NXT STG collaborative gallery across from the DPAC’s Buell Theatre — where Disney’s preBroadway engagement of “Frozen” is now running.
“All the thousands of people streaming in for ‘Frozen’ in the next couple weeks are seeing that, and hopefully some of them are going in,” Zeile said of the gallery, which features the work of Couillard and three festival jurors, and is run by the University of Colorado Denver’s College of Arts & Media.
“One of the main pieces of Supernova, outside of some really cool, beautiful wall paintings, is a video game (Couillard) created called Alien Afterlife, which is another interactive experience people can have,” he added.
Simply being digital or animated in nature does not automatically warrant Supernova inclusion. GIFs, which got their own showing at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this year, are too much of a fad to be taken seriously at the moment, according to Zeile. Music videos, however, are fair game.
“You don’t want to just celebrate a fad,” he said. “Although we actually have a piece in the festival this year called ‘New York GIF-athon,’ a 2½ minute piece made up of GIFs where the whole piece comes across as a work of animation.”
The festival kicks off in earnest at 9:45 a.m. on Friday with its Education Forum, which runs until 4 p.m. on the 13-foot-wide Discovery Wall inside the Auraria Library, at 1100 Lawrence St. (RSVP to ivar@plusgallery.com).
After a successful test-run of sorts over the weekend at the Biennial of the Americas’s “Havana Nights” celebration, Zeile is expecting increased attendance over last year’s Supernova.
“You now have the tools and technology for an individual to create what I consider to be aweinspiring work — instead of needing giant teams of people, as with animated features or big video games,” Zeile said.
“We’re in that moment right now.”