Cfa Receives Macarthur Grant To Produce International Media Mixer

For the past five years Chicago Film Archives has sponsored a local artistic collaboration called the Media Mixer. In each year, CFA commissioned three Chicago-based media artists to create new works with material taken from the organization’s archival footage. Nancy Watrous, executive director of CFA, says that the artists could choose and use any footage that they wanted, as long as CFA had the copyrights or the works were in the public domain. “We then would pair them up—in some cases, kind of a blind date—with Chicago audio artists or musicians to score the new piece,” she explains. CFA would then premiere the new works at a Media Mixer event at the Hideout. According to Watrous, the process and events had been “hugely successful,” with some of the pieces going on to win awards at festivals.

        But when Watrous learned that the MacArthur Foundation was offering a grant that would allow a cultural exchange, she contacted Fiorini with a new idea.  “When I began thinking about some kind of an exchange we could do with an archive in Italy, I realized we had a model in the Media Mixer,” Watrous says. “This time, it would be a sort of blind date between cultures.”