March 27-28, 2015 Friday and Saturday, 10:00 a.m.- 6:00 p.m. UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art 322 UNION AVE. WILLIAMSBURG BROOKLYN, NY 11211 — MAP (https://goo.gl/maps/zux4S)

Webcams, phone cameras, lenses, magnifiers, filters, adapters… Our obsessions with image recording have continued to motivate inventors and manufacturers to produce a myriad of new optics, as small as biconcave microlenses, and as big as massive reflective telescopes hunting for light traces of distant galaxies. We, media makers, enthusiastically experiment with and accumulate optical technologies. They fill up our camera bags; linger on desktop workstations and shelves; rest in our storage boxes, studios, and creative laboratories. Ultimately, we declare some of them obsolete. Like eyes going blind, detached from their receptor cells, pounds of glass, metal and plastic are put to rest in some remote dark corner. The Re/Lens retreat focuses on sustainable practices and seeks to breathe new life into these objects. It invites experimentations in image making by interfacing old with the new, analog with digital, forgotten with popular. Bringing a variety of lenses, adapters, filters, and contemporary image technologies such as smartphone cameras and applications into play, Re/Lens will delve into creative explorations of these unlikely syntheses. Let’s play!

ABOUT RE/LAB: Premised on the idea that students of media think and engage more meaningfully when they deeply understand the material history of their subject, Re/Lab encourages media innovation that is critically and historically informed for a sustainable creative future. Find out more at http://smscommons.newschool.edu/relab/.

ABOUT AMIR HUSAK: Amir Husak is a filmmaker and multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Husak has worked across a variety of time-based and interactive media, and also recorded and performed as a musician. His works have been shown at such diverse places as South by Southwest (US), Stadtmuseum Graz (Austria), Sundance Film Festival (US), Sarajevo Film Festival (Bosnia & Herzegovina), P.O.V./PBS (US), Big Sky Documentary Film Festival (US), TV Cultura (Brazil), and Full Frame Film Festival (US). Husak teaches as part-time faculty in the Media Studies & Film department at The New School in New York. He currently focuses on producing interactive works that combine documentary, essay and experimental techniques. Find out more at http://www.amirhusak.com/

Free for New School students, faculty, and staff. Cost to public: $150 for both days Accepted students should bring: Laptop and/or smartphone. If you want to bring your own lenses, feel free – but we’ll have lots.