STUDIO Event Series Presents: the Punto y Raya Festival

The STUDIO is pleased to bring the Punto y Raya (Dot and Line) film festival to campus on Tuesday, October 12th. This festival, which has earned the title of “most abstract in the world”, explores the creative possibilities of dots and lines in various spheres of science, art and thought. The Punto y Raya festival features no figuration – just dots and lines as ends in themselves!

This event is free and open to the public.

Presented by its organizer and curator, Nöel Palazzo of the Barcelona-based artist collective, Moviment d’Alliberament Digital (MAD), Punto y Raya goes back to basics in our representation of space and time to gain an insight into the world beyond perception. Palazzo is a feature film, TV, movie, animation and science fiction writer. Her films have been internationally awarded and she occasionally lectures and writes as a film critic. Palazzo will be present at the screening to introduce and discuss the festival.

Larry Cuba, a featured animator in the Punto y Raya festival, will also be present at the screening to discuss his work. Cuba is a pioneering and well-known computer animator; he worked as John Whitney’s assistant in the early 1970s on classics such as Arabesque, and later produced the well-known “star field” animations for George Lucas’s Star Wars. Cuba currently directs the Iota Center, a Los Angeles based archive and distribution center for computer animation and 20th-century abstract animation.

The Punto y Raya event at CMU formed the premise of a design exercise for Prof. Kristin Hughes’ undergraduate communication design studio in CMU’s School of Design. Seventeen students spent a week preparing posters for the festival. We’re proud to present the results, below: