Peter Burr's DVD-era animation network turned 20 at Roulette

In 2006, when YouTube was a baby and Netflix still mailed discs, Peter Burr pressed the first Cartune Xprez DVD and started driving experimental animation into basements and cinemas across twenty countries. More than two hundred events later, Burr's framing in the 20th-birthday announcement was sadly blunt: "the algorithm has swallowed most of the room."

The anniversary night, June 11 at Roulette in Brooklyn, was titled USEFUL FANTASY, and it gathered the label's generational core—Takeshi Murata's Monster Movie, Amy Lockhart's Walk for Walk, films by Martha Colburn, Jacob Ciocci (my old roommate!), James Duesing, and Jim Trainor—alongside performances built from game logic. MSHR played Network Entity through a handmade sculptural interface in which every sonic decision reshapes an image and every image bends the sound. Matt Romein's Milkman Zero put the performer inside a videogame to see what the game does with a body; the program's question ("who is actually in control?") rings loud and clear.

Burr closed the loop with MAINTENANCE VESSELS, described as "a slot machine at the mouth of a dungeon": visitors spin up hybrid avatars that wander a decaying underworld performing quiet, endless repair on architecture that may not want to be saved. Games have been Burr's material for years—the dungeon-crawler installations Cave Exits and Dirtscraper—and the credentials recently caught up: a PhD in game design and an assistant professorship at the University of Texas at Austin.

The whole night is archived from Roulette's livestream. What hopefully hangs around is the event's remains: a touring DVD label was a distribution system for unruly moving images, and the room that Burr is betting on as a successor. We've been on this lineage ourselves lately, most recently via a 1991 animation that framed early CGI in religious imagery; Cartune Xprez is the infrastructure that kept that tradition moving between institutions.