Ruth Catlow -Time is speeding up


Time is speeding up (2016, 11MB, 1:00 min)

This is a beautiful piece, a distillation down to a minute of a three month installation by Ruth Catlow, artist and co-director of the marvellous Furtherfield.
She explains its premise and construction better than I can, so I’ll hand over to her:

This networked video performance and installation is about how life seems to speed up as we get older; based on the reflection that when I was one day old, a day was my whole life but on the second day one day was only half my life etc.
The work was commissioned for ‘We Are Not Alone’, an exhibition for 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe, UK.


During exhibition opening hours between 23rd January -24th April 2016, viewers could watch a live looping video online. At the exhibition people could pose for the web cam, or might be caught looking at the video in which they were soon to be portrayed.
Using a computer programme called Geological Time Piece that I created with Gareth Foote a still webcam image was captured every 3-5 minutes during exhibition opening hours. The camera pointed at a wall in the gallery, upon which a changing text was displayed. The software added each image as a frame to a looping video, of fixed 3 minute duration. The frame density increased every 3 minutes, as each images was added to the video.
In the exhibition space full of movement – of light and shade and people coming and going – people could insert themselves into the video by standing between the webcam and the text. Over three months the human presences started to flicker and disappear and the moving image progressively conveyed a more geological sense of time, the arc of daylight moving through the space, the architecture, and other more static things came to dominate the image. The computer programme stopped running when the exhibition closed by which time the video contained over 3600 images. The final video runs for a minute at 60fps.

‘running to catch a train’ – a performance by Paula Musgrove


running to catch a train (2016, 103MB, 9:07 min)

I’m gently waking DVblog up to post this extraordinary piece of work from Paula Musgrove, with videography from Yasmin Cox (both year two Art & Design students at WSD where – transparency! – I currently teach.)
The performance took place at the private view of the end of year show and the video was then inserted as is,replacing the original performance soundtrack and joining the various physical outputs of the performance to form the substantive exhibition piece ( As you can see in the poster image.)
I think it is marvellous, subtle and profoundly moving work and I hope we will all hear a good deal more from Paula over the coming years.

Alan Sondheim – Last Wine


Last Wine (2013, 96MB, 2:50 min)

Anyone who has followed DVblog for any time at all will know how much we
admire & value the work of Alan Sondheim.
He commands a huge range of technique and tone in both his writing and moving
image work. At one point of his compass there is the fiercely cerebral; at
another a rich humour & at yet another a sense of fellow feeling with, a
striving to understand some of our most puzzling and yet everyday feelings
and states of mind.
Things we’ve all encountered in relationships with family, friends and strangers.
This is a particularly moving piece, the more so because of its uncertainty of tone
– its enactment of the sad awkwardnesses of human interaction.

Edward Picot – Job’s Comforters


Job’s Comforters (2013, 3MB, 7:00 min)

Those who associate Edward Picot solely with his marvellous Dr Hairy series,
wickedly funny and pointed satire in the kind of lo-fi/hand made tradition
that comes down from Postgate and Firmin might be quite taken
aback by this. You have to watch the whole thing. Until shortly before the
end you seem to be simply watching a poetic & minimal retelling of a bible
story, then the whole thing suddenly lurches several gears into the kind of
territory that one associates more with Tarr and Kasznahorkai at their most
bleak and disturbing (and somehow their most bracing and exhilarating too).
It’s a punch to the solar plexus of a piece and simply magnificent.
I don’t know where its bleakness comes from or takes us but what it does
en route burns into you.

Steven Ball – Boundary Cyclone Transaction


Boundary Cyclone Transaction (2013, 233 MB, 6:46 min)

There’s an odd mixture, in varying quantities, of bone dry wit and
a strain of almost ecstatic lyricism in the work of Steven Ball.
This is combined with an interest in formal governing devices
(how much they actually govern and how much it is part of the
expressive character of the works that they should appear
to so do I don’t know)
Steven, I’m delighted to say, made this piece especially to
be unveiled here on DVblog and it was something worth waiting for.
I append some of his notes to the piece.

****************************************************************

“Lists remind us that no matter how fluidly a system may operate,
its members nevertheless remain utterly isolated, mutual aliens.
Ontographical cataloging hones a virtue: the abandonment of
anthropocentric narrative coherence in favor of worldly detail.”

“…ontography is a practice of increasing the number and density
[of things], one that sometimes opposes the minimalism of contemporary
art. Instead of removing elements to achieve the elegance of simplicity,
ontography adds (or simply leaves) elements to accomplish the realism
of multitude. It is a practice of exploding the innards of things.”
– Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomonology

Imagine this as a premiss:

the world as it appears is only as it appears to you
and perhaps
the world
actually
appears in arbitrary order

Boundary Cyclone Transaction takes Ian Bogost’s characterisation
of the ontographic list and uses it as a process by which to
auto-construct a picture of a non-human, which is perhaps to
say alien, world, or at least one such as can be constructured
using material found on or through the internet. As such it
also presents a fragment of what might be considered as th
e consciousness of the internet as manifested in image, sound and text.

The video consists of collections of image sequences, written words,
spoken words and sounds. The order in which each of those elements
presents themselves to the viewer has been determined randomly,
therefore any juxtaposition of the elements is entirely arbitrary.
The words used are nouns, i.e. they are things, objects, they
were selected using a random word generator. The sounds consist
mostly of recording of environmental phenomena, such as weather
or recordings of cosmic energies, generally speaking non-human
sounds. The image sequences are all found online and consist of
landscapes, insects, animals, images of microscopic organisms
and viruses, astronomical image, in other words also largely
non-human. Both sounds and images were found through using
keyword searches. It was important in the making of the work
for the elements to be as removed from what I might customarily
intentionally select, for them to be as far away from the
familiarity of the (my) everyday, as possible.

Alienation is a state arising from objects in the world, as they
present themselves inevitably arbitrarily and without a coherent
narrative. In this video the use of random processes aims to
make coherence impossible, or as difficult as possible, while
still, due to the linear and temporal nature of its reception,
will still self-organise into a kind of self-coherent ecosystem.
The longer term aim is for this video to be realised in performance,
to perform itself, using software to randomly order the playback
sequence of the discrete elements and media objects (images,
words, sounds) for every iteration.

Anastasya Koshkin – Reliving and All Falling

Reliving and All Falling (2012, 206 MB, 4:42 min)

Lyric moving image poetry that keeps on giving, in proportion to time
spent with. I particularly admire the carefully structured and evocative
soundtrack – there’s a moment towards the end where a deep rumble starts
to suggest the rhythm of the waves we have been watching but never quite
completely coheres and this specific ambiguity typifies the richness of
the use of sound in general.
Visually, the angled image makes us more carefully examine and really see,
drink in, the casual beauties – in delicious high contrast B&W – placed before us.
Lovely.

Anastasya Koshkin on Vimeo

Osvaldo Cibils – 2 Humans, 1 Paper


2 Humans, 1 Paper (2013, 10MB, 3:38 min)

I first stumbled across Osvaldo Cibils and his marvellously eclectic and well..simply marvellous work
on Flickr but he seems to have all sorts of things going.
So simple but so, so telling. Kind of Buster Keaton meets Bruce Nauman meets something hard to pin down but lyrical, grotesque and smart all at once.
My kind of artist.
+++
2 humans 1 paper
video art/soundart.
performance with plotter paper 200 x 107 centimeters.
performers: fiorella alberti architect and osvaldo cibils artist.
place: artist’s studio. Via della Cervara, 55 – 38121 – Trento (TN) Italia
22 march 2013, 20 hours

Lucy Mills – Simply British


Simply British (2013, 77MB, 4:03 min)

Hi Lucy,
I think it’s really good. Who did the Hard Day’s Night remix?
I really like the way it is clearly a powerful comment on lots of things to do with the contrast between Britishness & flag waving and national hubris &c. and the actual situation for many people, but it’s never simply a piece of agit-prop.
At first I thought its slowness in unfolding might be a problem but I like the way it makes us take the time to think, with the various repeated images (like the bus with the slogan on it) but also with different material developing against the background you establish, especially the ever present and heartbreaking Big Issue guy – it turns out to be slow burning as opposed to slow. I also like the 90 degree rotation of some of the stuff and the way that then fits rather nicely into empty-ish spaces in the other “channel”. Great work – congratulations!
michael