Gov. Scott Walker gets checked, Mic Checked! (2011, 81MB, 3:45 min)

If you don’t feel inspired & cheered up by this tremendous video please do the checking
your pulse thing…
Stand Up Chicago

Fi (2011, 51MB, 9:57 min)

Joan Brossa, the Catalan poet, artist, performer and polymath,
who died in 1998, deserves to be more widely
known in the rest of the world.
I’ve often thought his work, in particular the visual
poems, prefigured much of the art of the early days
of the net (but mostly better: terser, wittier, riskier -
I think Brossa would have loved the net).
This elegant & delightful performance ( ‘Fi’ is Catalan
for ‘End’, in this context The End) was recorded
in Barcelona eight months before his death.

It requires a little patience; the reward being that
it can be viewed many more than one time, so it
seems like an appropriate thing to leave you with
over the summer.
Remember we’re always delighted to look at new work,
so if you’re making moving image yourself,
or you happen across great stuff don’t hesitate
to send us links.

We’re back on Monday, September the 26th – in
the meantime we wish you all a happy and relaxing summer.

A Walk with Jane Austen (1999, 144MB, 12:20 min)

‘the work is about exploring the veracity of history and of time,
and its constructs (in this case especially the notion of
“bodice-ripping” romance genres).
Playing with text and in-authenticity, the intention was to engage
an audience with notions of historical construction of women;
their facts and fictions, and the possibility of re-visioning histories.
– Delpha Hudson

Engaging hybrid of site specific performance and movie making,
the somewhat improvisatory quality lending it all a pleasantly
languid & unhurried air.
At the very end the sun joins in to striking effect & I love the rogue
arm at our right as the spectators leave.
Hudson is a charismatic & commanding performer -
we’ll have another of her performance pieces here in the Autumn.

Food Terror (2008, 73MB, 4:36 min)

More from Manchester’s Doodlebug.
This one is particularly splendid and
meal times will never be the same again.
Here’s the text Michael Barnes-Wynters sent me but
I don’t really know what it means:

Doodlebug Presents…25/10/08 at Contact feat.
Ronald fraser-munro’s RFM-UNPLUCKED. manc. poet
amanda milligan’s ‘mz.milly does…’ debut outting
with ‘On Becoming a Human Being’ (AV mix).
a sneak preview of Urbis’s Black Panther artist
Emory Douglas expo. French guerilla photgrapher
JR’s ‘Women are Heroes’ plus Terrorist’s FOOD TERROR mix.

I think we’re watching that last item.
Anyway, it’s great.
More soon.

Serra Frottage (2009, 13 MB, 3:17 min)

Whenever I’m travelling through, or near to London’s Liverpool Street station
I try and make time to pass by the wonderful Richard Serra sculpture,
Fulcrum, at the Broadgate end.
I really love it, one of the most successful pieces of public art I’ve
ever seen.
I mentioned this to a friend and he sent me a link to this piece,
one of a series of ‘minimal interventions’ by Jordan McKenzie
who clearly also um – -loves- – Serra’s work.

Control #1 [Seeking Kind in Human] (2009, 114MB, 4:52 min)

Michael got in touch via a mutual friend to tell me about what
seems to be an incredibly thriving live art scene in Manchester, UK.
To my shame, this is the first time I’ve come across it, so I’m going to
make up for this a little by posting three vids from Doodlebug, the
creative arts platform he founded.
This first is a performance by Michael himself with Sophie Yesilyurt.
It’s very powerful. What strikes me is how these performative things achieve
a huge effect, often with very simple means. I think those of us working
primarily in moving image have a good deal to learn from them.
More soon.

At Winter Equinox We Burn the Sun (2010, 37MB, 3:48 min)

And by way of wishing a Happy New Year to all, here’s a tremendous piece from my friends
Marc Garrett & Ruth Catlow, the movers behind the indispensable Furtherfield.org & the Netbehaviour list.
Here they ritually burn a copy of the evil Murdoch’s UK organ The Sun & accompany this
with music both apposite and well executed.
I think this is shot very well. I don’t mean in a boring technical sense – who gives a? -
but that it is utterly alive, especially those beautiful final, almost vertical, shots.
There’s a delicious play here too on folkishness which treads a fine line in avoiding
being itself folksy.
Further – here’s a practical demonstration of how political art doesn’t have to
be dour or ploddingly earnest and indeed can summon a visceral beauty.
There’s a dialogue (or, perhaps better, an argument) between this celebration of the beauty
of the world, betokened in this scene and what passes therein, and the real ugliness and
anti-humanity of the paper and its contents.
Great Great Great.

#1 (2007, 1MB, 56 secs)

#1 (2007, 1MB, 57 secs)

In 2007 I ran a little competition on my site centred aound
a musical setting I had made of a tiny poem by my friends and
collaborators Robert Roth & Carletta Joy Walker for
their magazine “And Then”.

I invited remixes, either musical or visual, of the song and
these two pieces, both utterly barking & delicately poetic at one
and the same time, came winging their way from the Smith Family
in Germany.
Wonderful!

Trailer for ADN/ARN (2003, 8 MB, 4:04 min.)

“ADN/ARN was an interactive installation addressed to one person at the time,
filmed with 8 surveillance cameras, in which each visitor was invited to confide
and then contractually sell a personal secret. The initial system took place in
Lausanne at the Centre d’Arts sc

Relation in Space (1976, 2 MB, 26 sec.)

Expansion in Space (1977, 5 MB, 1:18 min.)

In “Relation in Space” (1976) Marina Abramovic & Ulay ran around the room – two
bodies repeatedly move past each other. They collide at great speed like two planets,
mixing male and female energy into a third component called