Donna Kuhn – I don’t fix a word

I don
I don’t fix a word (2006, 4.5 MB, 2:16 min)

Mini Me
Mini-Me (2005, 12.1MB, 2:25 min)

These two videos by Donna Kuhn were made in circumstances of terrible
personal loss: the death of her son & then later that of a close friend.
Astonishing then, their delicacy & richness & the sheer dexterity of
handling & making, particularly in I don’t fix a word which
is a jewel, a small masterpiece.

Tevye – glimpse of a lost world

Tevye
Tevye – clip (1939, 32.1MB, 1:27 min)

Prior to WW2 there were between 10 & 13 million speakers
of Yiddish. Today there are probably less than 2 million.
Here is an image of a lost world, the flowering of Yiddish culture
in the years of the twentieth century before the Holocaust.
This is a clip from the 1939 film Tevye by Maurice Schwartz based on
the work of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem
The film has recently been restored and is available for .

Jamie Allen – Killing Lena


Killing Lena

Killing Lena (2007, 37.42MB, 2:13 min.)

Jamie Allen sent us a link to this Processing-utilizing piece
of work by him after having seen the post we did on Processing recently.
He explains it very clearly & cogently on his site so I’m just going to lift his text:

The “first lady of the internet,” was Playboy’s Miss November 1972.
Her turn-offs include “Men who wear shorts with white socks and black shoes.”
Lena’s issue was the most widely circulated issue of Playboy ever, selling 7,161,561 copies.

A single scanned image of Lena’s Playboy appearance subsequently took up favor
amongst digital imaging researchers. It has been used as a comparative standard
in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of image compression tests, publications and shoot-outs.

“Killing Lena” is a rendered video series in which Lena’s most famous photo is repeatedly
exposed to the compression algorithms she unwittingly helped to develop.
The videos presented are compression pornography, the suggestion of a
“compressivist art”, and a poetic digital demise.

Not much to add, dear viewer, except to observe the close kinship with
Alvin Lucier’s tremendous sound piece “I am Sitting in A Room”

3 with Heart from Brittany Shoot


Heart::Casing

Heart::Casing (2007, 3.29MB, 26 secs)


Heart::Arteries

Heart::Arteries (2007, 11.9MB, 1:33 min.)


Heart::Break

Heart::Break (2007, 5.35MB, 35 secs)

So first to the Elephant In The Room. There’s just no tiptoeing
round the fact that Brittany Shoot is just a top name
for a videoblogger. OK – we’re all feeling better now. To the work.
Take a look: kind of understated, yet smart;
concise, neat, but poetry to it too.
Sometimes the very-short-video form leaves you
feeling slightly underwhelmed, cheated almost.
This is the opposite, a slowburn in the mind.
More before long.

La Langue/The Tongue


La Langue/The Tongue

La Langue (2007, 20.2MB, 2:06 min.)

Warning: this piece is genuinely somewhat disturbing…

Beautifully made & also deeply chilling work from French vlogger
jolipunk
. Astonishing.

LA LANGUE est une tentative video sur notre rapport à la liberté d’expression.
Une succession de lents dézooms nous aspire dans une fatalité qui nous échappe
inexorablement.
Un songe qui nous confronte à notre rapport au language où la vision sanglante
de la perte de l’outil de communication est volontairement hypnotique et ésthétisée.
Le spectateur : il detourne le regard ou il contemple avec perversité et impuissance….


THE TONGUE is an attempt at a video about our relation to freedom of expression.
A succession of slow zooms-out draws us in to a destiny which eludes us inexorably.
A dream which confronts us with our connection to language and where the bloody
vision of the loss of our instrument of communication is deliberately hypnotic and aestheticised.
As for the spectator, either they avert their gaze or they stare, impotently and perversely…

Music : M83, Moon Child