Millie Niss – Skyway
Skyway (2009, 39 MB, 1:53 min)
A couple of months before her untimely death last year Millie Niss
sent me this video -
‘I have been working for a long time on and off (mostly off) these
days on a video showing industrial ruins on the outskirts of Buffalo,
shot from an elevated highway which is scheduled to be torn down…’
I remember thinking how beautiful and evocative it was and I assumed
Millie would publish it on the Sporkworld Blog in due course.
Sadly this never happened.
The other day I came across it & asked Millie’s mother and collaborator,
Martha Deed, for permission to post it here, which she gave,
so it’s a pleasure tinged with sadness to do so.
We’re going to take a summer break now.
We’ll be back on September 20th but in the meantime we’ll leave you
with this memorial to a fine artist & a fine human being.
Martha Deed – The Lost Shoe
The Lost Shoe (2010, 16MB, 4:35 min)
Martha Deed, one of our favourite people, & co-founder with
the much missed Millie Niss of the fantastic Sporkworld Microblog,
which we’ve raved about before & which we can’t recommend too
highly, has a paper publication coming out, a book of poems, for which
she created this chilling and beautifully made video “trailer”.
Watch the trailer then buy the book here
A Sad Loss
We’re deeply sad to have to report the untimely death on Sunday of
Millie Niss, at the age of 36.
Anyone fortunate enough to have met her, either online or in person,
will have been struck by the combination of razor sharp intelligence,
a glorious sense of humour and personal kindness with a sense of utter
puzzlement at pomposity, bullshitting or self-agrandisement.
She just didn’t get the latter three.
In recent years, working in close collaboration with her mother, Martha Deed
she brought us the wonderful Sporkworld Microblog,
something that always felt to me that rarity, the invention
of a new form (or at least an unprecedentedly deep and
thorough realisation of the possibilities of a new medium,
effectively the same thing.)
It’s uncool to the deepest degree, being about domesticity,
illness, food, birds and animals glimpsed from a car or house window,
the life of a small blue-collar town -its problems and its festivals- and so much more,
but then cool -being a facade- was a concept lost on Millie and that’s why I
treasure all the more this beautiful work and I mourn her loss
as an artist, as a friend and as a marvellous human being.
We send our deepest condolences to Millie’s family but in particular to Martha.
As a small tribute we post once again their short collaborative film about Millie’s
attempt to deal with the absentee ballot form in last year’s presidential election.
Millie Niss – Commercial Spots
Commercial Spots (2006, 8.4MB)
Archive sutff from the Sporkworld stable, this time from Millie Niss & it has
all the hallmarks that make Sporkworld work such an unalloyed pleasure.
Manifestly bullshit free, apparently straightforward but with onion like layers,
this one wonderfully highlights Niss’s writerly skills by foregrounding her
text (which foregrounding helped along by the mother of all sore throats) .
& it would be so easy just to have made the images just a kind of
accompaniment to the text but they are more, a little visual poem in
themselves, plus the percussion is just right; ( bizarrely perhaps ) putting
me at least in mind of the Last Poets.
Great!
Urban Eden by Millie Niss
Urban Eden (2006, 5MB, 1:50 min.)
“This movie takes place in the “Urban Eden” of the IBM Building’s Public
Atrium & Sculpture Gallery. The soundtrack consists of quotes involving the
words, “apple” and “Eden.” Ironic, isn’t it, that the IBM Building is decorated
with sculpted Apples as if they were promoting a rival company’s products….”
by Millie Niss from sporkworld.
Voting
I know we featured the folks at Sporkworld only recently
but they just posted this and it’s wonderful
- & somewhat topical…
Watch it all – it’s deadly serious but Millie Niss
makes her points with the kind of comic timing
many would kill for.
Recombinant Rain from Millie Niss
Recombinant Rain (2008, 7MB, 32 secs)
Source Video #1 (2008, 1.3MB, 10 secs silent)
Source Video #2 (2008, 2.2MB, 12 secs silent)
Source Video #3 (2008, 1.2MB, 14 secs silent)
Source Video #4 (2008, 2MB, 13 secs silent)
Millie Niss is one half of the daughter & mother team behind
the original & indispensable Sporkworld Microblog.
(And if you look at it for ten minutes & you don’t agree
it’s that, please check you have a pulse).
I’m not sure Millie felt that this piece was entirely successful.
(See her comments on the blog, linked above)
I’m posting it because even a borderline success from Millie
is something one can learn from. She has a formidable intellect
combined with a total & fierce independence & a complete
lack of bullshit.( Indeed I’m convinced that she wouldn’t
know how to bullshit, even if she wanted to.)
The last four pieces are tiny little studies of the rain
(delicate & lovely in their own right),
& the first is constructed from frames lifted from these
& worked over in various ways.
This piece (or actually the set of pieces, sources & first pass
at an end product alike) does it for me in a way that a lot of work doesn’t.
Simply, there’s a profound humanity to it.
Sure, it’s about the rain but it’s also about what it is
to be a human being in the world.
Sporkworld Lumières
Lawnmowing (2008, 3.9MB, 35 secs)
Mowing in February
Our Special Mowing in February Lawnmowers
are not the of the ordinary electric rotor,
gas-powered self-propelling,
or even hand pushed whirligig
human powered variety.
Our Mowing in February models
come with specially-equipped
permanently mounted plows
suitable for use by the most dedicated
lawnmowing enthusiasts
from September through May
in those clim’es so specially endowed
to understand the meaning
of a “Three Season Plow”
—Martha Deed
Scraping (2008, 1.9MB, 58 secs)
Millie Niss & Martha Deed’s Sporkworld project is sui generis – entirely unbeholden to
fashion or cool & standing in a long & broad American tradition of such stubborn
(& sometimes even eccentric) beauty.
Their latest wheeze & a vastly effective one it is too, is the Sporkworld Microblog
which integrates many formerly slightly disparate areas of their activity – poetry, still
& moving imagery, filthy humour, a sense of life’s transience & tragedy & utter strangeness,
into one coherent, constantly unrolling whole.
Formally too, they are smarter than smart, as anyone with eyes will surely see -
they’ve taken the splendid Lumière form & integrated it beautifully.
It fits them like a glove.
Lawnmower in particular seems to have been crafted by a 21st century
suburban Breughel.
Moon & People Watching
Millie Watching Martha Watching Moon (2007, 18.7MB, 26 sec)
Millie in SUV Watching Martha and David Watching Moon (2007, 1.67MB, 10 sec)
Does exactly what it says on the package & poetry too.
See more from Millie & Martha.