Author Archives: michael

Sam Renseiw – Fragmented Occurences

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Fragmented Occurences
Fragmented Occurences (2010, 67MB, 4:33 min.)

It’s a little while since we featured anything from the splendid Sam
Renseiw, so here’s a recent piece.
In contrast to many of his films, which have an incredibly strong
sense of a particular place, this was apparently composed
from odds and ends of footage from various locations during the last
few months.
I think it works beautifully; it’s instructive to see Sam intervening,
perhaps a little more than usual, at the editing level.
(His camera work is always very distinctive – there’s often a sense
-true or not- that many pieces are largely composed in the shooting.)

Whatever the case, this is, as always, a wonderful and utterly distinctive voice.

PS This is our 1000th post of the new series. Many thanks to all who have sent words of encouragement & appreciation. It makes the time spent working on DVblog feel doubly worthwhile.

Annie Abrahams & Curt Cloninger -<em> Double Blind</em>

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double blind
Double Blind (clip) ( 2010, 70MB, 5:38 min)

“Annie Abrahams (from the Living Room in Montpellier, France)
and Curt Cloninger (from Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center
in Asheville, North Carolina, US) repeatedly sang “love, love, love”
(a short excerpt from a pop song) as a kind of duet, in real
time/space and online.

In order to isolate them from their surroundings and make them
more attentive to the other, they were both blindfolded.
While singing they evolved and mutated the original song excerpt,
collaborating and communicating in a space/time of alterity.
The artists have never met each other in the flesh.

There was no set duration.
They sang until the last one of them decided to stop.
In both places a space was reserved for the live performance
and another for the video and audio projection.
A camera was fixed on each of their faces singing to each other.
This live video of both faces was projected both in the
Living Room space and in the Black Mountain College
Museum and Arts Center space.
The performance was also visible on the web at http://selfworld.net.”


Interesting and affecting convergence of the performative work
Curt Cloninger has been doing of late with the
strange, wonderful & categorisation denying oeuvre of Annie Abrahams.

We feature here only a tiny extract from the 4 hour plus performance
of Double Blind – the complete documentation will be on show
as part of Annie Abraham’s first UK solo show at HTTP gallery
in North London, in addition to new works and performances.
The opening is on Friday night & all are welcome – if you’re in
or near London it’ll be well worth getting along to.

Complete Double Blind documentation & links

Two from Kate Dickinson

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19th
19th ( 2010, 1MB, 1:00 min, silent)

are you ready
Are You Ready? ( 2008, 20MB, 52 secs)

Two contrasting short movies from Leeds, UK, artist Kate Dickinson.
The second should provoke a smile (did for me) but it’s
the first, in which not a great deal happens & in a deliberately
confined area of the screen to boot, that I particularly liked.
There’s a melancholy about its view of an overcast
Leeds landscape which is amplified by cropping a good deal of it out.
The resulting minimalism marshalls the viewer’s attention in a quite hypnotic way.

Vito Acconci #2

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Borders
Advice (clip, 2006, 2MB, 58 secs)

Borders
Acconci Studio Presentation (2006, 36MB, 29:02 min)

More from the splendid Vito Acconci, this time from
his later architecture and design period.
One vid is a little lollipop -advice to the young-
extracted from a longer interview and profile on
designboom.com.
The second is a much more substantial
and utterly fascinating presentation given at the launch of
LAB magazine in 2006.
What an astonishing human being!

Nathaniel Stern & Jessica Meuninck-Ganger – Passing Between/Distill Life

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The Works
The Works (2010, 15MB, 4:27 min)

Documentary
Interview/Documentary (2010, 23MB, 6:38 min)

We showed some earlier footage of the work featured here last May
and waxed lyrical about it.

Now Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger have a show at Gallery A.O.P
 in Johannesburg, South Africa, opening tomorrow, and we’re delighted
to feature two videos, one of the works themselves and one of a documentary
about their making and the impulse behind them, including interviews with
Nathaniel and Jessica.
These videos are also on a DVD* which comes with the show catalogue.

Usually I fight shy of reproducing artists’ own publicity but I’m going to
break from the rule here because what they themselves say sums the pieces
up rather nicely.

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern approach both old and
new media as form.
In their “Distill Life” works, the artists permanently mount translucent
prints and drawings directly on top of video screens, creating moving
images on paper. They incorporate technologies and aesthetics from
traditional printmaking – including woodblock, silk screen, etching,
lithography, photogravure etc – with the technologies and aesthetics
of contemporary digital, video and networked art, to explore images
as multidimensional.
Meuninck-Ganger and Stern hack and tweak, shoot and print,
appropriate and remix, edit and draw. Their juxtaposition of anachronistic
and disparate methods, materials and content -print and video, paper
and electronics, real and virtual – enables novel approaches to
understanding each. The artists engage with subject matter ranging
from historical portraiture to current events, from hyperreal landscapes
to socially awkward moments.
The works are surprising, wistful, enchanting, and seriously playful.

“The works are surprising, wistful, enchanting, and seriously playful.”
– absolutely!

I don’t know whether we have any readers in Johannesburg – if yes I strongly
urge you to go along to what promises to be a real treat.

* and in the interests of transparency I should say that I wrote the accompanying
music for the video documentation…

Picot et al – Dr Hairy & the London Hospital

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London Hospital
London Hospital ( 2010, 49MB, 9:59)

Writer & artist Edward Picot doubles as an administrator
in the UK health service & lets his hair down with this
deeply odd but amusing bit of lo-fi puppetry made in
collaboration with Julian Le Saux & Dr David Hindmarsh.

Just in case there are any knuckleheads out there
(and of course this is unlikely as you have the good taste
to read DVblog) who imagine this is an attack of any sort on
socialised medicine, the authors have kindly provided the
following statement:

“The creators of this piece would like to point out that they all work in
the National Health Service and are completely devoted to it.”

Vito Acconci #1

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Borders
Claim Excerpts (clip, 1971, 1MB, 29 secs)

Borders
Face Off (clip, 1972, 1MB, 28 secs)

Borders
Open Book (clip, 1974, 1MB, 31 secs)

Borders
Two Track (clip, 1971, 1MB, 31 secs)

Four tiny (in every respect) but nonetheless great clips
from the fearless, troubling & wonderful Vito Acconci in his writer &
video artist phase.
The clips are from the Video Data Bank site where you’ll
be pleased to know you can with seminal
(perhaps not the best choice of word) pieces by
Acconci and others for a mere $3600…
Or you could go and check out more of his work on UBUWEB..
Some stuff about the later Acconci coming shortly.

Liz Sterry – Borders

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Borders
Borders (2010, 201 MB, 3:59 min, silent)

Worth every second of the download for this extraordinary
piece from young UK artist Liz Sterry, a digital arts student at the design school
in Writtle, Essex, UK*.
It’s an astonishingly assured bit of conceptual gorgeousness.
I’m particularly taken with..what’s the word.. the ..um..rightness of judgement
with which it was shot and assembled – on the surface thrown together
but everything combining so easily & elegantly to create something of
logic, power and great beauty.

*Transparency – where I currently teach.