‘Irark’ (2003, 5.7 MB, 5 min.)
‘ME’ (2001, 18.5 MB, 2:45 min.)
Simply great stuff from Austrian Monochrom.
Author Archives: michael
Lee Sarter
Memory Loss (2008, 61.4MB, 2:13 min)
No Exit (2008, 38.2MB, 2:19 min)
Two pieces from Lee Sarter.
Memory Loss is an unequivocal success in my view,
evocative, very nicely constructed & haunting.
(Even manages to temporarily subdue my deeply felt &
longstanding antipathy to ambient sounding piano
soundtracks)
I don’t think No Exit works quite so well but it’s clear
in both that there’s a thinking & creative filmic intelligence at work here.
I look forward to more.
Sam Renseiw
Moves and Shadows (2008, 17.5MB, 3:17 min)
3:17 min of visual enchantment from the genius Dane
in this utterly ravishing dance vid.
LeedsVlog #1
Woodhouse Sunset (Alison Booth , 2007, 32.9MB, 1:17 min)
21 Today (Patrick Devlin, 2007, 20.2MB, 53 secs)
Soundcheck (Chris Harman, 2007, 45.3MB, 3:24 min)
At the end of last year I taught a course, which I rather pompously entitled
‘Videoblogging for Artists’, at Leeds College of Art.
The students made 5 videos each over a ten day period & some of what they
made stands up with the best.
The whole 100 or so to date are up here but I’m going to post two or three batches
of my favourites on dvblog over the next couple of weeks.
pixelbirds – cube pusher
Cube Pusher (2007, 31MB, 2:49 min)
Deft & very attractive interweaving of video & live performance from pixelbirds.
They make it look effortless; of course it’s anything but.
There’s an interesting form emerging here, with this physical intervention/relation
of live performers to a projection.
This notion has some way to unfold yet, I think, but
this is an excellent staging post.
Ride with Theo
Ride with Theo (2005, 27.7MB, 6 min.)
Directed in 2005 by Owen Plotkin of the now corporation
(Owen is also behind the excellent gaaagled.com)
this is a piece of viral advertising for an annual bike ride to raise
money for leukaemia research at Hammersmith hospital, London.
It features the splendid Theodore Bouloukos, whom regular dvblog
viewers will have seen & admired in Doron Golan�s recent piece.
Doron Golan – Forgot
Forgot (2008, 98.3MB, 12:06 min, silent theatrical act)
This is simply wonderful.
Doron’s work is strange – it doesn’t lend itself to blow by blow verbal description:
er..‘Some actors perform in a silent movie based on Waiting for Godot‘
Then you actually look at it (or if you haven’t you should, you really should).
The grammar of his editing is completely unique & mysterious (a feature of all his longer pieces).
‘Why did he do that?’ – ‘Dunno – but it made my spine tingle’
Work like this often slips under the radar because it has no easy marketing line,
it can’t be glibly summed up, reduced to an easily digestible one-liner.
Work like this is food you have to chew a little…but what flavour & what nourishment!
Also, the acting ( and the director/actor collaboration) is outstanding.
Smart, funny, puzzling, touching by turns…and generous also…
With Theodore Bouloukos, Joanne Douglas, Brian Gibson and Stephanie Noritz
Lossy Video
Hollywood News (2006, 2.7MB, 1:06 min. )
Saddam on Trial (2006, 1.9MB, 52 sec)
Two pieces from the Montreal based video collective Lossy Video.
The idea being to take news footage & ..er..look at it closely.
The results are undeniably capable, attractive & interesting.
Reminds me, conceptually, of Mark Tribe
The French Democracy
The French Democracy (2005, 39.7MB, 13:09 min)
Quite remarkable piece of Machinima from France, dealing with
the riots there by oppressed North African and Arab youth.
The subtitling and translation ( ‘I had some training to do’ says koulamata,
the author, rather disarmingly) are hit and miss, to say the least -but it would
be wrong to view this as an ‘all your base are belong to us’ curiosity.
The very strangeness of the English translation, the sheer virtuosity of shaping
the fairly recalcitrant source material into a coherent 13 minute plus narrative
means that its honesty and sincerity shine through at every moment.
There is an interesting discussion of the piece on the Machinima.com site.
Aaron Koblin –The Sheep Market
The Sheep Market (2008, 5.4MB, 32 secs)
Aaron Koblin, whose work we’ve featured here before does
rather wonderful things using the Processing language.
Well..of course that’s true..but if he wasn’t endowed with wit & smarts
& a sense of beauty then the tools he used would interest us not at all.
Here’s what he says about this piece (or rather the project for
which this vid is a short installation view):
TheSheepMarket.com is a collection of the first 10,000 sheep
made by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Workers were paid 0.02 ($USD) to “draw a sheep facing to the left.”
Animations of each sheep’s creation may be viewed at
TheSheepMarket.com.