Author Archives: michael

The Human Browser – Christopher Bruno

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The Human Browser
The Human Browser (2006, 29.7MB, 8:18 min)

Documentation recorded at last year’s transmediale in Berlin
of a quite marvellous project by Christopher Bruno which
just won the share festival & most deservedly too.
It’s a fantastic blend of technology, performance & a kind of ‘information poetry’.
In many hands it could have been smart but dullish, but this is joyous stuff.
There’s a whole load of videos up on the human browser site
& they all have their particular delights.

Bruno’s short project description goes:

Human Browser is a series of wireless Internet performances
based on a Wi-Fi Google hack.
Thanks to its headset, the actor hears a text-to-speech
audio that comes directly from the Internet in real-time.
The actor repeats the text as he hears it.
The textual flow is actually fetched by a program
(set up on a Wi-Fi laptop) that hijacks Google,
diverting it from its utilitarian functions.
Depending on the context in which the actor is,
keywords are sent to the program and used as
search strings in Google (thanks to a Wi-Fi PDA)
so that the content of the textual flow is always
related to the context.

The performer in this video is Manon Kahle.
A good deal of the charm of this project
is due to the “performances” of the actors which are
highly professional but also very human too.
.
Great stuff!

Transitos – Gonzalo Vidal Soler

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Transitos 2.1
Transitos 2.1 (2003-6, 21.7MB, 4:37 min)

Transitos 1.1
Transitos 1.1 (2003-6, 23.2MB, 6:32 min)

Transitos, (familiarmente Slows), es un trabajo que une la fotografia
y el video , la fotografia por que son planos fijos y tratamiento de
encuadre y luz puramente fotografico, el video aporta el movimiento,
la duracion y el sonido que rodea estos parajes, podriamos hablar
de fotografias sonoras con movimiento. Transitos son lugares por
los que el ser humano pasa o se deja llevar de forma automatica
y que por ese automatismo, deja de apreciar, aunque siempre deja
su huella sea esta sonora o fisica. Los slows estan divididos en
4 apartados: paisaje maritimo, paisaje urbano, retratos en tren,
y finalmente, paisaje rural.


Transitos (literally ‘Transits’, although I’ve got into the habit of
calling them “Slows”, for obvious reasons) is a work, or series of works,
that unites photography and video. Photography, in the insistence on a
fixed plane and the purely photographic treatment of frame and light;
video, in the introduction of the movement, duration and sound which
suffuse these locations. Perhaps: ‘Photography with sound and movement’ !
Transitos are places human beings pass through almost automatically and
therefore unconsciously, nevertheless always leaving their imprint, be it
sonic or material.
The pieces are divided into four groups: seaside, countryside, urban
landscape and train portraits.

Thoughtful, slow-burning, work of sometimes heart-melting beauty from
Spanish photographer Gonzalo Vidal Soler .

Exquisite Corpses

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Exquisite Corpses
Exquisite Corpses (2006, 1.74MB, 39 sec)

Lashings of Gallic style from the
Marmotte Corporation.
The music is “My My Metrocard” from Le Tigre.

8 halfmile – Fellini remixed

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8_halfmile
8 halfmile (2006, 6.9MB, 2:21 min.)

“Fellini’s classic film re-mixed Eminem-style…”
by – The AV Club, from Film Threat.

The Chapman brothers, interviewed.

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The Chapman brothers
‘At Home with the Colonel’ – pilot (2006, 54 MB, 14:53 min.)

Pilot for a proposed series of interviews by Mark Sanders
with contemporary artists, directed by Mark Logue,
who seems to have a serious track record.
The press release says the interviews wil be ‘playful & conversational’.
Can’t be bad – on the basis of this, hope v. much it gets commissioned.
Still undecided about the Chapmans, whether tossers or wunderkinder,
but this definitely attempts to shed some light thereon.
Good.

Anthony Rousseau – Float Like a Butterfly

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Float Like a Butterfly
Float Like a Butterfly (2005, 7.2MB, 1:15 min.)

Le jeune gar


‘The Camera Can Explain More than the Words’ – Alive in Baghdad

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Another Rocket in Baghdad
Another Rocket in Baghdad (10th October 2006, 19.4MB, 4:06 min)

Everyone's
Everyone’s a target (8th Jan 2007, 1:51 min, 7.3MB)

Quite extraordinary stuff from the Alive in Baghdad vlog.
Check out the complete video archive on the site, where
you can also donate to help sustain this important project.

Peppermint & Nadir – Wilderness Trouble

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Wilderness Trouble Version 1.0
Wilderness Trouble Version 1.0* (2007, 9.2MB, 3:31 min.)

When we posted their splendid Series of Practical Performances in the Wilderness
which will be returning here before long, we said lots of nice things about that.
No reason to change our minds now -this fizzes with both ideas & technique in much the same way (although the repetition lies in excellence sustained rather than any marking of time).
For me a litmus test of anything artistic is can it do the affective equivalent
of fart & chew gum, ie can it encompass radically different moods or themes
in a coherent way, that is, foreshadow in the particular, in tiny concrete detail,
something much broader & deeper.
Well, here, yes, sure.
A genuinely comic lightness of tone is yoked to some quite big themes,
but not awkwardly..in fact they make it look easy..don’t think it is though.
Neat.
from ecoarttech.

*This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License

Curt Cloninger: St Frank and the Wolf

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St Frank and the Wolf
St Frank and the Wolf (2007, 72MB, 6:21 min.)

Curt Cloninger is a clever, original & fearless commentator on new media art,
always worth reading for his eschewal (or at least extremely careful
chewing over) of received new media wisdom.
He also maintains the excellent lab404.com.
This is something a little different; a video record of a live performance piece.
Background from Curt:
‘The projected loops are pre-recorded, but they run in different synch
with each other and are modulated variably depending on the realtime
improvisational performance — so it’s a prescribed performance space
that is qualitatively different each performance. As the theremin
volume gets louder (as my realspace left hand gets higher), the
projected big hands get more opaque and their accompanying volume
gets louder. As the theremin volume gets lower (as my realspace left
hand gets lower), the smaller projected ghost hands get more opaque
and their accompanying volume gets louder.
…Legend has it that a wolf was attacking the town of Gubbio,
so St. Francis was called in to get it to stop. Francis brokered a
deal with the wolf where it agreed to stop attacking the people in
the town if they agreed to feed it and keep their dogs
from bothering it. In a similar spirit, this piece seeks to dialogue
with sound and light and come to some sort of consensus.
The piece is not trying to impose a “taming” order on the media,
nor is it letting the media run wild. It enters into a dialogue with
matter (sound and light in space) in order to modulate and be modulated
by it.’
Reasons to check this piece out despite its large file size:
(1) It has an oddness quotient of over 93%.
(2) The music is neat, bit like the rougher edged output of the
early minimalists plus, also, the generative/aleatoric
thing in music is a hard one to pull off & it’s well done here.
(3) Smart.
(4) It follows no fashion.
(5) It rejects irony – there is real human feeling here, sometimes verging on the ecstatic.

‘I feel like a frigging performing monkey’

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Breakfast
Breakfast (2006, 8.6MB, 3:46 min.)

There’s a quiet surrealism that is a feature (not the defining feature, but very much
there) of Martha Deed’s work. Well…it’s somewhere in the surreal, magical-realist,
what-have-you ballpark & it arises, I think, out of a careful & dispassionate (but not
lacking in warmth) observation of small things, sometimes domestic,
sometimes a telling detail of something bigger & darker.
Here she’s in domestic mode & it’s & light & charming but don’t mistake that for
trivial. it’s not.