Frank Talking #3 (2010, 278MB, 10:01 min)
Latest instalment in Edward Picot’s Dr Hairy saga which feels like
a weird amalgam of Oliver Postgate, soap and Carry On.
It’s interesting to observe how bold, deft & convincing Picot has become with the lo-fi
techniques he deploys in these and, furthermore, how engaging the actual
narrative is.
Great stuff!
2010 Clip Arts (2010, 20MB, 3:21 min)
Stunningly executed, but, for me at least, somewhat vacuous
sequel to his 787 Clip Arts of 2006.
From oliverlaric.com
Over The Edge (2010, 49MB, 1:37 min)
Alan Dojoji Pushes Fau Ferdinand in the Water because
She’s not Paying Him any ATTENTION!
so the story will be about I’m trying DESPERATELY TO GET YOUR ATTENTION,
but you’re ignoring me because you’re away or sleeping or not watching the
terrific goings-on in OpenSim so I sneak up on you (because you’re not
looking) and push you into the water which is very difficult because
pushing avatars requires the greatest skill, making sure that the pusher
is right behind the pushee, otherwise the pushee escapes, so you’re pushed
into the water and just as you’re falling you wake up and type “UOY” which
can only mean it’s a backwards world, and then we’re both in the water and
I’m dancing furiously and AGAIN YOU’RE PAYING NO ATTENTION!
Alan Sondheim
Touch Me (2011, 562KB , 2:00 min)
Hear Me (2011, 12MB, 1:11 min)
Second two parts of TOM (an instrumental rock opera remix in four parts)
by Curt Cloninger, of which we posted the first two last week.
Mathematics (2010, 163MB, 10:40 min)
There’s a wonderful deadpan quality to this piece from Chris Caines,
which captures dream logic perfectly (and satisfyingly –
I was worried about bathos and I needn’t have.)
It looks and sounds rather sumptuous too.
I do wonder if it couldn’t have moved just a tad quicker…
Mutant #2 (2010, 64MB, 4:04 min)
Annie Abrahams is a singular and compelling voice, her singularity
ironically copper-bottomed by her willingness to embrace the network
& collaboration thereon fearlessly, inquisitively and to always
striking effect. This piece is described as a video arising out of
the second session of a
“Telematic Performance / Experiment investigating communication and
relational dynamics in a dispersed group.”
and it’s bewitching.
The pages documenting it bear the motto
“Communication is never clean, smooth and transparent”
True – and to turn that truth into crystalline & affecting art is a little miracle.
Ethernet Orchestra on FBi Radio (2010, 92MB, 11:48 min)
More from the splendid Ethernet Orchestra with:
in Sydney, Australia – Roger Mills (Processed Trumpets), Bukhchuluun Ganburged (Mongolian Horse fiddle and throat singing) and Yavuz Uydu (Turkish Oud and Bendir)
in Londrina, Brazil – Chris Vine (Guitar)
and in Braunschweig, Germany – Martin Slawig (Laptop Electronics and Max/MSP processing).
All of it great, though I’m particularly a sucker for the throat singing.
Feel Me (2011, 11MB, 1:03 min)
Two parts of a rather good new work –
TOM (an instrumental rock opera remix in four parts)
by Curt Cloninger, of whom we are fans.
He remixes the 1975 film of the Who’s rock opera Tommy to striking effect.
I can’t imagine crossing the road to see the original, even for free, but
here Curt’s sense of beauty, drama and balance – which have served him
well in a number of works and projects involving remix/appropriation, notably
his fantastic playdamage project –
redeem banality to something genuinely affecting.
More next week.
Curse Her Black Heart (2010, 137MB, 4:24 min)
Chris Laxton’s creative deployment of a turntable & nice fractal images…
At Winter Equinox We Burn the Sun (2010, 37MB, 3:48 min)
And by way of wishing a Happy New Year to all, here’s a tremendous piece from my friends
Marc Garrett & Ruth Catlow, the movers behind the indispensable Furtherfield.org & the Netbehaviour list.
Here they ritually burn a copy of the evil Murdoch’s UK organ The Sun & accompany this
with music both apposite and well executed.
I think this is shot very well. I don’t mean in a boring technical sense – who gives a? –
but that it is utterly alive, especially those beautiful final, almost vertical, shots.
There’s a delicious play here too on folkishness which treads a fine line in avoiding
being itself folksy.
Further – here’s a practical demonstration of how political art doesn’t have to
be dour or ploddingly earnest and indeed can summon a visceral beauty.
There’s a dialogue (or, perhaps better, an argument) between this celebration of the beauty
of the world, betokened in this scene and what passes therein, and the real ugliness and
anti-humanity of the paper and its contents.
Great Great Great.
Christmas in Hollis (1987, 32MB, 4:02 min)
This vid is probably old news to a lot of you but it
passed me by completely in 87 (and the many times
too, apparently, it has since re-emerged on soundtracks &c.
I should get out more).
I love it. It makes me grin so wide I’m afraid my
head will fall off. Plus it’s seasonal.
This is our last post for 2010 so we’ll wish all of
you the happiest of holiday seasons & we’ll resume
posting on Jan 3rd.
The Mouse Escapes (2010, 56MB, 11:06 min)
After we posted the trailer for this the other week, director Simon
Mclennan was kind enough to let us post the whole movie, so here it is (and
quirky, and poetic and imaginative as it promised to be, it is.)
The Earth Has Been Destroyed (2010, 194MB, 5:06 min)
Something new from the splendidly sideways Austrian art/mischief wranglers
Monochrom is always welcome and this piece is no exception.
Absurd ( Popcorn for Chrissakes!!), just about hanging together,
but hanging together artfully nonetheless; even a little bit chilling too.
Alice in Wonderland (1903, 136MB, 9:32)
Enthralling first ever screen version of Alice in Wonderland
from 1903, lovingly restored by the folks at the BFI.
There’s no-one –no-one – who could not learn
something about film-making from this gem.
Nine minutes of sheer, grinning-with-joy delight.
In 2007 I ran a little competition on my site centred aound
a musical setting I had made of a tiny poem by my friends and
collaborators Robert Roth & Carletta Joy Walker for
their magazine “And Then”.
I invited remixes, either musical or visual, of the song and
these two pieces, both utterly barking & delicately poetic at one
and the same time, came winging their way from the Smith Family
in Germany.
Wonderful!
The Mouse Escapes [Trailer] (2010, 4MB, 37 secs)
Difficult to gauge from the trailer what the full 12 minute piece
might be like but it will clearly be interesting & atmospheric and guided
by an acute visual sense.
The music, written by director Mclennan, is also rather good.
Website, with lots of details, here.
Checkout Art Fairs (2010, 8MB, 1:07 min.)
Blotting Paper (2010, 13MB, 1:06 min.)
I hadn’t realized that the splendid Lumière et Son project, which
we’ve raved about here before, was a time limited thing
but, sadly, yes & they’ve posted their last, which we repost here
above.
We’ve grabbed a few more, which we’ll post in the near future, but
do yourselves a favour and go & wallow in their site now…
Black or White, the Gravy Version (2010, 58 MB, 2:38 min.)
An outing, or perhaps more a forced march, for Michael Jackson’s
Black or White refracted through the prism of English
whimsy that is Edward Picot (well, on occasion; fans will know
his range is much, much broader) with co-conspirator Hoola Hoop Kid.
Never understood the Jackson appeal myself but this I like a great deal.
Wish, though, they’d called it ‘Black or White, the Gravy Mix‘.
Blown Away(2003, 3MB, 52 secs)
Mental Profiling (2003, 7MB, 2:15min)
The New Saint of Louisiana (2003, 4MB, 41 secs)
Three more from Patrick Lichty.
Again- hard to believe these were made seven long digital years* ago.
Not a lot to add, except I approve his taste for Tuvan throat singing.
*Digital years a bit like dog years, of course.
Blackball (2008, 10MB, 1:21 min)
God, I dislike this work! It’s the combination of the stellar
degree of smug self-congratulation with a faux experimentalism/pretension
to art similarly typified by the ludricous “creative” moniker
attached to exponents of advertising.
But..but..again – like some ads, not many, some – there’s
something to be learned here, especially from Beasting
which manages to be both deeply, Zoolanderishly, risible
(the branded underpants) but also generate a kind of deep,
myth-related frisson.
All the more vexing that somewhere here is real talent.
So…we hold our noses and post…
Enough! Six months, at least, before any more of this.
I’m going out for some air.
Lick Yourselves (2005, 64MB, 6:27 min, silent)
The Little Artists are a UK collaborative duo, most famous/notorious
for their re-renderings of iconic artworks in the childrens’ construction toy
LEGO.
This brief description doesn’t do them justice – their work is rich & complex
& they make hay, playfully but profoundly too, with all sorts of contemporary
obsessions – remix &appropriation, branding, celebrity & not least the idea of
artistry/creativity itself.
This video stems from their 2005 show based on the work of Mark Quinn, the casting-
his-head-out-of-his-own-frozen-blood guy, and the show featured them dressing
up as ice cream salespeople and flogging fruit flavour ice lolly replicas of
the Quinn piece.
The vid is a minimal, leisurely and ever so slightly disturbing account of
one of these slowly melting.
I must declare an interest – I wrote an essay for their new book, which, if
your appetite is whetted, you can get here.
The New Miranda (2003, 38MB, 2:17 min)
Blooper – Voodoo Chicks (200?, 1MB, 16 secs)
The Engines of Truth (2000?, 20MB, 5:08 min)
Our Patrick Lichty season resumes after quite the longest break ever,
partly because I misplaced the files he so generously gave us
in 2007.
Looking through these again it comes home very forcefully what
a significant role Lichty played in the development of a new language of art video,
one contemporaneous with the birth pangs and development of net art & later to
feed centrally into online art practice.
The pieces still impress as hugely imaginative and sometimes challenging
and apart from their physical size and compression don’t appear time worn
at all. In fact, in many ways they seem amazingly prescient, perhaps
even ahead of their time.
More soon.
Readings (2008, 43 MB, 9:53 min.)
I must admit I’d never really heard of fashion video as a genre
until someone I teach showed me an astonishing piece by
Ruth Hogben & Gareth Pugh last week, which sent me off in search of more.
This piece comes from site called ShowStudio:
‘an award-winning fashion website, founded and directed by Nick Knight,
that has consistently pushed the boundaries of communicating fashion online.’
according to its ‘about’ page.
The piece we’re posting here is directed by Knight together with the designer
Hussein Chalayan, with editing by Ruth Hogben and music by Anthony, of Johnsons
fame.
It’s a tour de force, fizzing with ideas, a mesmerising watch,
and a fund of stealable ideas, so we’ll definitely be returning
for more, though I have to say I only see a dark void where
a living heart might have beat – there’s no speck of warmth
or humanity to it.
Frank Talking #1 (2010, 157 MB, 9:59 min.)
Frank Talking #2 (2010, 247 MB, 9:51 min.)
Two more episodes in Edward Picot’s satirical but affectionate
insider view of the British NHS.
You, the World and I (2010, 67MB, 6:10 min)
Another piece from Jon Rafman, and whilst it’s made with the same dexterity,
wit and inventiveness as all his work this one doesn’t quite hit me in the
same place as the others we’ve posted.
(Don’t get me wrong – this piece would garner unstinting praise were
it from most other people – it’s just that Rafman sets the bar high for himself).
It’s something to do with the closure-as-a-story.
It’s a bit too neat. The found material seems deployed as an aid to
story-telling rather than dripping with the glorious uncertainty and
ambiguity that chartacterised some other earlier work.
(An analogy: the difference between a Rauschenberg Combine
and a picture in shells at a seaside gift shop. Not that extreme here, of course)
None of which is meant to imply that it isn’t worth at least 12:20 min of your time…
Rilkes Tongue (2006?, 73 MB, 1:44 min)
Alan:
“something to stare at
This is a few years old, but hasn’t been put up; the dancer is Maud
Liardon, either Foofwa or I held the camera and made the video and
effects reminiscent of G. Moreau come to life, the church is in the
Swiss Alps, Rilke was buried behind it, murals of tormented hell,
angelic world of Elegies, we were transported”
…Alan Sondheim is one of the artists whose work you can see if
you can get to Nottingham, UK this Thursday – Sunday, 11th-14th Nov, 12-5 pm, in the first offline
appearance by DVblog, where a 45 minute program of work first posted here
will be continuously screened at The Wasp Room, part of Tether Studios.
Details:
Tether Studios,
17a Huntingdon Street
Nottingham
NG1 3JH
tel: 07729124336
mail@tether.org.uk
Artists featured:
Kerry Baldry, Steven Ball, Robert Croma, Rupert Howe, JimPunk, Donna Kuhn, Morrisa Maltz, Millie Niss, Giles Perkins, Sam Renseiw, Alan Sondheim, Nathaniel Stern, Liz Sterry, Eddie Whelan
Also – if you’re reading this & are interested in screening this program -we have both PAL and NTSC
DVDs available. Just mail us!
Binary Code (1994-98, 2MB, 52 secs)
On the Ephemeral Nature of Little Movies (1994-98, 3MB, 1:05 min)
I mentioned the Manovich Little Movies in the post I did the
other week on Eryk Salvaggio’s ‘Unfinished Mpeg Haiku’.
In the course of writing that I went to Manovich’s site to look at them
& was surprised to find that their page was in some disarray
and the movies themselves had been removed.
Nor could I find them either in the version archived on the Rhizome Artbase.
It seems a shame for them not to be available -they’re historical
(and in many ways amazingly presecient) documents at the least,
although I find them – especially the last one – gripping and touching too.
Then I remembered the wonderful Wayback Machine and I found them
there, all snug and safe and sound.
We’ll post them here in twos in the next week or so,
in the order in which they appeared in Manovich’s
original presentation of them.
Although the image linking to it has been removed from the site
Manovich’s very interesting statement remains.
(I guess if that goes too you’ll still be able to Wayback it)
