Category Archives: experimental

Woody Allen/Nathaniel Stern

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At Interval
at interval (1977/2006, 24.3MB, 13:22 min)

Early work from the redoubtable Nathaniel Stern where he reworked,
in the most curious of ways, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.
Interesting that although the working method here seems
almost diametrically opposed to the hands on, performative
approach found in his odys series here too is that same
sense of the fragility & vulnerability of human beings and their
bodies & psyches & of the unreliability of the language we use
to try & make what we want to happen & to relate or lie about what did .

ZDEN – emptyspaces

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emptyspaces
emptyspaces (2000, 31MB, 2:26 min)

Zdeno Hlinka aka ZDEN.
A multimedia artist from Slovakia who’s been a pioneer in
working with real-time and visual mixing.

Gabriel Shalom – Small Room Tango

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Small Room Tango
Small Room Tango (2007, 7.9MB, 3:43 min.)

Anyone who has attempted this kind of video-sampling-whilst-letting-the-
audio-determine-the-structure will now just how extremely bloody
difficult & fiddly it all is.
Hats off bigtime, then, to Gabriel Shalom, who not only makes it look
natural & easy but even squeezes poetry from it.

Joan Jonas – Waltz

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Waltz
Waltz (2003, 55.9MB, 7:04 min)

More ideas per second than many have in a lifetime & wonderful
& haunting & evocative & engaging & smart ones too.
She makes it look easy & natural. Think about it – bet it’s not.
A fantastic piece by veteran video artist/performer Joan Jonas found
on the invaluable Lumen Eclipse site.

Dark Continents 1 – Tyler Coburn

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dc1
Dark Continents 1 (2007, 51 MB, 2:34 min.)

Video artist and animator Tyler Coburn‘s self conscious and rough use
of digital techniques presents a compelling parallel to Hollywood’s continual
and rapid movement toward the fantastically “real”.

Paul Rodriguez – the Mean Reds

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Mean Reds
Mean Reds (2007, 11.6MB, 1:48 min)

Artist & filmmaker Paul Rodriguez made this rather good
(I particularly like the collage plus the loopy/scratchy business
towards the very end where he collages/edits the sound too)
music video in 2007.

He said:

‘I was planning on shooting my friends for a
documentary. Magically the Mean Reds were also
playing, so I decided to shoot them as well.
Months went by with me sitting on this footage.
Then I found my self printing out frames,
and doing collage on individual frames.’

Tony Arnold – Foundation

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foundation
Foundation(2011, 153MB, 14:01 min)

Here’s a striking and very beautiful piece of work from
Mississippi based artist Tony Arnold.
There is clear evidence of his discovery and love affair
with the greats of the American experimental film tradition but
he’s obviously gifted and visionary and very much his own
person. (I love his choice of music, sounds a bit like Ornette
Coleman but I think it’s not…wonderful, anyway)
This is evidenced by his website* too –
with exhilaratingly edgy and engaging work, full of ideas –
I particularly like his altered fashion ads series.
Interesting, very interesting, to see how this work develops.

*I am uncomfortable, however, with the dangerously
naive & abstentionist defence of hate-speech there – well,
more than uncomfortable:- it’s stupid & wrong headed –
tell the family of the next racist murder victim that the
language that convicted and sentenced them was just a “series of grunts”.
I’m assuming though it comes from young artist hunger &
restlessness & in-your-faceness and nothing worse.

Anri Sala – Time After Time

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Time After Time
Time After Time (2003, 45.5MB, 5:39 min)

I was initially rather mystified by the vogue in UK galleries for
the work of Albanian artist Anri Sala but after a while the penny
dropped.
The courage to embrace the poetry of detail, of stillness,
apparent lack of incident & furthermore to trust
one’s viewers to accompany one to that place…
Elegant, sad, lugubrious & also, I think, much more crafted
than first meets the eye.
Great.

Glimpse of the Garden

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Marie Menken – Glimpse of the Garden (1957, 36.2MB, 5:04)

Marie Menken, avant-garde filmmaker of the 1940s, 50s,
and 60s – in addition to being the inspiration for
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a Warhol
superstar – made inspirational work from a time we seem
to overlook too much today. The garden here belongs
to one of her husband’s former male lovers, and while
Menken was often criticized for being quaint in her displays,
her style is an obviously feminine one that hides much
deeper meaning in ordinary but stunning visuals.

Cory Arcangel – Urbandale

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urbandale
Urbandale (2000, 43MB, 7:30 min.)

“Urbandale”, an ASCII/ANSI movie by Cory Arcangel.
“Filmed at Urbandale Plaza in the eastern suburbs of Buffalo N.Y.,
“urbandale” is a study of America’s suburban sprawl stripped to its barest
essentials and void of unnecessary contemporary cultural influence. This
film captures the sly, bland smile strip plazas cast at modern culture.
The film, rendered in text, focuses on the repetitive motion of food
stuffs being cooked in the lobby of a discount department store.”

“Urbandale” is a 2000 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc
for its Turbulence project.