Home Movies (2007, 11.9MB, 1:10 min)
Money at the Situation (2007, 6.5MB, 37 sec)
Assured & capable micro movie making from Bill Shackelford in 2007.
In the case of Home Movies, more: beautiful, poetic
& singular, using only the artefact laden footage around cuts in
his grandfather’s 8mm home movies from the 50s & 60s.
Bravo!
Interview with Ubermorgen (2011, 41 MB, 6:51 min)
In Berlin, DAM Gallery presented two projects by the artist duo Ubermorgen.com.
The show featured a temporary WOPPOW flagship store featuring fashion with bullet
holes as trademarks and the Deephorizon project that presents oil paintings that are
directly linked to the BP oil spill. On the occasion of the opening of the exhibition,
VernissageTV met with ubermorgen.com
Frank Zappa on Crossfire (1986, 49MB, 21:17 min)
from – del.icio.us
Nam June Paik: Venus (2009, 62 MB, 5:28 min)
At Art Cologne 2009 Hans Mayer Gallery showed a piece by Nam June Paik,
a painted aluminium infrastructure with a multi painted satellite dish,
24 color TV sets and laser disc player. In this video, Hans Mayer gives us a
short introduction to the work. From VernissageTV.
Well Did You Evah? (1990, 14.2MB, 3:45 min)
Staying with Monday’s Iggy Pop theme, maybe you’re all
totally familiar with this but I never saw
it before & I think it is great .
Here he duets with Debbie Harry on the
Cole Porter song Well Did You Evah? as part of an
AIDS fundraiser from 1990.
Gavito & Plazaola (n/k, 13.5MB, 3:44 min.)
‘The secret of tango is in this moment of improvisation that
happens between step and step. It is to make the impossible thing
possible: to dance silence. This is essential to learn in tangodance,
the real dance, that of the silence, of following the melody.’
– Carlos Gavito
Watch the late Carlos Gavito & his partner Maria Plazaola
play havoc with the space time continuum in this extraordinary
piece in which time slows down, speeds up & actually comes to a
halt at least once.
Mesmerizing.
[ Found on this very strange tango site with lots more videos]
Control #1 [Seeking Kind in Human] (2009, 114MB, 4:52 min)
Michael got in touch via a mutual friend to tell me about what
seems to be an incredibly thriving live art scene in Manchester, UK.
To my shame, this is the first time I’ve come across it, so I’m going to
make up for this a little by posting three vids from Doodlebug, the
creative arts platform he founded.
This first is a performance by Michael himself with Sophie Yesilyurt.
It’s very powerful. What strikes me is how these performative things achieve
a huge effect, often with very simple means. I think those of us working
primarily in moving image have a good deal to learn from them.
More soon.
untitled (2005, 1.5MB, 1:50 min.)
Nice bit of guerilla art/action/video by Judith Supine and friend.
Took some bottle, I think.
Interview with Trisha Brown (2007, 11 MB, 3:06)
Anyone in or near London should absolutely get to see the
“Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown & Gordon Matta-Clark –
Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s” show,
currently at the Barbican. It’s fantastic!
I was particularly lucky to be there when a performance of the
Trisha Brown ‘walking on walls’ piece happened (worth
ringing in advance to see what performances are on and when)
I knew it would be interesting but, somewhat to my surprise,
I was immediately & intensely emotionally engaged by it too, finding
it lump-in-the-throat-&-tear-in-the-eye moving…
Although we’re concentrating here on Trisha Brown with an interview
conducted in 2007 at the Documenta 12 event (and after you’ve
watched that, the Guardian has a nice audio slideshow about the
walking on walls piece), all three artists shine in this show.
It’s all great but particularly interesting are the rooms of drawings
related to their various performance practices.
Joseph Beuys – Transformer (1979, 10 MB, 3 min)
Excerpt from a 60-minute documentary featuring avant-garde
German artist Joseph Beuys during a 1979 exhibit at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
Robert Roth Reads from ‘Health Proxy’ (2011, 76 MB, 6:30min)
I can’t be objective aboutRobert Roth – he’s a dear friend and his
tremendous & utterly singular book Health Proxy ( Buy it here)
would most definitely be my choice for that desert island.
In this little movie, odd and charming both, by fellow writer
George Spencer, he reads an extract from it, twice.
Trav-erse short (2011, 96 MB, 1:58 min)
This is shaping up to be Furtherfield fortnight & whyever not?
Here’s some footage I took there last Friday night, at the very entertaining
launch of the Art is Open Source/REFF – Roma Europa Fake Factory publication
& exhibition, (GO, if you’re in London) of a splendid performance by
Garrett Lynch of his Trav-erse, where he uses custom Max/MSP created software to
grab audio from an analogue world band receiver, manipulate and remix it.
I was struck both by the simplicity of the idea and the effectiveness of
its execution – a neat concept but also an excellent ear at work.
The sound from my stills cam video was unusable (shame, it sounded great
there) so in the latter section I’ve dubbed on sound from
an earlier performance of the piece in Cardiff, Wales in 2008.
Making Web MVideo (2011, 51 MB, 5:55 min)
“There was a lot of talk this week about WebM video after Google announced
that they were going to drop H.264 support from Chrome. This is huge news
for video makers, especially since Firefox 4 (which supports WebM) is almost done.
I figured it was time to look into WebM encoding tools again.”..
from Michael Verdi.
Duchamp’s Fountain (2011, 93MB, 1:59 min, silent)
Fascinating bit of footage from Kev Flanagan arising out
of a piece of work by Rob Myers (together with Curt Cloninger one
of the two smartest people I know) –here’s the original post
from his blog to give some context.
The whole thing sparked an interesting discussion on the Furtherfield
(see Monday’s post) originated Netbehaviour list this week.
Furtherfield (2011, 103MB, 5:28 min)
Great film about the wonderful UK arts organisation Furtherfield
– you can see & hear me* in it, enthusing further at a couple of points.
Beautifully made by Pete Gomes, it really captures something of
what makes Furtherfield such a big & special deal.
* So let that stand for a full declaration of interest:
I work with them, they’re my friends, they’ve shown
my work – none of which makes any of the nice things
said by me or anyone in the film any less true…
Aroundabout: Second Person Present (2011, 117MB, 4 min, silent)
Extracted from a longer work made for Steven Ball’s
Aroundabout blog
“I also showed it as part of a presentation of material from
Aroundabout I did at City Methodologies at the Slade,
where it was displayed looped continuously on a flat
screen monitor face up on the floor, while I ‘performed’
the blog with Powerpoint!”
Some of these expanded cinema folk do relish a challenge!
Even truncated & divorced from its performative context it stands
as a splendid bit of structural/formalist film/vid poetry.
DuPont (2011, 25 MB, 2:42 min.)
Smokey (2011, 25 MB, 2:45 min.)
A couple of previews from Rob Parrish
‘Flock’ in Liverpool (2008, 152MB, 2:44 min)
How many times do you read artists’ descriptions of their own work
and think ‘naaaaa…’ totally failing to recognise their stated ambitions
in what appears to you to be, at best, somewhat pedestrian and at
worst, a total disconnect from what they write.
This is the complete opposite of that, utterly living up to the makers’
stated intentions, and an absolute spine tingler to watch even through
the distance of video documentation.
Check out the KMA site for a complete description of the piece,
an ‘interactive light installation’ based around Swan Lake,
but not until you’ve watched this beautiful bit of documentary.
Particularly touching is the genuine joy in participation it evokes.
Very hard to pull off and very moving to see.
Omer Fast – The Casting (2008, 38 MB, 3:29 min)
Omer Fast, discusses his 2008 Whitney Biennial work, The Casting (2007),
a four-channel video featuring a young American army sergeant who recounts
two stories
European Vacation (2005, 25.6 MB, 2:18 min.)
Morning Routine (2005, 44.3 MB, 4:34 min.)
The Summer of Van Torre was hugely popular in 2005 in video blogging circles.
The wepisodes recount the life of Jon VanTorre, each week bringing him closer
to total cardiac arrest with Ether Baths, Spider-Man Nightmares, and Meat Sandwiches.
The series (which began in 2001) was presented online in 05 by Human Dog.
Here is an interview (2005, 67.5 MB, 13 min.) by Josh Leo with writers & directors
Jon VanTorre, Michael Schwartz and Chris Weagel.
7 Months of My Aesthetic Education (2005, 14 MB, 1:45 min.)
Speed up documentation from Tony Oursler‘s installation, “Studio: Seven Months of My
Aesthetic Education (Plus Some)” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005.
It combined video, sound, music and poetry to create environments that truly reflect the dissolving
boundaries of twenty-first-century culture. The work is inspired by Courbet
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.
Non-Linear Creation (2010, 58 MB, 3:16 min.)
Installation at ‘Fresh Paint 3‘ in Old Jaffa Port, Israel. the project is based on a live
camera input where the video camera is mounted above a the projection screen.
“The thought behind “Non-Linear Creation” is to think about video as some sort
of a “streaming deck of cards” which I shuffled again and again in real time using
Cycling74’s Max. I collected in a memory buffer the latest 60 cards/video frames,
shuffled them and played the outcome in 30 frames per second. The result is a video in
which the viewer is in constant, unnatural, flickering present, as it is reflected in the video.”
By Omer Golan.
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.
Mapping Festival – Motomichi and Otto (2010, 100 MB, 5:25 min.)
Mapping Festival is organized by Modul8, the most popular VJ software in the
market and the venue “Usine / le Zo” is their primary space.
Here is a great collaboration at the event. Video mixing by Motomichi and
music performance by Otto von Schirach.
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!
Trailer for ADN/ARN (2003, 8 MB, 4:04 min.)
“ADN/ARN was an interactive installation addressed to one person at the time,
filmed with 8 surveillance cameras, in which each visitor was invited to confide
and then contractually sell a personal secret. The initial system took place in
Lausanne at the Centre d’Arts sc
Secret 050 (2007, 2 MB, 1:03 min.)
And one more.
See original post for details.
