Compressionism (2006, 17.2MB, 5:37 min)
About time we had a new ism 🙂
DVblog regulars will have seen Nathaniel Stern’s video work here before
in particular the Odys series, characterised both by a luminous intelligence
& a willingness to take artistic risks.
In this short documentary about this (genuinely interesting & fruitful) ism of his own devising Stern
avoids lots of pitfalls: it’s clear, it’s thoughtful & smart, never smug & it makes
one want to see more of the work.
Variations V (1965, 7.5MB, 2:22 min)
‘John Cage made ‘Variations V’ in 1965 for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
He and David Tudor settled on two systems for the sound to be affected by movement:
directional photocells aimed at the stage lights, so that the dancers triggered sounds as
they cut the light beams with their movements, and a series of antennae.
When a dancer came within four feet of an antenna a sound would result.
Cage, Tudor, and Gordon Mumma operate equipment to modify and determine
the final sounds.’ – from mediaartnet.
a wristful of bits (2002, 6.19MB, 4:26 min)
8 bits or less (2002, 5.58MB, 4:47 min)
close vision (2002, 4.79MB, 3:33 min)
for a few bits more (2003, 6.29MB, 4:59 min)
Patrick Lichty, artist, writer, curator & wit, the man responsible
for the excellent Intelligent Agent, has donated a decade’s worth
of his video work to DVblog.
We’ll be showing it all over the next few months.
We start with these wonderful pieces: smart
& delirious, made mostly with images from a
Casio WQV-1 WristCam watch which is B&W with a resolution
of 100X100 pixels, ‘both the embodiment of technological determinism’ ,
Lichty comments, ‘and its antithesis.’.
I mostly have the urge to run fast from stuff which is fashionably
self referentially about the technological, often so worthy but oh-so-dull.
Thing with Lichty is, dull it is so not, rather, simultaneously
light (in a good sense..not dumbed down & simplistic,
but playful & engaging) possessed of genuine humor,
& just chock full of ideas & joyous invention.
Kid Quaalude -‘Upside Downer’ (2006, 37MB, 4:01 min)
“Well!”, as my dear mother used to say,
“What will they think of next?”
Neat film by Dave Whiting, shot in a rather
atmospheric former Tram depot in Weimar
& featuring Kid Quaalude doing what it
says on the tin.
Big I/O Brush (2004, 4.2MB, 2 min.)
‘I/O Bursh’ is a project of the Tangible Media Group at MIT Media Lab.
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!
8 BIT trailer (2006, 8.7MB, 1:28 min.)
“Premiering in New York at the Museum of Modern Art,
8 BIT is a hybrid documentary examining the influence of
video games on contemporary culture.
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
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.