Flow Spot Test #6 (2011, 18MB, 3:34 min)
“Just downloading apps at my Blanc Laptop Cart when all
of a sudden BenJi, an old teammate from XpresSpa shows up.
He happens to be subcontracted now by the American Airlines
subsidiary AffinityAlliance as an evaluator of potential for their
Oneworld Alliance codeshare lounges (of which FlowSpot is the
newest member).”
Flow Spot Test #5 (2011, 57MB, 2:03 min)
“Just having my early afternoon session of Body-Work with
Nnah, my Body-Designer.”
Says ANW, of the FlowSpot Tests:
For a large-scale exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
I created a color coordinated airport/hotel/mall/bank/spa/biennial lounge to
offer a site of relaxation and bodily engagement in an exhibition dominated
by isolated, sellable art objects.
All lounge products were purchased through online transactions (mostly
Target and Walmart), and were returned at the end of the exhibition.
My dystopic science fiction news video Global Countdown played on
a 55” flat panel monitor.
On opening night, visitors to FlowSpot could register for massages from
licensed massage therapists. While participants received massages they
could not see anything and listened to my directors commentary of the
Global Countdown video. The commentary consists of very basic visual
descriptions, with the goal being that the person receiving the massage
can visualize the video in their minds.
Throughout the duration of the exhibition, I used the lounge as a science
fiction video set to make “FlowSpot Tests.” In these videos I engaged
with the lounge both conceptually and materially in a color coordinated
outfit.
Contact me if you are interested in opening a FlowSpot in your airport,
hotel, mall, bank, spa, biennial, gallery, cultural center, or any other
space that you own/lease/use.
See also.
Anxiety About Relationships Between Friendship and Business (2011, 11MB, 2:41 min)
I’m so taken with Andrew Norman Wilson’s work I’m going to devote
the whole first week of this DVblog season to it.
He initially sent us a longish piece, Networking with Andrew Norman Wilson
made with Nicholas O’Brien of Bad At Sports.
It’s wonderful but pretty huge so you should definitely go and
look at the Vimeo version there.
On Monday, Weds and Friday of this week we’ll post smaller
pieces extracted from that (but without the commentary or
‘interview’ as it is styled elsewhere [-the text on the BAS page linked above]) ,
On Tuesday and Thursday we’ll post two of Wilson’s FlowSpot Tests
with some accompanying explanation from him.
I find this work in general very exciting because it does a lot
of interesting, nuanced and often rather funny (and I’m in favour of funny –
there are very few great works of art which contain no funny at all)
and intially apparently contradictory things.
Let me give you my take on it.
The Webinars are all composed entirely of footage sourced from Pond5
“the worlds stock media marketplace” . The FlowSpot Tests are performative
pieces involving bizarre consumer items sourced from e-bay and wallmart and
deployed in a 21st Century updating of silent movie Lloyd-Keaton-Chaplin
deadpan involving, too, a certain degree of slapstick
and displaying a deliciously calibrated sense of the ridiculous.
The Webinars (a least when one takes account of their titles and certainly viewed
in the light of the commentary from “networking”) are a kind of consumerist
reductio-ad-absurdam.
The intent is celarly in some sense satirical but the pieces take risks in
that they don’t stop and end in critique – there is an understanding of
how toxically compelling some of this imagery is and to some extent they
toy with celebrating this.
Wilson is clearly a natural movie maker. He doesn’t restrain himself from
visual flourishes and jokes which are by no means integral to any
satirical case but make the pieces more fun to watch.
(The distortion effects applied to objects in the periphery of the
action in FlowSpot Test #5 are a case in point.)
Additionally, and most impressively, there is a muddying of the
waters in Networking… (and by implication the
Webinars and FlowSpot Tests) whereby
cogent and apparently straightforward philosophising is allowed
to cross pollinate/contaminate with the satire and vice versa,
leaving the viewer with -ahem- work to do.
This work is not glib; it takes risks – in order to maintain its
high level potency it risks misunderstanding.
A look at Wilson’s CV shows a spell spent working for a
labour union and I read the impulse behind these pieces
as radically anti-commodification and corporate mind rot.
Agit-prop, thankfully, it’s not, but “something rich and strange”
– radical art for interesting times to come.
Nice to see this when so many younger artists seem to be
tempted by a career orientated and somewhat cynical celebration
of that same deadend emptiness.
Native Dancer (2011, 92MB, 2:08 min)
Genbush (2006, 17MB, 6:03 min)
Two pieces from Alan Sondheim -one we originally posted in 2006
and one very recent. The new piece –Native Dancer –
is a particularly affecting example of recent motion capture/avatar work.
It properly forms part of a triptych but I think it is the outstanding of the
three and I’m going to exercise curatorial perogative & post it singly.
It enchants me -I don’t know exactly why, I think the reasons could be
quite banal -there’s something of the children’s TV sci-fi epic about it perhaps…
Don’t know, just love it.
And here’s what we originally said about the other piece, which I see no reason to change:
Humor is perhaps not a quality that springs immediately
to mind when discussing the work of Alan Sondheim.
Wrong! His work is saturated in it, often a species of
graveyard or gallows wit.
Here, though, he just lets loose, plays.
But the man is incapable of doing anything that doesn’t
resonate with layer upon layer of meaning too!
Monument (2006, 3MB, 1:53 min)
Monument, a computer program continuously scans the headlines
of 4,500 English-language news sources around the world, looking
for people who have been reported killed. Each time it finds an article,
an algorithm determines the number of deaths, and instructs a ceiling-mounted
mechanism built from Legos to drop one yellow BB per person.
by Caleb Larsen.
Inside.v04 (2001, 6.7MB, 1:51 min)
Newbody.v01e (2004, 14.5MB, 3:32 min)
Two short animations from the series ‘Meat’ by Jose Carlos Casado.
Ideas of potential new forms, clones, and artificially
produced offspring are touched upon in ‘Inside.v04’
‘Newbody.v01e’ is kind of Hieronymus Bosch does the Olympics,
the stuff of nightmares & transcendent beauty too . The score, by
Sophocles Papavasilopoulos, is also a small masterpiece:
complex, yet self-effacingly serving the totality.
Experiment (2006, 3.3MB, 1:20 min.)
2006: Michael Verdi takes a stand and stakes out
some videoblogging territory.
Appraisal Part #1 (2011, 232MB, 10:14 min)
Appraisal Part #2 (2011, 151MB, 9:40 min)
Edward Picot’s bizarre and wonderful Dr Hairy series, the adventures of a hirsute
UK general practitioner coping with NHS (the NHS we love, don’t misunderstand us)
bureaucracy, continues with these first two episodes of Appraisal.
Picot’s comic timing just gets better & better (& occasionally strays into some
almost Beckettian territory) – it’s fascinating to watch a long
project like this unfold. If you missed the preceding episodes they’re here (as are some other
gems, some equally amusing, some altogether different in style and mood)
Layers (2007, 23 MB, 5:23 min)
“Layers is a mashup narrative machinima created with footage from Metal
Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PS2), Military footage from an Apache Helicopter
in Iraq (Public Domain/Department of Defense), and Shadow of the Colossus
(PS2). Recorded almost entirely through a sniper scope from the game, it
extends the conversation about the relationship between increasingly
sophisticated military technology and the drive towards visual realism in
videogames. What happens to the relationship between killer and victim
when they are separated by real and virtual distances? Adding the layer
of virtuality through the videogame complicates this relationship even further.”
by Joshua Fishburn.
Wikipedia:Technologies of Cooperation (2005, 70 MB, 1:30 hr.)
Lecture at Stanford University on Wikipedia by founder Jimmy Wales.
Memorial Stone (2011, 92 MB, 38:31 min)
“As technology moves forward.. all my work is falling apart.. I’d like to move
forward as well, into a more outside adventurous practice, so this video is an
attempt to document the ruins and the remains of my internet work”
– by Heath Bunting
Un chien andalou (1929, 156MB, 15:40 min.)
This is just the source.
Can you imagine Cocteau, Deren, later Hitchcock & Cronenberg
without this?
Oh..more:- the whole of cinema would have a great gaping bloody gap
in it & what was left would be dull dull dull & Black Francis wouldn’t have been
able to write ‘Debaser’.
It simply prised open the language.
Afterwards, Bunuel went on to make some of the sharpest, most provocative
& disturbing films of the 20th century & Dali went on to
…well… be Dali.
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
Departure (2009, 34 MB, 4:24 min)
I love this video for two, apparently almost entirely independent
(but maybe, in some strange, deep way, connected) reasons.
First – the music is great. I listen very little popular music these
days (which is why I’m 2 years late with this) as most of it, even
(especially!) the so called indie stuff gives the impression of
having been focus-grouped into bland submission before being let
limply loose not to offend anyone.
This, contrariwise, oozes life & not-giving-a-fuck from every note
(especially the splendidly slightly out of tune vocals; but it’s all a joy).
Secondly, director of the video, Kate Thomas, about whom I know
nothing and could find out no more, had the totally brilliant idea
of simply stringing together some footage of French students
and workers standing up for themselves against the riot cops in 68.
If this all doesn’t make you weep with barely suppressed joy please
check your pulse.
untitled (2005, 1.5MB, 1:50 min.)
Nice bit of guerilla art/action/video by Judith Supine and friend.
Took some bottle, I think.
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.
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
Interview with Shirin Neshat (2010, 123 MB, 3:54 min)
Studio Banana TV interviews video artist, moviemaker
and photographer Shirin Neshat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Consolation Service (1999, 10 MB, 1:43 min.)
“Consolation Service” follows a young Finnish couple, Anni and J-P, as they
make public their decision to divorce. It is set in early spring in Helsinki, with
its frozen landscape on the cusp of thawing.
Consolation service (awarded at the Venice Biennial in 1999) Ahtila also
deconstructs the formation of the narrative and cinematic illusion: as though
in a straight documentary film (Cinéma vérité), both narrator and camera are
shown openly. The illusion of fiction is thus shattered, made visible. The use of
a hand-held shaking camera reminds the group Dogma 95 led by Lars Von Triers.
Beach (2009, 64 MB, 4:57 min.)
“A happy family is shown on a beach in Tel Aviv, as 100 km away a girl runs
from the bombardment of a beach in Gaza. It’s a reality where tranquility may
turn into horror in an instant. The conflicting scenes on a TV on the blink raise
the impossibility of accepting an absolute picture of a reality.”
By Guli Silberstein.
efj360 (2010, 3 MB, 1:28 min.)
“Knitoscope Testimonies is the first web based video using “Knitoscope” software,
a program that translates digital video into a knitted animation. Knitoscope is a moving
image offshoot of microRevolt’s freeware knitPro. Knitoscope imports streaming video,
lowers the resolution, and then generates a stitch that correspondes with the pixels color.
The title “Knitoscope” is based on Edison’s early animation technology the kinetoscope,
which was a “coin operated peep show machine
War Criminal (2003 -2010, 22MB, 3:18 min)
When I first saw this piece from Nigel Ayers I assumed, quite wrongly, he
was involved with some heavy duty image manipulation in the cause of a
kind of conceptualist ‘activism’ (and I sat scratching my head at just how difficult it
must have been to get that image onto so many moving figures).
DOH! The facts are much weirder and much, much better…
Great stuff! Hats off! Not worthy, not worthy!
Latest episode in Edward Picot’s splendid Dr Hairy sequence.
