Marc Garrett & Ruth Catlow – At Winter Equinox We Burn the Sun

the mouse escapes
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.

Patrick Lichty #4

Blown Away
Blown Away(2003, 3MB, 52 secs)

Mental Profiling
Mental Profiling (2003, 7MB, 2:15min)

 the new saint of louisiana
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.

Patrick Lichty Season – #3

The New Miranda
The New Miranda (2003, 38MB, 2:17 min)

blooper - voodoo chicks
Blooper – Voodoo Chicks (200?, 1MB, 16 secs)

 the engines of truth
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.

Some Frank Talking from Edward Picot

franktalking1
Frank Talking #1 (2010, 157 MB, 9:59 min.)

franktalking2
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.

                                                                               previously…

Eija-Liisa Ahtila – Consolation Service

consolation_service
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.

By Eija-Liisa Ahtila.

Guli Silberstein – Beach

guli_beach
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.

Knitoscope Testimonies by Cat Mazza

alex360
alex360 (2010, 1 MB, 30 sec.)

efj360
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

Nigel Ayers – War Criminal

first line
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!

Let Nigel explain…

Versions, 2010, Oliver Laric

versionsversions1
Versions (2010, 115 MB, 8:50 min)

By Oliver Laric.

Old Fashioned Medicine

oldfashionedmedicine

Latest episode in Edward Picot’s splendid Dr Hairy sequence.