Buky Schwartz – 2 illusory videos

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videoconstructions2 (1978, 5MB, 1:16 min.)

buki_schwartz1
The Chair (1980, 36MB, 9:54 min.)

Buky Schwartz (1932-2009), an Israeli sculptor and video artist
who passed away last year, was known for his deceptive videos
that interplay between illusory appearance and the actual ‘reality’.
The 2 vids here were exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York in 1981.
From the splendid Videoart.net

Markos Vamvakaris sings ‘Atakti’

vamvakaris
Atakti (196?, 11MB, 2:23 min)

Utterly compelling clip from a 1960s German documentary featuring a
spine tingling live performance in a Piraeus taverna by the great
rembetiko singer Markos Vamvakaris.
I could watch & listen all day.

PS I think atakti means ‘bad’ or ‘naughty’

Opto-Isolator – Golan Levin and Greg Baltus

optoisolator
Opto-Isolator (2007, 6MB, 46 sec.)

“Opto-Isolator inverts the condition of spectatorship by exploring the questions:
“What if artworks could know how we were looking at them? And, given this
knowledge, how might they respond to us?” The sculpture presents a solitary
mechatronic blinking eye, at human scale, which responds to the gaze of visitors
with a variety of psychosocial eye-contact behaviors that are at once familiar and
unnerving. Among other forms of feedback, Opto-Isolator looks its viewer directly
in the eye; appears to intently study its viewer’s face; looks away coyly if it is stared
at for too long; and blinks precisely one second after its visitor blinks.”

By Golan Levin and Greg Baltus.

Martha Deed – <em>The Lost Shoe</em>

the lost shoe
The Lost Shoe (2010, 16MB, 4:35 min)

Martha Deed, one of our favourite people, & co-founder with
the much missed Millie Niss of the fantastic Sporkworld Microblog,
which we’ve raved about before & which we can’t recommend too
highly, has a paper publication coming out, a book of poems, for which
she created this chilling and beautifully made video “trailer”.

Watch the trailer then

Eyecode – Golan Levin

eyecode
Eyecode (2007, 7MB, 52 sec.)

“Eyecode is an interactive installation whose display is wholly constructed
from its own history of being viewed. By means of a hidden camera, the system
records and replays brief video clips of its viewers’ eyes. Each clip is articulated
by the duration between two of the viewer’s blinks. The unnerving result is a
typographic tapestry of recursive observation.”

By Golan Levin.

Annie Abrahams & Curt Cloninger -<em> Double Blind</em>

double blind
Double Blind (clip) ( 2010, 70MB, 5:38 min)

“Annie Abrahams (from the Living Room in Montpellier, France)
and Curt Cloninger (from Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center
in Asheville, North Carolina, US) repeatedly sang “love, love, love”
(a short excerpt from a pop song) as a kind of duet, in real
time/space and online.

In order to isolate them from their surroundings and make them
more attentive to the other, they were both blindfolded.
While singing they evolved and mutated the original song excerpt,
collaborating and communicating in a space/time of alterity.
The artists have never met each other in the flesh.

There was no set duration.
They sang until the last one of them decided to stop.
In both places a space was reserved for the live performance
and another for the video and audio projection.
A camera was fixed on each of their faces singing to each other.
This live video of both faces was projected both in the
Living Room space and in the Black Mountain College
Museum and Arts Center space.
The performance was also visible on the web at http://selfworld.net.”


Interesting and affecting convergence of the performative work
Curt Cloninger has been doing of late with the
strange, wonderful & categorisation denying oeuvre of Annie Abrahams.

We feature here only a tiny extract from the 4 hour plus performance
of Double Blind – the complete documentation will be on show
as part of Annie Abraham’s first UK solo show at HTTP gallery
in North London, in addition to new works and performances.
The opening is on Friday night & all are welcome – if you’re in
or near London it’ll be well worth getting along to.

Complete Double Blind documentation & links

Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT

jenny_holzer_programming
Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT (2009, 23MB, 2:40 min.)

Jenny Holzer discusses the programming of her LED sculptures
during the installation of the exhibition PROTECT PROTECT at
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

From Art:21

Vito Acconci #2

Borders
Advice (clip, 2006, 2MB, 58 secs)

Borders
Acconci Studio Presentation (2006, 36MB, 29:02 min)

More from the splendid Vito Acconci, this time from
his later architecture and design period.
One vid is a little lollipop -advice to the young-
extracted from a longer interview and profile on
designboom.com.
The second is a much more substantial
and utterly fascinating presentation given at the launch of
LAB magazine in 2006.
What an astonishing human being!

Wreck & Salvage – Fun with Muybridge

muybridge
Fun with Muybridge (2009, 18 MB, 1:30 min)

Conversations with Eadweard J. Muybridge.

By Wreck & Salvage – a package of three video producers:
Erik Nelson, Adam Quirk & Aaron Valdez

Music by Kevin Bewersdorf.