A Panopticon in Burnley (2007, 20.9MB, 1:45 min)
Great short by Giles Perkins about a piece of public art by
Tonkin Liu situated on a hillside outside Burnley, UK.
I love Giles’s Super 8 work (folk might remember
his catalogue of British seaside bathing huts here last year, don’t
know whether we’ve re-posted it yet, but we will,
gentle viewer, we will) & there’s an added bonus in the sound
of those beautiful Lancashire vowels – ‘uor ouwses’ – on the soundtrack.
Delicious!
Anarchy In The UK (2007, 45.4MB, 4:44 min)
Anarchy In The UK has been a bit of a theme of late here on dvblog.
Now, from the indispensable Rupert Howe comes this breathtaking version.
Not only is it extremely funny, with an off the meter chutzpah quotient,
(witness the animal terror in the eyes of the guys on the tube towards the end)
but like a lot of Rupert’s work it’s a kind of contemporary London travelogue
(of the best sort: hard edged, eyes wide open truthful & hence beautiful) too.
whiteboard #1 (2007, 21.2MB, 3:09 min)
Hmm..this might be controversial but it strikes me that Union Docs ,
an NYC based documentary arts collaborative are flirting with something
one might loosely call documentary formalism.
Well, I’m a sucker for formalism, the proviso of course
being it generates something I care about.
This does (although it seems to pushing the far boundary
of the ‘documentary’ category – I’d be interested in
UD’s thoughts about what constitutes this).
So, thinking going on…good! good!
Looks to be lots of other interesting stuff on their
site too.
Two more to come.
.
Treehouse Kit (excerpt) (2005, 2.3MB, 1 min.)
Excerpt from a single channel video installation and sculpture by Guy Ben-Ner.
“Treehouse Kit” consists of a large wooden tree created from recombined, generic furniture.
The sculpture is presented along with an instructional style video in which Ben-Ner
(in swim trunks and a huge beard, a cross between Robinson Crusoe and an archetypical Israeli settler) converts the pre-fab tree back into a rudimentary home.
Originally commissioned for the Israeli Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale 2005.
Open City (2007, 26.2 MB, 4:27 min)
Open City: Tools for Public Action was an exhibition and series of public programs
at Eyebeam that focus on the ingenuity of graffiti writers, artists, protesters,
pranksters & hackers attempting to reclaim the public realm.
Here’s work from 11 of the artists featured in the exhibition.
From the Graffiti Research Lab.
golden cage (2007, 5.5MB, 4:03 min)
western state: geoff mcfetridge (2007, 36.2MB, 9:04 min)
Geoff Mcfetridge has had his hands in some amazing things including the title sequences for Adaptation and Virgin Suicides as well as music videos for The Avalanches, Simian, and (the first video posted) Whitest Boy Alive. I came across this video on my local skate shop’s blog and was interested to find out more about the creator and stumbled across the incredibly interesting series Western State put on by Coudal Partners. The second video posted “examines Geoff Mcfetridge, his work and his moustache.” I have put the videos in this order because this is the way I viewed them and I found it was fun to watch the artist’s work and then take the time to get to know more about him. Things seem to tie themselves together nicely that way.
Whitest Boy Alive
from star w (2005, 3.1MB, 1:40 min.)
watched wire (2006, 6.1MB, 2:15 min)
Compelling sound stuff from two different sources.
First a piece from projectsinge.net,
a kind of feedback carillon & the movement that
it engenders/engenders it totally absorbing –
comedic, touching, strange.
Secondly, work by Alan Sondheim, who needs
no introduction here. More delicate & austere
than the Larsener piece, it provides a sharp &
fascinating contrast in the, one would have hitherto
thought, relatively easily exhausted, genre of
“work-made-by-having-microphones-or
-other-devices-attached-to-one’s-body.”
Messa di Voce (2003, 12.3MB, 2:40 min)
Messa di Voce (Ital., “placing the voice”) is an audiovisual performance
in which the speech, shouts and songs produced by two abstract vocalists are
radically augmented in real-time by custom interactive visualization software.
by Golan Levin & Zach Lieberman.
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.