Device Activated (2011, 10MB, 1:54 min)
And after Tuesday’s ad here’s another piece of personal work
from Morrisa Maltz and it’s simply glorious.
I’m tempted to say it feels like restoration comedy on some
sort of mind-altering compound but it’s much, much weirder,
more beautiful & haunting than that.
Keep ’em coming Morrisa!
We’ll show them as long as you let us!
‘Flock’ in Liverpool (2008, 152MB, 2:44 min)
How many times do you read artists’ descriptions of their own work
and think ‘naaaaa…’ totally failing to recognise their stated ambitions
in what appears to you to be, at best, somewhat pedestrian and at
worst, a total disconnect from what they write.
This is the complete opposite of that, utterly living up to the makers’
stated intentions, and an absolute spine tingler to watch even through
the distance of video documentation.
Check out the KMA site for a complete description of the piece,
an ‘interactive light installation’ based around Swan Lake,
but not until you’ve watched this beautiful bit of documentary.
Particularly touching is the genuine joy in participation it evokes.
Very hard to pull off and very moving to see.
I Hate Mozart [excerpt] (2006, 11MB, 4:03 min)
Excerpt from the 2006 production of Bernhard Lang’s opera
I Hate Mozart written for the Viennese Mozart Year festivities
of that year.
It’s interesting in a number of ways. Lang’s musical language is based upon the
loop, but loops treated within a fairly hardcore art music environment.
Sounds like a recipe for pretension or disaster. Strangely it’s neither,
but most compelling.
Secondly, the piece is that rare beast, too often promised and so rarely
delivered, a genuinely comic opera and all the more impressive for being
cast in an apparently recalcitrant & unforgiving musical language
for such a purpose.
Hats off, Mr Lang, hats off.
Frank Talking #3 (2010, 278MB, 10:01 min)
Latest instalment in Edward Picot’s Dr Hairy saga which feels like
a weird amalgam of Oliver Postgate, soap and Carry On.
It’s interesting to observe how bold, deft & convincing Picot has become with the lo-fi
techniques he deploys in these and, furthermore, how engaging the actual
narrative is.
Great stuff!
Over The Edge (2010, 49MB, 1:37 min)
Alan Dojoji Pushes Fau Ferdinand in the Water because
She’s not Paying Him any ATTENTION!
so the story will be about I’m trying DESPERATELY TO GET YOUR ATTENTION,
but you’re ignoring me because you’re away or sleeping or not watching the
terrific goings-on in OpenSim so I sneak up on you (because you’re not
looking) and push you into the water which is very difficult because
pushing avatars requires the greatest skill, making sure that the pusher
is right behind the pushee, otherwise the pushee escapes, so you’re pushed
into the water and just as you’re falling you wake up and type “UOY” which
can only mean it’s a backwards world, and then we’re both in the water and
I’m dancing furiously and AGAIN YOU’RE PAYING NO ATTENTION!
Alan Sondheim
Mutant #2 (2010, 64MB, 4:04 min)
Annie Abrahams is a singular and compelling voice, her singularity
ironically copper-bottomed by her willingness to embrace the network
& collaboration thereon fearlessly, inquisitively and to always
striking effect. This piece is described as a video arising out of
the second session of a
“Telematic Performance / Experiment investigating communication and
relational dynamics in a dispersed group.”
and it’s bewitching.
The pages documenting it bear the motto
“Communication is never clean, smooth and transparent”
True – and to turn that truth into crystalline & affecting art is a little miracle.
Ethernet Orchestra on FBi Radio (2010, 92MB, 11:48 min)
More from the splendid Ethernet Orchestra with:
in Sydney, Australia – Roger Mills (Processed Trumpets), Bukhchuluun Ganburged (Mongolian Horse fiddle and throat singing) and Yavuz Uydu (Turkish Oud and Bendir)
in Londrina, Brazil – Chris Vine (Guitar)
and in Braunschweig, Germany – Martin Slawig (Laptop Electronics and Max/MSP processing).
All of it great, though I’m particularly a sucker for the throat singing.
Nuit blanches 2010 – DIEZ and paradigme (2010, 41 MB, 1:55 min.)
Collaboration of Video mapping, light and sound installation, done for
Nuit blanches 2010 Metz.
Audio Visual design by paradigme.
Scenography and video mapping by DIEZ.
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.
Christmas in Hollis (1987, 32MB, 4:02 min)
This vid is probably old news to a lot of you but it
passed me by completely in 87 (and the many times
too, apparently, it has since re-emerged on soundtracks &c.
I should get out more).
I love it. It makes me grin so wide I’m afraid my
head will fall off. Plus it’s seasonal.
This is our last post for 2010 so we’ll wish all of
you the happiest of holiday seasons & we’ll resume
posting on Jan 3rd.