rock your body (2007, 31 MB, 4:45 min.)
by Brian Bress.
Category Archives: conceptual
Marc Garrett & Ruth Catlow – At Winter Equinox We Burn the Sun
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.
2 More from Lumière et Son
Zach Layton – microorganism studies
microorganism studies (2007, 14 MB, 5:05 min.)
Work from an experimental television center residency by Zach Layton.
Lumière et Son Bow Out
Checkout Art Fairs (2010, 8MB, 1:07 min.)
Blotting Paper (2010, 13MB, 1:06 min.)
I hadn’t realized that the splendid Lumière et Son project, which
we’ve raved about here before, was a time limited thing
but, sadly, yes & they’ve posted their last, which we repost here
above.
We’ve grabbed a few more, which we’ll post in the near future, but
do yourselves a favour and go & wallow in their site now…
Patrick Lichty #4
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.
Elodie Pong – ADN/ARN
Trailer for ADN/ARN (2003, 8 MB, 4:04 min.)
“ADN/ARN was an interactive installation addressed to one person at the time,
filmed with 8 surveillance cameras, in which each visitor was invited to confide
and then contractually sell a personal secret. The initial system took place in
Lausanne at the Centre d’Arts sc
Brian Bress – keep it in your pants
The Little Artists – Lick Yourselves
Lick Yourselves (2005, 64MB, 6:27 min, silent)
The Little Artists are a UK collaborative duo, most famous/notorious
for their re-renderings of iconic artworks in the childrens’ construction toy
LEGO.
This brief description doesn’t do them justice – their work is rich & complex
& they make hay, playfully but profoundly too, with all sorts of contemporary
obsessions – remix &appropriation, branding, celebrity & not least the idea of
artistry/creativity itself.
This video stems from their 2005 show based on the work of Mark Quinn, the casting-
his-head-out-of-his-own-frozen-blood guy, and the show featured them dressing
up as ice cream salespeople and flogging fruit flavour ice lolly replicas of
the Quinn piece.
The vid is a minimal, leisurely and ever so slightly disturbing account of
one of these slowly melting.
I must declare an interest – I wrote an essay for their new book, which, if
your appetite is whetted, you can get here.
Patrick Lichty Season – #3
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.