Character 3/3 – Iris (2012, 67MB, 1:20 min)
Last one of three and all a pleasure to post and to view.
Here’s to lots more work from Morrisa.
Category Archives: conceptual
self.detach – decomposing identities
self.detach (2008, 13MB, 2:24 min.)
‘self.detach is a dynamic Object, which adopts a critical position
towards the celebration of the ego on the internet by dissolving
self-portraying pictures into coloured particles.’
A project by Tim Horntrich and Jens Wunderling.
Morrisa Maltz – Character 2/3 – Inverted Rose
Character 2/3 – Inverted Rose (2012, 43MB, 55 secs)
2nd in the series of 3, the first of which we posted last week.
I think these are lovely and haunting and I’m impressed by Morrisa
Maltz’s diligence and imagination.
(I love what she does with sound, too)
Is it just me or do these slightly conjure Isadora Duncan for anyone else?
Last one on Friday.
Richard Haley – Extending a Rain Puddle’s Reach By 16 Inches
Puddle Extension (2007, 5MB, 6:42 min.)
Masonite, masking tape, and plastic sheeting device
designed to extend a rain puddle’s reach by 16 inches.
By Richard Haley.
In the realm of ‘A Series of Practical Performances In The Wilderness’
by Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir. (1) (2)
Morrisa Maltz – Character 1/3 (Infinite Loop)
Character 1/3 [Infinite Loop] (2012, 130MB, 1:07 min)
I love Morrisa Maltz’s work. I particularly relish the way
she doesn’t rest on her laurels but pushes herself ever on to new
and (over-used word in the arts but, I think, apposite here)
fearless ways of thinking about and making things.
This is the first of three pieces best described, literally,
as moving pictures.
Tremendous!
Adam Mufti – Garden Cities of the Future
Adam Mufti – Garden Cities of the Future (2008, 53MB, 7:19)
Remarkable, hypnotic work from the incredibly talented Adam Mufti.
Part meditation on modern life, part perhaps futuristic foreboding,
this piece sort of leaves me speechless, though I fear a lack of
editorializing might portray lukewarm feelings.
It’s really just that I’d rather a viewer experience this on his/her own.
I thought I’d watched a 3 minute piece – only when posting this did
I discover the actual runtime is more than double what it seems.
In this case, that’s exceptional.
The video also features the voice of London actress Juliet Rylance.
The whole thing, the composition, the editing, all of it: truly stunning,
took my breath away. Find a quiet spot and enjoy.
Lucy Mills – Sunday Afternoon Narcissism
Sunday Afternoon Narcissism (2012, 190MB, 2:46 min)
Hypnotic and disorientating chunk of enchantment from London artist
Lucy Mills.
Only one cavil and that’s the title – the self-deprecation involved might
serve to camouflage the actual richness of this piece, at least from the
casual viewer*.
Let’s be optimistic and assume careful viewing, which work of
this quality certainly merits.
* Although, on reflection, the ‘Sunday Afternoon’ also suggests a certain
dreamy languor quite in keeping with just how gently ravishing it all is.
Alan Sondheim – Disappearing Body
Disappearing Body (2012, 44MB, 1:02min loop)
Time marches on but some things don’t change and one of these is
our unbounded admiration here for the work of Alan Sondheim.
This is a perhaps a lollipop in comparison to some of his work but
it is, as always, rich and beautiful and lodges both in the conscious
mind and in our dreams.
Says Sondheim:
Mark Esper’s Two-Tone Enlightenment work forms the basis
of this short video. The screen presents shadows as positive,
not negative; infrared light forms the projection source
which is read and interpreted by revolving LEDs.
The body disappears. In the video, I imitated the effect
using video echo in an attempt to erase the body almost
entirely. Mark’s piece is brilliant, and the video is a
byproduct; I take advantage of the illumination to create
a somewhat clumsy series of movements.
Thus the mechanical is made virtual, and the virtual made
mechanical; such reversals form the core of theory povera.
The One That Got Away – Marisa Olson
The One That Got Away (2005, 19MB, 9:02 min.)
In the Fall of 2004,Marisa Olson gained worldwide attention
while training to audition for American Idol
Jeremy Bailey – Transhuman Dance Recital #1
Transhuman Dance Recital #1 (2008, 56MB, 6:30 min.)
“If Jeff Koons had fallen for the Microsoft Help Paperclip rather than
vacuum cleaners or La Cicciolina, presumably the result would have
looked a lot like: ”The Jeremy Bailey Show”.
Says Jeremy Bailey: “From now on I dedicate myself to finding better
ways for humans to dance”
Barney Doodlebug at i-Kast 2012
iKast 2012 (2012, 70MB, 3:23min)
iKast voodoodoodles (2012, 89MB, 2:35min)
voodoo 1 (2012, 362MB, 9:58min)
Here’s some more gripping work from Michael Barnes-Wynters a.k.a Barney Doodlebug
who previously opened my eyes to a thriving live arts scene in Manchester, UK.
Featured here are two videos of a new piece by Michael which figured in i-Kast,
“a live intervention transmission for www.artplayer.tv with artists roney fraser-munroe,
naomi kashiwagi and michael barnes-wynters” in May of this year.
The first video is an excellent short documentary overview of the event
with interviews with key figures.
Michael is going to be running an event for 15-25 year olds as part of the season
in the new Tate Modern space “The Tanks” on Thursday 23 August.
Video Haiku: Four Frame Dance Project
Video Haiku – Four Frame Dance Project: Megan Mayer (2008, 22.4MB, 3:38)
Second in a series of four frame dance videos from
Video Haiku in 2008.
Lovely, inspiring, and fun.
Next week, some more recent work by Kevin Obsatz, the person behind this.
Netbehaviour Mailing List Fractal Excerpt
Netbehaviour Mailing List Fractal [Excerpt] (2012, 5MB, 59 secs)
From Claude Heiland-Allen:
Seven years of archives for this mailing list filtered down
to the most often occurring 1000 words of 4 letters or more,
in an infinite fractal zoom – each word is made up of the
words that most likely follow it.
We love the Netbehaviour list & this, splendid & bonkers both, does just
what it says on the tin with that excellent institution – we’ve posted
the minute long version here but if that whets your appetite for more
there’s an hour long version at archive.org.
Christian Marc Schmidt – 2 Movies
Driving (2006, 6MB, 4:39 min.)
Loop (2006, 11.8MB, 7:49 min.)
Two 2006 movies from Christian Marc Schmidt’s adaptive landscapes
sequence of work.
Check out the link above for Schmidt’s background notes on the pieces.
I’ll just observe that they are not alone in recent work featured here
in belonging to a category of work that could be called gorgeous formalism.
via Aram Bartholl – Magnotta SpeedShow
Magnotta SpeedShow (2012, 20.4, 3:07 min)
Magnotta SpeedShow – A vanity surf performance.
“One week after Magnotta got caught we present a vanity surf performance at the exact same Internetcafe in Berlin where Magnotta was arrested while vanity surfing! Be invited to join and vanity surf yourself!”
“Killing is bad, mailing bodyparts is worse, vanity surfing (while getting caught) is cool!”
“Internet cafes are not just vaguely unglamorous places for ethnic minorities and communications challenged, they do have a genuinely bad reputation.” [Olia Lialina – ‘Still There’] Where else a social network killer can be caught? Of course in the Internet cafe!”
[shot and edited(!) on a smart phone ]
Internetcafe Helin, Karl-Marx-Straße 156, Berlin
Tuesday 12th of June, 2012, 8-10 pm
by Constant Dullaart, CuratingYoutube, Olia Lialina & Aram Bartholl
PSST! Pass it on…
DRIFT SLICYCLE POPPED! (2007, 11MB, 1:59)
LOQUACIOUS EYESICLE WILD-BITES (2007, 14.9MB, 2:34)
PSST gets designers, animators, and directors together for
collaborative film projects every year. Their main concern
is process, which they explain comes from a fusion of the
Dadaist game Exquisite Corpse and the sometimes childhood
game, Telephone.
Whatever their theory, their annual collections are stellar.
Lior Shvil – The Kosher Butcher
The Kosher Butcher (2010, 84MB, 8:56 min.)
“.. Israeli provocateur Lior Shvil presented “The Kosher Butcher,” a darkly humorous commentary on Mideast politics in which he portrays a meatpacking Sweeney Todd.”
June Pak
June Pak – double (2002, 892 KB, 0:30)
June Pak’s work is innovative and breathtaking.
In double, one character disrupts the other’s stability
by changing the television channel but is nevertheless
oblivious to this effect. Pak says, “This exchange
between the two suggests the disjunction within
oneself caused by technology and boredom.”
Vera Brunner-Sung
Vera Brunner-Sung – untitled (2006, 2.5MB, 1:10)
Vera Brunner-Sung – Longshore (2004, 9.9MB, 4:34)
Two short films from Vera Brunner-Sung, made respectively
on 16mm and super 8, both exploring boundaries of privacy
and community, the understanding of memory and place.
Shannon Noble – Finger Bolts
Finger Bolts (2005, 1.9MB, 1:13 min.)
Shannon Noble, an extremely technically accomplished
artist, made this elegant short video in 2005 from the simple, well-timed,
juxtaposition of moving images and sounds.
He’s still making stuff – he’s quite strangely
secretive about his work and quite often as soon
as it’s posted somewhere it disappears again.
A shame – he’s consistently great.
Amy Carpenter – Why Not?
Amy Carpenter – Why Not? (2006, 8.4MB, 2:56)
In thinking back on the people that inspired me when
video online first began to really take hold of everyone,
I remembered Amy Carpenter’s Welcome to Amyville.
This little piece from a few years ago always stuck with me.
It felt so innovative at the time and still really outshines
many similar works to have come after it.
Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe #1 (NK, 2.69MB, 1:43 min)
Pierre Huyghe #2 (NK, 1.59MB, 3:03 min)
Pierre Huyghe #3 (NK, 2.33MB, 1:29 min)
Pierre Huyghe #4 (NK, 2.29MB, 1:30 min)
Four short videos by the often vexing, occasionally brilliant, Pierre Huyghe
from the website of the PBS Art in the 21st Century series.
3 from John Murphy
Hanging Around (2008, 14.7MB, 1:35 min)
Cuckoo Land (2008, 28.6MB, 3:03 min)
2008 work from John Murphy, whose work we’ve featured here before.
Three videos which differ sharply in tone and which despite
a apparent simplicity of construction resonate long afterwards.
Case study: Cuckoo Land.
* found footage
**the good old forwards/backwards routine
still amusing/engaging enough in this case to hold one’s attention, but
***the muzak Grieg piano concerto
on the way back seemed a bit like over-egging it at first but
I find it speaks to me here more than the rather crude formal
device might warrant.
Partly this is due to the setting. Each piece gains in depth from its
association with the others, but I wonder also whether
it isn’t a sign of great artistic confidence on Murphy’s part:
“Here’s what I did – make of it what you will!”
Some Versions of Pastoral
Extended Camera (2005, 5.5MB, 2:19 min.)
Night Performance #3 (2005, 12.1MB, 7:54 min.)
In May 2005 Garrett Lynch & co-conspirators blagged some
money from Arts Council England to spend a weekend at a
country house playing with video.
The result is documented on this great site.
At their best these vids do absolutely match up to the
funding application rhetoric. They combine performance,
technology & layer upon layer of knowingness to produce results
which had me, at least, open mouthed with admiration.
Wonderful!
More from Duncan Speakman
The Delicate Museum – What Everyone Else Was Talking About (2006, 13MB, 1:21)
The Delicate Museum – A Suggestive Manifesto (2006, 9.7MB, 1:32)
Two more breaths of fresh air from 2006 and The Delicate Museum,
also known as Duncan, formerly of 29fragiledays.
Said before, I’ll say it again: such beauty in the small things.
Curt Cloninger & A Bill Miller – sliveRider
sliveRider (2012, 316MB, 5:26 min)
From: Curt Cloninger
To: Michael Szpakowski
Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2012 4:21 PM
A video collaboration between A. Bill Miller and Curt Cloninger.
Audio by Low. Bill and Curt swapped files back and forth until the
person receiving the file felt it was finished. Links to the video
files in progress are included.
I’ve been reading Deleuze on Leibniz about the Baroque fold, and
this project seems like we were folding video. Like cooking, folding
in ingredients. The trace of each iteration is discernible, baked
into the final fold. Not so much cutting, fading, layering, moshing,
or even remixing (although there is some “databending”).
Hope you are doing well over there,
Curt
On Sunday, May 20, 2012, Michael Szpakowski wrote:
This is quite, quite enchanting.
Do either of you have any objection to me doing a DVblog post on it?
thanks!
Michael
At 8:28 AM -0400 5/20/12,
a bill miller wrote:
Fine with me!
bill
Thanks Michael,
Yes, please do.
Best,
Curt
More from Diana Brighouse
Lior Shvil – Rough Cut
Rough Cut (2007, 54MB, 4 min.)
Born in 1971 in Tel Aviv, Lior Shvil currently lives in New York and recently attended Columbia University’s School of the Arts MFA program.
Shvil works primarily in video, installation and sculpture. His works are multi-layered, both poetic and critical; they tap into collective memory (cultural, mythical, historical), and are inspired by television, cinema and story telling.
Shvil received his B.A. from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. He has had a solo shows at the Herzliya Museum of Art and the Heder Gallery in Israel. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Haifa Museum of Art in Israel, Milliken Gallery in Stockholm, The 7th International Istanbul Biennial, and NGBK Gallery in Berlin. Shvil won the Samuel Givon Prize for Young Artists, awarded by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, as well as the Israel-America Fund for Culture, Israel. – See more at: givon art gallery.
ZDEN – Mindfuck
mindfuck (2001, 30MB, 3:26 min)
Mindfuck, a semi-automatic city psychosis.
Made in 2001! by ZDEN.
Ant Farm – Media Burn
Media Burn by Ant Farm (1975, 202MB, 25:46)
Infamous July 4, 1975 “pseudo-event” featuring a
speech by “JFK Jr.” and a 1959 Cadillac turned wacky
crash test car through a wall of burning television sets,
produced by video artists and activist collective Ant Farm.
The first four and a half minutes of this particular video
feature actual news coverage about the event.
The rest is the full speech and crash. Inspiration.
Video via the Media Burn archive.
Brody Condon – Performance Modifications
Death Animations (2007, 22 MB, 2:58 min.)
“‘Death Animations’ by Brody Condon.
Closely linked to his past process of modification of existing computer games,
as well as performative events with medieval re-enactment and fantasy live
action role playing subcultures, the work is a re-creation in medieval fantasy costume of Bruce Nauman.
One Step Ahead
One Step Ahead – Stefan Nadelman (2004, 9MB, 4:07)
Stefan Nadelman is Tourist Pictures, and since I like
his older stuff just as much (or more than) the new,
I’m posting this Nike-commissioned piece from a few years ago.
Nathaniel Stern & Scott Kildall – Tweets in Space
Tweets in Space (2012, 52MB, 2:27 min)
Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern of Wikipedia Art return with another
project both odd, lyrical and utopian.
“Tweets in Space” will beam Twitter discussions from participants worldwide
towards GJ667Cc: a planet 22 light years away that apparently might support
earth-like life.
Anyone can take part, simply by adding #tweetsinspace to their tweets during
two performance times in September, when Stern and Kildall will be doing live
projections at the International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico,
and boldly tweeting where none have tweeted before.
They say:
“This differs from every past alien transmission in that it is not only
a public performance, but also performs a public: it is a real-time
conversation between hopeful peers sending their thoughts to everywhere
and nowhere.
Our soon-to-be alien friends will receive unmediated thoughts and responses
about politics, philosophy, pop culture, dinner, dancing cats and everything
in between.
By engaging the millions of voices in the Twitterverse and dispatching them
into the larger Universe, “Tweets in Space” activates a potent discussion
about communication and life that traverses beyond our borders or understanding.
It promises more than could ever be delivered.”
David Phillips and Paul Rowley
Phillips & Rowley – latent heat (2004, 7.7MB, 3:25)
Phillips & Rowley – personal effort (2004, 2.1MB, 1:41)
Lovely, engaging work from this talented duo, originally
from Dublin and Memphis respectively. These two pieces
showcase some earlier work, but their later work is equally
enchanting. I’m particularly fond of their installation work,
but we’ll save that for another day.
Curt Cloninger: Again (I Wish I Was A Fool For You)
Again (I Wish I Was A Fool For You): 9:23-9:26 pm (2012, 70MB, 2:27 min)
Again (I Wish I Was A Fool For You): 10:08-10:10 pm (2012, 64MB, 2:33 min)
I love (and increasingly so) Curt Cloninger’s work.
The wonderful series of gif/flash/loop/glitch/kitchen sink audio visual poems on his site, his forays into
datamoshing and his series of live performative/endurance pieces
which, sprouting like green shoots from a rather austere central
European branch manage to be filled with light and nuance and a
-how shall I put it -… a joy which is earned, which is not trivial,
and to which we are invited and which arises out of a heightened sense
of ourselves and of others as embodied beings and of our necessary interconnections…
Here’s Curt’s account of a recent piece, a collaboration with his wife Julie,
for which we post two pieces of documentation. (I don’t know whether Curt sees
them as simply that. I think they are quite lovely in themselves – certainly the video
piece derived from Curt and Annie Abraham’s telematic collab Double Blind,
featured here previously certainly has artistic legs of its own and perhaps should
be taken as something of a precedent.)
Anyway, over to you Curt:
“A 3 Hour performance by Curt and Julie Cloninger. Julie is pre-recorded
on video singing for ten minutes along with Curt playing Rhodes piano.
Her video and audio are then projected and looped in the performance space
while Curt sings and plays guitar live. Both are blindfolded.
A duet across time. The repeated excerpt is from the Richard and
Linda Thompson song “For Shame of Doing Wrong.
Performed at the Black Mountain College campus during the 2012 “reHappening festival”.
Man With a Movie Camera – Perry Bard
Man With a Movie Camera (Trailer) (1929-2007, 6MB, 2:17 min.)
“Man With a Movie Camera is a participatory video shot by people around the world
who are invited to record video according to the original script of Vertov’s Man With
A Movie Camera and submit it to a website which will archive, sequence and deliver
it. When the work streams your contribution becomes part of a worldwide montage,
in Vertov’s terms the ‘decoding of life as it is’.
Project by Perry Bard.
Morrisa Maltz – Two New Movies
I Don’t Know That Would You Like to Search the Web for it? (2012, 96MB, 38 secs)
Image White/Red (2012, 12MB, 35 sec loop)
Another DVblog favourite today, I’m glad to say.
Morrisa Maltz, returning to the world of art from her foray
into commerce (but that so elegant and sharply done), presents
us with two new vids, mysterious and lovely both; one that
feel ecstatic and the other with, perhaps, a darker note, I think.
Anyway, partly because I think it’s enlightening and partly because, dammit,
I can, I reproduce below an edited verison of an exchange
Morrisa and I had about these.
MM:
…think I’m moving in a bit of a different direction…I’m working
on a few pieces that are much shorter and meant to loop- sorts of images
that function more as paintings and could possibly fit in sculptures
or present themselves framed on a wall… I’m not sure if those would
work for DVblog, but I’m attaching two pieces that function in that way,
one that is similar to old pieces a bit and one that is entirely meant
to loop and function as more of an “image” than a video……..
I’m really trying to get back in the groove after all the Mofone excitement
so no worries if you don’t like these pieces and don’t want to write
about them or want to write something not so great about them…
MJS:
I think they’re both great & I’d love to do a post about them.
For me change is a sign of life. Nothing depresses me more than the all
too frequent art school advice to find a “thing” and to keep doing it.
Imagine Picasso with this philosophy…
Anyway – although they are different you have very distinctive fingerprints 🙂
MM:
I think that change is extremely important for an artist , and it’s …
unfortunate that artists quite often get pegged into one way of making
things and continue to work in that vein- that seems to contradict
the whole idea of an artist for me…
Lisa Cianci
okay, not okay (2006, 2.53MB, 4:03 min)
year before last (2006, 1.98MB, 3:43 min)
I admire this work in its refusal to cosy.
I think it’s quite brave, in a medium where
startling visual effects are so easily realisable,
so little needing to be worked for, to make something
( & not just a work but a whole series)
that demands such careful listening
& hands out so few visual lollipops.
Lisa’s site.
Harrell Fletcher – Blot Out The Sun
Harrell Fletcher – Blot Out The Sun (2002, 46.7MB, 5:32)
Harrell Fletcher’s 2002 unconventional remake of Ulysses.
A garage in central Portland, Oregon is the setting for this
conceptual re-working of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The garage
owner, Jay, mechanics and neighborhood denizens serve as
narrators, reading lines from the novel that focus on death,
love, social inequality and the relationship between individuals
and the universe.
A five minute clip from the 22-minute piece featured in the
2004 Whitney Biennial
Peter Scott – Death was the West
Death was the West (2012, 221MB, 5:19 min)
A restrained, austere, smart and at the same time gripping piece from
Essex, UK, film-maker Peter Scott, still in his final months at art school.
I understand it to be a by product of a work in progress but it
has an integrity and presence entirely of its own.
I look forward to more.
Eating Disorder- Arzu Ozkal Telhan
‘My practice can be grouped under the interpretation of body and its
relationship to its environment. I make attempts to emancipate the body
from social and cultural norms and try to suggest ways to distance one from
the limits imposed on the society by totalitarian establishments.’
by Arzu Ozkal Telhan.
2 from Patrick Lichty
Explaining Conceptual Art to Bizarro (2012, 89MB, 1:36 min)
Danger Music #17 by Dick Higgins (2012, 19MB, 45 secs)
And to celebrate our resurrection (for which heartfelt thanks go to James Morris), two newish pieces from the redoubtable (I write so many of these things a nagging doubt enters my mind as to whether I’ve perhaps called Patrick redoubtable before, once, twice…more? But leave it – redoubtable he is) Patrick Lichty.
Both pieces take place in DC Universe Online, about which I know nothing so I won’t even begin to show myself up by attempting to expand, and both reference recent art history – one Beuys explaining pictures to a dead hare and the other Dick Higgins’s Danger Music.
Both are utterly splendid.
Alan Sondheim – What Remains
what remains (2007, 19.7MB, 1:26 min.)
We need no excuse here to feature more of Alan Sondheim’s singular & remarkable oeuvre.
This one caused a bit of a debate on Netbehaviour in 2007 -some baulked, fearing it to be images
of rending, tearing of the body. Alan says not at all, it’s tantric/ecstatic.
The singer is Alan’s wife Azure Carter.
When he originally posted it, it came with this poem (a sonnet?):
what remains
because of the faces and powers among our second lives
and third and others in-between the others; because of
swollen faces thinned back to pages bones and shadowed flesh
that nothing stays what was simple and illusion
and then poetics rounds and fills the world
among lost pages and inscriptions freed
from every symbol and symbols freed and world;
the less are said the farther truth transcends
because of truths and songs and lights and place
where bodies turn; because of bodies churned and stretched
among beams of those lights and those songs; those truths
nothing stays back nothing; valleys fill with jostled things
and things churn symbols; the world
fills silence; skies get dark kiss; welkin
Blurring Fat by Ajit Anthony Prem
Blurring Fat (2006, 20MB, 5:15 min.)
Podcast from Ajit @ squigglebooth
Her – Kelly Cook, Him/Writer/Director – Ajit Anthony Prem.
Superb !
Joan Healy: Deranged, but in a Good Way
Sithair (2007, 6.4MB, 1:49 min)
Cyber Skin (2007, 38.8MB, 3:05 min)
Meat Market (2007, 39.6MB, 7:14 min)
I was lucky enough to see young Irish artist Joan Healy
present her work at a 2008 DATA event in Dublin.
It was strange.
First off, consciously or not, she has this innocent
butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth demeanour and then she
shows this.. er..stuff
Documented here, in ascending order of weirdness, there’s a performance piece
where she transforms her hair into a musical instrument,
a piece where she satirises the current bio-art fashion by
getting into a box, exposing some of her back (the installation
claims this is especially grown cyber-skin)
& then attempting to draw to screen the patterns the punters trace
out on her.
Last is ..well.. (vegans avert your eyes), electronically assisted dancing meat
– you know.. chops.. steaks.. & the like..
After she gave her talk I said to her I thought her work was ‘utterly deranged’
She smiled sweetly and said she would take it as a compliment.
It was.
Paul Slocum – Time Lapse Homepage
Time Lapse Homepage (2003, 18.4 MB, 55 sec.)
‘Paul Slocum‘s Time-Lapse Homepage (2003) signifies through accretion.
This high-definition video is composed of 1,000 computer screenshots
of his homepage. Complete with an upbeat score that could easily be
a corporate jingle to promote a new technology, the stills display the
building, erosion, and occasional complete overhaul of an ever-evolving
Web site. This work provides a layered historical record of something
we tend to see only in discrete units-the appearance of a homepage on
any given day-while attempting to think through Web design in the
language of earlier time-based media.’
Daniel Liss – Sixth Map
Sixth Map (2006, 17.3MB, 3.44 min.)
When filmmaker/videoblogger Daniel Liss challenged himself to make 7 videos in 7 days,
he also challenged his online audience to collaborate with him in the process.
His daily assignments came from viewers of his videoblog who determined
where, about what and how he should make each video.
Each day, they posted an assignment and each day Daniel posted a video in response.
Then came praise and criticism in the comments of each day’s videoblog post.
The process took him miles from home, he told personal stories, invented new narratives,
and played more than a few tricks on his guiding/goading audience.
For this video he was given the assignment,
“Today, you are a local. Trick us into believing that you are a local.
Tell us a story about your history.”
By Mica
Jeremy D. Slater
Jeremy D. Slater – Manic Chinatown Bicycle (2007, 15.6MB, 2:01)
Jeremy D. Slater – Kanjiscroll (2007, 11.1MB, 0:41)
Two travel videos – albeit different sorts of it –
from Jeremy Slater, who primarily works in sound.
But I like his video work – minimal, often observational
in one way or another – so here are two samples.
Amelia Winger-Bearskin – State of Things
Amelia Winger-Bearskin – State of Things (2007, 19.9MB, 8:58)
Amelia Winger-Bearskin makes fun, funky performance pieces
and has a couple on her website worth viewing.
This is my favorite piece from her Chroma Key series.
Try swearing for nine minutes straight and see
how successful you are.
Two from Blip Boutique
Blip Boutique – Not In Love (2007, 30.2MB, 1:28)
Blip Boutique – 24 in 60: hollywood (2007, 18.8MB, 1:14)
Two shorts from 2007, from Blip Boutique,
makers of fine viral, art, and music videos
Woody Allen/Nathaniel Stern
at interval (1977/2006, 24.3MB, 13:22 min)
Early work from the redoubtable Nathaniel Stern where he reworked,
in the most curious of ways, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.
Interesting that although the working method here seems
almost diametrically opposed to the hands on, performative
approach found in his odys series here too is that same
sense of the fragility & vulnerability of human beings and their
bodies & psyches & of the unreliability of the language we use
to try & make what we want to happen & to relate or lie about what did .
ZDEN – emptyspaces
emptyspaces (2000, 31MB, 2:26 min)
Zdeno Hlinka aka ZDEN.
A multimedia artist from Slovakia who’s been a pioneer in
working with real-time and visual mixing.
Dark Continents 1 – Tyler Coburn
Dark Continents 1 (2007, 51 MB, 2:34 min.)
Video artist and animator Tyler Coburn‘s self conscious and rough use
of digital techniques presents a compelling parallel to Hollywood’s continual
and rapid movement toward the fantastically “real”.
Paul Rodriguez – the Mean Reds
Mean Reds (2007, 11.6MB, 1:48 min)
Artist & filmmaker Paul Rodriguez made this rather good
(I particularly like the collage plus the loopy/scratchy business
towards the very end where he collages/edits the sound too)
music video in 2007.
He said:
‘I was planning on shooting my friends for a
documentary. Magically the Mean Reds were also
playing, so I decided to shoot them as well.
Months went by with me sitting on this footage.
Then I found my self printing out frames,
and doing collage on individual frames.’
Duncan Speakman – Is Life Boring?
Duncan Speakman – Is Life Boring? (2005, 5.3MB, 1:17 min.)
From Duncan Speakman (yes, his real name) and the now abandoned 29fragiledays.
Duncan moved onto the less populated Delicate Museum, but I enjoy his older work much more (maybe because there is simply more of it?).
No contrived voice-overs (at least not at first), I’m also given enough time to meditate on the video.
Sometimes short is too short.
This is one of the best pieces from his previous incarnation.
Anri Sala – Time After Time
Time After Time (2003, 45.5MB, 5:39 min)
I was initially rather mystified by the vogue in UK galleries for
the work of Albanian artist Anri Sala but after a while the penny
dropped.
The courage to embrace the poetry of detail, of stillness,
apparent lack of incident & furthermore to trust
one’s viewers to accompany one to that place…
Elegant, sad, lugubrious & also, I think, much more crafted
than first meets the eye.
Great.
Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett –Festival of Money
Festival of Money (2012, 111MB, 8:06 min)
Amusing & depressing both, because it is so spot on, a lovely bit of
satire from Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield fame.
Most artists, of course, are from the 99%…this is a timely reminder of
where our interests lie and don’t lie…
Dan Canyon
Quilts Never Sleep (short version) (2007, 20.9MB, 3:07 min)
Two very different but attractive & telling pieces from Dan Canyon.
The first was part of a show of – you guessed it – quilts in London in 2006,
about which read more here.
The second could’ve been made for dvblog, well, at least for me, as I’m a fool
for all things turntablist, & features the splendidly monickered Mickey Morphingaz.
Glimpse of the Garden
Marie Menken – Glimpse of the Garden (1957, 40MB, 5:04)
Marie Menken, avant-garde filmmaker of the 1940s, 50s,
and 60s – in addition to being the inspiration for
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a Warhol
superstar – made inspirational work from a time we seem
to overlook too much today. The garden here belongs
to one of her husband’s former male lovers, and while
Menken was often criticized for being quaint in her displays,
her style is an obviously feminine one that hides much
deeper meaning in ordinary but stunning visuals.
Cory Arcangel – Urbandale
Urbandale (2000, 43MB, 7:30 min.)
“Urbandale”, an ASCII/ANSI movie by Cory Arcangel.
“Filmed at Urbandale Plaza in the eastern suburbs of Buffalo N.Y.,
“urbandale” is a study of America’s suburban sprawl stripped to its barest
essentials and void of unnecessary contemporary cultural influence. This
film captures the sly, bland smile strip plazas cast at modern culture.
The film, rendered in text, focuses on the repetitive motion of food
stuffs being cooked in the lobby of a discount department store.”
“Urbandale” was a 2000 commission of New_Radio_and_Performing_Arts for it’s Turbulence project.
PS
This is a mp4 version of the original urbandalePNG video. (quality of the video has been degraded)