Lucia Nimcova – Exercise (2007, 40.5MB, 6:03)
Outrageously funny video from 2007 by Slovakian artist
Lucia Nimcova.
I’m pretty sure not being able to understand
the language makes this that much more
endearing and amusing.
Category Archives: conceptual
John Cage – 4:33
John Cage – 4:33 (2004, 47MB, 9:23 min)
Wonderful video of the BBC Symphony Orchestra under
Lawrence Foster giving a performance of John Cage’s
notorious/ provocative/seminal/epoch-making 4:33.
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
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.”
This is their fundraising video – please consider making a donation to make the
project happen and also publicise and share it on lists, facebook, twitter, etc.
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.
Ben Pranger – my life is not a happening
my life is not a happening (2007, 17.3MB, 1:31 min)
I really like this genre of physical theatre/dance/happening/what-you-will
put through the video mangler (apparently jitter does its stuff here)
& the splendidly named Ben Pranger & his accomplices
carry it off rather nicely.
I gather this piece arose out of some workshops in 2007.
I love the excitement of that sort of voyage of discovery; there’s a kind
of frontier feel to it which is really captured here.
It’s also a philosopher’s stone job – out of apparently prosaic fragments
comes forth a small kind of magic.
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
Still Life: Gallery – Gareth Long
Still Life: Gallery (2002, 3.5 MB, 3:22 min.)
This piece was shot with a still camera. The images are ‘stitched’ together using
a combination of specialized software and by hand; the stills seamlessly joined to
create a new space. Because the space is made up of stills instead of video, any
and all action contained within the frame is arrested. The two major precepts of
video – motion and time – are thus implied but impenetrable.
from Gareth Long.
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.”
The entire Seven Maps series can be seen here : http://pouringdown.tv/sevenmaps
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 .
‘Want’ by MTAA & RSG
Want (clip) (2008, 74 MB, 2 min.)
‘Want was a new multiple channel algorithmic video installation as part of the exhibition
‘Live’ at the Beall Center for Art & Technology.
The life-sized six-screen video display uses custom software to monitor real time
Internet searches. When the software finds a programmed keyword, it triggers a
video clip of one of several actors/avatars who translates the virtual request to reality.
A soccer mom says,’I want French.’
A rocker dude says, ‘I want Star Trek Enterprise.’
A nondescript middle-aged guy says, ‘I want Little Girl.’
A girl says, ‘I want Forever.’
The six video screens are triggered almost concurrently, causing the voiced requests
to overlap. The result is an audio-visual cacophony of desire; an online echo chamber
of warped reality.‘
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.’