Kid Quaalude -‘Upside Downer’ (2006, 37MB, 4:01 min)
“Well!”, as my dear mother used to say,
“What will they think of next?”
Neat film by Dave Whiting, shot in a rather
atmospheric former Tram depot in Weimar
& featuring Kid Quaalude doing what it
says on the tin.
MTAA in The Studio (2006, 33MB, 5:49 min.)
MTAA’s ’10 Pre-Rejected, Pre-Approved Performances’, was included in
Performa05. The work, selected by an online voting process is described as follows:
An installation is created with $100 worth of materials bought at the nearest
24-hour ATM-enabled deli or convienance store.
The materials are purchased at midnight.
In this video, Mica interviews MTAA in their studio &
gets the lowdown on this project and more.
By Mica Scalin.
Suicide Jumper (2005, 8MB, 4 min.)
Improv Everywhere strikes again.
This is a video of a sketch performed,
unannounced, on the streets of NYC.
By Mica Scalin.
the storyteller (2001-4, 13.3MB, 2:24 min.)
Six pieces originally shown as a gallery installation.
Says their creator, the artist Nathaniel Stern :
‘The odys series consists of six short digital video poems / monologues for
small screen viewing in an intimate gallery space. By stuttering between
odys actions and words, listeners construct his person. As he attempts
to re-member, bringing the past back to his body and calling it his own,
listeners attempt to piece together a story for themselves. Viewers are
encouraged to re-visit and jump over juxtaposed media, and create a
shifting collage of, and in response to, his person.’
This is work of huge ambition both aesthetically & technically &
it’s brave and it’s edgy, sometimes to the point of being uncomfortable to
watch. Neither does Stern fear engaging with complex & difficult ideas.
Definitely worth more than one viewing.
they may be giant (2001-4, 12.3MB, 2:06 min.)
multiplicity (2001-4, 5.3MB, 1:17 min.)
Dance, Motherfucker, Dance! (2006, 7.4MB, 3:22 min)
Epiphany (2006, 1.9MB, 11 sec loop)
From the town that brought you Boling & Morales here’s more,
this time from John Crowe of ‘plural medium’
Is it something in the water or just that unrelenting Southern sun
that seems to make Athens a crucible of weirdness?
Be afraid, be very afraid &c.
Music for the delicately entitled Dance, Motherfucker, Dance! by the
Violent Femmes.
Super Cool (2005, 14.4MB, 2:30 min)
Humorous faux interview of sorts with ecoarttech,
Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir.
ShotCutScoredAndPostedByEmailFromMyNokia93Phone (2007, 2.4MB, 2:41 min)
I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on how, whatever is the ostensible
subject of movies, they are all in some sense ‘about’ everything we see
in every frame. And with the passing of time how this often becomes
more true as if, like a dog from water, the meaning is shaking itself out.
The Bas Jan Ader ‘falling’ movies exemplify this ( & how poignantly!) for me –
their conceptual motor aside, I remain most haunted by their background landscapes..
Rupert Howe of FatGirlInOhio brings this sharply to mind –
the subject might be a morning jog or Falafel but the totality of each movie
contains some of the best evocation of the glory & the grime that is
2007 London I’ve yet seen. That doesn’t exhaust it, of course, which is why this
work is deft & it is fine.
He is gravely mistaken about the Falafel though – undoubtedly the
best Falafel in London is at Gaby’s on the Charing Cross Road…
The Shining (2005, 9.5MB, 1:24 min.)
Stanley Kubrick classic horror as a romantic-comedy family flick.
A masterful trailer cut by Robert Ryang.
Sleepless In Seattle (2005, 19.4MB, 58 sec.)
This is what happens when the ultimate chick flick gets
the horror/thriller trailer treatment from – Demis Lyall-Wilson.
For Sore Eyes (2006, 23MB, 2:17 min)
I like this (though what I mean by that is sort of provisional; read on)
& also it, the piece, bothers me a lot.
I watched it once, context free, then I read a statement Anders Weberg supplied*
and quite honestly still felt pretty context free, and it’s that very elusiveness
which makes me say I like this and it’s that very elusiveness
which makes me say this bothers me, a lot.
Questions:
# Is the woman drowning, fighting for breath?
# If she is drowning & we find the film in some sense beautiful
are we then complicit in something terrible?
# Or is she frolicking in the water & does the slo-moness &
the sound mislead or, perhaps, just lead us.
# Is the footage appropriated or was it shot especially?
# If yes, was it slow in the original?
# Was the image treated in any way other than (possibly) being slowed down?
# Did either the music or the sound come with the original?
# Either way, is the provenance of music & sound different?
# It sounds like the sound really is the sound of something
(perhaps something terrible, I don’t like to think) happening underwater.
Is it?
# Is there a general lightening of tone just before the end?
# Does she free herself from the water?
# Is she now safe?
# We’re happy because she’s safe. Does this feeling
in us represent a cop out by either filmaker ( if there
are two, the original & the appropriator), a failure to follow
through,a failure of nerve?
# Or is she just leaping from her frolicking in the water,
shaking it from her hair in a kind of elemental ecstacy?
# Why is everything so dark?
# If everything is OK why is everything so dark?
*‘For Sore Eyes is another exploration of the ambivalence of the male
gaze and gendered (dis)order.
It is a suggestive reflection of life in the
pyrotechnic insanitarium of consumerism freedom.
But what really is freedom?’
The Human Browser (2006, 29.7MB, 8:18 min)
Documentation recorded at last year’s transmediale in Berlin
of a quite marvellous project by Christopher Bruno which
just won the share festival & most deservedly too.
It’s a fantastic blend of technology, performance & a kind of ‘information poetry’.
In many hands it could have been smart but dullish, but this is joyous stuff.
There’s a whole load of videos up on the human browser site
& they all have their particular delights.
Bruno’s short project description goes:
Human Browser is a series of wireless Internet performances
based on a Wi-Fi Google hack.
Thanks to its headset, the actor hears a text-to-speech
audio that comes directly from the Internet in real-time.
The actor repeats the text as he hears it.
The textual flow is actually fetched by a program
(set up on a Wi-Fi laptop) that hijacks Google,
diverting it from its utilitarian functions.
Depending on the context in which the actor is,
keywords are sent to the program and used as
search strings in Google (thanks to a Wi-Fi PDA)
so that the content of the textual flow is always
related to the context.
The performer in this video is Manon Kahle.
A good deal of the charm of this project
is due to the “performances” of the actors which are
highly professional but also very human too.
.
Great stuff!
