03.07.06 (2006, 5.3MB, 1:54 min.)
03.12.06 (2006, 3.7MB, 1:08 min.)
03.17.06 (2006, 3.8MB, 1:13 min.)
Back in 2006, when video blogging just started, Andrew Schneider
was the funniest person on the internet.
From Astoria, Queens, it’s the whether|man.
Martin on Wegman (1999, 13 MB, 2:09 min.)
The introduction to the identity program from the PBS series
Art in the 21st Century in which host Steve Martin is featured
in this charming and quirky video by the artist William Wegman.
Mr. & Mrs. Blue Skies (2006, 50MB, 5:30 min.)
‘September 7th marks three exciting years since meeting my wife.
In that time, my life has changed dramatically for the best.
It seems like I finally have a life!
This video should certainly remind you of being forced to sit through the
family vacation videos by your parents.
If it doesn’t then you should watch it a couple of times.’
By Ajit Anthony Prem
Music: Mr. Blue Sky by Electric Light Orchestra
From squigglebooth
Experiment (2006, 3.3MB, 1:20 min.)
2006: Michael Verdi takes a stand and stakes out
some videoblogging territory.
Ice Cream Lift (2003, 6.3MB, 2:07 min)
“In 1996, I started working on a project idea to change the
aesthetics of exericise. I became a “fitness guru” and made my
own 55-minute workout video where all 12 workouts used food as
exercise equipment. The music in the video is from bands that I knew
in CA, or bands that I listened to while working in my studio.”
Kristen Baumlier from Buns of Butter.
mobile opera (2006, 7.1 MB, 48 sec.)
from – fast moving animals.
Music: Rossini: ‘La Danza’. Voice: Beniamino Gigili
Movie #4 (2006, 1.9MB, 44 sec)
Movie #14 (2006, 2.9MB, 1:12 min)
Interesting work from Canadian film maker Jimi Bogdanov.
Movie #4 , in particular, has a fragile & arresting beauty.
Cross Examination (2005, 44 MB, 5:40 min)
Made in 2005, this is a really extraordinary piece for lots of reasons:
(1) It’s so carefully made ( & must have taken no little work)
(2) The chutzpah quotient is almost 100%
(3) There is more here than meets the eye
(4) The use of music (in its second appearance very reminiscent
of the school of Rifle/Hartley but spot on nonetheless)
(5) The warmth, genuine warmth; the real insight into people
As you see here Josh Weinstein, Brooklyn based film maker
does a lot of work for corporate clients. Hmmm.
Really, all you can think is, on the basis of this, they get way,
way more & better than they could possibly deserve.
Disarmed (2002, 15.8 MB, 2:42 min.)
Mother of All Bombs (2003, 9.5 MB, 1:45 min.)
Nick Fox-Gieg is an animator and theatrical designer.
His short films have been shown at the Rotterdam and Ottawa film festivals,
at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and on Canada’s CBC TV.
Minivan on Fire (2007, 12.6MB, 32 sec)
So…I wrote the comment below in 2004 about the poem (below)
by poet-artist-programmer-polymath Lewis LaCook
but it fits the movie making too, I think.
The poem I reproduce here because it’s great &
because I can.
…*such* great work Lewis.
There’s the delirious and gorgeous imagery that has
always been such an attractive component of your work,
but here also (and did I not notice it so much before
or has it been slowly crystallizing?) a rigorous,
almost steely control of the materials.
The sense of storytelling, the incorporation of
dialogue, the confidence to mix the heady stuff with
the almost prosaic…
a complete pleasure…
michael
— Lewis LaCook wrote:
I had this feeling that I was
worth loving, and you let me
have it: a month of solid
silence and invisibility, and you’ve
forgotten me now, I’m sure:
haven’t even taken the movies back.
I feel I might’ve excited you. True,
you said, “You’re mischievous,
undermining, it gets you hot
to be bad,” with the heroin
of your eyes pushing through me,
“I need all your attention.”
Client status: Connected.
In cramped shoes I’m
transparent on milk
ice: sliding over islands, mortar,
crystals lateral with morphine
lapsed into strings,
stillness; my lace.
Cerebral, but rebellious.
The secret to rolling a great joint
is to roll it tight enough to smoke well
but loose enough to let any left-
over stems elude piercing the paper.
I feel it might be exciting
to feel loved. Someone rubs me
until I blossum. Until it
rains on my tongue. This is free.
There are only so many
kinds of sense. One in which
you’re thick, surrendered
to golds and reds, wear glasses
and have supper with your
mother. Meanwhile, outside
our encampment, fat
velvet fires rescue air from
almost total transparency.
I suck up files from a remote
location for work. Wake up
with my eyes already sunk,
jerk off: get high. Client status:
Connected. A tartly-intelligent
girl with her hand on my belly.
She says she likes it too much.
She has all my attention.
Character sets legitimize
where the pre-dawn wind
plies from you in heavy draughts
your childhood, your child, rubber
nipples: reading under a passive
milk of electric, not walls.
They hug cattle before they
shoot them in the brain.
I sleep past waking.
Everyone will be infinitely home soon.
I was dreaming in blush sundaes,
before, though: we are the wasps
that would rather sting themselves
to death, if that means we escape
a natural terminal port: we’re
those literal motherfuckers
who will not hover, but sparkler
and cackle like it’s all that’s
holding us down. I hate the royal
we. Dreaming about licking
the heart of red, the pith of gold,
cleaning you of stalwart
impurities. Ever feel
like you’re just marking a beat
in a line. Smoke orally
inflates the room. Filtration
flirts with purity the way eightball
chicks glom to money;
it makes them feel loved. Even
common houseplants know
where the sun is, swoon and go
limp when she’s gone. I’m still
waiting for that Saturday you promised me
not thinking about me at all not thinking about
you at all not thinking about you at all.
The Internet (2006, 5.3MB, 1:03 min.)
2006 report from Valdezatron Industries technology department.
from Aaron Valdez.
Found Art (Nolita) Unmonumental 484 (2011, 3 MB, 26 secs)
Found Art (Chelsea) Unmonumental 507 (2011, 3 MB, 23 secs)
Joy Garnett is not only a fascinating and accomplished painter but
she takes a neat photo too.
There’s a huge set of images on her Flickr pages entitled
Unmonumental – a recording and honouring of the melancholy beauty
of the neglected, ephemeral, the broken and the passing.
Recently she’s added videos to the collection and here’re two
of them.
They are utterly beguiling and we’re going to show the whole
lot over the next weeks and months.
Making Web MVideo (2011, 51 MB, 5:55 min)
“There was a lot of talk this week about WebM video after Google announced
that they were going to drop H.264 support from Chrome. This is huge news
for video makers, especially since Firefox 4 (which supports WebM) is almost done.
I figured it was time to look into WebM encoding tools again.”..
from Michael Verdi.
legbones (2011, 9MB, 1:11 min)
dawnchorusorspeakingintongues (2011, 4MB, 33 secs)
The only things I know about these three pieces is that they
were posted to the Netbehaviour list on Saturday last, that they
were shot on a cellphone and that they are …well… quite odd.
Almost disturbingly so, but in a thrilling way too:
to be so offhandedly minimal, so cavalier about any technical considerations
and still to make something with this sort of punch…
Interview with Shirin Neshat (2010, 123 MB, 3:54 min)
Studio Banana TV interviews video artist, moviemaker
and photographer Shirin Neshat.
European Vacation (2005, 25.6 MB, 2:18 min.)
Morning Routine (2005, 44.3 MB, 4:34 min.)
The Summer of Van Torre was hugely popular in 2005 in video blogging circles.
The wepisodes recount the life of Jon VanTorre, each week bringing him closer
to total cardiac arrest with Ether Baths, Spider-Man Nightmares, and Meat Sandwiches.
The series (which began in 2001) was presented online in 05 by “Human Dog”.
Here is an interview (2005, 67.5 MB, 13 min.) by Josh Leo with writers & directors
Jon VanTorre, Michael Schwartz and Chris Weagel.
More Landscaping Views (2010, 54MB, 3:47 min)
Art and Traffic (2010, 14MB, 1:00 min, silent)
We haven’t had anything from the indispensable Sam Renseiw
for a little while so, just to make Monday more tolerable for us all,
here are two recent pieces, both small gems.
I particularly like the Lumière, ‘Art and Traffic’
Secret 040 (2006, 3 MB, 1:16 min.)
Secret from “Secrets For Sale”, a film which reveals the radical
ADN/ARN experience, an interactive installation addressed to one
person at the time, in which each visitor was invited to confide and
then contractually sell a personal secret.
Project by Elodie Pong.
War Criminal (2003 -2010, 22MB, 3:18 min)
When I first saw this piece from Nigel Ayers I assumed, quite wrongly, he
was involved with some heavy duty image manipulation in the cause of a
kind of conceptualist ‘activism’ (and I sat scratching my head at just how difficult it
must have been to get that image onto so many moving figures).
DOH! The facts are much weirder and much, much better…
Great stuff! Hats off! Not worthy, not worthy!
First Line (2002, 165kb, 7 secs)
Second Line (2002, 224kb, 10 secs)
If I remember rightly Eryk Salvaggio posted a link to this tiny piece
on the Rhizome list in 2002, at a time when the Rhizome Artbase was
still rejecting some embryonic video or video like works as ‘not net-idiomatic’.
The post was something of an epiphany for me and I suspect
when the history of online video comes to be written this work,
together with the Manovich “Little Movies”, will loom large
(As beginning to find a way towards precisely a ‘net-idiomatic’
video practice).
Also: I thought then (and I still think now) it is wonderful work.
Here’s what Salvaggio said about it at the time:
Mpeg Haikus
these are short films which work in their original digital formats
as 30 to 60 second mpeg files. The idea was to stay “egoless”
as in the nature of a haiku, and so there is no design – the films
and the files are presented by whatever defaults your browser
uses. The first, “Unfinished Mpeg Haiku,” is a short 30 seconds
of an airplane’s vapor trails across the sky, the second, a 30
second loop of a bird hopping on industrial machinery.
The third line is not represented, but is intended to be the
viewer’s response, ie. dismissal, understanding, happiness,
sadness- whatever meaning the viewer makes.
Skyway (2009, 39 MB, 1:53 min)
A couple of months before her untimely death last year Millie Niss
sent me this video –
‘I have been working for a long time on and off (mostly off) these
days on a video showing industrial ruins on the outskirts of Buffalo,
shot from an elevated highway which is scheduled to be torn down…’
I remember thinking how beautiful and evocative it was and I assumed
Millie would publish it on the Sporkworld Blog in due course.
Sadly this never happened.
The other day I came across it & asked Millie’s mother and collaborator,
Martha Deed, for permission to post it here, which she gave,
so it’s a pleasure tinged with sadness to do so.
We’re going to take a summer break now.
We’ll be back on September 20th but in the meantime we’ll leave you
with this memorial to a fine artist & a fine human being.
Diect Language 5.0 (2010, 74 MB, 6:26 min)
Steven Ball has re-started his Direct Language project & this was the first piece
of the new sequence.
I think it is quite breathtaking.
It strikes me as very much in a relatively recent British experimental film tradition
where a quite austere formalism can engender the most extraordinary beauty.
There’s always the danger of a failure of nerve, the pill being quite needlessly sugared
and nothing such happens here.
Not only is it haunting & lovely, there’s food for thought here too,
the lack of glibness & the refusal to cuddle up to the viewer meaning
it sustains repeated viewing.
Vampire Sun (2004, 13.7MB, 2:41 min.)
Vertigo Essay (2004, 13.8MB, 2:30 min.)
Stuff from 2005 from Rob Parrish at Hopper Video.
Couldn’t be more packed to the gills, these movies,
with formal invention. Torn between admiration &
extreme irritation at the Edvard Grieg vocoder.
Not sure it all entirely comes off but it’s
to be commended, as is the fact that
serious thinking is clearly at work here.
Better than timidity, for sure.
(HV still going strong & well worth checking out.
We’ll revisit ourselves, I think, in the Autumn.)
A Short History of Virtual Hiking (2005, 9.1MB, 3:47 min.)
Originally posted in 2006.
Singer (2005, 4.7MB, 1:15 min.)
Grouik-Grouik (2005, 11.9MB, 1:48 min.)
Accomplished stop motion shenanigans from French
videomaker Charlie Mars, self-styled ‘Videomaker from Outerspace’.
First Class (2010, 127 MB, 3:40 min)
And First Class it is too -we’ve enthused about Morrisa Maltz here quite
recently & her first music vid (for Everybody Else) doesn’t disappoint.
It’s stylish without being glib, chock full of ideas but nicely unified by
a visual language those who’ve seen her work before will instantly recognise.
My only cavil (which I already expressed to her) is the degree of
objectification at work here in the portrayal of women,
(you know…the boys play & the girls kind of dance around
or pose, looking nice &c &c) which I find a tad depressing coming from
a clearly enormously talented & capable woman artist.
More than well made though & I look forward to whatever comes next.
Save Your Skin (2007, 4 MB, 1:03 min)
Save Your Skin – stolen skins, scripted environment,
where the skins of avatars are being put on display.
A Second Life performance by Gazira Babeli.
What Is This? (2006, 20.8MB, 2:31 min.)
Deft & attractive travelogue/visual poem/puzzle taking
us on a dream tour of Moljevic’s native Amsterdam.
More on his YouTube channel, and website
Amazing (2005, 4.1MB, 2:02 min.)
I found this in my DVblog to-do folder & embarassingly
I can’t remember when or from where I downloaded it.*
If anyone can oblige please mail us.
Anyway, it made me laugh quite immoderately.
A Letter From Beirut (2006, 36.9MB, 4:41 min.)
This video letter was made on July 21, 2006 at the studios of Beirut DC, a
film and cinema collective which runs the yearly Ayam Beirut Al Cinema’iya Film
Festival. This video letter was produced in collaboration with Samidoun, a grassroots
gathering of various organizations and individuals who were involved in relief
and media efforts from the first day of the Israeli attack on Lebanon. It was
also featured at the Biennial of Arab Cinema, organized by the Arab World
Institute in Paris.
Unbroken Eggs – Monument to Luciano Fabro (2007, 13 MB, 3:30 min)
Physical scripted environment.
A Second Life performance by Gazira Babeli.
triplightz (2010, 2 MB, 5 sec silent palindrome loop)
3skullstr (2010, 18 MB, 7 sec silent palindrome loop )
skull3pth (2010, 2 MB, 7 sec silent palindrome loop)
Three new pieces from Abe Linkoln on the ever reliable,
ever astonishing, what was called Triptych TV.
Interview with Chen Chieh Jen (2008, 40 MB, 6:05 min)
Studio Banana TV interviews Taiwanese videoartist Chen Chieh Jen.
Time Travel (2010, 10 MB, 1:10 min)
A Right of Passage (2010, 14 MB, 1:04 min)
We’ve not hidden our enthusiasm here for the work,
always interesting ,often stunning, of Sam Renseiw.
Sam’s been a particularly deft & prolific exponent of the
Lumière form re-invented/discovered/conceptualised
by Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen and Brittany Shoot (of this manor).
Here the whole thing goes a stage further with a great
collaboration between Renseiw and British filmmaker/sound artist
Philip Sanderson, archived on a site called Lumière et Son
which title, for me at least, occasions both a groan and a kind of grudging admiration.
The work is great – Renseiw’s originals, with new found-sound additions
from Sanderson; playful, witty and perhaps even a a little profound,
in a Zen kind of way.
I hadn’t really clocked it properly until I saw a couple of these pieces
at a screening in London the other day.
Here’s one from that programme (the original of which
we posted here a while ago) plus another that especially
tickled me.
Splendid stuff & here’s to many more!
companjeros (2001, 17 MB, 1:16 min)
los homeboys (2001, 37 MB, 6:34 min)
Ali el fofo & Don Conejo. unplugged 2001 ticotaco
By Max Moswitzer.
Thunder (2004, 69 MB, 11:00 min)
Quite, quite beautiful!
Original editorial
Interview with Kohei Nawa (2010, 50 MB, 4:32 min)
Studio Banana TV interviews Japanese artist Kohei Nawa
Ground Play (extract) (2009, 64 MB, 5:15 min)
I stumbled across Robert Todd’s work by accident & I’m glad that I did.
Judging by the extracts on his site, one of which we’re posting here, he will bear
a good deal of further investigation.
Here I love the use of oblique angles, cropping &c. to create a world both highly abstracted
yet naggingly familiar (and very beautiful).
There’s also an interesting dynamic going on between the probing camerwork & the
thoughtful and restrained editing.
Magma by Rocketboom (2009, 53 MB, 6:22 min.)
The excellent new Magma.
Entry point and guide for online video.
