Sadie Benning – Me and Rubyfruit (1990, 24.9MB, 5:40)
Classically beautiful and poignant video-diary-esque
early work from the innovative Sadie Benning. Me
and Rubyfruit, a reinterpretation of Rita Mae Brown’s
Rubyfruit Jungle, finds Benning lamenting the limitations
of being a young lesbian woman in modern culture.
Roughly sixteen when she made this piece, it was shot
on a Fisher-Price Pixelvision 2000 camera, making the
intense grainy footage all the more raw.
Peace (2005, 19.7MB, 2:46 min)
This Borat performance at a country-western bar in Tucson, Arizona
provoked a sharp letter from the Anti-Defamation League.
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries at the New Museum (2008, 62.5MB, 2:48 min)
If you don’t know them, you should; Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
have been responsible for some of the most spine tingling & evocative work
on the net in the last ten years,
This documentary, lifted from the indispensable Rhizome, gives a good bares bones historical
account of them in the context of a show earlier this year at the New Museum.
I didn’t see the show & whilst I’m pleased they’re getting this wider exposure I wonder
if there isn’t something quite particular about the way their work presents in a browser
(preferably, in my view, with headphones on, ie. as submerged in these delicious
& fractured quasi narratives as only the net experience will allow).
Then, it is visceral and immediate.
On the evidence here, there seems to have been something
a little more diffuse about this multiple screen installation.
I don’t know; it’s a surmise; I’d be happy to be told I’m wrong.
It raises interesting questions, though, about the transplanting of work
from browser to gallery.
Terminally Ambivalent Over You (2002, 26.1MB, 3:19 min.)
Based on Stephen Coate‘s song from the album ‘When Psyche meets Cupid’,
this animation tells the story of a prisoner who works in a prison’s
gramophone factory and while assembling gramophones thinks of his girlfriend.
Neat stuff from Alex Budovsky, aka Aleksey Budovskiy.
Memory Loss (2008, 61.4MB, 2:13 min)
No Exit (2008, 38.2MB, 2:19 min)
Two pieces from Lee Sarter.
Memory Loss is an unequivocal success in my view,
evocative, very nicely constructed & haunting.
(Even manages to temporarily subdue my deeply felt &
longstanding antipathy to ambient sounding piano
soundtracks)
I don’t think No Exit works quite so well but it’s clear
in both that there’s a thinking & creative filmic intelligence at work here.
I look forward to more.
Jay and Mark Duplass – The Puffy Chair (2005, 6.3MB, 2:14)
Debut feature from the Duplass brothers, a few years
old, and part of the Mumblecore filmmaking movement,
which I seem to be partial towards.
Rubber Band Hand (2005, 21.4 MB, 2:47 min.)
A young man discovers the limits of his newfangled
rubber band hand. From – Brian Liloia.
Michel de Broin – Keep On Smoking (2006, 8.2MB, 2:51)
Absolutely hilarious video for a fantastic piece of interactive art.
I thought I was going to end up with a statement about
smoking cigarettes with I came across Michel de Broin’s
Keep On Smoking.
But completely unrelated, de Broin says this:
As an alternative to petrol, this custom-made bicycle
transforms kinetic energy produced by the cyclist into smoke.
The will to power is a renewable energy resource that can be
recuperated by a power generator supplying enough electricity
to operate a smoke machine. The work is the result of two
coupled machines; the one human is productive and the other
machine, consumptive. This coupling of machines produces smoke,
a waste energy that is liberated freely in the atmosphere.
A Good Joke (2005, 18.5 MB, 3:16 min.)
This short is based on an old joke, a perennial in compilations of
Jewish humor. Although the details differ between versions, the
scene remains the same: a priest challenges a rabbi to debate on
the spiritual condition of Jewish people. But neither speaks the other’s language.
Commissioned by Project Mosaica, by Nick Fox-Gieg.
