Omer Fast – The Casting (2008, 38 MB, 3:29 min)
Omer Fast, discusses his 2008 Whitney Biennial work, The Casting (2007),
a four-channel video featuring a young American army sergeant who recounts
two stories
Category Archives: activism
Studio Banana TV Interviews Shirin Neshat
Interview with Shirin Neshat (2010, 123 MB, 3:54 min)
Studio Banana TV interviews video artist, moviemaker
and photographer Shirin Neshat.
Marc Garrett & Ruth Catlow – At Winter Equinox We Burn the Sun
At Winter Equinox We Burn the Sun (2010, 37MB, 3:48 min)
And by way of wishing a Happy New Year to all, here’s a tremendous piece from my friends
Marc Garrett & Ruth Catlow, the movers behind the indispensable Furtherfield.org & the Netbehaviour list.
Here they ritually burn a copy of the evil Murdoch’s UK organ The Sun & accompany this
with music both apposite and well executed.
I think this is shot very well. I don’t mean in a boring technical sense – who gives a? –
but that it is utterly alive, especially those beautiful final, almost vertical, shots.
There’s a delicious play here too on folkishness which treads a fine line in avoiding
being itself folksy.
Further – here’s a practical demonstration of how political art doesn’t have to
be dour or ploddingly earnest and indeed can summon a visceral beauty.
There’s a dialogue (or, perhaps better, an argument) between this celebration of the beauty
of the world, betokened in this scene and what passes therein, and the real ugliness and
anti-humanity of the paper and its contents.
Great Great Great.
Patrick Lichty Season – #3
The New Miranda (2003, 38MB, 2:17 min)
Blooper – Voodoo Chicks (200?, 1MB, 16 secs)
The Engines of Truth (2000?, 20MB, 5:08 min)
Our Patrick Lichty season resumes after quite the longest break ever,
partly because I misplaced the files he so generously gave us
in 2007.
Looking through these again it comes home very forcefully what
a significant role Lichty played in the development of a new language of art video,
one contemporaneous with the birth pangs and development of net art & later to
feed centrally into online art practice.
The pieces still impress as hugely imaginative and sometimes challenging
and apart from their physical size and compression don’t appear time worn
at all. In fact, in many ways they seem amazingly prescient, perhaps
even ahead of their time.
More soon.
Guli Silberstein – Beach
Beach (2009, 64 MB, 4:57 min.)
“A happy family is shown on a beach in Tel Aviv, as 100 km away a girl runs
from the bombardment of a beach in Gaza. It’s a reality where tranquility may
turn into horror in an instant. The conflicting scenes on a TV on the blink raise
the impossibility of accepting an absolute picture of a reality.”
By Guli Silberstein.
Knitoscope Testimonies by Cat Mazza
efj360 (2010, 3 MB, 1:28 min.)
“Knitoscope Testimonies is the first web based video using “Knitoscope” software,
a program that translates digital video into a knitted animation. Knitoscope is a moving
image offshoot of microRevolt’s freeware knitPro. Knitoscope imports streaming video,
lowers the resolution, and then generates a stitch that correspondes with the pixels color.
The title “Knitoscope” is based on Edison’s early animation technology the kinetoscope,
which was a “coin operated peep show machine
Nigel Ayers – War Criminal
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!
Gazira Babeli – Save Your Skin
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.
A Letter From Beirut
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.
Three from Writtle
Ashleigh Smith – Impossible Conversations (2010, 75 MB, 2:30 min)
Emma Haggis – Out of Sight, Out of Mind (2010, 118 MB, 2:18 min)
Lucy Mills – Response (2010, 108 MB, 2:02 min, silent)
So, first, I should say, Writtle is where I taught this year, but it cuts both ways:
I wouldn’t post these pieces by graduating students here on DVblog unless I
thought they were all great, which I do.
They’re also diverse, in a fascinating way.
There’s Ashleigh Smith’s haunting – stays with you long afterwards – game/real life hybrid,
Lucy Mills beauty industry critique – half mash-up, half rather brave performance,
(It’s interesting the way that all three pieces incorporate, to
some degree, elements of self performance) and Emma Haggis’s superbly made
and utterly captivating stop motion environmental piece.
In each case one can see a personal language well into its development.
(All these pieces or variants/derivatives thereof formed part of larger
installations; I’m impressed by the naturalness & lack of self consciousness
with with these three move between modes of working/presentation)
I hope they’re all still making work in ten years – given this
starting point then that would be a treat in store.