Category Archives: nature

Liz Sterry – Borders

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Borders
Borders (2010, 201 MB, 3:59 min, silent)

Worth every second of the download for this extraordinary
piece from young UK artist Liz Sterry, a digital arts student at the design school in Writtle, Essex, UK.
It’s an astonishingly assured bit of conceptual gorgeousness.
I’m particularly taken with..what’s the word.. the ..um..rightness of judgement
with which it was shot and assembled – on the surface thrown together
but everything combining so easily & elegantly to create something of
logic, power and great beauty.
*Transparency – where I currently teach.

Sam Easterton – Animal Vegetable Video

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ardvark
Ardvark (2001, 1.6MB, 15 sec.)

scorpion
Scorpion (2001, 1.1MB, 10 sec.)

tumble1
Tumbleweeds (2001, 1.2MB, 10 sec.)

wolf
Wolf (2001, 1.1MB, 10 sec.)

Since 1988, Sam Easterton has been using tiny
‘helmet mounted’ cameras to create an archive of videos filmed
from the perspective of plants and animals.

By Mica

Matt McCormick and The Shins

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Matt McCormick – The Past and Pending (2003, 34MB, 5:17)


Matt McCormick – Australia (2007, 29MB, 3:57)

Matt McCormick is one of those heroes I never knew I had.
He makes insanely tight music videos and local commercials
around the Portland area, in addition to being a friend to hipster
bands and a musician himself.
These are two award-winning videos for the band The Shins,
who I’ve posted from before, though I have no affiliation or
particular love for them.
They just end up extra special on film, especially through
McCormick’s visions of A-Team remakes and leisurely photo drives.

David Askevold – Nova Scotia Fires

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Nova Scotia Fires
Nova Scotia Fires (1969, 5MB, 3:00 min)

I hadn’t, to my shame, heard of the late David Askevold until the Camden Arts Centre
put on a beautifully put together and gripping retrospective last year.
Here’s one of the pieces on show then. It’s not particularly great quality plus
it’s in a tiny window but it does conjure (perhaps an appropriately Askevoldian
choice of word) something of the impact -witty, smart and otherwordly – of his work.

* and there’s a good review of that here.

Alan Sondheim – Kelvin Helmholtz Clouds

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Kelvin Helmholtz Clouds (2008, 5.6MB, 24 secs)

It’s funny – even when Sondheim does picturesque there’s
something very defiantly personal about his take on it.
Here it’s the way that the sequence of images just occasionally
looks as if it hadn’t been thrown together at random but
most of the time it does.
And this does not matter -in fact it’s an asset -there’s a shamanic
urgency to everything Sondheim does which is wholly engaging.

Bob Ross is alive. The Joy of Painting..

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miron_bilski
Bob Ross is alive (2008, 22MB, 2:50 min.)

joy_painting
The Joy of Painting (2008, 15MB, 5:45 min.)

Bob Ross came to prominence as the creator of ‘The Joy of Painting’,
a program on public television in the US. Here are a couple of great parodies
that poke fun at Bob and his calm and enduring nature.
Top is from Dutch filmmaker Miron Bilski (from the viral video award)
Bottom is from artists Max Kotelchuck and Peter Nowogrodzki.

Diana Brighouse – Floating Green Leaves

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Floating Green Leaves
Floating Green Leaves (2012, 212MB, 3:52 min)

Diana Brighouse is a doctor turned artist in a grand tradition.
She’s currently completing an MA at the University of Chichester in the UK.
Her work is intensely thoughtful and thought through and also often very beautiful.
I’m not always keen on artist commentaries on their own work but what she sent
me is a model of clarity so I’ll reproduce it in full here.

‘The underlying stimulus for my work is to challenge the reductive philosophy
that prevails in Western society today.
I believe that reductionism is manifest through a prioritising of scientific
or quantitative methodology. An unquestioning belief in the measurable is
found not only in science and technology, but also in education, medicine
and politics.
I believe that the supremacy of the measurable can be directly related not
only to the political and financial threats to the arts, but also to the
regressive attitudes towards women and the disabled.
Successive postgraduate university educations in medicine, spirituality,
psychotherapy and art have repeatedly challenged the certainties I have
been taught.
My use of digital video (a quantitative binary process) to produce images
that I believe to be non-reductive reflects the paradoxes created by my
chosen professions.
There are multiple possible interpretations of the videos depending on
the background of the viewer. This is deliberate and hopefully supports
my non-reductive thesis.
These videos are part of a series investigating reflections; a second
series that I am also currently working on investigates shadows.
My intention is that this series will be more politically orientated.
My videos are taken in my garden and edited with Sony Vegas Platinum 11.0HD.’

We’ll have another of these beautiful works next week.

David Phillips and Paul Rowley

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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.

Duncan Speakman – Is Life Boring?

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Duncan Speakman – Is Life Boring? (2005, 5.3MB, 1:17 min.)

From Duncan Speakman (yes, his real name) and the now abandoned 29fragiledays.
Duncan moved onto the less populated Delicate Museum, but I enjoy his older work much more (maybe because there is simply more of it?).
No contrived voice-overs (at least not at first), I’m also given enough time to meditate on the video.
Sometimes short is too short.
This is one of the best pieces from his previous incarnation.

Glimpse of the Garden

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Marie Menken – Glimpse of the Garden (1957, 40MB, 5:04)

Marie Menken, avant-garde filmmaker of the 1940s, 50s,
and 60s – in addition to being the inspiration for
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a Warhol
superstar – made inspirational work from a time we seem
to overlook too much today. The garden here belongs
to one of her husband’s former male lovers, and while
Menken was often criticized for being quaint in her displays,
her style is an obviously feminine one that hides much
deeper meaning in ordinary but stunning visuals.

2 from Jack Ryan

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RyanJ_I_Fell_For_You.jpg
I Fell for You (2011,8MB, 1:00 min)

TraitThreshHoldcompressed.jpg
Threshold (2011, 86MB, 3:29 min)

I Fell For You:

‘My early artistic ideas came from a 3-year experience as
a commercial fisherman in Alaska. At the time, my work
centered on ideas consistent with the locale: hermetic
fabulousness, escape, odyssey, and the sublime.
Todayperversities of the sublime continue to influence the
way I shape projects. A consensual explanation of the
contemporary sublime would acknowledge that there are
thresholds of human perception and a desire to explore these
thresholds connecting ourselves to a greater environment of
understanding and awareness. At the root of my work is
an interest in human experience.’

Threshold:

‘Borrowing from fluxus films Threshold is filmed in Iceland
and the Oregon Coast and made for a project with The
Archer Gallery.
The video takes place where land meets sea, where the
landscape moves from vertical to horizontal, and
associatively between life (verticality) and death (horizontality)’

I’m guessing the club formed by the intersection of the sets of
experimental video makers and of former commercial fishermen
in Alaska is a fairly exclusive one.
Jack Ryan upholds its honor in these two exhilarating
(but totally uningratiating, no puppy-dog-eyes here) pieces.
I especially love “I fell…”.
Very bracing.

Mr. & Mrs. Blue Skies – Ajit Anthony Prem

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Mr. & Mrs. Blue Skies
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

Heath Bunting – Memorial Stone

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memorial_stone
Memorial Stone (2011, 92 MB, 38:31 min)

“As technology moves forward.. all my work is falling apart.. I’d like to move
forward as well, into a more outside adventurous practice, so this video is an
attempt to document the ruins and the remains of my internet work”
– by Heath Bunting

Ruth Catlow – Landscape

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love_is_a_wave.jpg
Landscape (2011, 114MB, 3:12 min)

Ravishing piece of work from my friend and colleague Ruth Catlow
who is also co-director of the indispensible Furtherfield.org

We’ve been talking a lot amongst ourselves and with our students about
continuities across art history and about hybrid techniques which
meld both the ancient and the newest.
Filmed in the New Forest, this piece (apart from its great beauty)
is an exemplar of this approach and pathbreaking in its way.
(More so than much which, dull-eyed, shouts and waves the latest thing
from the rooftops.)
The oldest kind of mark making, delicately but robustly realised,
captured on a tiny portable video camera in a semi-performative
way and then networked…
Beautiful and nourishing both.

Edward Picot –Things That Flow

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after the fall
Things That Flow (2011, 175 MB, 4:00 min)

Doing what it says on the can, and doing it elegantly
and with understatement and grace, a new pastoral (although
that’s not quite the word because the urban, or at least the mechanical,
usually intrudes into the idyll in some way) from Edward Picot.

Anne de Vries – Forecast

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4cast
Forecast (2011, 58 MB, 5:04 min)

By Anne de Vries.
Text: Bertrand Russell.
Sound: James Whipple.
Tech assistance: Timur Si-Qin.

Martha Deed – War and Peace

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War and Peace
War and Peace (2006, 35.4MB, 2:34 min.)

Some delicate & tough poetry of the everyday &
the often overlooked (& thence of all we are & of
our place in the natural world too) from Martha Deed in 2006.

Shannon Noble – Newt

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newt
Newt (2010?, 47MB, 1:48 min)

We haven’t had anything from Shannon Noble for a long time.
He’s quite elusive. His blog springs up, then disappears, then appears
again under a different name. Currently most of his stuff just seems to
be sitting, unlinked, in a folder on his site.
His work is always interesting (in the strong sense that one can
always learn from it) and hardly ever showy. Maybe his lack of need to show off
or jump up and down saying look at me, even when he’d be justified in so doing
is tied in with his apparent reluctance to promote his work.
Don’t get me wrong -I approve of the former -it makes the viewer do some work and there
are rewards to be had here for doing that work.
Here’s the first of two pieces, a bit like Robert Croma’s piece earlier this week,
not at all in mood or content but simply in being by someone who clearly knows
exactly what they are doing.
The use of sound is both deeply eccentric and wonderful.
More next week.

Edward Picot – Combine Harvester

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la descente
Combine Harvester (2010, 68MB, 2:23 min)

A eclogue of sorts from Edward Picot; somewhat noisy, somewhat dusty
but evocative of the real British countryside and a little bit thrilling too.

Rick Silva – Krummholz Formation

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krummholz formation
Krummholz Formation (2010, 112MB, 16:48 min)

It’s always a pleasure to post new work from Rick Silva here
and this piece is no exception.
His work has been heading somewhere strange, gripping
and utterly his own for some time now.
I find this loyalty to a very personal vision both admirable
and exemplary. I’m fascinated to see whether further development
along this path is possible or whether there will at some point be a sharp
change of direction.
(Once again with this piece I really want to see it
in a gallery -nobody is more adept or at home at work for the net than Silva
but I can’t help feeling that this work needs space and distance…)

Two Loops – Michael Szpakowski

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loop6sec
Loop (2010, 6 MB, 6 sec, loop)

loopwatch
Watch (2010, 19 MB, 18 sec, loop)

By Michael Szpakowski.

Direct Language

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pink tall bike
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.

More Virtual Hiking

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Rush Creek
Rush Creek Wilderness Trail Movie (2006, 41.1MB, 5:43 min.)

This one, from 2006, is as splendid as the one we posted yesterday.
Like that, though, there’s a deep oddness here.
Sometimes the virtual hiker is discussed in a clinical, technical, manner,
then at others anthropomorphised shamelessly.
Then the narration: -is anyone really that deadpan?
Seems like the camping isn’t confined to tents on the trail.
But then it is also utterly beguiling & lovely – makes me, at least, yearn
to pack my boots & book a flight.

Sun Capture – Julianne Swartz

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suncapture
Sun Capture (1999, 9.6 MB, 1:23 min.)

Transferring the reflection of a natural occurrence (the movement of the sun)
from outdoors to indoors, Brooklyn-based artist Julianne Swartz creates
her site-specific installation “Sun Capture” with existing architecture, metal pole,
mirror, sun, and wind.

Alan Sondheim: large tree-scan world images

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Treee
treee (2006, 2.28MB, 1:03 min)

treees 3
treees 3 (2006, 5.86MB, 38 sec)

treees 8
treees 8 (2006, 9.15MB, 58 sec)

“similar to a scanning electron microscope, two images of a moving tree
with enormous detail were stitched together, warped, merged, and
analyzed at every stage. the result is a planetary configuration; one can travel
for at least an hour or two through the detailing. at times threads or
tubes appear; at times there are planes, sharpened edges, odd holes and
gaps. a tetrahedral mapping was employed.

it is this acute exploration of acute angles of inner worlds that
fascinates me. the mp4 file is small and an enormous amount of detail
is lost, but you get the idea. there are videos as well of course.
here is the resurrection of encapsulated movement-into-landscape of a
five-story tree outside the virtual environments laboratory at west
virginia”

Alan Sondheim

Circulation by ZDEN

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Circulation by ZDEN
Circulation (2003, 56.1MB, 3:24 min)

ZDEN is a Slovakian artist and a pioneer in real-time
video performing – VJing. His live visuals are produced by a
self-developed post-production tool called CIRCULATION,
a software-based real-time 3 source video mixing engine.
Visit his site.
More vids here.

Deaf Swedish Beaver TV

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deafswedishbeavertv
Deaf Swedish Beaver TV (2010, 9MB, 1:03 min)

Sooooo un-PC on just soooo many levels
and quite quite wonderful too, a great Lumière from
DVblog’s own Brittany Shoot.

Edward Picot – Bramble Jelly

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Bramble Jelly
Bramble Jelly (2010, 63MB, 5:14 min)

Lovely little pastoral from Edward Picot, as resolutely
unfashionable as ever and not any the worse for it.
More soon.

Jason Miller – Fall Was Kind

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fall was kind
Fall Was Kind (2009, 40 MB, 2:57 min)

Well, we’re a season out, but it somehow feels altogether
appropriate to feature this bit of tranquil & melancholy loveliness
on a holiday day like today.

(Made, BTW, by yet another School of Athens alumnus, Jason Miller)

We’re going to take a short break ourselves now, but we’ll be back,
batteries fully re-charged, on January 4th.

We wish everone a happy & peaceful holiday season.

Brantley Jones – Dead Plants

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Dead Plants
Dead Plants (2009, 36 MB, 1:24 min)

Another from the seemingly inexhaustible (but always pleasantly individual)
film seam at the School of Athens.
This is a lovely understated little study of ..er..dead plants, which fuses quirk,
a certain menace and a strange found beauty into something very satisfying.
Brantley Jones seems to live a double life – his website contains much more
“well made” stuff.
It will be interesting to see where he heads, eventually.

PS Also, how can you not warm to someone who lists the late great
David Foster Wallace as inspiration?

Two from Rick Silva

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Colorado
Colorado (2008, 93 MB, 8:41 min)

Massif
Massif (2009, 142 MB, 110:13 min)

Continuing a line of thought, of work, which seemed to begin with
his 2007 piece A Rough Mix Rick Silva creates two new pieces
in the wholly original style he has forged over the past few years.
(Contemplate those last words – it’s a rare claim to be able to make)
The two big themes seem to be landscape/environment & various
remixing practices ( of which Silva, of course, under various pseudonyms,
is a we-are-not-worthy master).
Thre’s a lot of greatly well-intentioned and almost equally dull “environmental” art
around, it being so zeitgeisty and all, but if this is how is could be
I want more.
Big downloads but, even if you’re on a slowish connection, well worth the wait.
(The movies here are obviously compressed & reduced in size -I would love to see them
full on in a gallery context!)

The Commoners – by Jessica Bardsley & Penny Lane

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commoners
The Commoners (Excerpt, 2009, 37 MB, 1:25 min)

“In 1890, one man had the idea to collect every bird ever mentioned in Shakespeare
and release them into Central Park. The only bird to survive in the New World was the European
Starling, now one of the commonest birds in America. Its introduction is now widely considered
a major environmental disaster.
The Commoners is a moving image essay about starlings, poetry, and the purist rhetoric used
to describe “invasive species.” It is also about the paths people forge through history, intentionally
or not, as they attempt to change the natural world.”

Written & directed by Jessica Bardsley & Penny Lane.

From video_dumbo 2009.

Lesbian Rangers – Victory at The Rock

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rock
Victory at The Rock (2005, 72.4 MB, 4:45 min.)

The Lesbian Rangers.
More clips .

Private Screening

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Charlene Rule – Private Screening (2009, 10.9MB, 1:38)

Lovely view from Scratch TV.

Lin Delpierre – Austere Beauty

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Autoportrait d’Oro (2009, 63MB, 11:04 min)

There’s so much to commend in this quiet & beautiful piece I’m
unsure, really, where to start.
Three things though, stand out.
One is the modesty, the restraint, of the conception
-there’s no horrible look-at-how clever/shocking/whatever I am
about it, just some serious *looking*.
The camera looks and we look with it, with its (and with the artist’s,
although he’s there in the frame too) help.
Second, this austerity of visual means allows the sound to play a really
significant role in the piece. Again the work doesn’t trumpet its own innovative
qualities but quietly (pun intended) it does something quite radical with sound and
with our attention to same.
Lastly, it’s just very, very well made – that sort of still amibience is just so difficult to capture
effectively because digital video can be very unforgiving in that context – interlacing
& pretty much any sort of compression can generate horribly visible artefects.
Here, even in this pretty compressed version, there are none -it just looks like a
transparent window to a small epiphany…
Hats off then, three times.

Lin Delpierre’s site.

Everyone I can think of who has died

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everybodyicanthinkof
Everyone I can think of who has died (2009, 49MB, 6:24 min.)

Edward Picot is writing the names of all the
people he can think of who have died onto leaves,
then floating them down a stream near his house.

Marianne Moore – The Fish

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The Fish (date unknown, 754KB, 1:12 min)


The Fish

wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices

More Kev Flanagan

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Tea Tree (2008, 12.3MB, 2:24 min)


Waterball (2008, 20.9MB, 2:23 min)

Not that much to add to what we’ve said before.
More work, careful, modest, austere and somehow darkly
(& I don’t just mean the light or lack of) beautiful, from Kev Flanagan.

Ash Sechler – 2 movies

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Transformation (2009, 15.5MB, 1:18 min)


Representation of Memory (2006, 75.4MB, 2:22 min)

Clearly there is something in the water in Athens, Georgia giving us,
as it has, John Michael Boling & Javier Morales, John Crowe,
Dan Osborne, Brantley Jones and now Ash Sechler.
Hmm – The School of Athens, Georgia.
There’s no common style but there is a certain sensibility which,
curiously, pervades the quiet meditative stuff as well as the more
out-there and bizarre – it’s a species of wryness combined with an
eye for the casually arresting, odd and beautiful.
It’s exemplified here in both these rather good pieces, though I particularly
like Representation of Memory.

‘Bird’ by Ken Seeno

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bird5
Bird (2007, 9MB, 4:30 min.)

by Ken Seeno.

A Series of Practical Performances In The Wilderness (3)

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moose_and_atv
moose and atv (2005, 2MB, 46 sec.)

springwater_finale
springwater finale (2005, 6.5MB, 2:27 min.)

Final two pieces, chapters 7 & 8, from

stapelia ophelia

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stapelia
Stapelia Ophelia (2005, 2.7MB, 1:23 min.)

‘The corpse flower’ in the window is getting louder, I can hardly
think. There is no running away from the smell, the sound is
deafening if you listen closely. The flowers keep coming back, I
cannot stop them. There is wind & rain as well, now, as I am seeing
the clip much later, the elements without which the day would be void.

Gerben Kruk – 2 Movies

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Vogels (2003, 3.5MB, 1:01 min)


Overdrive(2003, 4.5MB, 1:12 min)

Two 2003 pieces from Dutch artist Gerben Kruk.
I like the way the quite in-your-face soundtrack in both cases
sets the tone for & structures our response to the visuals.
There’s a curious contradiction between the bucolic content of Vogels
and the sheer noisiness and velocity of it.
(AND NB THOSE SENSITIVE TO FLICKER SHOULD PROBABLY NOT
ATTEMPT TO WATCH IT) .

Michael Guidetti – Ocean

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ocean
Ocean (except) (2008, 9.5MB, 1:30 min.)

by Michael Guidetti.

Kinetocast in autumn

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Kinetocast – To Watch In Preparation For The Deep Fall (2006, 8.5MB, 1:25)


Kinetocast – To Watch For Help Getting Through (2007, 16.9MB, 2:55)

Two more from the endlessly delightful kinetocast,
conceptual pieces about existential moments.

Xologola – Michael Robinson

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Xologola (2007, 49.3MB, 1:18 min)

DeK, from no fat clips!!!, recommends this piece by Michael Robinson
with sound by Bish.
It’s undeniably skilfully made & pretty though I can’t help wishing
more happened.
There’s a moment, about 1:06, where we seem to be gearing up
for some visible variation in tempo & geometry but the moment
passes & the piece ends.
Nonetheless one can’t help but admire the process:
… made up of scans and pictures of branches,
broken and scratched glass, and digitally painted textures…

Recombinant Rain from Millie Niss

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Recombinant Rain (2008, 7MB, 32 secs)


Source Video #1 (2008, 1.3MB, 10 secs silent)


Source Video #2 (2008, 2.2MB, 12 secs silent)


Source Video #3 (2008, 1.2MB, 14 secs silent)


Source Video #4 (2008, 2MB, 13 secs silent)

Millie Niss is one half of the daughter & mother team behind
the original & indispensable Sporkworld Microblog.
(And if you look at it for ten minutes & you don’t agree
it’s that, please check you have a pulse).
I’m not sure Millie felt that this piece was entirely successful.
(See her comments on the blog, linked above)
I’m posting it because even a borderline success from Millie
is something one can learn from. She has a formidable intellect
combined with a total & fierce independence & a complete
lack of bullshit.( Indeed I’m convinced that she wouldn’t
know how to bullshit, even if she wanted to.)
The last four pieces are tiny little studies of the rain
(delicate & lovely in their own right),
& the first is constructed from frames lifted from these
& worked over in various ways.
This piece (or actually the set of pieces, sources & first pass
at an end product alike) does it for me in a way that a lot of work doesn’t.
Simply, there’s a profound humanity to it.
Sure, it’s about the rain but it’s also about what it is
to be a human being in the world.

Rupert Howe – Sun

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sun
Sun (2008, 5.4MB, 30 secs)

Utterly ravishing Lumière from the never predictable,
always interesting, Rupert Howe.

On that summery note, we’re going to take a rest in the sunshine.
We love doing DVblog, but the daily deadline definitely takes
its toll after a bit.
We’ll be getting ready to hit the ground running again around 16th Sept.
& we’ll still keeping our eyes peeled for the new, for the weird &
(best of all!) for the wonderful.

Have a great summer!

Brittany, Doron, Michael.