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.
Category Archives: nature
Edward Picot – 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.
Liz Sterry – 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.
Jason Miller – 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
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
Colorado (2008, 93 MB, 8:41 min)
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
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
Private Screening
Charlene Rule – Private Screening (2009, 10.9MB, 1:38)
Lovely view from Scratch TV.
Lin Delpierre – Austere Beauty
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.
Everyone I can think of who has died
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
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
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
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
A Series of Practical Performances In The Wilderness (3)
moose and atv (2005, 2MB, 46 sec.)
springwater finale (2005, 6.5MB, 2:27 min.)
Final two pieces, chapters 7 & 8, from
stapelia ophelia
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
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
Kinetocast in autumn
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
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
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
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.
Three more from Paul Kelly
Dust/Spring Evening (2005-7, 26.2MB, 1:57 min)
Dignity (2004, 40.4MB, 7:02 min)
Rain : Focus winter in the north (2004-9, 9.5MB, 1:12 min)
We showed a couple of rather restrained, pastoral pieces by Paul Kelly
in February of this year.
So, here’re three rather restrained, somewhat more urban pieces.
I admire the determinedly austere approach, to make much – or rather
to make us make much- of what is given to the camera (quite a lot, it has
to be said, in Dignity which is a touching portrait of man & dog), although
one does have visions of a kind of Yoda figure meditating in depth before every possible
editing decision to take the four years Focus apparently took to make.
I look forward to more.
Grizzly Bear – Knife
Knife (2007, 67 MB, 5:50 min.)
“Death Valley is hot. We wouldn
A Series of Practical Performances in the Wilderness (2)
My Temporary Visiting Position From The Sunset Terrace Bar – Carlo Zanni
My Temporary Visiting Position From The Sunset Terrace Bar (2008, 30 MB, 4:10 min.)
“Set in the city of Ahlen, Germany, “My Temporary Visiting Position From The Sunset Terrace Bar“, imitates an amateur’s film of the landscape framed at sunset.
While the city strip is pre recorded the sky is captured in real time from a webcam shooting the sky of Naples (Italy) at sunset and as such, always changing.
The work, confronting themes such as exile, migration and border control, is enhanced by a poem by the esteemed author Ghada Samman and music by the international band Gotan Project and legendary composer Gabriel Yared.”
Clip from the beautiful project by Carlo Zanni.
Keep On Smoking
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.
Flat Earth – Thomson & Craighead
Flat Earth (2007, 22 MB, 7:08 min.)
“Flat Earth is a desktop documentary, which takes the viewer on
a seven minute trip around the world so that we encounter a series
of fragments taken from real peoples’ blogs. These fragments are
knitted together to form a kind of story or singular narrative.”
from Thomson & Craighead.
Paul Kelly – two movies
Armenia: Mandelstam (2007, 16.3MB, 3:24 min)
Track 4 (2007, 10.3MB, 1:46 min)
A couple of rather evocative & lyrical pieces from Paul Kelly
about whom I know very little.
On his site he’s says he’s reluctant to join the
online fray, publicising his work.
Know how he feels, but I’m glad he got in touch with us
& we’re pleased to show his stuff here- it deserves an audience.