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.
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.
Knife (2007, 67 MB, 5:50 min.)
“Death Valley is hot. We wouldn
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.
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 (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.
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.
Transformations v 1.0 (2007, 54MB, 2:47 min)
We’ve featured some of Irish artist Kev Flanagan’s work here
before.
He’s just started a new video blog which manifests a radically different
approach to that of his previous work.
Here’s an example – it’s slow (in a good sense), meditative and hypnotic.
Kev says he’s been looking at a lot of Chris Marker’s work – I can see that high
seriousness coming through, but this puts me in mind more of Tarkovsky or
particularly Tarkovsky’s sensibility in the face of natural phenomena.
waiting on bob (2005, 5.7MB, 1:56 min.)
move this rock (2005, 12.5MB, 3:56 min.)
stick like snakes (2005, 5.5MB, 1:54 min.)
Chapters 1,2,3 from the DVD ‘A Series of Practical Performances In The Wilderness’
by Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir.
This is very smart work indeed – it references, or better evokes, ideas & precedents
& techniques from all over world culture high & low & I’m sure this is conscious.
The thing is, a bit like the effect of C5’s short history of virtual hiking,
featured here last year, the rather knowing formalism of it all & the dry
keep-your-distance wit ironically somehow create a space for a deeply traditional
romanticism about nature & the landscape to sneak back in.
Not a criticism. Me, I love it.
A Rough Mix (excerpt) (2007, 140MB, 8 min.)
Excerpt from a single channel and a looping installation DVD by Rick Silva.
Oh this is smart & rich & lovely work!
You think perhaps the remix idea has colonised all of our thoughts
& our work to the level of clich�.
(So maybe all that remains is to classicize it – to do it better & better,
which is certainly something Silva, in various guises, has recently done..)
One day, someone describes
might, if of a cynical turn of mind, think – ‘Ho-Hum!’
Then you actually look at it & there’s something alchemic going on.
From a fairly base metaphor, Rick Silva conjures a work of elegance,
substance & great beauty – a beauty not only visual but moral.
Look at it! – it’s a paean to the planet but many other things too:
the scratching becomes dance, it’s a dance film!
The music is so carefully cut (but in such an apparently offhand way,
the way one imagines the mythical 19th century gentleman
would cut): it’s a music video!
It’s a travelogue (but its editing would not have made sense
before the net).
Each basic level constantly & fruitfully gives rise to other emergent
meanings which in turn reseed new ways of thinking about the piece
– the mark of a serious & substantial work of art.
PS Interesting to compare this with Cary Peppermint’s recent
Series of Practical Performances in the Wilderness
– another work that is in a sense engaged around loosely ecological
themes, very much the zeitgeist, (but reasonably so!)
& whose artistic qualities are not confined, limited, by that engagement…
PPS Now I think about it – there’s all the wonderful stuff by Stallbaum & Poole too.
That fits in somewhere too…
PPPS Personally I like this much more than Silva’s recap – for me, in that, there was a sense in which the formal structure based on a kind of repetition over a long period eventually closes
us off ( although one can of course see how that work might have been
a very necessary staging post to this)
– here there’s a fantastic sense of opening-out
Exhilarating!
Primary and other Remote Locations (2006, 44.5MB, 3 min)
We’ve featured the work of Brett Stalbaum & Paula Poole here before
*****Lewis Carroll like note – when I say before I might mean after
– I can’t remember whether we’ve reposted their other work yet –
something to look forward to perhaps!*****
a couple of times. I’ve been mystified in public here before (ditto)…are
the videos a work in themselves or merely the documentation of the computing/walking/painting/whatever that comprises the process?
I feel like it’s the former (no justification except my bones & the fact that
these vids are both clear & totally elusive..& it makes me a candidate
for Pseud’s corner but it seems to me no accident that the experience
-the way what seems initially straightforward somehow recedes –
of watching them is not unlike that of reading Emerson)
You can check out the details of the work process on the paintersflat
site but watch the video first..it’s ravishing..it conjures up the richness
of the process so beautifully & excitingly & oh now I’m in a loop because
of course I don’t know what the process was like because
I’ve only seen the videos. But they are sticky & fragrant &
evocative & funny in my head…
These folks are doing something very right.
Wilderness Trouble Version 1.0* (2007, 9.2MB, 3:31 min.)
When we posted their splendid Series of Practical Performances in the Wilderness
which will be returning here before long, we said lots of nice things about that.
No reason to change our minds now -this fizzes with both ideas & technique in much the same way (although the repetition lies in excellence sustained rather than any marking of time).
For me a litmus test of anything artistic is can it do the affective equivalent
of fart & chew gum, ie can it encompass radically different moods or themes
in a coherent way, that is, foreshadow in the particular, in tiny concrete detail,
something much broader & deeper.
Well, here, yes, sure.
A genuinely comic lightness of tone is yoked to some quite big themes,
but not awkwardly..in fact they make it look easy..don’t think it is though.
Neat.
from ecoarttech.
*This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License
