Shannon Noble – Newt

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.

Rick Silva – Krummholz Formation

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…)

Direct Language

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

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.

Alan Sondheim: large tree-scan world images

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