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.