Category Archives: new media art

Joshua Fishburn – Layers. Machinima

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Layers (2007, 23 MB, 5:23 min)

“Layers is a mashup narrative machinima created with footage from Metal
Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PS2), Military footage from an Apache Helicopter
in Iraq (Public Domain/Department of Defense), and Shadow of the Colossus
(PS2). Recorded almost entirely through a sniper scope from the game, it
extends the conversation about the relationship between increasingly
sophisticated military technology and the drive towards visual realism in
videogames. What happens to the relationship between killer and victim
when they are separated by real and virtual distances? Adding the layer
of virtuality through the videogame complicates this relationship even further.”

by Joshua Fishburn.

Delpha Hudson – Out With Mother

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Out With Mother (2011, 73MB, 1:32 min)

I’m oscillating between finding this piece by Delpha Hudson really rather
beautiful and rather chilling (or both).
It’s perhaps the ambguity which makes it so effective, difficult to get a
precise fix on.
There’s no doubting that it’s a smart piece of work. I love the dual tempo thing
with the scene in the background unfolding slowly behind the more anxious and
busier foreground.
I’m assuming the speech like sound *is* sampled from an actual child -again the ambiguity
arising from, on the one hand its near musicality and on the other the
inevitable and immediate visceral response (certainly from anyone who’s ever had kids)
it provokes is a point adding to the richness of the thing.
Great. More from Delpha soon.

Wikipedia Art in London

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Wikipedia Art Intro (2011, 114MB, 2:29 min)

And, appropriately following on from yesterday’s post, a little intro
to the splendid Kildall/Stern Wikipedia Art project which is showing, as part
of a two person show at London’s Furtherfield gallery (formerly HTTP)
from this Friday.
(One individual piece by each artist too – promises to be a real treat)

Private view tonight 6:30 (Thurs.) – all welcome, maybe see you there.

This piece narrated in Stern’s breathless-puppy-dog-with-an-off-the-dial-IQ
trademark delivery with reassuringly measured interventions by the
no less smart & talented Kildall.

Edit by Foster Stilp, plus suitably keyed up and excited music by Stilp and
Kevin McGillivray, who together trade as Felixsofia

Drake Music Commission – Distant Interiors

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Distant Interiors (2011, 87MB, 2:16 min)

Drake Music is an organisation initiating and enabling a whole spectrum
of activity around disability and the arts (particularly music
but other artforms too).
This could be worthy, condescending and dull. It is none of these.
In recent years, under the inspired leadership of Carien Meijer,
DM has ensured it is situated primarily as a very forward looking
arts organisation which happens to work closely with disabled artists
to enable new and fresh work to emerge.
It has encouraged collaborations between disabled and non-disabled artists
and, in a sense, works towards its own future disappearance not only
by using technology to level the playing field but also by aspiring not
to pity or the sideshow but to serious, top level, work.

This is their first online commission, a remote collaboration between
video artist Melanie Clifford, composer Ailís Ní Ríain and artist Rebecca Key.

I like the fact that it is so confident in its austere and beautiful
language and aims, not to charm us, but to engage us.
The spiky and beautiful music is particularly exhilarating.

Heath Bunting – Memorial Stone

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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

Estella Cumberford – Friendsource14

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Friendsource14 (2011, 21MB, 1:18 min)

This piece, by Estella Cumberford, is great on a whole number of fronts.
Firstly it’s really nicely made.
The images walk that difficult line between
telling us too much and too little, and the audio
(processed, apparently, in GarageBand) is well judged,
well executed and more than a little engaging.
You wouldn’t guess from the piece’s surface simplicity
(first impressions only of course, anyway. Examine it closely
and see how hand-made and un-algorithmic it is)
the layers of structuring and processing that went into
it but I can’t help feeling these do manifest in the sense of
its coherence, richness and general success as a work of art.
The text was sourced & assembled from status updates on F******* of
14 of the artist’s friends. This then read by her & processed as noted.
The images were then grown (organic metaphors seem somehow
particularly apposite) out of this text and rendered by a kind of
shadow screen technique.
It’s an exquisite piece of work.
Transparency dictates I tell you that I teach Estella
at Writtle. (I use the word teach loosely -as with most of
the students we have an absorbing and on-going dialogue.)
It’s work like this that makes that part of my life so rewarding.

James Seo – Asynchrony – Split (Head)

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Asynchrony – Split (Head) (2006, 11 MB, 2:14 min)

“My latest project is Asynchrony. It’s a set of four interactive sketches for the
simultaneous visualization of multiple points in time within video. When combined
with time-lapse or looped video clips, each sketch generates a crudely synthesized
image of different time points in video, all within the shared space of the visual frame.
They divide the video frame into static or animated rectangular regions,
each of which can have its own time flow.”
by James Jung-Hoon Seo.
from Split Screen.

Talking About DVblog

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Electronic Village Galleries Talk 6th May 2011 (2011, 164MB, 32:14 min)

Gosh -where to start?
Awhile back we were approached to assemble a selection of
work from DVblog for screening at a gallery in the UK.
This reel then took on a bit of a life of its own, showing
at the museum of club culture in Hull, UK and at the Buffalo Literary Center, New York.
(of course ‘a life of its own’ is completely unfair – it got shown because real
human beings –Kerry Baldry and Martha Deed respectively – put work into making it happen.)
Then Kate Southworth, who is running a brilliant pilot project
involving showing digital work in village halls in Cornwall, in the extreme
south-west of the UK, asked if I’d be interested in curating something
and the reel immediately sprang to mind..

To cut a long story short it was shown at the second EVG event at
Zennor village hall on 7th May and I went down to talk (at some
length, I notice with a certain degree of horror)
about digital video on the net, DVblog in particular and about the
artists involved in this selection.
Here, for better or for worse, is my talk, filmed, heroically, given my
restless delivery style, by Delpha Hudson.
If you’d like to reconstruct the programme for yourself it’s below, with links to
the original DVblog posts.

And if you’d be interested in screening it, please get in touch!
(We also have a reel of silent work which has been screened with
musical accompaniment and is available for more such outings.)

JimPunk, 2010: T

Ruth Catlow – Landscape

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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.