Kino Da! (1981, 5.6 MB,1:42 min )
Kino Da! , a wonderful portrait of the poet and communist Jack Hirschman
by the American experimental filmmaker Henry Hills is just one of the Hills films
that can be viewed at . More about Hills and his work see – henryhills.com
Donald Trump on Citizen Kane (2004, 40.2MB, 3:22 min.)
by Errol Morris.
‘The last thing one would imagine Donald Trump talking about is Citizen Kane,
what many believe to the greatest film ever made, but here he is talking about
in one of the aborted projects by Errol Morris — like he has lived it, like he is a
reincarnation of Charles Foster Kane. The beauty is not just in the Errol Morris
meditative style or even what Trump has to say about Citizen Kane but what we
want to see. Mainly, that Trump’s life mirrors that of Kane and that this real life
epic character sees his own tragedy.
Talking about wealth, he says ‘In real life, wealth does in fact isolate you from other
people…it is a protective mechanism’. That quote speaks volumes. The salesman is
poking holes into his much marketed life. Asked on what advice he would give
Charles Foster Kane, Trump says boldly: ‘Get yourself a different woman!’.
Erection (1971, 180MB, 18:06 min.)
A nineteen-minute film by John and Yoko, which was made in London during
1970 and 1971. When John had heard that the London International Hotel was
to be built in Kensington, he sought permission to film its entire construction.
Once he’d obtained it he contacted the photographer Iain MacMillan and asked
him to take a series of photographs of the construction. MacMillan had a stills
camera and filmed the erection of the hotel from a fixed position for a period
of eighteen months.
The stills were presented in sequence in the film, which ended with a shot of the
completed hotel where all the lights were then turned off, leaving a black screen.
On the soundtrack Yoko sang two songs, ‘Airmale’ and ‘You’, using tapes of recordings
of Joe Jones Tone Deaf Music Co., which was, in fact, a number of toy percussion
instruments that played themselves, a squeaky style of sound devised by a former
associate of Yoke’s Fluxus days, Joe Jones. The hotel was situated at 147 Cromwell
Road and later became the London Swallow Hotel.
03.07.06 (2006, 5.3MB, 1:54 min.)
03.12.06 (2006, 3.7MB, 1:08 min.)
03.17.06 (2006, 3.8MB, 1:13 min.)
Back in 2006, when video blogging just started, Andrew Schneider
was the funniest person on the internet.
From Astoria, Queens, it’s the whether|man.
Gilgamesh, Part #1 (2012, 214MB, 5:03 min)
Beyond Spectacle (2012, 214MB, 5:03 min)
About DVblog –
Doron started DVblog in summer 2005 and Michael started posting about a month after.
A number of people have contributed hugely along the way – notably Mica Scalin, Brittany
Shoot and Brian Gibson.
We’ve been vandalised a couple of times (hence postings now dating back only to late 2006,
although the vast majority of what was ever posted is back up now) but we’ve also had some really
delightful feedback from people who’ve felt what we’ve done is worthwhile.
Early on we decided that anything we posted would actually live on our server and this means we have assembled an extraordinary and unique archive of the birth and infancy of art video specifically created for or focussed upon the network.
One day we will donate this to an institution that will preserve it and continue to make it available for both joy and study.
When we started Quicktime was the only serious way for anyone to post moving image work to the net. Although it remains the backbone of virtually all digital moving image activity, as a mode of delivery it has now been almost completely superseded by streaming video. This has two implications – one being that the casual viewer has become less patient and is much more likely to go to YouTube or similar, where there’s no significant wait and where quality has improved immeasurably. The other is that fewer and fewer artists are posting their work in QuickTime format – so our old methodology of accepting submitted work but also scouring the net for interesting stuff is at least 50% outmoded.
Finally we want to say – it has been hard work and for no material reward. Indeed, not only have we never made a dime out of DVblog, it has cost us both cash and a great deal of time to sustain. Not that we are complaining – we hope we provided a service to people and certainly we learned a great deal and derived a great deal of pleasure from everything we posted. We made some good and lasting friendships too.
For the reasons listed above we are going to stop posting regularly from today. We finish with pieces from two artists who, in very different ways, have given us a great deal of pleasure – Annie Abrahams and Edward Picot.
Annie, with a record of a networked performance in November of 2012 and Edward with a splendidly mad take on the tale of Gilgamesh, featuring characters from his Dr Hairy series.
We’re not proposing to shut up shop entirely – we will continue post such work in QuickTime format which is submitted to us and which we like. We still think there is something special about the amount of control over quality posting an actual QT file gives and we’re very interested in continuing to write short, but we hope thoughtful and helpful, texts about these. Please, therefore, don’t be shy abuot sending us stuff!
We’d like to thank all who have contributed work over the past seven and a half years and, of course, those who have taken an interest both in the work and what we’ve had to say about it.
Finally we wish readers and contributors alike a happy, productive and thoughtful 2013.
Michael Szpakowski & Doron Golan, 1st Jan 2013.
Essen Dortmund Lederhosen (2005, 36MB, 6:11 min.)
Rick Silva a.k.a – camoufleur, created a musical video
for the former duo-member band – Zeugwart Hallbauer.
futurespots – Splinters (2006, 10.1MB, 1:44)
futurespots – Flash (2006, 3.7MB, 1:10)
From the futurespots archives, two older works
from what is now a defunct videoblog.
These days, Christopher Black’s experimental
and interactive media can be found on his personal site.
Magnotta SpeedShow (2012, 20.4, 3:07 min)
Magnotta SpeedShow – A vanity surf performance.
“One week after Magnotta got caught we present a vanity surf performance at the exact same Internetcafe in Berlin where Magnotta was arrested while vanity surfing! Be invited to join and vanity surf yourself!”
“Killing is bad, mailing bodyparts is worse, vanity surfing (while getting caught) is cool!”
“Internet cafes are not just vaguely unglamorous places for ethnic minorities and communications challenged, they do have a genuinely bad reputation.” [Olia Lialina – ‘Still There’] Where else a social network killer can be caught? Of course in the Internet cafe!”
[shot and edited(!) on a smart phone ]
Internetcafe Helin, Karl-Marx-Straße 156, Berlin
Tuesday 12th of June, 2012, 8-10 pm
by Constant Dullaart, CuratingYoutube, Olia Lialina & Aram Bartholl
Media Burn by Ant Farm (1975, 202MB, 25:46)
Infamous July 4, 1975 “pseudo-event” featuring a
speech by “JFK Jr.” and a 1959 Cadillac turned wacky
crash test car through a wall of burning television sets,
produced by video artists and activist collective Ant Farm.
The first four and a half minutes of this particular video
feature actual news coverage about the event.
The rest is the full speech and crash. Inspiration.
Video via the Media Burn archive.
Recreation, Re-Creation (2006, 9.6 MB, 4:27 min.)
“This video juxtaposes original 16 mm footage acquired from my Grandfather with interview footage taken of my Mother and Grandparents. All but the
past-tenses of their speaking are left intact, while the film footage has been aggressively manipulated. The project seeks to question the language of constructing one’s identity through negotiation with familial history, where the past has been constructed and reconstructed in order to corroborate certain facades of culture which are wished to be left intact.”
From Bitsy Knox
Picasso – I salute you, I embrace you! (2006, 3MB, 29 sec)
Prévert goes postcard shopping (2005, 10MB, 1:22 min)
Two gems from the excellent website of the French
Institut National de l’Audiovisuel , featuring two figures
associated with surrealism, the poet Jacques Prévert &
(seen here on crackingly deranged form) the artist Salvador Dali
New Media in the Marketplace (2011, 37 MB, 52 min)
“Over the years, we’ve found that a number of the artists we support in our Emerging Fields category have questions about how they can better market and exhibit their work. They have questions about pricing and editioning; changing formats; what it is that they are actually selling when they offer a work for sale; what their obligations to representatives and collectors are after a sale; and whether or not they should even participate in an art market that is, in their eyes, more sympathetic and better able to represent works in more conventional or established media.
On November 2, Creative Capital hosted a webinar for grantees to explore some of these issues and answer specific questions from artists working in new media. The panelists were Jason Salavon (2000 Visual Arts), Karolina Sobecka (2009 Emerging Fields), Stephen Vitiello (2006 Emerging Fields) and Marina Zurkow (2001 Visual Arts). Sean Elwood, Creative Capital’s Director of Programs & Initiatives, served as the facilitator.”
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST FROM THIS DISCUSSION
Podcast from Creative Capital.
‘White Flood’ – clip 1 (1940-2, 1.1 MB, 30 sec.)
‘A Child Went Forth’ – clip (1940-2, 1.4 MB, 30 sec.)
‘White Flood’ – clip 2 (1940-2, 661 KB, 29 sec.)
Easily the most interesting of all Brecht’s composer collaborators
& in flat contradiction to the current myth spread by those
who dislike his politics, by far the better composer than the rather
dull Weill, Hanns Eisler’s keen intellect turned to questions of film in his
exile in the USA in the early forties.
Under the auspices of the New School & funded by the Rockefeller foundation
Eisler conducted an intensive investigation of the relationship between
film & music , often involving him writing new music to already existing footage.
You can see some of this footage here – but what you really need to do is to listen.
There is no-one who could not learn something from the amazing way Eisler
deploys music here.
After the project, Eisler went on to write, with Theodore Adorno,
himself no slouch intellectually (& also a practicing composer),
one of the key books on music & the movies –‘Composing for the Films’
These clips come from the website for a new edition of the book
released with a companion DVD documenting much of the Rockefeller experimentation.
Indispensable.
La sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (1895, 6MB, 46 sec.)
The year is 1895. The “Hangar” was the first set in the history of Cinematography and
can be seen here in “La Sortie de l’usine Lumière”, Lumière’s first film.
from the fantastic site – Institut Lumière.
Indian Movie [Declan Kilfeather] (2007, 3MB, 55 sec)
Punch [Kerry Baldry] (1994, 30MB, 1:14 min)
Land Gauge [Steven Ball] (1981/2008, 44MB, 1:21 min)
Upside Down World [Marty St.James] (2008, 19MB, 1:25 min)
I wrote a review of Vols. 1 to 4 of Kerry Baldry’s excellent One Minutes
project for a new journal, the Moving Image Review and Journal, and I thought it would be nice to post the pieces I discuss in it here.
Martin Archer Live at The Grapes, Sheffield (2006, 85.8MB, 9:52 min)
Great vid made by Jonny Drury of Martin Archer, a unique
& towering figure in British (here I was going to interpolate experimental but that
doesn’t really do justice to the intensely personal soundworld Archer has
forged over the years – a combination of fierce poetry, a huge
intellectual range & hunger & a love affair with sound & how it
can be ordered & dis-ordered & where one now feels he knows
exactly where he’s going, so experimental feels in a way
like an impertinence) music of the past 25 years,
performing at The Grapes pub in his home town of Sheffield, UK.
Wikipedia:Technologies of Cooperation (2005, 70 MB, 1:30 hr.)
Lecture at Stanford University on Wikipedia by founder Jimmy Wales.
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, Martha Deed and Kate Southworth respectively – put work into making it happen.)
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.)
Joseph Beuys – Transformer (1979, 24 MB, 3 min)
Excerpt from a 60-minute documentary featuring avant-garde
German artist Joseph Beuys during a 1979 exhibit at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
Soziale Plastik (1969, 14 MB, 1:47 min)
Joseph Beuys accepts the challenge to expose himself to the anonymous spectator,
in speechless close-up on a video monitor: the artist as..
DuPont (2011, 25 MB, 2:42 min.)
Smokey (2011, 25 MB, 2:45 min.)
A couple of previews from Rob Parrish who writes;
“Back in September of 2006, I launched Next To Heaven with this staccato mission statement, I download movies from Archive.org. I watch the movies. I write and record new audio. I re-cut the video to the new audio. Every Wednesday there will be a new movie.” And so it was for 52 straight weeks. In January 2011, I started releasing Season 2, another 52-week effort. During both seasons I learned a lot about storytelling, saw scores of amazing public domain films, and garnered a bit of love in the form of awards, film festival appearances, and favorable press.”
Samuel Beckett‘s only venture into the medium of cinema, Film was written
in 1963 and filmed in New York in the summer of 1964, directed by
Alan Schneider and featuring Buster Keaton. For the shooting Mr.
Beckett made his only trip to America. The film, which has no dialogue,
takes its basis Berkeley’s notion esse est percepti that is, to be is to be perceived.
European Vacation (2005, 25.6 MB, 2:18 min.)
Morning Routine (2005, 44.3 MB, 4:34 min.)
The Summer of Van Torre was hugely popular in 2005 in video blogging circles.
The wepisodes recount the life of Jon VanTorre, each week bringing him closer
to total cardiac arrest with Ether Baths, Spider-Man Nightmares, and Meat Sandwiches.
The series (which began in 2001) was presented online in 05 by Human Dog.
Here is an interview (2005, 67.5 MB, 13 min.) by Josh Leo with writers & directors
Jon VanTorre, Michael Schwartz and Chris Weagel.
7 Months of My Aesthetic Education (2005, 14 MB, 1:45 min.)
Speed up documentation from Tony Oursler‘s installation, “Studio: Seven Months of My
Aesthetic Education (Plus Some)” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005.
It combined video, sound, music and poetry to create environments that truly reflect the dissolving
boundaries of twenty-first-century culture. The work is inspired by Courbet
RAMBO (1987, 5.6 MB, 2:32 min)
ZERO ONE KILL MY DESIRE (1988, 7 MB, 3:12 min)
Early videos by Max Moswitzer using found footage material,
video collage, remix and animation.
More Max Moswitzer here.
ZWlSCHENLAGERUNG EINER NULLOESUNG (1988, 10.5 MB, 4:47 min)
COMPUTER GAME (1987, 9 MB, 3:53 min)
Early videos by Max Moswitzer using found footage material, remix
and live performance.
ZWlSCHENLAGERUNG EINER NULLOESUNG was using documentary
films from 1938-1945 and was a live action performance at the
University of Applied Arts in Vienna in 1988.
COMPUTER GAME was exhibited at ARS Electronica in 1987.
More Max Moswitzer here.
Willow Creek Coffee (2006, 14.5MB, 47 sec.)
A Greater Degree of Hardware Awareness (2006, 25.6MB, 4:40 min.)
Is that a Shakespeare reference I see before me?
These 3 artists from Milwaukee ( who seem to have mutated
into an essentially music making outfit since) used whatever comes to
hand or mind, allied to an aesthetic that privileged
collaboration, speed & the improvisational,
to make this beautiful & engaging work.
clip #1 (1995, 7.6MB, 32 sec.)
clip #2 (1995, 3.2MB, 14 sec.)
clip #3 (1995, 4.1MB, 17 sec.)
Some lovely footage of the great free improv guitarist Derek Bailey,
who died in 2005, working with be-bop hoofer Will Gaines.
As with so much Bailey did, it seems at first deeply
odd & then, in equal measure, wonderful.
Important to understand this wasn’t some sort of gimmick:
Gaines had known Bailey since the sixties & although much of his
fame was garnered firmly in the mainstream, he has spent a great
deal of time working with cutting edge improvisors.
Enjoy two wonderful artists at the top of their game.
From European Free Improvisation.
Neighborhood Nuclear Superiority (50’s, 15MB, 1:35 min.)
Stumble upon this funny 50
Scandal – trailer (1950, 7.7MB, 1:38 min)
The Idiot – trailer (1951, 6.3MB, 1:22 min)
Don’t know whether these are the original, or re-edited, trailers
but they’re wonderful, wonderful.
Watch and marvel.
I know neither of these films but I can’t wait to get my sweaty
palms on the DVDs from Eureka Cinema’s Masters of Cinema series.
Claudia Hart Animated Installations (2005-2008, 39MB, 8:19 min.)
“Claudia Hart creates sublime landscape gardens that often contain
expressive and sensual female bodies that are meant to interject
emotional subjectivity into what is typically the overly-determined
Cartesian world of digital design. This video compilation includes
excepts from recent 3-D animated installations.”
from bitforms gallery NY.
VlogHistory1 (2007, 15.5MB, 4:07 min.)
from the excellent Richard Show.
