Category Archives: architecture

Ruth Catlow -Time is speeding up

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Time is speeding up (2016, 11MB, 1:00 min)

This is a beautiful piece, a distillation down to a minute of a three month installation by Ruth Catlow, artist and co-director of the marvellous Furtherfield.
She explains its premise and construction better than I can, so I’ll hand over to her:

This networked video performance and installation is about how life seems to speed up as we get older; based on the reflection that when I was one day old, a day was my whole life but on the second day one day was only half my life etc.
The work was commissioned for ‘We Are Not Alone’, an exhibition for 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe, UK.


During exhibition opening hours between 23rd January -24th April 2016, viewers could watch a live looping video online. At the exhibition people could pose for the web cam, or might be caught looking at the video in which they were soon to be portrayed.
Using a computer programme called Geological Time Piece that I created with Gareth Foote a still webcam image was captured every 3-5 minutes during exhibition opening hours. The camera pointed at a wall in the gallery, upon which a changing text was displayed. The software added each image as a frame to a looping video, of fixed 3 minute duration. The frame density increased every 3 minutes, as each images was added to the video.
In the exhibition space full of movement – of light and shade and people coming and going – people could insert themselves into the video by standing between the webcam and the text. Over three months the human presences started to flicker and disappear and the moving image progressively conveyed a more geological sense of time, the arc of daylight moving through the space, the architecture, and other more static things came to dominate the image. The computer programme stopped running when the exhibition closed by which time the video contained over 3600 images. The final video runs for a minute at 60fps.

Nicki Rolls – Dream Home & Don’t Know Y

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Dream Home (2012, 61MB, 1:00 min)


Don’t Know Y (2010, 116MB, 2:23 min)

I first encountered Nikki Rolls’ work through Kerry Baldry’s splendid One Minutes series.( In fact we featured another piece by her in our very first post about that series)

As with so many of the artists included in that series she’s an amply justified curatorial choice;
her work is subtle, thought provoking and very beautiful.
She makes tiny ( or sometimes none, except to select) interventions into found (sometimes “found from herself”) images or footage which have a transformative effect and an expressive force much greater than one might have any right to predict. Beautiful.

Constellation – Covent Garden Winter Lights

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uva_coventgarden
Constellation (2008, 17MB, 3 min.)

“Commissioned by Covent Garden, United Visual Artists lit up the market
halls of Covent Garden with a responsive light installation. Launched as
the flagship piece of the winter season program at Covent Garden the
installation featured 600 custom-designed mirrored LED tubes hanging
above the entire Covent Garden market space.


The volumetric arrangement of the tubes created a canvas in which three
dimensional light formations were made possible. Constellation was also
individually controllable using a custom-designed control panel, giving the
installation an intimate connection with the public.”

United Visual Artists are a British-based collective whose current practice spans permanent architectural installation, live performance and responsive installation.

Santiago Sierra – NO, Global Tour

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NOGlobalTour
NO, Global Tour trailer (2010, 21 MB, 3:11 min)

Team Gallery, Lisson Gallery , Galería Helga de Alvear & Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani,
in association with Artprojx Cinema, present the UK premiere of NO, Global Tour,
2010 by Santiago Sierra.
The 120 minute film consists of the manufacture and transportation of two monumental sculptures
in the form of the word “NO”, travelling through different territories on a flatbed truck.
The NO, GLOBAL TOUR has resulted in a feature film that documents the passage of this
large NO through various world cities.
A monumental sculpture – unchanged both in its form and immediate meaning – that gradually
assumes a complex semantic load during a journey full of eventualities, accidents, and unexpected events.

Laser Tag – The Graffiti Research Lab

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laser tag
laser tag (2006, 17.6MB, 4 min.)

The Graffiti Research Lab is dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers,
artists and protestors with open source tools for urban communication.

Steven Ball – Aroundabout: Second Person Present

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aroundabout
Aroundabout: Second Person Present (2011, 117MB, 4 min, silent)

Extracted from a longer work made for Steven Ball’s
Aroundabout blog


“I also showed it as part of a presentation of material from
Aroundabout I did at City Methodologies at the Slade,
where it was displayed looped continuously on a flat
screen monitor face up on the floor, while I ‘performed’
the blog with Powerpoint!”

Some of these expanded cinema folk do relish a challenge!

Even truncated & divorced from its performative context it stands
as a splendid bit of structural/formalist film/vid poetry.

Diez – Architectural Mapping Preview – Metz Station

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architectual_mapping
Architecturale Mapping Preview Station Metz (2010, 53 MB, 4:14 min.)

Cette preview a

Nuit blanches 2010 Metz, France with DIEZ and paradigme

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Nuit blanches 2010 – DIEZ and paradigme (2010, 41 MB, 1:55 min.)

Collaboration of Video mapping, light and sound installation, done for
Nuit blanches 2010 Metz.
Audio Visual design by paradigme.
Scenography and video mapping by DIEZ.

Marina Abramovic & Ulay: Relation Work (1976 – 1979)

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relation_in_space
Relation in Space (1976, 2 MB, 26 sec.)

expansion_in_space
Expansion in Space (1977, 5 MB, 1:18 min.)

In “Relation in Space” (1976) Marina Abramovic & Ulay ran around the room – two
bodies repeatedly move past each other. They collide at great speed like two planets,
mixing male and female energy into a third component called

Sondheim & an Ad…

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rilkes tongue
Rilkes Tongue (2006?, 73 MB, 1:44 min)

Alan:
“something to stare at

This is a few years old, but hasn’t been put up; the dancer is Maud
Liardon, either Foofwa or I held the camera and made the video and
effects reminiscent of G. Moreau come to life, the church is in the
Swiss Alps, Rilke was buried behind it, murals of tormented hell,
angelic world of Elegies, we were transported”

PLUS
tether

…Alan Sondheim is one of the artists whose work you can see if
you can get to Nottingham, UK this Thursday – Sunday, 11th-14th Nov, 12-5 pm, in the first offline
appearance by DVblog, where a 45 minute program of work first posted here
will be continuously screened at The Wasp Room, part of Tether Studios.

Details:
Tether Studios,
17a Huntingdon Street
Nottingham
NG1 3JH

tel: 07729124336

mail@tether.org.uk

Artists featured:
Kerry Baldry, Steven Ball, Robert Croma, Rupert Howe, JimPunk, Donna Kuhn, Morrisa Maltz, Millie Niss, Giles Perkins, Sam Renseiw, Alan Sondheim, Nathaniel Stern, Liz Sterry, Eddie Whelan

Also – if you’re reading this & are interested in screening this program -we have both PAL and NTSC
DVDs available. Just mail us!

Julianne Swartz – Installations

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deep_storage
Deep Storage (2002, 10 MB, 2:03 min.)

julianne_swartz_transfer
Transfer (2001, 7 MB, 1:28 min.)

A couple of documentaries of site specific installations by
“boundlessness” artist – Julianne Swartz.

Christophe Gendre – Travelling

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Christophe Gendre: Travelling
Travelling (2004, 185 MB, 11:33 min)

Carefully made & delicious to watch travelogue
(although I think it conflates a number of different trips,
so in one sense it’s about travel itself as much as place)
from French artist Christophe Gendre.
More soon.

Millie Niss – Skyway

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skyway
Skyway (2009, 39 MB, 1:53 min)

A couple of months before her untimely death last year Millie Niss
sent me this video –

‘I have been working for a long time on and off (mostly off) these
days on a video showing industrial ruins on the outskirts of Buffalo,
shot from an elevated highway which is scheduled to be torn down…’

I remember thinking how beautiful and evocative it was and I assumed
Millie would publish it on the Sporkworld Blog in due course.
Sadly this never happened.
The other day I came across it & asked Millie’s mother and collaborator,
Martha Deed, for permission to post it here, which she gave,
so it’s a pleasure tinged with sadness to do so.

We’re going to take a summer break now.
We’ll be back on September 20th but in the meantime we’ll leave you
with this memorial to a fine artist & a fine human being.

Sans Verre – Brad Tinmouth and Kaitlin Till-Landry

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sacsverre
Sans Verre (2008, 7.3 MB, 1 min)

A documentation of a performance made with Lili Huston-Herterich.
By Brad Tinmouth and Kaitlin Till-Landry.

Dan Graham – Beyond

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dan_graham_beyond
Dan Graham – Beyond (2009, 40 MB, 3:02 min)

Narrated by Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz and Curator Chrissie Iles, artist
Dan Graham discusses Heart Pavilion (1991), Public Space,
Two Audiences (1976), and Opposing Mirror and Video Monitors (1974).
All were on view in Dan Graham: Beyond at the Whitney Museum in 2009.

Produced by the Whitney Museum.

Scanner et al. – Night Jam

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NightJam
NightJam (2006, 26MB, 11:28 min.)

An Artangel commissioned project from 2006 involving
sound artist Scanner working with clients of London’s
New Horizons Youth Centre, devoted to work with homeless youth.
The musical collaborators are MC Utta, MC Marcel,
MC Quick Latino, MC Magic and MC Sweetie.

Undoubtedly evocative, if a tad derivative, especially
considering the resources at play here.
The multilingual MCing is great though!

Studio Banana TV Interviews Pablo Valbuena

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pablo_valbuena
Interview with Pablo Valbuena (2009, 43 MB, 3:46 min)

Studio Banana TV interviews visual artist and architect Pablo Valbuena.
After working in digital media designing virtual architectures for videogames,
he currently looks for new ways of using light to introduce the dimensions of
time and movement in urban spaces, altering the perception of physical space
through projected virtual realities.

Takashi Ito – Spacy

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Private Charges
Spacy ( 1981, 14MB, 2:27)

The other day,on a whim, I bought Takashi Ito’s collected works on DVD
from the BFI shop. I’d never heard of him before.
I’m so glad I did. It is utterly compelling and remarkable work.
Spacy is an early piece and the clip here is neither complete
not particularly good quality but it does give you a taste of Ito’s early
– almost formalist – style.
There’s such delight in seeing how this broadens into the flexible,
confidently handled and singular idiom of the later pieces, where a quite
musical rigor in the formal structuring is never absent but which
also underpins a beautifully ambiguous and rich expressivity.
The whole set was one of those all too rare tingle-down-the-spine
revelations which I gulped down in a couple of sittings.
This is outstanding & important work – I urge people to become acquainted with it.

Vito Acconci #2

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Borders
Advice (clip, 2006, 2MB, 58 secs)

Borders
Acconci Studio Presentation (2006, 36MB, 29:02 min)

More from the splendid Vito Acconci, this time from
his later architecture and design period.
One vid is a little lollipop -advice to the young-
extracted from a longer interview and profile on
designboom.com.
The second is a much more substantial
and utterly fascinating presentation given at the launch of
LAB magazine in 2006.
What an astonishing human being!

Grrrridwave – EXYZT and Boris Edelstein

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modul8
Grrrridwave (2006, 60 MB, 4:26 min.)

Collaborative installation between EXYZT and Boris Edelstein
of team Modul8 as part of the METAVILLA project
at the Architectural Biennale in Venice 2006.

Light Attack – Studio Daniel Sauter

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Light Attack (2004, 17MB, 4:55 min.)

Light Attack

‘uses a custom mobile projection setup installed in a car
to project an animated virtual character onto the cityscape.
Short pre-recorded video loops are arranged into seamless motion
patterns by the computer software, allowing interaction with the
architecture and passers-by in real-time.’

More from Studio Daniel Sauter.

Nira Pereg – G Spotting

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gspotting
G Spotting (2003, excerpt, 4MB, 1 min.)

“G Spotting is a search for the pleasure zone of the look. In keeping
with commands, which are read out aloud, the camera moves horizontally
and vertically over an architectural landscape towards what seems like
pleasure zones. Although the search is visual, the image remains unplanned,
following the sound and carrying out each command. While using the urban
landscape as a chart of the female body, the work touches on the themes of
surveillance, modern weaponry and pornography.”

by Israeli video artist Nira Pereg.

Urban Eden by Millie Niss

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eden3
Urban Eden (2006, 5MB, 1:50 min.)

“This movie takes place in the “Urban Eden” of the IBM Building’s Public
Atrium & Sculpture Gallery. The soundtrack consists of quotes involving the
words, “apple” and “Eden.” Ironic, isn’t it, that the IBM Building is decorated
with sculpted Apples as if they were promoting a rival company’s products….”
by Millie Niss from sporkworld.

Mark Napier at bitforms gallery nyc

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smoke
smoke (excerpt) (2007, 7MB, 56 sec.)

‘A symbol of the human desire to monumentalize ideas in physical form,
the Empire State Building is a subject of Mark Napier‘s artwork in the past four years.
This icon of American hegemony is key to exploring shifting structures of power,
specifically the transition from steel to software as the medium of power in our time.’
In Smoke, a generative software installation projected on the bitforms gallery wall.
Images from the show –here.