Another Rocket in Baghdad (10th October 2006, 19.4MB, 4:06 min)
Everyone’s a target (8th Jan 2007, 1:51 min, 7.3MB)
Quite extraordinary stuff from the Alive in Baghdad vlog.
Check out the complete video archive on the site, where
you can also donate to help sustain this important project.
nexttoheaven (preview) (2006, 5.2MB, 1:24 min)
“OK, there have been questions and a few complaints.
But, yeah, there is a secret project. Here’s a peek.
Here are a few ideas that didn’t make the cut –
Sound of one hand clapping
What we ate, what we didn’t eat (lost tape!!)
Network centric warfare
Time graffiti
Cherry Tree talk
Hard shave with color bars behind”.
from hoppervideo .
borat response (2004, 1.9MB, 54 sec.)
Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat provided
lots of Controversy and created Conflicts
with the Kazakh Government.
Wilderness Trouble Version 1.0* (2007, 9.2MB, 3:31 min.)
When we posted their splendid Series of Practical Performances in the Wilderness
which will be returning here before long, we said lots of nice things about that.
No reason to change our minds now -this fizzes with both ideas & technique in much the same way (although the repetition lies in excellence sustained rather than any marking of time).
For me a litmus test of anything artistic is can it do the affective equivalent
of fart & chew gum, ie can it encompass radically different moods or themes
in a coherent way, that is, foreshadow in the particular, in tiny concrete detail,
something much broader & deeper.
Well, here, yes, sure.
A genuinely comic lightness of tone is yoked to some quite big themes,
but not awkwardly..in fact they make it look easy..don’t think it is though.
Neat.
from ecoarttech.
*This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License
St Frank and the Wolf (2007, 72MB, 6:21 min.)
Curt Cloninger is a clever, original & fearless commentator on new media art,
always worth reading for his eschewal (or at least extremely careful
chewing over) of received new media wisdom.
He also maintains the excellent lab404.com.
This is something a little different; a video record of a live performance piece.
Background from Curt:
‘The projected loops are pre-recorded, but they run in different synch
with each other and are modulated variably depending on the realtime
improvisational performance — so it’s a prescribed performance space
that is qualitatively different each performance. As the theremin
volume gets louder (as my realspace left hand gets higher), the
projected big hands get more opaque and their accompanying volume
gets louder. As the theremin volume gets lower (as my realspace left
hand gets lower), the smaller projected ghost hands get more opaque
and their accompanying volume gets louder.
…Legend has it that a wolf was attacking the town of Gubbio,
so St. Francis was called in to get it to stop. Francis brokered a
deal with the wolf where it agreed to stop attacking the people in
the town if they agreed to feed it and keep their dogs
from bothering it. In a similar spirit, this piece seeks to dialogue
with sound and light and come to some sort of consensus.
The piece is not trying to impose a “taming” order on the media,
nor is it letting the media run wild. It enters into a dialogue with
matter (sound and light in space) in order to modulate and be modulated
by it.’
Reasons to check this piece out despite its large file size:
(1) It has an oddness quotient of over 93%.
(2) The music is neat, bit like the rougher edged output of the
early minimalists plus, also, the generative/aleatoric
thing in music is a hard one to pull off & it’s well done here.
(3) Smart.
(4) It follows no fashion.
(5) It rejects irony – there is real human feeling here, sometimes verging on the ecstatic.
then and now (2006, 5MB, 20 sec. loop)
“although it’s only twenty seconds there’s a bunch of stuff from DVblog in it:
iggy’s hand, the gnarls barkley video, a piece from the nuclear attack video,
and the begining of another video from some guy called Moljevic.
and, of course, there’s that great riff from yes. “
Antonio Mendoza.
Breakfast (2006, 8.6MB, 3:46 min.)
There’s a quiet surrealism that is a feature (not the defining feature, but very much
there) of Martha Deed’s work. Well…it’s somewhere in the surreal, magical-realist,
what-have-you ballpark & it arises, I think, out of a careful & dispassionate (but not
lacking in warmth) observation of small things, sometimes domestic,
sometimes a telling detail of something bigger & darker.
Here she’s in domestic mode & it’s & light & charming but don’t mistake that for
trivial. it’s not.
from Howl part 2 (1997, 7.5MB, 4:07 min)
The mighty Allen Ginsberg, buffoon, trickster, personality, conscience, catalyst
above all genuine, genuine poet; our Whitman, sometimes bad but never boring,
who in so many ways shaped ‘the best minds of his generation’,
reads from part two of ‘Howl’ shortly before his death in 1997.
From the excellent allenginsberg.org
duetavatargrange (2006, 28.9MB, 5:04 min.)
Alan:
That is absolutely stunning!
Was it choreographed or improvised? Are you saying the
source material was originally motion capture? Did you
contribute to the choreography?
Some of it puts me in mind of the kind of motion
“artifacts” one gets when pausing movie capture or
scrubbing through something..
Also there’s a spirit of resistance about it that is
profoundly human & humane – it reminds me of the
struggle to signal, to articulate, of people with
cerebral palsy whom I’ve known, or my late
father’s fight with Parkinson’s.
The piece seems tremendously dignified to me – almost
heroic; must have required *such* technique to perform (well,
doesn’t surprise me – I remember the Foofwa running
piece you posted somewhile ago)
This is everything I love about dance (& art in
general)
michael
Performers:
Foofwa d’Imobilit
Lamp (2006, 945 KB, 1:33 min.)
Mr. Fish is a comic illustrator whose work is often featured
in print publications. Now you can see his sardonic humor
animated on LA Weekly‘s website!
This one is more lighthearted than the usual Mr.Fish fare.
For more biting political critique, in the form of awesome comics
be sure to visit his blog.
By Mica Scalin.