Monthly Archives: May 2007

Kari Altmann – CDR (Listen)

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CD(R) Listen
CDR (Listen) (2007, 13.75MB, 1:20 min)

Says Kari Altmann:

‘This is the webvideo version. In real life it also lives as a
looping video installation with headphones (that play nothing).
This piece is meant to encourage you to question the notion
of listening and hearing. When experiencing it some people
crave audio, some people hear imprints, memories, and echoes of it,
and some people “see” it or “feel” it. The headphones that are
expected to play audio or music are actually used to close you
off to outside noises and force you to truly listen to the piece
and process it within your own headspace. Many people already
think audiovisually, while many others still divide the two in
their own terms. What do you hear?’

Eyebeam: open city

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opencity
Open City (2007, 26.2 MB, 4:27 min)

Open City: Tools for Public Action was an exhibition and series of public programs
at Eyebeam that focus on the ingenuity of graffiti writers, artists, protesters,
pranksters & hackers attempting to reclaim the public realm.
Here’s work from 11 of the artists featured in the exhibition.
From the Graffiti Research Lab.

Kev Flanagan

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Talking Heads
Talking Heads (2003, 12.8MB, 1:09 min)

Ain
Ain’t Nobody Got It (2006, 18.1MB, 1:35 min)

Two movies from Irish artist & curator Kev Flanagan.
I like them both, but there is something so utterly fuck-off mad
about the Aguilera cover, with its fine disregard to boot for any known
production value, which totally does it for me.
The performers in that are Cian McConn & Stephanie Hough
who as Margaret and Jim have their own neat line in performance…

Rick Silva – A Rough Mix

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A Rough Mix
A Rough Mix (excerpt) (2007, 140MB, 8 min.)

Excerpt from a single channel and a looping installation DVD by Rick Silva.

Oh this is smart & rich & lovely work!
You think perhaps the remix idea has colonised all of our thoughts
& our work to the level of clich�.
(So maybe all that remains is to classicize it – to do it better & better,
which is certainly something Silva, in various guises, has recently done..)
One day, someone describes this work in words to you & you
might, if of a cynical turn of mind, think – ‘Ho-Hum!’
Then you actually look at it & there’s something alchemic going on.
From a fairly base metaphor, Rick Silva conjures a work of elegance,
substance & great beauty – a beauty not only visual but moral.
Look at it! – it’s a paean to the planet but many other things too:
the scratching becomes dance, it’s a dance film!
The music is so carefully cut (but in such an apparently offhand way,
the way one imagines the mythical 19th century gentleman
would cut): it’s a music video!
It’s a travelogue (but its editing would not have made sense
before the net).
Each basic level constantly & fruitfully gives rise to other emergent
meanings which in turn reseed new ways of thinking about the piece
– the mark of a serious & substantial work of art.

PS Interesting to compare this with Cary Peppermint’s recent
Series of Practical Performances in the Wilderness
– another work that is in a sense engaged around loosely ecological
themes, very much the zeitgeist, (but reasonably so!)
& whose artistic qualities are not confined, limited, by that engagement…

PPS Now I think about it – there’s all the wonderful stuff by Stallbaum & Poole too.
That fits in somewhere too…

PPPS Personally I like this much more than Silva’s recap – for me, in that, there was a sense in which the formal structure based on a kind of repetition over a long period eventually closes
us off ( although one can of course see how that work might have been
a very necessary staging post to this)
– here there’s a fantastic sense of opening-out
Exhilarating!