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.