D’ Banj Oliver Twist Dance Video Competition (2011, 33 MB, 1:57 min)
Monthly Archives: January 2012
Afrobeats Week – #1 // 2Shy – Azonto Girl
2 Shy: Azonto Girl(2011, 82 MB, 3:39 min)
Q: Why?
A: Because we can
ZDEN – emptyspaces
emptyspaces (2000, 31MB, 2:26 min)
Zdeno Hlinka aka ZDEN.
A multimedia artist from Slovakia who’s been a pioneer in
working with real-time and visual mixing.
Gabriel Shalom – Small Room Tango
Small Room Tango (2007, 7.9MB, 3:43 min.)
Anyone who has attempted this kind of video-sampling-whilst-letting-the-
audio-determine-the-structure will now just how extremely bloody
difficult & fiddly it all is.
Hats off bigtime, then, to Gabriel Shalom, who not only makes it look
natural & easy but even squeezes poetry from it.
Richard Jochum’s group self portraits
Richard Jochum, Selfportrait as a Group #5 (2006, 14.5MB, 3:33)
Captured by Richard Jochum, proof that a photograph is much
more than we ever see: a collection, a collective process,
the self interconnected.
Comme un Chat Noir au Fond d’un Sac
comme un chat noir au fond d’un sac (2006, 18.4MB, 4:47 min)
A beautiful excerpt from Stephane Elmadjian’s feature film found
on composer Daniel Wohl’s website.
Starting off a bit intense it winds itself down and into some breathtaking stuff.
Joan Jonas – Waltz
Waltz (2003, 55.9MB, 7:04 min)
More ideas per second than many have in a lifetime & wonderful
& haunting & evocative & engaging & smart ones too.
She makes it look easy & natural. Think about it – bet it’s not.
A fantastic piece by veteran video artist/performer Joan Jonas found
on the invaluable Lumen Eclipse site.
Dark Continents 1 – Tyler Coburn
Dark Continents 1 (2007, 51 MB, 2:34 min.)
Video artist and animator Tyler Coburn‘s self conscious and rough use
of digital techniques presents a compelling parallel to Hollywood’s continual
and rapid movement toward the fantastically “real”.
Paul Rodriguez – the Mean Reds
Mean Reds (2007, 11.6MB, 1:48 min)
Artist & filmmaker Paul Rodriguez made this rather good
(I particularly like the collage plus the loopy/scratchy business
towards the very end where he collages/edits the sound too)
music video in 2007.
He said:
‘I was planning on shooting my friends for a
documentary. Magically the Mean Reds were also
playing, so I decided to shoot them as well.
Months went by with me sitting on this footage.
Then I found my self printing out frames,
and doing collage on individual frames.’
iligili – Lulu PIP
Lulu PIP (2009, 194 MB, 12:10 min.)
iligili has been doing hardcore pornography art and music videos
for over 25 years now. In the last decade he has been living in the Republic of Colombia
where he gets most of his inspiration for the upbeat, ‘in your face’ extravaganza.
Two from David Fincher
The Motels – Shame (1985, 18.7MB, 3:59)
Rick Springfield – Celebrate Youth (1985, 25.6MB, 3:58)
Before directing features like Se7en, Zodiac, and Fight Club,
badass David Fincher made some awesomely 80s music videos.
He continues to make solid music videos for more
contemporary acts, favoring the short form to the
Hollywood machine. These lyrically poor videos
serve as proof that you too can film talking billboards,
windy alleys full of teens, use the color-pass effect,
and still go on to direct such hits as Alien 3.
Tony Arnold – Foundation
Foundation(2011, 153MB, 14:01 min)
Here’s a striking and very beautiful piece of work from
Mississippi based artist Tony Arnold.
There is clear evidence of his discovery and love affair
with the greats of the American experimental film tradition but
he’s obviously gifted and visionary and very much his own
person. (I love his choice of music, sounds a bit like Ornette
Coleman but I think it’s not…wonderful, anyway)
This is evidenced by his website* too –
with exhilaratingly edgy and engaging work, full of ideas –
I particularly like his altered fashion ads series.
Interesting, very interesting, to see how this work develops.
*I am uncomfortable, however, with the dangerously
naive & abstentionist defence of hate-speech there – well,
more than uncomfortable:- it’s stupid & wrong headed –
tell the family of the next racist murder victim that the
language that convicted and sentenced them was just a “series of grunts”.
I’m assuming though it comes from young artist hunger &
restlessness & in-your-faceness and nothing worse.
Duncan Speakman – Is Life Boring?
Duncan Speakman – Is Life Boring? (2005, 5.3MB, 1:17 min.)
From Duncan Speakman (yes, his real name) and the now abandoned 29fragiledays.
Duncan moved onto the less populated Delicate Museum, but I enjoy his older work much more (maybe because there is simply more of it?).
No contrived voice-overs (at least not at first), I’m also given enough time to meditate on the video.
Sometimes short is too short.
This is one of the best pieces from his previous incarnation.
Anri Sala – Time After Time
Time After Time (2003, 45.5MB, 5:39 min)
I was initially rather mystified by the vogue in UK galleries for
the work of Albanian artist Anri Sala but after a while the penny
dropped.
The courage to embrace the poetry of detail, of stillness,
apparent lack of incident & furthermore to trust
one’s viewers to accompany one to that place…
Elegant, sad, lugubrious & also, I think, much more crafted
than first meets the eye.
Great.
Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett –Festival of Money
Festival of Money (2012, 111MB, 8:06 min)
Amusing & depressing both, because it is so spot on, a lovely bit of
satire from Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield fame.
Most artists, of course, are from the 99%…this is a timely reminder of
where our interests lie and don’t lie…
Dan Canyon
Quilts Never Sleep (short version) (2007, 20.9MB, 3:07 min)
Two very different but attractive & telling pieces from Dan Canyon.
The first was part of a show of – you guessed it – quilts in London in 2006,
about which read more here.
The second could’ve been made for dvblog, well, at least for me, as I’m a fool
for all things turntablist, & features the splendidly monickered Mickey Morphingaz.
Glimpse of the Garden
Marie Menken – Glimpse of the Garden (1957, 36.2MB, 5:04)
Marie Menken, avant-garde filmmaker of the 1940s, 50s,
and 60s – in addition to being the inspiration for
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a Warhol
superstar – made inspirational work from a time we seem
to overlook too much today. The garden here belongs
to one of her husband’s former male lovers, and while
Menken was often criticized for being quaint in her displays,
her style is an obviously feminine one that hides much
deeper meaning in ordinary but stunning visuals.
ASCII Rock – Yoshi Sodeoka
Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin (2003, 20 MB, 4:14 min.)
Unchained by Van Halen (2003, 18 MB, 3:21 min.)
Ascii Rock by Yoshi Sodeoka is a brilliant example of the genre of ASCII art, which creates still images and videos entirely out of alphabetic and numeric characters (ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a common format for text files in computers and on the Internet that represents alphabetic and numeric characters as binary numbers)
Cory Arcangel – Urbandale
Urbandale (2000, 43MB, 7:30 min.)
“Urbandale”, an ASCII/ANSI movie by Cory Arcangel.
“Filmed at Urbandale Plaza in the eastern suburbs of Buffalo N.Y.,
“urbandale” is a study of America’s suburban sprawl stripped to its barest
essentials and void of unnecessary contemporary cultural influence. This
film captures the sly, bland smile strip plazas cast at modern culture.
The film, rendered in text, focuses on the repetitive motion of food
stuffs being cooked in the lobby of a discount department store.”
“Urbandale” is a 2000 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc
for its Turbulence project.
Recreation, Re-Creation, or, We Like OLD Stuff – Bitsy Knox
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.”
Bitsy Knox from 312.
Sondheim, Foofwa – <em>Blanking</em>
Blanking (2011, 30MB, 1:07 min)
for Carol Novack
‘I was working on this, shot with Foofwa d’Imobilite at Eyebeam,
when I heard the news that Carol Novack had died. for many of us,
this was unexpected and awful, as if the year couldn’t end
without just one more tragedy.
Foofwa and I had talked about our
work together, earlier, about issues of pain, wounding, death;
I think this piece, made at the time, is all I could do, I speak
through image and sound, these words already lost, resting in
peace
thank you Foofwa and Jamie and Jackson at Eyebeam’
Alan Sondheim
Morrisa Maltz – an interesting intersection of art & commerce
Saved By The Bell/Mofones (2011, 33MB, 54 secs)
The title of this post being words that seldom pass my lips but which in this case
are entirely to the point.
The splendidly creative video artist Morrisa Maltz whose work we’ve been delighted
to feature here several times made these..um..arty-i-phone holders, which are, it has
to be said, rather good and to cut a long story short their commercial potential was
spotted and now she is a C….E….O & Urban Outfitters are selling her stuff.
You can read a fuller account here and you can view & buy here.
I hope she spends all of any money she makes on giving herself time to make more of the
very smart and fetching art videos she’s so good at.
Anyway this is a promotional vid for the moFones, lovingly carved from “Saved by the Bell”.
She even does marketing classily.