Carlos Gavito & Maria Plazaola

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Carlos Gavito & Maria Plazaola
Gavito & Plazaola (n/k, 13.5MB, 3:44 min.)

‘The secret of tango is in this moment of improvisation that
happens between step and step. It is to make the impossible thing
possible: to dance silence. This is essential to learn in tangodance,
the real dance, that of the silence, of following the melody.’
– Carlos Gavito

Watch the late Carlos Gavito & his partner Maria Plazaola
play havoc with the space time continuum in this extraordinary
piece in which time slows down, speeds up & actually comes to a
halt at least once.
Mesmerizing.

[ Found on this very strange tango site with lots more videos]

Ladislas Starewitch – Le Lion Devenu Vieux

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Le Lion Devenu Vieux
Le Lion Devenu Vieux (1932, 3.5MB, 1:04 sec.)

Ladislas Starewitch is often credited with inventing stop motion animation
as we know it, though so are several other people. It depends on what fits
into your definition of stop motion.
Certainly he was probably the first to actually make little figures and move
them frame by frame in an attempt to duplicate lifelike movement of actual
living things. it was because he was filming beetles and found that the hot
lights made them lethargic, so he made his own little beetles asrealistically
as possible and animated them instead.
This gave birth to further projects with very lifelike but sometimes partially
anthropomorphic (human-like) animals.
from – Darkstrider.

By Mica. (thanks Adam)

Studio Banana TV: Interview with video artist Annika Larsson

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annikalarsson1
Interview with Annika Larsson (2011, 134 MB, 3:47 min)

An interview with the Swedish video artist Annika Larsson.
In this interview Larsson talks about her approach towards a
post-produced composition of reality, about the psychological
hidden dynamics hidden in the characters of her video pieces
and about the evolution of her work, amongst other things.

from Studio Banana TV.

Michael Barnes-Wynters – Control #1

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Control #1
Control #1 [Seeking Kind in Human] (2009, 114MB, 4:52 min)

Michael got in touch via a mutual friend to tell me about what
seems to be an incredibly thriving live art scene in Manchester, UK.
To my shame, this is the first time I’ve come across it, so I’m going to
make up for this a little by posting three vids from Doodlebug, the
creative arts platform he founded.
This first is a performance by Michael himself with Sophie Yesilyurt.
It’s very powerful. What strikes me is how these performative things achieve
a huge effect, often with very simple means. I think those of us working
primarily in moving image have a good deal to learn from them.
More soon.

PIRATE – Annika Larsson

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pirate_larson
PIRATE (2006, 45 MB, 8:25 min)

By Annika Larsson.
Music by Tobias Bernstrup & Annika Larsson.

Crystal Stilts/Kate Thomas – Departure

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Departure
Departure (2009, 34 MB, 4:24 min)

I love this video for two, apparently almost entirely independent
(but maybe, in some strange, deep way, connected) reasons.
First – the music is great. I listen very little popular music these
days (which is why I’m 2 years late with this) as most of it, even
(especially!) the so called indie stuff gives the impression of
having been focus-grouped into bland submission before being let
limply loose not to offend anyone.
This, contrariwise, oozes life & not-giving-a-fuck from every note
(especially the splendidly slightly out of tune vocals; but it’s all a joy).
Secondly, director of the video, Kate Thomas, about whom I know
nothing and could find out no more, had the totally brilliant idea
of simply stringing together some footage of French students
and workers standing up for themselves against the riot cops in 68.
If this all doesn’t make you weep with barely suppressed joy please
check your pulse.

Land of the Free

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Land of the Free
untitled (2005, 1.5MB, 1:50 min.)

Nice bit of guerilla art/action/video by Judith Supine and friend.
Took some bottle, I think.

Joy Garnett’s Unmonumental Videos

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Found Art (Nolita) Unmonumental 484
Found Art (Nolita) Unmonumental 484 (2011, 36 MB, 26 secs)

Found Art (Chelsea) Unmonumental 507
Found Art (Chelsea) Unmonumental 507 (2011, 32 MB, 23 secs)

Joy Garnett is not only a fascinating and accomplished painter but
she takes a neat photo too.
There’s a huge set of images on her Flickr pages entitled
Unmonumental – a recording and honouring of the melancholy beauty
of the neglected, ephemeral, the broken and the passing.
Recently she’s added videos to the collection and here’re two
of them.
They are utterly beguiling and we’re going to show the whole
lot over the next weeks and months.

Klaus Lang –Zwillingsgipfel

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suess-map 2b
Zwillingsgipfel (2007, 122 MB, 8:02 min)

The music of the Austrian composer Klaus Lang ( not to be confused
with fellow Lang composers Bernhard or even David) is both very strange
and very beautiful. It’s a world where the tiniest gesture, the smallest
variation or nuance has great weight and presence. It’s no intellectual game
or posture though, but something, certainly for me, deeply affecting.
See what you think.
Bizarrely, I believe (and I’m open to correction) that “Zwillingsgipfel”
translates as “Twin Peaks”.

Ran Slavin – Organic Urbanic

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organicurbanic
Organic Urbanic (2002, 14 MB, clip, 1:17 min)
“Organic Urbanic is a reality-fiction video based on an ambient
micro/macro cosmos of the urban-organic tapestry of the city.
The local and familiar transgresses into a dense textured
urban scape. The city is featured and filtered as a distorted
blue print image of itself.
The streets cars and buildings reveal an organic living machine-symbiotica.
Organic Urbanic amplifies what is already there. Among others, a complex
inner connectivity of city factors amplified and relocated.”

By Ran Slavin
Full duration: 9:00 min.

Trisha Brown Interviewed

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suess-map 2b
Interview with Trisha Brown (2007, 11 MB, 3:06)

Anyone in or near London should absolutely get to see the
“Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown & Gordon Matta-Clark –
Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s” show,
currently at the Barbican. It’s fantastic!
I was particularly lucky to be there when a performance of the
Trisha Brown ‘walking on walls’ piece happened (worth
ringing in advance to see what performances are on and when)
I knew it would be interesting but, somewhat to my surprise,
I was immediately & intensely emotionally engaged by it too, finding
it lump-in-the-throat-&-tear-in-the-eye moving…
Although we’re concentrating here on Trisha Brown with an interview
conducted in 2007 at the Documenta 12 event (and after you’ve
watched that, the Guardian has a nice audio slideshow about the
walking on walls piece), all three artists shine in this show.
It’s all great but particularly interesting are the rooms of drawings
related to their various performance practices.

Eleanor Suess – Map 2b

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suess-map 2b
Map 2b (1996, 33 MB, 1:29min)

We’ve got hold of a few movies spanning nearly 15 years from
Eleanor Suess who has staked out a very interesting position on the
borders of architecture and fine art (and specifically film/video art).
We’ll start with an early, and rather ravishing, handmade piece:

“Using a 16mm handmade film technique a DOLA/OS map of Perth
is transformed into a spatial surface. The territory of the drawing
is explored and navigated, the gridlines dominating the optical
soundtrack, marking the speed of the film as it passes in front
of the viewer

Joseph Beuys – Transformer

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joseph_beuys_transformer
Joseph Beuys – Transformer (1979, 10 MB, 3 min)

Excerpt from a 60-minute documentary featuring avant-garde
German artist Joseph Beuys during a 1979 exhibit at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

RUBBER – Quentin Dupieux

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Rubber_quentin_dupieux
RUBBER (2011, 35 MB, 2:21 min)

Trailer for RUBBER, the story of Robert, an inanimate tire that has been
abandoned in the desert, and suddenly and inexplicably comes to life.
RUBBER is a ‘smart, funny and wholly original tribute to the cinematic
concept of “no reason” ‘.
Director: Quentin Dupieux

Ran Slavin – omni1.9

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omni1.9
omni1.9 (2002-97, 18 MB, 1:28 min, excerpt)
“The idea behind this loop is to show the 360 degrees of choice. The mad culmination of wanting
to go to all directions at once. Inspired by the ceiling of the Geneva airport while in transit.
Shown also as a video installation of varying loop durations on a transparent two way screen.

Like a small vignette of digital nature, the small figures are continuously looping in a busy circular
motion with the urge to span in all directions at once.This stasis, a static dance, the body like a
scanner unable to decide, caught between indecision. A seemingly digital nature. The bodies
which are silhouettes of the artist, become small digital scanner probes.”

Video and audio: Ran Slavin
Original: 6:33min/variable/2002-97

George Spencer films Robert Roth

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trav-erse_short
Robert Roth Reads from ‘Health Proxy’ (2011, 76 MB, 6:30min)

I can’t be objective aboutRobert Roth – he’s a dear friend and his
tremendous & utterly singular book Health Proxy ( Buy it here)
would most definitely be my choice for that desert island.
In this little movie, odd and charming both, by fellow writer
George Spencer, he reads an extract from it, twice.

Ran Slavin – Everything Is Urgent

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EverythingIsUrgent
Everything Is Urgent (2008, 4 MB, 42 sec (Excerpt)

Ran Slavin
confronts the human figure in conjunction with the annoying barking of a dog. 4 figures, 2 young men and women, stand in front of an unknown audience, in front of a void and bark ferociously.
Driven away from systematic and social norms, the human barking figures attack us from within the digital domain, outward.
They present an uncompromising hybrid human, a cross between man and animal. Do they try to warn us, scare us like an omen or blame us? We see a human but hear an animal. Like a shout of desperation of a person who can no longer use his voice.

2008, 4:12 min. Single or 4 channel installation

Garrett Lynch performs Trav-erse

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trav-erse_short
Trav-erse short (2011, 96 MB, 1:58 min)

This is shaping up to be Furtherfield fortnight & whyever not?
Here’s some footage I took there last Friday night, at the very entertaining
launch of the Art is Open Source/REFF – Roma Europa Fake Factory publication
& exhibition, (GO, if you’re in London) of a splendid performance by
Garrett Lynch of his Trav-erse, where he uses custom Max/MSP created software to
grab audio from an analogue world band receiver, manipulate and remix it.
I was struck both by the simplicity of the idea and the effectiveness of
its execution – a neat concept but also an excellent ear at work.
The sound from my stills cam video was unusable (shame, it sounded great
there) so in the latter section I’ve dubbed on sound from
an earlier performance of the piece in Cardiff, Wales in 2008.

Anne de Vries – Forecast

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4cast
Forecast (2011, 58 MB, 5:04 min)

By Anne de Vries.
Text: Bertrand Russell.
Sound: James Whipple.
Tech assistance: Timur Si-Qin.

Making Web MVideo by Michael Verdi

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webmvideo
Making Web MVideo (2011, 51 MB, 5:55 min)

“There was a lot of talk this week about WebM video after Google announced
that they were going to drop H.264 support from Chrome. This is huge news
for video makers, especially since Firefox 4 (which supports WebM) is almost done.
I figured it was time to look into WebM encoding tools again.”..

from Michael Verdi.

Duchamp’s Urinal

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Duchamp's Fountain
Duchamp’s Fountain (2011, 93MB, 1:59 min, silent)

Fascinating bit of footage from Kev Flanagan arising out
of a piece of work by Rob Myers (together with Curt Cloninger one
of the two smartest people I know) –here’s the original post
from his blog to give some context.
The whole thing sparked an interesting discussion on the Furtherfield
(see Monday’s post) originated Netbehaviour list this week.

Joseph Beuys – Soziale Plastik

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soziale_plastic_beuys
Soziale Plastik (1969, 9 MB, 1:47 min)

Joseph Beuys accepts the challenge to expose himself to the anonymous spectator,
in speechless close-up on a video monitor: the artist as

A Film About Furtherfield by Pete Gomes

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snow haiku
Furtherfield (2011, 103MB, 5:28 min)

Great film about the wonderful UK arts organisation Furtherfield
– you can see & hear me* in it, enthusing further at a couple of points.
Beautifully made by Pete Gomes, it really captures something of
what makes Furtherfield such a big & special deal.

* So let that stand for a full declaration of interest:
I work with them, they’re my friends, they’ve shown
my work – none of which makes any of the nice things
said by me or anyone in the film any less true…

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.

“Next To Heaven” Returns for a Second Season

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dupont_preview
DuPont (2011, 25 MB, 2:42 min.)

smokey_preview
Smokey (2011, 25 MB, 2:45 min.)

A couple of previews from Rob Parrish

Wendy Keenan – 3 Movies

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legbones
legbones (2011, 1MB, 1:11 min)

outtake
outtake (2011, 0.2MB, 10 secs)

dawnchorusorspeakingintongues
dawnchorusorspeakingintongues (2011, 0.6MB, 33 secs)

The only things I know about these three pieces is that they
were posted to the Netbehaviour list on Saturday last, that they
were shot on a cellphone and that they are …well… quite odd.
Almost disturbingly so, but in a thrilling way too:
to be so offhandedly minimal, so cavalier about any technical considerations
and still to make something with this sort of punch…

littlelines by Curt Cloninger

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littlelines_curt1
littlelines (1965, 68 MB, 17:28 min)

A beautiful short experimental piece by Curt Cloninger,
messing around with ffmpeg and – “datamoshing.”.
More from Curt here.

Martha Deed – Snow Haiku

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snow haiku
Snow Haiku (2011, 28MB, 1:22 min, silent)

Oh this is beautiful!
Martha Deed‘s work is unique, beholden to no-one;
lyrical and tough at the same time.
It’s the work of someone who has seen a great deal of life,
of sadness and wickedness both and yet who still dares to
hope and to dream and to find that life wonderful.

Film by Samuel Beckett with Buster Keaton

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buster_keaton
Film (1965, 68 MB, 17:28 min)

Samuel Beckett‘s only venture into the medium of cinema, Film was written
in 1963 and filmed in New York in the summer of 1964, directed by
Alan Schneider and featuring Buster Keaton. For the shooting Mr.
Beckett made his only trip to America. The film, which has no dialogue,
takes its basis Berkeley’s notion esse est percepti that is, to be is to be perceived.

Morrisa Maltz – Device Activated

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device activated
Device Activated (2011, 10MB, 1:54 min)

And after Tuesday’s ad here’s another piece of personal work
from Morrisa Maltz and it’s simply glorious.
I’m tempted to say it feels like restoration comedy on some
sort of mind-altering compound but it’s much, much weirder,
more beautiful & haunting than that.

Keep ’em coming Morrisa!
We’ll show them as long as you let us!