VideoArtBlog

FILZ-TV (FELT TV)

2010-07-24T14:25:00.026+02:00

by Joseph Beuys (1970)
11:25', b/w, sound

The “Filz-TV” / “Felt TV” project is one of the first short artist films ever broadcast on German television as part of the forty-two minute show entitled “Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum Fernsehausstellung” / “Television Gallery Gerry Schum Television Exhibition”. Beuys had performed this action piece for the first time in Copenhagen in 1966. He staged it again for Schum’s cinecamera with slight variations in the home of collectors Jost and Barbara Herbig. For this performance he used the object “Filz-TV-Gerät” / “Felt TV Set”, which was in the Herbigs’ collection. It is a television set with felt stuck over its screen, an additional sheet of felt, a pair of boxing gloves, and a blood sausage. The television set is on during the performance, which lasts just under five minutes and is captured in three fixed shots.

In the 11-minute film, Beuys explored metaphors of communication and energy through the medium of television. As the TV broadcast a talk show, Beuys blocked the image with a felt pad, then punched himself in the face while wearing the gloves, as if the information from the television were assaulting him and meeting with resistance. He carved the sausage into a swordlike shape and moved it over the felt like a stethoscope, then dabbed it on the walls of the room. He ended by pushing the television against the wall, hanging a large felt pad on the wall, and leaving the room.

Beuys explained this cryptic work in terms of opposites. An actor sits opposite the television. Its screen is doubled with a felt "anti-image" that obstructs information. Finally, a second felt pad stands in for artists. In the end, the television is abandoned: a transmitter without a receiver. "The observer himself is very much as important as what comes out of the box," Beuys stated.

To see the work, simply follow the link below. Enjoy.

http://ubu.artmob.ca/video/Beuys-Joseph_Filz-TV_1970.avi

BOUNCING IN THE CORNER, No. 1 & No. 2

2010-05-31T08:57:00.009+02:00

by Bruce Nauman (1968 & 1969)

No 1: 1968, 60 min, video, b&w, sound
No.2 (Upside Down): 1969, 60 min, video, b&w, sound

For "Bouncing in the Corner, No. 1", Nauman turned the camera sideways and positioned it so that his head is cropped from the frame and his body is presented from neck to ankles. Just as he bounces back to a standing position, his body falls again, momentarily collapsing, only to spring forward once more. This action places his body in an intermittent space, occupying a position halfway between standing and leaning, halfway between the wall and the room. Falling backwards into the corner and then pushing himself off the wall again, he appears to be trying to levitate himself... As he performs these actions, his hands slam into the wall to break his falls, and the sounds become an integral part of the activities filmed.

In "Bouncing in the Corner, No.2 (Upside Down)" Nauman is repeating the same activity—leaning back and bouncing forward from the corner—this time the camera is positioned just above his head. This gives his body the sense of constantly rising and falling, his chin just crossing the bottom edge of the screen before sinking back. Here, however, the images were recorded with a fixed camera that was inverted rather than turned on its side.

Bruce Nauman is one of most important and influential figures in contemporary art. His seminal films and videotapes from the 1960s and '70s are among the most innovative contributions to media art. In these conceptual works, Nauman uses his body as an art object, executing repetitive performance actions in his studio. Exploiting the phenomenology of the medium, including its immediacy, space, and intimacy, his real-time gestures investigate the very process of making art.(Texts: Electronic Arts Intermix & Video Data Bank)

To see excerpts of the works, simply follow the links below. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkYR-v_tacI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsEt6oBAuPw

RAUMSEHEN UND RAUMHÖREN (Seeing and Hearing Space)

2010-04-07T10:35:00.001+02:00

by Valie Export (1974)

6 min, bw, PAL, stereo, Sony U-Matic

Like in 'Split Reality', the personality conveyed by a medium in this performance tape appears to be schizophrenic. Two video cameras and a mixer make possible a closed-circuit action that demonstrates not only the differences in the way the viewers perceive a person who is physically present in the room and simultaneously electronically reproduced, but also how the image is manipulated by its electronic conveyance. The camera zooms in and out, subjecting the performer's monitor likeness to permanent alteration. Specific synthetic sounds are linked to the picture: optically close = loud sound and rapid tone repetition, optically remote = quiet sound and slow tone repetition. The work is arranged in 6 parts: 1. space position, 2. split images, 3. space position composition, 4. split image composition, 5. body, 6. body composition.

"The raw material is a single, periodically repeating tone, created with a synthesizer. It should not create the illusion of a sound source moving around in the room, rather of sound moving in an imaginary field of references according to the following scheme: Optical: CLOSE - Acoustic: LOUD and FAST SOUND REPETITION Optical: FAR AWAY - Acoustic: SOFT and SLOW SOUND REPETITION. The change of sides LEFT/RIGHT corresponds to a slight change in sound colour. When the image is divided, one hears two sound repetitions simultaneously. In the second part of the tape, the four different stages of apparent distance of the viewer to the represented object are, for psychological reasons, not revealed through differences in the sound level. Rather, each of the four first main sounds of the basic noise becomes particularly clearly audible through filtering." (Christian Mecheles on the video performance "Raumsehen und Raumhören")

"In the words of Valie Export, the theme of "Raumsehen und Raumhören" is "the body in space". In contrast to the well known (photographic) "Raumkonfigurationen" (Space Configurations) works, which were made around the same time (or somewhat earlier) in which the female body is situated simultaneously in geometric space and in the social environment, "Raumsehen und Raumhören" treats the relationship between body and space more abstractly, as a structural study in the perception of parallel image and sound (a process which is described in psychology as synaesthesia). The video places a motionless figure in a space, four different camera positions and four different synthesizer tones in relation to each other. We see the artist standing calmly facing the cameras. Apparent movement is created through splitting the images, already created through the filming technique. The stasis of the body contrasts with the dynamic possibilities of the technical apparatus. The work is in the tradition (amongst others founded by Export herself) of making the medium of video visible through its own determinants. What we see today is the conservation of a unique performance in Kölnischer Kunstverein (Art Association of Cologne), which had a clearly defined temporal outline. The locality itself seems less prominent at first. On closer inspection however, it moves into the foreground in its relevance to the theme "the body in space". What applies to the physical functions of the body, also applies to its social position. In the end, the social position of a body (of an artist) is also determined through a symbolic place, such as in the way it is represented by an art association".  (Patricia Grzonka translated by Sofia Hultén)

To see an excerpt of the work with the RealPlayer, click on the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.urban-infill.com/images/raum-sehen-new.rm

SUNSHINE ON TRANQUILITY

2010-03-10T14:08:00.000+01:00

by Wang Ya-hui (2005)

4'36, color

"Sunshine on Tranquility" is a delicate piece in which we can see, from a fixed point of view, a room whose moving walls make up a number of possibilities of light that relativise the spatial relationships between objects, observers and the room itself.

Wang Ya-hui, a young Taiwanese artist who won the 2007 Loop Award in Barcelona, has worked mainly in video since 2002. Her work is driven by the exploration of human consciousness and examines how hidden or conscious changes of “being” are triggered through illusion and imagination. In the 2006 Shanghai Biennale, Wang Ya-hui’s work Sunshine on Tranquility was installed on the top floor of the museum. Richard Vine, editor of Art in America described it as “ the most engrossing work of the entire biennale…that sense of awakening at various moments to find oneself in a new place, where certain elements are the same but the context has utterly changed.” He expressed well the main concept of her work. Ya-hui uses daily life elements to recreate a new order different from reality. She examines the intimate relationship between people and the objects that surround them.

To see an excerpt of the piece, simply follow the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gNupRhND0Q&feature=player_embedded

RETURNING TO FUJI

2010-02-25T00:07:00.000+01:00

by Nan Hoover (1984)
8:21 min, color, sound

Nan Hoover subtly orchestrates light and movement in real time to suggest enigmatic sculptural landscapes. At times using her own body as landscape, she creates an evocative tension between abstraction, reality and illusion. In Returning to Fuji, Hoover creates the perception of a mountain swathed in mist through gradual changes of shifting light and shadow, accompanied by evocative sound.

Exploring subtle ambiguities of visual perception, Hoover elicits an evocative tension between abstraction and reality, fluidly manipulating light and shadow into sculptural form with slow, concentrated movements. Precisely composed for a stationary camera, unfolding in real time, these contemplative reveries use austere reductivity to invoke the sublime. A hand, traced by shifting light, becomes a luminous, sculptural landscape; moving shadows suggest a mountain veiled in mist. Nuanced orchestrations of light on a close-up of the body or a surface create enigmatic illusions of scale, form, space and temporality, evoking metaphorical transformations and timelessness. A painterly aesthetic pervades these minimalist works.

Prior to concentrating on video, performance and photography in 1974, Hoover worked in painting and drawing. She wrote that her images "reflect quietness, using slow movement to catch the gradual changes in light, color, and form. I attempt to transport one into an area within ourselves where we can dream and explore our personal worlds."

Nan Hoover was born in 1931 and died in 2008. She attended the Corcoran Gallery Art School. Hoover moved to Amsterdam in 1969, and performed and exhibited her work extensively throughout Europe. She received a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship in 1980. Her video works have been exhibited at festivals and institutions internationally, including Documentas 6 and 8, Kassel, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre International d'Art Contemporain, Montreal; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kijkhuis, The Hague; Sydney Video Festival; Berlin Film Festival; Kunstmuseum, Bern; and Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany.
Hoover lived in Amsterdam for almost four decades. She was living in Berlin at the time of her death in 2008 (Text: Electronic Arts Intermix).

To see an excerpt of this work, simply follow the link below. Enjoy.
http://www.nan-hoover.com/3_video_tapes/fujimov.html

NU•TKA•

2010-02-24T00:03:00.000+01:00

by Stan Douglas (1996)

6:50 min, single-channel color video projection, quadraphonic sound

“It is no surprise,” writes Stan Douglas in his text on Nu•tka•, that the Gothic novel narratives with their vampires and other monsters “flourished during the era of high imperialism—when remote and exotic areasof the world were being drawn into the European orbit . . .” For it is widely known that the discovery of the “foreign” was accompanied by its oppression and destruction, while the repressed threatens to returnin the sublimated manifestations of the uncanny. The video installation takes us to the west coast of Vancouver Island, to Nootka Island, where the first Europeans landed in 1774. The island was given its present name two years later as the result of a misunderstanding: when James Cook asked Chief Maquinna the name of his land, he replied “Nootka!” which roughly means “go” or “turn-around.”For a brief time, mutually beneficial trade relations between the Euro-peans and “Nuu-chah-nulth” were maintained, until the Spaniards and Britons clashed—irrespective of the native inhabitants—over issues of colonial claims to Nootka Sound.

Nu•tka• focuses on the two opponents Esteban José Martínez, envoy of the Spanish crown, and James Colnett, representative of a British trading company. The two met on Nootka Sound in 1789: one with the mission of establishing a colony whence the expansion of New Spain was to be instigated; the other on behalf of John Mears, who laid claimto the island for himself and the British crown, planning to set up a permanent foreign trading post. Following a fierce argument, Martínez took the Briton, including ship and crew, prisoner, whereupon Colnett went shortly thereafter insane. Callicum, chief of the neighboring Clayoquot Sound—displeased at this development as he respected the British as trading partners—took Colnett’s side. In a skirmish, Callicum was accidentally shot by Martínez’screw, which not only caused the Nuu-chah-nulths to cease relations with the Spaniards once and for all but also caused Martínez to forfeit the trust of his government. As such, Colnett and Martínez both failed: one lost his ship, business, and mind and the other his position of supremacy.

The Nu•tka• video installation is based on two camera pans along the imposing landscape of Nootka Sound unified on the screen. Douglas has interwoven the images line by line, the landscape sometimes confusingly melding together, sometimes drifting apart, constantly seem-ing to dissolve, following its ghostly afterimages. Only at six points do the pictures run synchronously, and the landscape finds itself again, only to drift away once more. From the off, we hear two different voices, one representing Martínez, the other Colnett. The quadraphonic sound system that Douglas useshere lends the two disembodied voices an invisible, uncanny presence. They speak at the same time, each describing his own view of the conflict. Colnett’s monologue heralds his growing delirium, while Martínez’s words be speak frustration. The script of their soliloquiesis based on historical documents and journals. The cacophony is regularly interrupted, precisely at those six points where the camera pans over Nootka Sound harmonize. Colnett and Martínez then jointly recitetext fragments from colonial and Gothic novels by Edgar Allan Poe,Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, Captain James Cook, or the Marquis deSade. The threat of getting lost in the thicket of foreign landscapes is as present in both men’s remarks as is their fear of the return of the repressed: meaning to equal extent both the native inhabitants and the desire to indulge in the transgression of reason and law far from home.
In Nu•tka• the landscape becomes a mirror of the constant oscillation of the Western soul between self-assertion and dissolution, conflict and conciliation—and of the ostracized third person. (Text borrowed from Iris Dressler)

To start drifting, simply follow the link below. Enjoy.

http://ubu.artmob.ca/video/Douglas-Stan_Nutka_1996.avi

LA RÉGION CENTRALE

2010-02-21T22:00:00.001+01:00

by Michael Snow (1971)

16mm, color, sound, 80 min.

"La Région Centrale" is arguably the most spectacular experimental film made anywhere in the world, and for John W. Locke, writing in Artforum in 1973, it was "as fine and important a film as I have ever seen." If ever the term "metaphor on vision" needed to be applied to a film it should be to this one. Following Wavelength, Michael Snow continued to explore camera/frame movement and its relationships with space and time in Standard Time (1967) an eight minute series of pans and tilts in an apartment living room and (Back and Forth) (1968Ð69), a more extended analysis. But with "La Région Centrale", Snow managed to create moving images that heretofore could no possibly be observed by the human eye. For this project he enlisted the help of Pierre Abaloos to design and build a machine which would allow the camera to move smoothly about a number of different axes at various speeds, while supported by a short column, where the lens of the camera could pass within inches of the ground and zoom into the infinity of the sky. Snow placed his device on a peak near Sept ësles in Quebec's Région centrale and programmed it to provide a series of continuously changing views of the landscape. Initially, the camera pans through 360¡ passes which map out the terrain, and then it begins to provide progressively stranger views (on its side, upside down) through circular and back-and-forth motions.

The weird soundtrack was constructed from the electronic sounds of the programmed controls which are sometimes in synch with the changing framing on screen and sometimes not. Here, allusions to other films occur, especially science fiction works like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which similarly reveals a barren, human-less primal landscape (with odd sounds) and spatially disorients the spectator. In La Région Centrale's second hour, the world is inverted for so long, that when the camera swings vertically through a full circle to restore the horizon line to its rightful position, above the earth, it looks wrong. In the complete absence of human or animal forms, one can imagine the outlines of animals in the silhouetted shapes of rocks at twilight. It is impossible not to notice "camera movement" in this film, and, as Locke notes, one is inclined to observe the frame edge leading the movement (rather than the center) much of the time. (Text borrowed from Peter Rist).

To see an excerpt, follow the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYr_SvIKKuI

SUCCESSIVE INCONCEIVABLE EVENTS

2010-02-20T15:10:00.000+01:00

by Richard T. Walker (2005)

Video, color, sound, 6:19 min.

Richard T. Walker sits down in a breathtaking landscape – his back turned to the audience – and starts an intimate conversation with nature. When faced with nature’s lack to even acknowledge his presence, he senses not only a lack of warmth and comfort, but ultimately the absence of any kind of connection at all...

Richard T. Walker's films are about solitude. They are moments in conversations, moments in dialogues, moments when people contemplate and come to terms with, or start to understand, a certain situation or a relationship. Walker's work is a constant enquiry into the disparity between our thoughts of "somewhere" and what actually happens "somewhere". In their transient nature, the films almost become behavioural studies of the act of experiencing. Experiences are redefined and reinvented by the artist as he speaks, continuously changing, shifting, turning, and eventually becoming timeless. We are reminded that personal conflicts and dilemmas are eternal, and will remain the same in the way they look, but not in the way they are lived.

To see an excerpt of man vs nature, simply follow the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCfnMf5FHU8

MADDESTMAXIMVS

2010-02-18T20:37:00.000+01:00

by Shaun Gladwell (2009)

Installation at Australian Pavillion, La Biennale di Venezia 2009

The picture above is a production still of Shaun Gladwells"Interceptor Surf Sequence", which was part of his show at the Venice Beinnale this year: entitled MADDESTMAXIMVS, the show brought together the artist’s trademark slowed-footage video installations of figures undertaking acts of physical virtuosity, with sculptural works and interventions into the fabric of the pavilion itself, such as a motorcycle that stucks in the outer wall of the building.

MADDESTMAXIMVS has been developed over a two-year period and marks a shoft from Shaun Gladwell’s earlier focus upon urban environments and engageds instead in a performative, personal exploration of the boundaries and possibilities of a human relationship to the Australian hinterland: roadkill kangaroos are found on the side of highways by a black leather clad motorcyclist and given a ritualistic burial, a figure surfs a vehicle as it moves through desert roads, a masked individual rapidly paints and subsequently erases images of the/a universe in open arid settings, and a group of figures spin against natural rock formations.

To see a video about the show, simply follow the link below. Enjoy.

http://blip.tv/file/get/Henrichy0205blip-ShaunGladwellAustralianPavilionVeniceBiennale2009848.mp4

NUMMER ACHT (EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT)

2010-02-18T00:21:00.000+01:00

by Guido van der Werve (2007)

16 mm to DVD, color, sound, 10 min loop

Dutch artist Guido van der Werve makes the kind of films Caspar David Friedrich might have dreamt up if he had had a sense of humour and access to a camera. It is impossible, when witnessing such overwrought, touching and often hilarious scenes, not to think of Van der Werve as the love child of Bas Jan Ader, another Dutch artist preoccupied with the slapstick possibilities of isolation, sadness, alienation and the elements, especially water (into which, of course, Ader eventually and tragically disappeared).

When "Nummer Acht" opens, everything is not all right. After a few seconds of a soundless, white-titles-on-black background screen, a blinding whiteness and massive roar shock us into high alert. The opening image will carry us through the film's full 10 minutes: We see a lone, black-clad man walking toward us on a seemingly endless ice sheet. He is trailed -- methodically, menacingly -- by a massive icebreaker, a behemoth of a ship lumbering through expanses of seemingly immovable ice. We are in the Gulf of Bothnia, the northernmost expanse of the Baltic Sea near a Finnish port town. Van der Werve took a small crew there to film his 2007 pas de deux with the icebreaker Sampo. The ship towers over van der Werve's minuscule figure. It's a beast of a machine, confidently biting through the floe as ice crumbles against its powerful hull. The monster is largely faceless: Its black and white prow is many times larger than its above-deck operations tower, and there's no sign of life inside. Both boat and figure move in lockstep. Van der Werve continues forward while the icebreaker keeps pace. The scene appears as if it could go on indefinitely. To suggest just such an endless journey, van der Werve ends the film as suddenly as it began, snapping back to a silent black screen and final credits.

What to make of this? Though the action is minimal, the psychology is intense. The stark image of man pursued by industrial beast glues us to our seats. When will the man fall tragically through the ice? When will he break into a run? Will the ship give up pursuit? As time passes and it becomes clear that, in fact, nothing will happen next, the film turns into a philosophical exercise. The artist's steady progress -- neither a march nor an amble, it's the walk of a distracted window shopper or a tourist determined to blend in -- turns into a metaphor for our journey through life. The beast at his tail stands in for the demons that accompany us from childhood unto death. Though the figure appears unaware of the monster behind him, he never wavers in his forward march, suggesting that he knows better than to stop. As viewers, we feel at first as if we know something that our hero doesn't. His walk appears too relaxed, he must not know what's behind him. Yet as the film progresses, we begin to understand that he probably does know. He just wants to keep moving. As we watch, we begin to understand. The ship becomes a little less menacing. We, like van der Werve, are getting comfortable with our demons.
(Text parts borrowed from Jessica Dawson, washingtonpost.com & Jennifer Higgie, frieze.com)

To see a bootleg, simply follow the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J58WGm0Wibo

WRESTLING

2010-01-05T20:06:00.000+01:00

by Jen DeNike (2003)

"Wrestling", 2003, video, color, sound, 3:06 min. loop

Jen DeNike places individuals in artificially staged social situations as a means of investigating the myriad ways in which we are socially conditioned. She does not work with professional actors, instead discovering her subjects in everyday locations and situations. Trained as a photographer, DeNike’s videos are short continuous loops that focus on a single action or a series of singular actions. Recent works concentrate on the rituals and emotive physical states of adolescence: powerplay, sexuality, initiation, vulnerability, latent aggression and detachment are fused into powerfully evocative images.

"Wrestling", 2003, video, color, sound, 3:06 min. loop

The latent aggression, competition and erotic physicality of the ritualized, sometimes laughable rivalry between adolescents is revealed in Wrestling (2003), a work which impressively illustrates the playful dialectic of dependence and self-determination, the struggles involved in growing up and dealing with social expectations, vulnerability and a role model that requires belligerent behaviours.

In both video and photography Jen DeNike always works with non-actors. Her strategies include brief instructions to the participants, little or no camera movements with the end result culminating in un-edited one-takes. Jen DeNike’s personal experiences are closely woven into her works, which deal with her daydreams, observations and obsessions. By letting the audience witness personal, at times intimate situations without unduly exposing the protagonists, her works unfold meanings that go far beyond the individual, subjective, or personal.

"Dunking", 2004, video, color, sound, 3:19 min. loop

Click on the image above or follow the link below to see her work installed at KW Berlin in 2006. Enjoy.

http://www.berlinerkunstkontakter.de/kunstwerke02092006.htm

SHOOT

2009-12-26T15:12:00.001+01:00

by Chris Burden (1971)

Shot on Super-8, 16mm film, and half-inch video. Guided by the artist's comments on both the works and the documentative process; sound, b&w, 1:53 min

«In this instant 1 was a sculpture.» Chris Burden means the moment his arm was pierced by a bullet from a (copperjacket) 22 long rifle. Actually, when a friend pulled the trigger on November 19, 1971 at a distance of 13 feet, the intent was only to graze the artist's arm.

«Shoot» was considered one of the most spectacular performances of the seventies, provoking journalists to ask, «Will he survive 30?» Such remarks turned Burden into a living myth but they also delineated the controversy that has always attended his work (Burden was taken to a psychiatrist after this piece). The controversy surrounding «Shoot» was fuelled by the fantasies and fears triggered by shooting and gunshot wounds. Films like «Full Metal Jacket» or «Bultets over Broadway» indicate an enduring interest in the folkloric tradition of westerns, war and gangster movies. With the escalation of the Vietnam War, the subject matter penetrated the minds of the American public no longer as fiction but as fact in the shape of body bags, invalids and veterans from Vietnam. This exerted a significant influence on the daring of Burden's experimental piece.

To see the piece, simply follow the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26R9KFdt5aY

KILL ME TWICE, DEAR FRIEND, DEAR ENEMY

2009-12-21T01:13:00.000+01:00

by Emmanuelle Antille (2005)

2 channel video installation , colour, sound, 14 min

Emmanuelle Antille's oeuvre explores the interaction between different groups of people in their isolated living spaces and specific, often somewhat alienating, rituals. She often develops a theme in the longer term, working with a group of (amateur) actors. She then creates a number of works, in various media, from this material. A feature of her video works is the interweaving of reality, fiction and dreams. These works confront the viewer with a universe which oscillates between closeness and distance, affection and latent aggression, going as far as physical or spiritual intrusion. While achieving this effect, Antille also creates highly original female roles which mark a departure from tradition, since they are not circumscribed by the male viewpoint.

"Tornadoes of My Heart" is the generic title of a body of works which includes three video installations, a series of thirty photographs and a feature film. The first installation of "Tornadoes of My Heart" is "Kill me twice, dear friend, dear enemy".

From the artist's website:
"This installation is composed by two large video projections placed side by side on the same wall. This double projection presents two boys of seventeen years old, two friends gone for a walk in the middle of nowhere. They are like two blood brothers, and we enter in their violent intimacy, the particularity of their relationship. The videos draw their portraits, showing the power of their bounds and secret expectations. Edited according a elaborate system of loops and axed around the main sequence of images showing a tornado, this installation places the viewer directly in the heart of this « love/hate » relationship, deep inside this exclusive friendship at the specific moment where the two teenagers’ lives is about change forever, where through death the two of them will become one and unique body."

About "Tornadoes of My Heart":
"In this whole project I developed the theme of teenagehood through his various aspects : the rituals and languages, the friendships, family and the relationships inside a community, the diary. This whole project started by the writing of the screenplay for the feature film titled Rollow. Once the screenplay written I organized several castings in order to find the teenagers who would act in the film. My wish was to work with unprofessionnal actors, some very dynamic energies.
As soon as the technical team was complete and the teenagers selected, we rehearsed all together everyday during a period of two months before the shooting of the film. During this period I met each teenager’s family, spent time in each one’s environment in order to know them better. All these preparation phases, close to the way of making a documentary film, brought a lot to the project and created a very strong intimacy that could be felt afterwards in the final images. After the rehearsal period, we shot the project during two months in summer. In the end, we had more than fifty hours of film material : some filmed sequences were made for Rollow, others for the video installations. Shot in a very intimistic way by a small team, the images are often very physical and close to the bodies. The project is based on this idea to film scenes of fiction as in a documentary film. The camera was always on and shooting almost all the time. We were all moved by the immergency of catching all the kids’ spontaneous gestures and gazes, all those very fragile and thiny attitudes that happen only once and that can never be repeated. This was a way to blow the limit between the reality and the fiction.
About the photographic series, it started right after the filming of the project. At the end of the summer I organized a photo shooting with each teenager without the technical team. In a calmer atmosphere we went back to each location of the filming. I wanted to take very intimate and intense portrait of each of them, to catch who they really were without them having to play a part. So I asked them to look straight to the camera in a very simple way. We shot about one thousand photos in total. In the end I made a selection of thirty of them."

To see an installation video of the work, simply follow the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.emmanuelleantille.com/category/tornadoes-of-my-heart/video-installation/

WGG TEST

2009-12-18T16:45:00.000+01:00

by Paul McCarthy (2003)

Video, colour, sound, 5:20 min

Paul McCarthy’s "WGG Test" takes one of the popular movie genres of recent years, the slasher film, to even more outrageous extremes. A handheld camera records a number of women in bikinis partying on a boat and taking turns to hack at a very human-looking leg with a hatchet. The publicity material provided claims that McCarthy ‘questions the effects that violence and mutilation, both real and simulated, have on the viewer in contemporary culture’, but this compelling yet repulsive film also acts as a commentary on reality television culture and its fascination with ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Its title alludes to the American media brand Girls Gone Wild – an exemplar of what Ariel Levy calls ‘raunch culture’ – in which young women are induced to flash and pose suggestively for the camera in exchange for baseball hats and T-shirts.

Paul McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1945. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from the University of Southern California. McCarthy gained recognition for his intense performance and video-based work on taboo subjects such as the body, sexuality, and initiation rituals. McCarthy’s work has also explored themes of family, childhood, violence and dysfunction while using bodily fluids, paint, and food to create elaborate and grotesque critiques of cultural icons.

To start a sailing party gone wrong, simply click on the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.ubu.com/film/mccarthy_wgg.html

THE STAR WARS

2009-12-15T13:24:00.000+01:00

by Jubal Brown (1997)

colour, sound, 1:00 min

A sci-fi classic reduced to 9 and a half seconds. Quote from the artists’ youtube channel: “References are made here to the accelerating pace of pop culture and the entropy of the attention span in the post-post-modern viewer. The black at the beginning means it’s art”.

Read more about Jubal Brown’s (mostly performance based) art here. To start the wars, simply click on the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX1cM7vpgl4

ESCAPE VEHICLE NO.6

2009-12-14T00:53:00.000+01:00

by Simon Faithfull (2004)

Documentation of live event at Artists Airshow, color, sound, 25 min

Live event - Artists Airshow, 12 September 2004, Royal Aeronautical Engineering Workshops, Farnborough, Hants, UK

Commissioned by Arts Catalyst, "Escape Vehicle No.6" started as a live event developed from the previous balloon film 30km. The live audience first witnessed the launching of a weather balloon with a domestic chair dangling in space beneath it. Once the apparatus had dissapeared into the sky they then watched a live video relay from the weather balloon as it jouneyed from the ground to the edge of space.

"Simon Faithfull’s works can be seen as an ongoing investigation into the incomprehensible scale of the earth as an object. The Escape Vehicles employ video cameras, transmission systems and drawing devices as measuring tools to define size, time and distance, and the experiments often involve travel either by the artist himself or by cameras sent out as surrogate, dispassionate eyes.

Since he was a child, Simon Faithfull has suffered from “a melancholy awareness that I was tethered to this mundane realm. Like many young boys I was annoyed to find out that other things could fly and I couldn’t. Flies could even walk on ceilings! That didn’t seem fair.” And for more than a decade now, the 42-year-old artist has been expressing his beef with the forces that keep him earthbound through a series of quixotic films and sculptures to be exhibited as Gravity Sucks at the BFI gallery in London as part of the “One Giant Leap” summer season celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. “I made my first Escape Vehicle back in 1996,” says Faithfull down the line from his home in Berlin. “It was a chair, fitted with rockets and designed to be a heroic failure. But I wasn’t prepared for how anticlimactic it was when the chair just turned upside down and exploded.” It’s like a Top Gear experiment as filmed by a desperate castaway. Even though you know the chair – looking so lonely against a wide, pink sunrise – will fail to leave our planet’s atmosphere (possibly even the ground) it’s hard to suppress that little flutter of irrational hope that perches in the soul. Faithfull’s Escape Vehicle No 2 was, he says, “a truly pathetic object” – inspired by a Victorian plan for a flying machine. But by Escape Vehicle No 4 Faithfull’s ideas were really taking off. His boiler suit tethered to a hot-air balloon made of dustsheets “actually flew off, and disappeared!” he says. “Although it later came down on an elderly couple’s patio while they were taking tea in the garden.”

But it’s the 25-minute film of “Escape Vehicle No 6″ that sends the emotions on the giddiest trip. You watch, in horrified fascination, as a generic office chair rises 18 miles (over South East England) dangling from a weather balloon. The sound of static is ritualistically punctuated by a bell-tolling noise (which is actually sending back a GPS signal) as the chair twitches vulnerably in an environment where there’s no oxygen and the temperature is minus 60 degrees. Suddenly there’s a violent spasm and a leg hurtles off into the void. “At that point, the pressure has burst the balloon off camera,” Faithfull says, “and the chair is actually falling. Only you can’t tell because there are no reference points.” While captivating at its most basic, physical level, Faithfull’s work also speaks of the futility of human attempts to escape “the trivial, the mundane and the self”. And also of the beauty in the soul’s constant attempts to soar beyond “the forces of everyday reality”. Helen Brown, Telegraph.co.uk

To fly off and disappear, simply click 'play' below. Enjoy.

[brightcove vid=29032933001&exp3=25560314001&surl=http://c.brightcove.com/services&pubid=1348423968&w=486&h=412]

PS: Here's the projects follow up: a Toshiba advert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6PSbUl_68k&feature=player_embedded

With eight HD cameras used to capture the film, it makes it the highest high-def advert ever shot. The biodegradable chair was only a model, the eight cameras were used to have as many different lens types as possible.

Looks nice, but.. whatever.

SPACE PROGRAM

2009-12-12T23:34:00.001+01:00

by Tom Sachs (2007)

Video by Tom Sachs and the Neistat Brothers, 2008, 14:08 min

This is a video by Tom Sachs and the Neistat Brothers about Tom Sachs’ 2007 project “Space Program”. Sachs re-enacted the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing from countdown to splashdown at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles.

“When my astronaut took her first step on the Moon, or the gallery floor, we had rehearsed it so many times that we were sure that it was going to be disappointing. But when it finally happened, we all went crazy! We weren’t surprised because we were so prepared, but it was nevertheless a huge thrill and relief.” (Tom Sachs)

From the Gagosian Gallery press release: ”For more than a decade Sachs has pondered the homespun technical ingenuity and romance with the unknown that brought America the Apollo program. Experimenting with models of varying scale (Lunar Module (1:18), 1999; Crawler, 2003) has culminated in the realization of his own life-size SPACE PROGRAM. Pirating the milestone in collective memory when man took his first walk on the moon, Sachs reconstructs its key components, built to scale his way. By recollecting this historic event as a custom-made experience from the free domain of public imagination, he renders it totally in and of our time, charged by a vigorous artistic idiom that is ambivalent to the core. In a new twist on his shameless cannibalizing of corporate identity, Sachs now has the giants of high-style branding – Nike, Prada, and the like – working for him to produce items (lab coats, space boots) for the detailed inventory of his funky space odyssey.

In addition to the huge, intricately built lunar module that is the centerpiece of SPACE PROGRAM – replete with such classic Sachsian features as a fully stocked booze cabinet, toolkit, and soundtrack necessary for survival on an alien planet—visitors will find a fully functioning mission-control unit. On a grid of monitors, the liturgy of space exploration unfolds in a live demonstration by Sachs and his team, involving countless rituals and procedures, from instrument checks to moon-walking and sample-collecting to splash-down. Thus the gallery becomes a sort of reliquary of both the material traces and special effects of the artist’s encounters with the terrible sublime”.

To start the countdown, simply click on he link below. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAfYCpeBHi4&feature=player_embedded#

SPACESHIP

2009-12-10T12:20:00.000+01:00

by Bernard Gigounon (2002)

color, sound, 6 min.

Bernard Gigounon gives us a boost to let go of trivial reality, even if just for a while. This results in tiny phantasmagorias like “Starship”, a visual investigation of a passing ship, which turns into a weird and estranging object through the juxtaposition of its symmetrical reflection.

“Starship” alludes to the pictorial translation of weightless architecture that has been imprinted on our perception by science fiction. The objects are of unearthly perfection and suggest a vulnerable kind of inviolability. Details accumulate into a whole which shows that nothing has been overlooked, and which, majestically as the tall ships of old, glides along in the unruffled space. Simple image interventions (reflection and slow-motion) and an all-encompassing soundtrack of heavy, theatrical orchestra music complete the effect. You become aware that all you need to do to free yourself from earthly matters is looking at things ‘with different eyes’.

To watch the video, simply click on the image or the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHDLLd-pjCE

THE LEGIBLE CITY

2009-12-08T20:20:00.001+01:00

by Jeffrey Shaw (1988-91)

Computergraphic installation (Manhattan version (1989), Amsterdam version (1990), Karlsruhe version (1991))

Collection of ZKM-Medienmuseum, Karlsruhe, Germany

Jeffrey Shaw created three versions of his “Legible City” between 1988 and 1991. The Manhattan variant was one of the very first interactive installations, today regarded as a key work of the genre.

In “The Legible City” the visitor is able to ride a stationary bicycle through a simulated representation of a city that is constituted by computer-generated three-dimensional letters that form words and sentences along the sides of the streets. Using the ground plans of actual cities - Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe - the existing architecture of these cities is completely replaced by textual formations written and compiled by Dirk Groeneveld. Travelling through these cities of words is consequently a journey of reading; choosing the path one takes is a choice of texts as well as their spontaneous juxtapositions and conjunctions of meaning.

The handlebar and pedals of the interface bicycle give the viewer interactive control over direction and speed of travel. The physical effort of cycling in the real world is gratuitously transposed into the virtual environment, affirming a conjunction of the active body in the virtual domain. A video projector is used to project the computer-generated image onto a large screen. Another small monitor screen in front of the bicycle shows a simple ground plan of each city, with an indicator showing the momentary position of the cyclist.

The Manhattan version (1989) of this work comprises eight separate fictional story lines in the form of monologues by ex-Mayor Koch, Frank Lloyd Wright, Donald Trump, a tour guide, a confidence trickster, an ambassador and a taxi-driver. Each story line has a specific letter colour so that the bicyclist can choose one or another to follow the path of a particular narration. In the Amsterdam (1990) and Karlsruhe (1991) versions all the letters are scaled so that they have the same proportion and location as the actual buildings which they replace, resulting in a transformed but exact representation of the actual architectural appearance of these cities. The texts for these two cities are largely derived from archive documents that describe mundane historical events there.

To see a video of the installation, simply click on the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj4EbEBkj88&feature=related

VIDEO THEORIE II

2009-12-08T00:14:00.000+01:00

by Dellbrügge & De Moll (1992)

6‘, color, audio 1+2, Text: Dieter Daniels

The ‘Video Theory' series is composed of four parts, each taking a visually different approach to the closed production circuit of artworks and discourse, and using media theory as a resource for artistic production. The discourse production is supplemented by an additional ‘remix' and an ‘interview'.
The Dellbrüge/de Moll team, which has been working with materials including video since 1989, pursues in its productions a resolutely conceptual, media-theory-based approach often implemented with a generous portion of irony. In the course of the 1990s the two artists have turned increasingly to work in public spaces, and the artistic deployment of the Internet.

Part I of the ‘Video Theory' series operates with animated sign language, meaning that Beate Ermacora's text is comprehensible only to the initiated. Part II of the «Video Theory» series visualizes the English translation of a text by Dieter Daniels as text integrated in the images and staccato of optical stimulations. Part III of the «Video Theory» series converts a text by Matthew Geller into a song accompanied by a guitarist in alternation with passages from a black picture. Part IV of the «Video Theory» series; the visuals integrate a text authored by Friedemann Malsch.

To start reading, click on the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.workworkwork.de/videos/vi2.htm

I AM WITH YOU IN ROCKLAND

2009-12-07T00:40:00.000+01:00

by Karl Holmqvist (2005)

DVD, sound, black and white, 25 min

The work of Karl Holmqvist revolves around inter-human communication, experiments with language in all its aspects, and texts that he presents in printed as well as sonic form. In his performances and videos both the spoken and written word feature centrally. In his works Holmqvist often refers to other artists and figures extracted from popular culture, in particular to the world of rock and pop, as well as religion and politics.

“I’m with you in Rockland” is a video work that is exclusively composed of a black image with white subtitles, where the artist on the soundtrack navigates between extraneous quotes extracted from the media and pop culture. The text-based piece openly refers to Allen Ginsberg’s well-known poem ‘Howl’ from 1955 (in which the third part has the same title) and adds elements from popular culture together in a way that closely relates to slam poetry. “I’m With You in Rockland” stimulates, asking the viewer to take an active position; depending on the frame of reference of the recipient the words come across as alternately serious, funny, and moving.

To start the video, simply click on the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.ubu.com/film/holmqvist_rockland.html

TELEVISION DELIVERS PEOPLE

2009-12-05T16:41:00.000+01:00

by Richard Serra & Carlota Fay Schoolman (1973)

Video Tape (colour, sound, 6 minutes)

Produced in collaboration with Carlotta Schoolman, Richard Serra's 1973 video "Television Delivers People" functions as a critique of broadcast television and mass advertisement. With scrolling text, accompagnied by elevator music, Serra and Schoolman critizise the television medium as an instrument of social control, which, disguised as entertainment, reinforces the power structures of those who profit from it: the corporations. A critique of the capitalist system way ahead of its time.

To start the text, simply click on the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbvzbj4Nhtk&feature=player_embedded#

FLUXUS 29: WORD MOVIE

2009-12-05T13:54:00.000+01:00

by Paul Sharits (1966)

16 mm, color, sound, 4 min

Reading video: a speeding flicker film of passing words, playing with the mind’s desire to make sense of them — an effect of the phenomenon of retinal persistence.

Paul Sharits is one of the main protagonists of structuralist film, and together with Tony Conrad one of the inventors of the so-called »flicker« genre. Trained in painting and visual design, he completed his first color flicker films in 1966. Sharits negates filmic illusion, and places the focus on the function and materiality of film, as well as on the viewers’ subjective perception.

Later, Paul Sharits was one of the first artists to explore and establish the inclusion of 16mm films projections in gallery/museum spaces. In his Statement Regarding Multiple Screen/Sound Film Environments-Installations, published in Film Culture in 1978, he intended to define the fundamental principles for a new cinema. This new cinema seemed to be much more engaged with the actual production of social experiences and exchange than with traditional exhibiting methods. Films -and other filmic forms of exhibition- had to be exhibited in public spaces of free access, according to Sharits, in which people could come and go without temporal predetermined impositions. For this reason, Sharits postulated, the presentation forms of these new film-events required a non-evolutional organization but an open, transforming and natural structure. His circularly structured films allowed filmic reproduction in loop, permitting a continuous perception.

To read the video, simply click on the image or the link below. Enjoy.

http://ubu.artmob.ca/video/fluxfilm_29_word_sharits.mpg

TUNED

2009-12-04T03:58:00.000+01:00

by Oliver Pietsch (2009)

Video, DVD, stereo, 14 min.

Oliver Pietsch’s videos are marked by a solid archival testimony to cinematic and audiovisual culture. From old films to more recent ones, from documentary to independent cinema through Hollywood block-busters, the artist plays around with fictional re-interpretations by a themed selection of chosen images. These images are accompanied by a remixed or alternative soundtrack, linked or not to the original fiction. This filmic “reshaping” immerses the spectator in a narrative of accumulated visuals, whose incomplete nature leaves the door open to personal identification and to emotions linked to the recognition and familiarity of the images.

In “TUNED”, portraits of people consuming drugs taken from film history are edited together in rapid succession. All appear radically isolated, their inward-looking eyes looking out from the screen appearing helpless and disorientated. Their trip alternates between giggling lust and panicked anxiety turning increasingly into blank horror. The paradox: In the sequence the crazed and overwrought figures once again build a community whose unifying core is the flight from the community and the search for the true self in itself. The film can here be understood as metonymy for western culture.

To start the love, simply click on the image or on the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1jp5h_oliver-pietsch-tuned_creation

TRINITY

2009-12-03T01:40:00.000+01:00

3:11 min

Unfortunately there's no info on TRINITY out there, but YouTube describes it correctly as a "Martin Arnold-esque romp through one particular avenue of the Trinity Broadcasting Network".

The loony lady in the clip is Jan Crouch (born Janice Wendell Bethany, 1937). She is the co-founder, vice-president and director of programming of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, or TBN, the world's largest Christian television network. Crouch is noted for her flamboyant makeup and dress when appearing on TBN. She typically sports a large pink bouffant and heavy make-up, somewhat reminiscent of another televangelist, the late Tammy Faye Bakker.

To become "so happy", click on the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C8Aslwhu44

PIÈCE TOUCHÉE

2009-12-02T08:24:00.001+01:00

by Martin Arnold (1989)

16mm Film, b&w, 16 min, stereo

Martin Arnold’s mesmerizing breakthrough film, “Pièce Touchée”, is based on a single 18-second shot from a forgotten film noir (”The Human Jungle”, Dir. Joseph M. Newman, 1954). Woman sitting in a chair. Man enters the room. Man and woman kiss. Exit man. Arnold uses an optical printer to replay the same action over and over, slow it down or play it back and forth.

It begins in an apartment with a woman sitting in a chair and reading. For a long time (at least, in terms of film viewing), the image is completely static. Arnold has replaced the original audio with a mechanical droning that remains constant throughout the film. Eventually, a man opens a door directly behind the woman, and Arnold plays this movement back and forth, as if the man can’t decide whether he’s coming or going. Then he walks over to where the woman is sitting, and by playing the action back and forth, Arnold turns this motion into a kind of spastic dance. The woman stands up, and she and the man begin walking to the other side of the apartment, the camera tracking with them. In addition to playing the action back and forth, Arnold splices in shots of the same action flipped horizontally and vertically. The editing in places is so rapid, it looks as though two mirror images have been superimposed over one another. What matters isn’t what the footage shows (which is fairly banal) but how Arnold manipulates his raw material.

Arnold has constructed a cinema machine - not simply a custom optical printer or recycling system, but a kind of mnemographic machine, an apparatus that writes and rewrites memories on the surfaces of film. Arnold´s cinema, however, is not a smooth machine. The breakdowns, short-circuits and gasps that define his cinema create a violently neurotic machine. Arnold´s machine stutters and twitches from the moment it is turned on.This is due, in part, to the fact that Arnold´s cinema barely holds together under the strain of a constant tension between its elements. It is a machine that thematizes even as it reproduces the scene of its own breakdown, obsessively and compulsively.

To watch the video click on he link below -- and the impatient viewer starts right at the 2 min mark. Enjoy !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9JJc7TEsZI

METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER

2009-12-01T20:23:00.000+01:00

by Jack Goldstein (1975)

16 mm, color, sound, 2 min. loop

“Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer”, Jack Goldstein’s iconic two-minute tour de force, brings media’s subliminal power to the fore. The roar of the movie studio’s trademark lion here is looped into a (neurotic) repetition, making it easy to discern that the picture moves partly in reverse. This attempt to pass off “backward” for “forward”–a quirk of the source material underscored by Goldstein’s manipulation–stands as a particularly compelling visual analogy for the cyclical nature of history and exploitation, as well as for the endless diet of recycled stories Hollywood dishes out.

“Going to the movies” represents a staged sequence of ordered entrances into the apparatus of cinema. Conventionally, after the public’s entrance into the architecture of the cinema space, and followed by the darkened interior and projection, the studio trademark always introduces the first visual access into the celluloid space, followed by subsequent entrances to credits, titles, and space of the filmic narrative. In Goldstein’s film Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the lion’s roar gives an early example of an appropriated sequence: it floats isolated within a brightly red-colored field, thus commodified by the artist in a subtle but significant gesture, an endlessly repeating technological sample, its roar audible in a symbiotic relationship with the mechanical noises of its origins, the nearby 16mm projector.

Once this iconography was resituated within the institution of art, it turned into an entrance to itself. Instead of entering into the sublime of a sequel, the past, or the powerful spectacle of Hollywood cinema, it renders a contemporary signification of the moment, which is also more than the sum of its collectible parts. It represents a recollection of Hollywood cinema and the twentieth-century mass media as the producer of a very specific space/time continuum. The work offers an access to enquiry into the new cultural character of an era still unfolding and uncharted, and links to issues of media and power as characterized by the notion of the industry spectacle, that was already underway in 1975.

To start the video, click on the link below. Roar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlN5Jkr9Gew&feature=player_embedded

TECHNOLOGY/TRANSFORMATION: WONDER WOMAN

2009-11-30T02:18:00.000+01:00

by Dara Birnbaum (1978-1979)

Video (color, sound), 5:50 min. Original Television Footage: CBS Inc. “Wonder Woman”. Sound: The Wonderland Disco Band

Welcome to an appropriation themed video week. Let’s start with a pioneering example of “video sampling”: Dara Birnbaum’s iconic work “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” from 1979 is utilizing footage snatched from broadcasts of the live-action super hero show of the same name.

Dara Birnbaum created one of the first examples of appropriation imagery from mainstream television, something that is now quite common. “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” features, as one might expect, Wonder Woman, the main character of the prime-time television programm of the same name which was based on an action-adventure comic book.

Explosive bursts of fire open ”Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman”, an incendiary deconstruction of the ideology embedded in television form and pop cultural iconography. Appropriating imagery from the TV series Wonder Woman, Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moment of the “real” woman’s symbolic transformation into super-hero. Entrapped in her magical metamorphosis by Birnbaum’s stuttering edits, Wonder Woman spins dizzily like a music-box doll. Through radical manipulation of this female Pop icon, she subverts its meaning within the television text. Arresting the flow of images through fragmentation and repetition, Birnbaum condenses the comic-book narrative — Wonder Woman deflects bullets off her bracelets, “cuts” her throat in a hall of mirrors — distilling its essence to allow the subtext to emerge. In a further textual deconstruction, she spells out the words to the song Wonder Woman in Discoland on the screen. The lyrics’ double entendres (”Get us out from under … Wonder Woman”) reveal the sexual source of the superwoman’s supposed empowerment: “Shake thy Wonder Maker.” Writing about the “stutter-step progression of `extended moments’ of transformation from Wonder Woman,” Birnbaum states, “The abbreviated narrative — running, spinning, saving a man — allows the underlying theme to surface: psychological transformation versus television product. Real becomes Wonder in order to “do good” (be moral) in an (a) or (im)moral society.”

To see wonderwoman spinning around, click on the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4y5e5_dara-birnbaum-technologytransformat_shortfilms

C’ÉTAIT UN RENDEZ-VOUS

2009-11-29T20:54:00.000+01:00

by Claude Lelouch (1976)

35mm, 9 min, colour, stereo

The godfather of car racing: C'ÉTAIT UN RENDEZ-VOUS shows an nine-minute drive through Paris in the early hours of the morning (5:30), accompanied by sounds of a high-reving engine, gear changes and squealing tires.

Shot in a single take, it is an example of cinéma-vérité. The length of the film was limited by the short capacity of the 400 foot 35mm film reel, and filmed from a gyro-stabilised camera mounted on the bumper of a Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9. Until recently, there was no confirmation of who was driving or what car he was driving. Over the years, various sources claimed an F1 driver was at the wheel of a Le Mans Matra 675, Ferrari 275 GTB, or an Alpine A110. However, Claude Lelouch confirmed on his official website in March 2006 that he was driving, and it was a 6.9 litre Mercedes.

The route taken in the film is 10.42 km long (6.48 mi). It takes the driver 7:57 to cover that distance, giving him an average speed of 78.64 km/h (48.86 mph). According to recent claims by Claude Lelouch, he later dubbed over the sound of a Ferrari 275GTB to give the impression of much higher speeds. Calculations made by several independent groups using the film show that the car never exceeds 140 km/h (85 mph), which seems to lend credence to his recent comments.

One observer was posted, with a walkie talkie, close to the Louvre palace at the only blind junction (archway) to assist the driver, however Lelouch has revealed that the radios failed, and if the assistant had tried to warn him of a pedestrian the message would not have been received. Lelouch was arrested shortly after the film was screened but was later released without charge.

To start the insanity, simply click on the link below. Enjoy.

http://vimeo.com/757553

TUNNEL

2009-11-29T16:16:00.000+01:00

by Thomas Demand (1999)

2 min, 35mm Filmloop, Dolby SR

Thomas Demand is known for making photographs of three-dimensional models look like real images of rooms and other spaces. The subjects represented in Demand´s photographs often relate to scenes of cultural or political relevance.

‘Tunnel’, Demand's first film, presumably shows a fast-paced tracking shot through the tunnel in which Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash. At first the viewer seems to remember seeing these images in the media. But in reality the set is a true to life, cardboard mock-up of architectural details. Under closer inspection, one also realizes that instead of reproducing reality Thomas Demand creates a perfectly-constructed model world. The cleverly-lit cardboard scenery takes up an incident of recent history and, in doing so, mirrors the illusionary features of what appear to be familiar images. The film literally reflects upon the model of our relationship to images from the mass media. In the process, the construction, representation and repetition of reality create a complex weaving of connections. That the accident used as the theme was the result of a hectic, car chase caused by paparazzi lends the work yet another aspect of the reflection of the media.

Despite adopting some of the tools of the cinema, Demand describes his film as ‘more an animated still image than a cinematographic undertaking’. His interest lies chiefly in the formal qualities of the piece, which he relates to both musical composition and minimal structures. Thus, although the film can be considered as a succession of evenly spaced still images, these images are tightly choreographed into an overall structure comprising several slightly different sequences. In each sequence the artist has introduced variations in, for example, the speed of the camera, its direction and angle, and the length of the dark passages between each drive-through.

To see the video, click on the link below. Enjoy.

Tunnel (1999)

CREMASTER 4

2009-11-29T13:03:00.000+01:00

by Matthew Barney (1994)

35mm film with sound, 42 mins., courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

CREMASTER 4 (1994) was, in fact, the first installment that Matthew Barney filmed. It was produced on a shoestring budget of $200,000 (largely paid for by London arts organization Artangel, New York dealer Barbara Gladstone, and the Foundation Cartier in Paris). The film is set on the Isle of Man — an small island (about three times the size of Washington, D.C.) in the sea between Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales.

To start the race, click on the the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i24yOKE7jKw&feature=related

CLOVER

2009-11-29T01:46:00.001+01:00

by Billy Rennekamp (2009)

HD Video loop (6 s)

This short stop-motion video piece was created by artist Billy Rennekamp. It shows a car driving in circles on a highway clover intersection which is layered with Google Maps street view iconography. The driver seems to be going in the opposite direction of Google’s noted traffic direction at this intersection -emphasizing the possibilities for creative synthesis that come along with Street View: you can seamlessly traverse a path that the Google camera van never actually traversed in real life.

Click on the link below to enter the interchange. Enjoy.

http://www.loshadka.org/billy/archive.php?Number=59

BLACK CAR

2009-11-28T15:43:00.000+01:00

by Øyvind Aspen (2009)

Super 16mm transferred to HD video, 16:9, colour, 3 ch. sound, 8m 25s

Welcome to VideoBlog.

So far I could not find any further information on Øyvind Aspen’s mesmerizing ‘Black Car’ piece, but nevertheless it’s a phantastic opener for a “car race” themed video week...click on the link below to see what's happening behind you. Enjoy.

http://www.oyvindaspen.com/films/black_car.html