ART TORRENTS

Closed

2008-09-07T19:45:00.004+02:00

This blog is closed as of today and will be left in it's current state.

PLEASE NOTE: Synergy; I still invite people to KaraGarga. I receive a fair amount of emails; write a few words about what you have to contribute.

Hiraki Sawa - Elsewhere / Spotter (2002 - 2003)

2008-08-13T22:28:00.000+02:00

Hiraki Sawa was born in Ishikawa, Japan in 1977 and currently lives in London. He uses lo-tech video animation to create poetic dreamscapes - ruminations on ideas of time and motion, innocence and alienation, dislocation and displacement. His seminal film, 'Dwelling', 2002 was accomplished while still a graduate student at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and brought him to the attention of the international art world through exhibitions including New Contemporaries and East International. Certain leitmotifs recur throughout the films - a child's rocking horse, migrating animals, model jet planes - objects which play out notions of travel and nomadism, of being at home and thinking of elsewhere.

Elsewhere (2003)
b&w
Duration 7:40

Spotter (2003)
b&w
Duration 7:40

Marcel Broodthaers - A Voyage on the North Sea (1974)

2008-08-13T22:26:00.003+02:00

Between 1957 and his death in 1976, Marcel Broodthaers made approximately fifty films. The exact number is difficult to determine: Several no longer exist; some are multipart "programs" assembled from groups of short films (many appropriated from industrial or otherwise "authorless" sources); and others are subtle variations on previous works. A recent exhibition at pioneering curator and collector Thomas Solomon's new gallery, Solo Projects, paired a 16-mm silent film, Un Voyage en Mer du Nord (A Voyage on the North Sea), 1973-74, with a thirty-eight-page, French-bound book that shares its title and ostensible subject matter: the pairing of a late-nineteenth-century amateur painting of an archetypal European ship and a twentieth-century photograph of a pleasure boat against a modern urban backdrop. The roughly four-minute film is projected on a retractable home-movie screen--a Broodthaers motif--and the book displayed on a simple wooden shelf, lit by a single spotlight.

Un Voyage's almost obsolete format and pedagogical presentation gave the show the feeling of a historical document. In each work, Broodthaers "cuts" into the painting and the photograph by focusing on small details. The artist is said to have dated the painting to around 1900, and initially it seems that Un Voyage is delivering a rigorous structural analysis based on formal and historical oppositions marking the divide between the nineteenth century and the twentieth: novel versus cinema; painting versus photography; shipping as commerce versus sailing as leisure. But the work does more than this. By using splicing, binding, and repetition to join these apparent opposites, it performs a complex overlapping of materiality and history. Punctuated by intertitles that demarcate fifteen "pages," the film insinuates a relationship to contemporaneous structuralist cinema--think of the wall-mounted seascape photograph that is central to (and literally at the center of) Michael Snow's forty-five-minute zoom in Wavelength, 1967. But again the comparison unravels as the film in Un Voyage undermines its own apparent logic, repeating "page" five twice, for example, or inserting a brief closeup of cotton weave where one would expect a shot of the painted canvas.

The film and book represent Broodthaers's interest in reproducible media, though the relatively small edition--just one hundred examples of the pair were produced--also suggests that the artist was not aiming for a mass audience. The evidence indicates that Broodthaers was interested in complicating the status of these objects by subverting any notion of an "original" or definitive version. It should be noted that Un Voyage follows directly from several 1973 works not included in the exhibition, among them two 16-mm films--Analyse d'une peinture and Une peinture d'amateur decouverte dans une boutiquede curiosities--and a slide projection, Bateau Tableau. Un Voyage itself in many ways resembles a slide show: Testing the limits of the cinematic, Broodthaers injects a dose of humor by assembling a deliberately inert motion picture from still images.

While Broodthaers's practice is often defined within the limited framework of institutional critique, the breadth and sheer unruliness of his project suggests that one might just as easily place him alongside an artist such as Bruce Conner, with whom he shared both a penchant for found footage and a somewhat after-the-fact Surrealist sense of humor. A 1971 film program by Broodthaers, in which he appropriated the 20th Century Fox logo, also aligns him with Ed Ruscha, who used the same image in 1962, and presages Jack Goldstein's use of the MGM Lion. Solomon's presentation of Un Voyage at this particular moment raises subtle questions about the mediation and proliferation of images, allowing Broodthaers's interrogation of pictures from the past to implicate our digital present.

You know where.

Gary Hill - Blind Spot (2003)

2008-08-09T09:18:00.003+02:00

Born in Santa Monica, California in 1951, Gary Hill was a surfer who became interested in sculpture in high school. He studied sculpture and painting in Woodstock, New York, and in 1973 he borrowed a video portapak from Woodstock Community Video (WCV). From 1974 to 1976 he was TV lab coordinator at WCV, producing tapes that "arose out of a dialogue with the properties of the medium." From 1975 to 1977 Hill was an artist-in-residence at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York, where he made use of various tools including the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor and David Jones's colorizer which Hill helped build. In 1976 Hill met poet George Quasha who, along with Charles Stein, inspired Hill's first experiments with language. Hill's early works investigated synthesized imagery, ecological subjects, and post-minimal political statements (Hole in the Wall, 1974). Hill's works exploring the intertextuality of image, sound, speech, and language emerged in the late 70s and early 80s, such as Soundings (1979) and Around and About (1980). Hill has gained an international reputation for his video art tapes and installations.

Marcel Broodthaers - Le corbeau et le renard (1968)

2008-08-09T09:16:00.001+02:00

Marcel Broodthaers (January 28, 1924 – January 28, 1976) was a Belgian poet, filmmaker and artist with a highly literate and often witty approach to creating art works.

He was born in Brussels, Belgium, where he was associated with the Groupe Surréaliste-revolutionaire from 1945 and dabbled in journalism, film, and poetry. After spending 20 years in poverty as a struggling poet[1], he performed the symbolic act of embedding fifty unsold copies of his book of poems Pense-Bête in plaster, creating his first art object. That same year, 1964, for his first exhibition, he wrote a famous preface for the exhibition catalogue;

\"I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time I had been no good at anything. I am forty years old... Finally the idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway. At the end of three months I showed what I had produced to Philippe Edouard Toussaint, the owner of the Galerie St Laurent. \'But it is art\' he said \'and I will willingly exhibit all of it.\' \'Agreed\' I replied. If I sell something, he takes 30%. It seems these are the usual conditions, some galleries take 75%. What is it? In fact it is objects.\" Broodthaers, 1964[2]

He worked principally with assemblies of found objects and collage, often containing written texts. His most noted work was an installation in his Brussels house which he called Musée d\'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (1968). This installation was followed by a further eleven manifestations of the \'museum\', including at the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle for an exhibition in 1970 and at documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972. For such works he is associated with the late 20th century global spread of both installation art, as well as \"institutional critique,\" in which interrelationships between artworks, the artist, and the museum are a focus.

Broodthaers died in Cologne, Germany on his 52nd birthday.

Oliver Payne & Nick Relph - Comma, Pregnant Pause (2004)

2008-08-09T09:15:00.000+02:00

Comma, Pregnant Pause, 2004 (27 minutes)

A comma indicates a pause or break between parts of a sentence; in
spoken communication, a pregnant pause is one that is full of meaning
– significant – suggestive. This video features mobile phones, in whose
text messages commas are seldom used. There are often, however,
pregnant pauses during the wait for a reply. This work starts with the
commentary:

‘I want to be the best there ever was, to beat all the best that's my
cause.’

The video is dominated by two seated people dressed as mobile phones.
Their costumes are based on ‘Mowbli’, the ubiquitous mobile phone logo
from Carphone Warehouse, and their faces are covered by scary-looking
masks, taken from the popular series of films Scream, 1996, 1997, 2000,
and Scary Movie, 2000, 2001, 2003, but originating in Edward Munch’s
painting, The Scream, 1893. Their conversation is indicated by two
different text alerts – ‘1,2,3,4’ and a musical sound, like a guitar or harp
– whilst each text message appears as a series of subtitles. The
conversations are fractured, featuring messages such as, ‘the newest
thing is now wearing the word’. Young people are part of a texting culture in
which messages sometimes go astray, so spoken conversation would often
be more efficient.

The background imagery varies throughout:

• a CD spinning round and multiplying to form numerous CDs
• a rotating white plastic pizza divider from the centre of a take-away box
• sunsets appropriated from the Internet
• various digitised patterns
• text in dots zooming illegibly across the screen
• a JJB Sports shop
• a black-and-white William Morris print, which becomes more and more smudged.

At times, the phones disappear, to be replaced by the legs and bicycle
wheels of passers-by, repeated as split-screen mirror images so the legs
move in a comic way. Using the same split-screen effect, American football
players are also featured.

Later on, a third person enters dressed in a black suit, white shirt and holey
socks, wearing a Jar Jar Binks mask from Star Wars: Episode I, 1999. He
sits on a tin and starts a rap-like monologue with:

‘I'm knackered, I'm knackered
I'm fucking back-packered
smack-thwackered at the end of the shelf of the rack
of the aisle at the store where you don't go back
but all the while I could see, I could see
the crack at the back of the blister pack.’

On the whole, *Payne* and Relph reject the authoritative voice-overs
apparent in many documentary films in favour of texts that take the form
of email dialogues between them. These narratives are not conventional,
and the narrators are always male.

Cyrus Frisch - Vergeef me AKA Forgive me (2001)

2008-08-05T13:53:00.002+02:00

A Mediamatic screening of the film by Cyrus Frisch, in which the method actors are heavyweight addicts and the story is an intentional double of a play and borderlines on that which is wrong.
Forgive me is the film adaptation of Cyrus Frisch's controversional play Jesus/Lover, which was performed by HARDDRUG ADDICTS and ALCOHOLISTS. Frisch first plays with the actors, to later be able to find the enraged viewer who is getting worked up because it is wrong, what I am doing here.
This film with Frisch as Jesus disguised as Jerry Springer is not light on the stomach. But those who can take it will get to know some extraordinary people - even the angry ones.
Forgive me (Vergeef me) by Cyrus Frisch has recently been released on DVD by Reel23.

Available at KaraGarga.

Leos Carax - Pola X (1999)

2008-08-05T02:08:00.000+02:00

A successful, carefree young writer, Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu), lives in an enormous, pristine chateau in Normandy with his adoring mother, who he calls Sister (Catherine Deneuve). He is engaged to be married to a lovely young woman who adores him, and he has just reunited with his cousin, whom he loves deeply. But Pierre is haunted by a vision in his dreams of a strange, dark-haired peasant woman who attracts him in unexplainable ways. When she suddenly appears, stumbling out of the woods and claiming that she is his long-lost sister, Isabelle (Katerina Golubeva), he falls blindly, madly in love with her. Tearing out of Normandy and heading for Paris, Pierre discredits everything in his life including his family, his friends, and his money. He takes Isabelle to an abandoned warehouse run by a cult, where they live together in deranged passionate misery.

POLA X, an intense, gripping, all-consuming film, is Leos Carax's (THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE) most simultaneously disturbing and beautiful movie. Based on the haunting novel by Herman Melville, PIERRE OR THE AMBIGUITIES, the film breaks down all the boundaries of familial love, then proceeds to do the same for the human psyche. Featuring lush photography that tricks the eye and taunts the mind, the filming is superb. As the story progresses and grows more complicated, the scenery changes from spacious green summer foliage to cold, cluttered, industrial structure. The sound is embracing, the acting is precise, and the feeling of the film is positively captivating.

Available at KaraGarga.

Stephen Kijak - Scott Walker: 30 Century Man (2006)

2008-08-05T01:53:00.001+02:00

“Scott Walker: 30 Century Man” is a long-overdue look at one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in rock history.The film explores his music and career, from his early days as a jobbing bass player on the Sunset Strip, to mega-stardom in Britain’s swinging 60’s pop scene as lead singer of The Walker Brothers, to his evolution into one of the most astonishing soundmakers of the last few decades.
He’s 63 years old and released his first album in over 10 years, “The Drift” on 4 A.D. Records last year to wide-spread critical acclaim. The film features exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the album as well as interviews with friends, collaborators, and fans including, among others:
David Bowie, Radiohead, Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), Brian Eno, Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz), Neil Hannon (The Divine Comedy)(DVD only), Marc Almond, Alison Goldfrapp, Sting, Dot Allison, Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins), Richard Hawley, Rob Ellis, Johnny Marr (The Smiths/Modest Mouse), Gavin Friday, Lulu, Peter Olliff, Angela Morley, Ute Lemper, Ed Bicknell, Evan Parker, Hector Zazou, Mo Foster, Phil Sheppard, Pete Walsh, and more.

Directed by Stephen Kijak, who brought you the delightfully deranged documentary CINEMANIA (a profile of 5 of NYC’s most manic film buffs), this is a different form of obsession altogether. Inspiring god-like devotion from fans, Scott Walker’s has a cult that has grown considerably since his 1995 release “Tilt”, a dark and difficult masterwork. His new album takes that sound further than anyone could have imagined…

Available at KaraGarga.

Harun Farocki - Bewerbung, Die (1996)

2008-08-03T22:58:00.000+02:00

From his work in the fiction mode to documentary to installation, German filmmaker Harun Farocki has consistently explored ideas of language, ideology, perception, and contemporary audio-visual culture. In this unique documentary, Farocki draws on the anxiety of unemployment as he follows the efforts of several candidates who take part in a training program designed to teach them how to apply for a job. The goal is to learn how to market and sell themselves, a goal that Farocki exposes as demeaning and superficial. An insightful look at the manipulative tactics of big business, Farocki's film is as thought provoking as it is revealing. In German with English subtitles.

Available at KaraGarga.

Various - Animated Painting (2007)

2008-08-03T22:50:00.002+02:00

The San Diego Museum of Art organized a state-of-the-art exhibition which showcases the latest trend in animated art by contemporary artists. It ran from October 13, 2007, to January 13, 2008, and featured 25 cinematic works by 14 international contemporary artists who adapt traditional painting and drawing methods to the concepts and technologies of animation.

Animated Painting presents some of the most compelling artists working with these new hybrid strategies which have been increasingly used by contemporary artists over the last several years.

The works on display show two predominant approaches in animation. While some artists are maintaining the practice of handmade images, which is immersed in styles of traditional drawing and painting or forms of conventional animation, other artists are working with live action sources that are either self-generated or taken from popular culture and then digitally recoded into a painterly style. Animated Painting shows how digital media is transforming older art forms and how contemporary artists are providing a fresh take on the popular, commercially-dominated art form of animation. By taking animation out of its commercial context and incorporating it into fine art, artists are able to accomplish results that are not necessarily found in its commercial use and that offer a timebased method in which to convey their message. The exhibition also highlights the widespread globalization of moving image art and its growing accessibility to new audiences.

“This is a groundbreaking and visually stunning exhibition. SDMA is proud to present these challenging works,” says the Museum’s executive director, Derrick Cartwright. “As digital art has grown in popularity over the past few years, museums have a broad responsibility to contextualize these representations. Animated Painting does an excellent job at making this work accessible to diverse audiences. The exhibition provides visitors with an opportunity to explore a growing trend in contemporary art and to enjoy a wide variety of new time-based works by leading international artists.” Highlights of Animated Painting include William Kentridge’s animated film Tide Table (2005); computer animated figures by Julian Opie that will be displayed outside of the Museum; Jeremy Blake’s digital video Sodium Fox (2005); and Sadie Benning’s video projection of hand-made drawings, Play Pause (2006). In addition, Wit Pimkanchanapong has been commissioned to create a site design for the exhibition space. The artist’s ceiling design is based on an analog progression of imagery and will be printed on sheets of suspended paper. Animated Painting also showcases the close relationship between contemporary art, popular culture, and progressive musical styles as several works feature new compositions and audio soundscapes.

The artists participating in the exhibition are the Barnstormers, Sadie Benning, Jeremy Blake, Sebastián Díaz Morales, Kota Ezawa, Ruth Gómez, William Kentridge, Ann Lislegaard, Takeshi Murata, Serge Onnen, Julian Opie, Wit Pimkanchanapong, Qiu Anxiong, and Robin Rhode.

Animated Painting is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue featuring essays by the exhibition’s curator Betti-Sue Hertz, animation studies scholar Suzanne Buchan, and media theorist Lev Manovich, an exhibition checklist, artist biographies, and a DVD with sample clips of the works in the exhibition. After its run at the San Diego Museum of Art, the exhibition will be on view at the Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT) in Tijuana, Mexico, from October 1 through December 31, 2008, and at the Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, from February 6 through April 19, 2009.

Animated Painting is organized by the San Diego Museum of Art. This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Krichman Family Fund of the Jewish Community Foundation, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and the African Arts Council of the San Diego Museum of Art. Additional support is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, the County of San Diego’s Community Enhancement Program, and members of the San Diego Museum of Art.

Available at KaraGarga or Amazon.

Destroy All Monsters & Mike Kelley & Carey Loren - Grow Live Monsters (2007)

2008-07-28T15:26:00.002+02:00

Grow Live Monsters is a selection from short home-made no-budget 8mm, super 8 and 16mm film fantasies made between 1971-1976. Most of the films revolved around a group of friends and the wall of noise they would create in basement cellars and in live performance. This was Destroy All Monsters, one of the most avant-garde 'bands' of all time. Featuring artists Niagra, Jim Shaw, Corey Loren and Mike Kelley, Destroy All Monsters is like nothing else. Ever. Psychedelic meets noise meets high and low brow art in a Midwestern blender. Say goodbye to your retinas." DVD Contents: "Grow Live Monsters (1971-1976)" - The early films of DAM; "Shake A Lizard Tail or Rust Belt Rump" - Montage of late-night TV adverts, techno club dancers, and Z grade monster clips; "Monsters Redux" - Outtakes, concert footage, band memorabilia, and photos; "DAM Invades Seattle" - Performance footage from Seattle, 2000; "Hometown Horrors" - Band photos and production stills. Total running time: approx. 145 minutes "Grow Live Monsters is a selection from short home-made no-budget 8mm, super 8 and 16mm film fantasies made between 1971-1976. Most of the films revolved around a group of friends and the wall of noise they would create in basement cellars and in live performance. This was Destroy All Monsters, one of the most avant-garde 'bands' of all time. Featuring artists Niagra, Jim Shaw, Corey Loren and Mike Kelley, Destroy All Monsters is like nothing else. Ever. Psychedelic meets noise meets high and low brow art in a Midwestern blender. Say goodbye to your retinas." DVD Contents: "Grow Live Monsters (1971-1976)" - The early films of DAM; "Shake A Lizard Tail or Rust Belt Rump" - Montage of late-night TV adverts, techno club dancers, and Z grade monster clips; "Monsters Redux" - Outtakes, concert footage, band memorabilia, and photos; "DAM Invades Seattle" - Performance footage from Seattle, 2000; "Hometown Horrors" - Band photos and production stills.

Available at KaraGarga.

Alan Zweig - Lovable (2007)

2008-07-24T15:42:00.001+02:00

At some point, everyone has asked the question, why is it so hard to find love? In this final installment of the autobiographical trilogy that includes Vinyl and I, Curmudgeon, Alan Zweig reflects with disarming candour on why, if he longs for a partner and children, he is still single at mid-life.

Through intimate, heartfelt and often hilarious interviews with a series of diverse, smart and attractive single women, Zweig explores yearnings for the romantic myths of our culture and the difficulty of finding and sustaining relationships.

Some women have come to accept and prefer being alone, but many still dream of a future they can share. Rather than remaining the objective observer, Zweig approaches his female subjects as kindred spirits, sharing their vulnerability and openness. A perfect mixed tape of love songs provides the backdrop for this courageously candid look at love and longing. - Hot Docs

The last in the introspective trilogy that includes Vinyl and I, Curmudgeon. Available at KaraGarga.

Alan Zweig - I, Curmudgeon (2004)

2008-07-24T15:41:00.000+02:00

In this often very funny enquiry into crankiness, Toronto filmmaker Alan Zweig interviews notable curmudgeons like Fran Lebowitz, Harvey Pekar and Bruce LaBruce. Zweig wants to know what their frickin' problem is and, more importantly, whether it's the same as his. As in Vinyl, his equally irascible doc on record collectors, the endearingly dour filmmaker spends much of I, Curmudgeon spilling his guts directly to his camera and torturing himself with big questions that he can never answer satisfactorily. Zweig then confronts his subjects with the same questions, thereby making them even grouchier. (How grouchy? Andy Rooney is moved to kick Zweig out of his office.) Though I, Curmudgeon's meandering structure and incessant jump-cuts are irritants, they're also appropriate to the movie's abrasive, anti-social personality. Consider this a testament to the power of negative thinking. - Eye Weekly

Available at KaraGarga.

Alan Zweig - Vinyl (2000)

2008-07-24T15:39:00.002+02:00

This is a study of the joy and the madness of collecting things, in this case records. However, im pretty sure that regarless of what media you collect, you will recognize yourself in the individuals portrayed in here.

Nice vhs-rip, not as blurry as the screenshots below indicate.

Available at KaraGarga.

John Cage - Variations V (1965)

2008-07-23T12:30:00.002+02:00

Already uploaded Variations VII, so here's the earlier, legendary work that premiered at New York's Philharmonic Hall (!) in 1965. This recording was from a german performance taped for television broadcast the next year. I'm listing John Cage as the director, since he's the mastermind here, but if you know Cage, you understand what a misnomer this is. "Collaborative" doesn't get the half of it: you've got Stan VanDerBeek's films, Nam June Paik's video, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma and John Cage on various tape machines rigged up by Robert Moog and Billy Kluver, Merce Cunningham and company doing movement, actual video here is somebody named Arne Arnbom, but don't know if editing was supervised by VanDerBeek, may have been. The video quality is poor, I've tried to preserve what little there was by not compressing too much - sound is great though. Full 50 min, including a 5 min opening commentary in german without subtitles. German speakers on KG - come lend a hand! - mediaburn(user on KaraGarga)

John Cage made «Variations V» in 1965 for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He and David Tudor settled on two systems for the sound to be affected by movement. For the first, Billy Klüver and his colleagues set up a system of directional photocells aimed at the stage lights, so that the dancers triggered sounds as they cut the light beams with their movements. A second system used a series of antennas. When a dancer came within four feet of an antenna a sound would result. Ten photocells were wired to activate tape-recorders and short-wave radios. Cecil Coker designed a control circuit, which was built by my assistant Witt Wittnebert. Film footage by Stan VanDerBeek and Nam June Paik's manipulated television images were projected on screens behind the dancers.
The score was created by flipping coins to determine each element and consisted of thirty-five «remarks» outlining the structure, components, and methodology. The specific sound score would change at each performance as it was created by radio antennas responding to the dancers' movements.

The photocells were located at the base of the five-foot antennas placed around the stage. Cage, Tudor, and Gordon Mumma operate equipment to modify and determine the final sounds.

Available at Karagarga.

Ps. check out sbmp3b if you want to check out a lot of Mark Leckey music projects.

Robert Smithson - Hotel Palenque (1969-72) & Neville Wakefield - Yucatan Is Elsewhere, On Robert Smithson's HOTEL PALENQUE

2008-07-13T15:13:00.004+02:00

Robert Smithson's 1969 lecture published in Parkettart alongside an essay by Neville Wakefield. Download it via mediafire right here or at UbuWeb.

Christian Marclay - Guitar Drag (2000)

2008-07-07T00:24:00.000+02:00

The 14-minute video Guitar Drag, 2000, shows an amplified Fender guitar attached to a rope being pulled behind a pick-up truck. As the guitar drags across back roads and dirt trails, it produces a range of cacophonous musical sounds that often correlate to what is seen. Guitar Drag explores the collected mythologies of the guitar, the rural South and the truck, and Marclay evokes such disparate associations as rock-and-roll guitar smashing and the history of lynching in the South.

Available at KaraGarga.

Leosh Janachek - On the Way to the House of the Dead (1930)

2008-07-04T03:25:00.001+02:00

Not to be confused with the truly awful "House of the Dead," this is an OPERA by the Moravian (Czech) composer Leos Janacheck based on the short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and conducted by the brilliant Pierre Boulez using the Schoenberg choir.

Why do I go into the dark, frozen cells of criminals with the poet of Crime and Punishment? Into the minds of criminals and there I find a spark of God. You will not wipe away the crimes from their brow, but equally you will not extinguish the spark of God. Into what depths it leads - how much truth there is in his work!

See how the old man slides down from the oven, shuffles to the corpse, makes the sign of the cross over it, and with a rusty voice sobs the words: 'A mother gave birth even to him!'

Those are the bright places in the house of the dead.

From the House of the Dead (Z Mrtvého Domu in Czech) is an opera by Leoš Janáček, in three acts. The libretto was translated and adapted by the composer from the novel by Dostoyevsky. It was the composer's last opera, premiered on 12 April 1930 in Brno, two years after his death.

Janáček worked on this opera knowing that it would be his last, and for it he broke away from the habit he had developed of creating characters modeled on his love interest Kamila Stösslová (although the themes of loneliness and isolation can clearly be seen as a response to her indifference to his feelings). There are, in fact, almost no female characters, and the setting, a Siberian prison, offers up a large ensemble cast instead of one or several prominent leads. There is no narrative to the piece as a whole, but individual characters narrate episodes in their lives, and there is a "play-within-a-play" in Act 2.

From the House of the Dead was virtually finished when Janáček died. Two of his students, believing the orchestration was incomplete, "filled out" large portions of the score, as well as adapting the ending to be more optimistic in tone. In addition to the work of Bretislav Bakala, Ota Zitek made changes to the text and sequence of events in the opera.[1] Decades later, a version closer to the composer's intentions superseded that version, and is most often heard today. Some productions, however, still use the ending adapted earlier, as it lessens the bleakness of the story.

The vast orchestra for which this opera is written includes chains (as a percussion instrument), to evoke the sound of the dead.

This is the Deutsche Grammaphone dvd recording, with both 5.1 dolby and normal stereo sound, as well as all the menu extras including five short making of features. The 7.5gb dvd here compressed to 4.3 for burning.

Chéreau rehearsing Skuratov's narration
Chéreau and Boulez on Dostoyevsky's text
Thieu Niang working on the two pantomimes
Boulez and Chéreau on the position of the chorus in Act III
Boulez rehearsing the Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Available at KaraGarga.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster - Parc Central (2006)

2008-07-03T19:42:00.001+02:00

A collection of 11 short poetic psycho-geographic portraits of cities and spaces from artist Dominique Gonzelez-Foerster, who's cinematic 2007 solo show at Musée dArt moderne de la Ville de Paris http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/4008 will be supplemented in 2008 by the Unilever commission for the Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern (joining Carsten Holler's slides, Olafur Eliason's sun, and Doris Salcedo's crack amongst many other prestigious past projects).

Ranging from the revisiting of a scene of Ming-Liang Tsai's 'Vive l'Amour' through the eyes of its protagonist, to a ticker-tape parade in Buenos Aires, from a reflection on the filmic qualities of Brasilia,to an observation of the observers of the 1999 eclipse in Paris. All soundtracked by a sensitive balance of field-recordings and carefully chosen delicate music.

A review of the work Riyo, included on DVD here.

This collection of films from cities across the globe provides further evidence of Gonzalez-Foerster's unmistakable sense of urban ambience and tropical melancholia. In a conversation between the artist and Jacques Ranciere published in Art Press, the philosopher, reflecting on the dialogue between East and West in her work, observes, "What is interesting is what they over there have done with what they borrowed from us here. You don't get that here, maybe because we have the idea that there are no more journeys left." That may be the case, but after seeing Gonzalez-Foerster's films I want to go places: Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Taipei, and of course Japan, though I'm not sure if her Japan really exists or whether it's a semiotic fantasy after Roland Barthes.
- Daniel Birnbaum, Artforum, 2006

"Parc Central" est composé de 11 films qui offrent un voyage visuel, sonore et poétique à travers 11 villes traversées par l'artiste. Fascinée par la ville, l'espace et l'urbanisme, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster développe depuis plusieurs années le concept de "modernité tropicale", à partir de la cohabitation et de la confrontation entre architecture et végétation. C'est autour de cette recherche qu'elle a conçue "Parc Central"
- MK2 DVD description

Available at KaraGarga.

Ken Jacobs - Window (1964)

2008-07-01T11:12:00.001+02:00

Window (1964) 16mm, color, silent

The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience's sense of gravity. The camera's movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera the adjacent building turns). About four years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice. --K. J.

Ken Jacobs was born May 25th, 1933 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His family background was that of a broken home, with a father who didn't care about him, and a mother who passed away when he was seven. His childhood life could be characterized, as he would call it, " Disastrous but typical, bequeathing me a social disgust and anger that I have cultivated, refined, monumentalized, and I am gagging on." His grim childhood had taught him to be a stronger person on the outside.

Aside from his early childhood difficulties, at the age of sixteen he had the opportunity to go to the Museum of Modern Art. There, he took a keen interest in various filmmakers, which then inspired him to write some of his own movie scripts. Also, he developed a love for art and painting. He attended the high school of Industrial Arts and often visited the film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

He served at the US Coast Guard. In 1955 he continued to study painting in New York, and in 1956 he studied with Hans Hoffmann.

Also in 1956 he befriended the filmmaker Jack Smith and began to work on his first films and first attempts in Silhouette Theater. In 1956, Jacobs put together a film called Orchard Street. Over the next couple of years, with the help of fellow filmmaker and classmate Jack Smith, his work was finally acknowledged. Smith, being a hopeful actor, starred in Jacob's film Blonde Cobra as well as a few other films.

He founded the Millennium Film Workshop in New York. He then taught film studies at St. Johns University. In 1969 he founded the film department at the State University of New York in Binghamton together with Larry Gottheim. From 1971 to the present he has been professor of film in Binghamton. In 1986 he was a guest of the DAAD (Berlin Artist's Program). In 1996 his work was shown in a comprehensive film retrospective in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Available at KaraGarga.

Paul Sharits - Ray Gun Virus (1966)

2008-07-01T11:08:00.004+02:00

Ray Gun Virus (with sound!)
1966
According to artist, sound is to be turned to max volume.

Although affirming projector, projection beam, screen, emulsion, film frame structure, etc., this is not an "abstract film"/projector as pistol/time-colored pills/yes=no/mental suicide and then, rebirth as self-projection. "... just colors and strobe ... 'light-color energy patterns (analogies of neural transmission systems) generate internal color-time shape and allow the viewer to become aware of the electrical-chemical functionings of his own nervous system' ... It's true." - David Curtis, International Times "RAY GUN VIRUS is a work in which no images appear yet one can get pure identity on film. ... projected film itself makes the viewer aware of where he stands. RAY GUN VIRUS is not so-called 'Psychedelic Cinema' but even more and goes beyond it through Sharits' bright clarification of the media." - Takahiko Iimura, Film Art Exhibition: Fourth Int'l Experimental Film Competition, Knokke-Le-Zoute; "Twenty Years of American Personal Film" anthology, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1966. Collections: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Royal Archive of Belgium.

Available at KaraGarga.

Robert Frank - The Present (1996)

2008-06-30T22:30:00.002+02:00

1996, 24 min.
Simple objects, photographs, and events prompt Frank to self-conscious rumination. From his homes in New York and Nova Scotia and on visits to friends, the artist contemplates his relationships, the anniversary of his daughter's death, his son's mental illness, and his work.

Available at KaraGarga.

Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson - Swamp (1971)

2008-06-26T20:51:00.001+02:00

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson collaborated on this seminal film, which viscerally confronts issues of perception and process. The action of the film is direct: Holt walks through the tall grasses of a swamp while filming with her Bolex camera, guided only by what she can see through the camera lens and by Smithson's verbal instructions. The viewer experiences the walk from Holt's point of view, seeing through her camera lens and hearing Smithson's spoken directions. Vision is obstructed and perception distorted as they stumble through the swamp grasses. Holt has stated that Swamp "...deals with limitations of perception through the camera eye as Bob and I struggled through a muddy New Jersey swamp. Verbal direction cannot easily be followed. As the reeds crash against the camera lens blocking vision and forming continuously shifting patterns, confusion ensues." - eai.org

Available at KaraGarga.

Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson - Mono Lake (1968 - 2004)

2008-06-23T13:30:00.003+02:00

1968-2004, 19:54 min, color, sound
Featuring Super 8 film footage and Instamatic slide images of artists Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and Nancy Holt as they visited California's Mono Lake in July of 1968, this piece was edited by Holt in 2004. Mono Lake candidly captures the young artists as they explore the haunting landscape of one of the oldest and most distinctive lakes in North America. Heizer and Smithson are heard reading facts about the unique ecology, geology and natural phenomena of this alkaline lake. The voiceovers are set against filmed images and snapshots of the artists within the uncanny beauty of the lake's environment. Smithson is shown collecting cinders from the volcanic hills on the lake's shores, which were used to make his 1968 sculpture "Mono Lake Nonsite."
Mono Lake is a document of a unique natural environment, a "home movie" of the artists' 1968 road trip, and an intimate view of three seminal figures in the earth art movement as they interact with the Western landscapes that are so central to their work.
The following text, which appears on-screen, provides further background on the recording and editing of the piece: "Mono Lake was shot in 1968 on Super 8 film and Instamatic slides, which were later transferred to video. Smithson selected the readings and the music by Michel Legrand for the early, unedited soundtrack, which was recorded close to the time of the filming. The two country and western songs were sung by Waylon Jennings at a performance in Las Vegas attended by Heizer, Holt and Smithson in the week before the trip to Mono Lake, California... Holt and Smithson originally planned to edit Mono Lake together. The project was subsequently put aside until 2004, when it was edited by Holt for the Robert Smithson Retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles."
Robert Smithson, with Michael Heizer and Nancy Holt, caught on film July 27, 1968. Camera: Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson. Soundtrack Readings: Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson. Producer/Editor: Nancy Holt. Music by Michel Legrand from the soundtrack of the film "Bay of Angels" by Jacques Demy, Cine-Tamaris, 1963. Songs by Waylon Jennings: "Walk on Out of My Mind," (RCA Victor, 1967); "Stop the World (and Let Me Off)," (RCA Victor, 1965). Readings from the booklet "Rock Hounding Out of Bishop" written by Cora B. Houghtaling, Chalfont Press, Bishop, CA, 1967. A Holt/Smithson Video. (quote from eai.org)

Available at KaraGarga.

Piero Golia - Killer Shrimps (2004)

2008-06-18T00:07:00.001+02:00

Original format: 16:9 DV video
Duration: 75 minutes

Synopsis
Pool side at a ranch style house in the canyons of Los Angeles two film-makers and their crew are filming a documentary about a young director. An interesting exploration into the ambitions and expectations of a rising star. Going back and forth in between different realities and possible futures, the arrival of a peculiar food delivery will open their experience to an alternative world populated with hallucinations. This sets the stage for the mother of all gorefests, as the two directors and their crew end up as characters in the eternal battle against evil creatures.

Director's comment

In Killer Shrimps the boundaries between reality and fiction are pushed so far they almost disappear, the real becomes unreal and the fictive becomes plausibly authentic. Concerning the proposition of a new technique of filmmaking: instead of the traditional reproduction of reality with the use of convincing sets or a lifelike shooting style, we decided to execute this movie by forcing reality to become fiction, by pushing the actual to become similar to what ought to be considered artificial. All the usual categories of realism, time and space, get lost in the name of a bigger general category, ìthe unreal. The actual film will be a sort of behind-the-scenes view of a documentary that was never executed. Going back and forth in time, the usual linearity of this dimension becomes elliptical to the point that it almost disappears or becomes unrecognizable. This creates different certainties and a variety of possible futures, until expectations and fears appear as something physical, opening up the possibility of experiencing an alternate world populated with zombies.

Available at KaraGarga.

Isidore Isou (Jean Isidore Goldstein) - Treatise on Slobber and Eternity (1951)

2008-06-17T18:50:00.001+02:00

This is the opening manifesto of the postwar european avant-garde cinema. Created by the charismatic founder of Lettrism, mentor of Lemaitre and Debord, the Hungarian jew Jean Isidore Goldstein who moved to Paris in 1945 and went by the nickname given to him as a child by his mother: Izu (Isou). Quite obviously inspirational to generations of filmmakers, not the least of which were two little directors you might have heard of named Stan Brakhage and Jean-Luc Godard.

Available at KaraGarga.

Jack Chambers - The Hart of London (1970)

2008-06-15T13:27:00.001+02:00

"Jack Chambers's 80-minute The Hart of London (1970) is a sprawling, ambitious film that combines newsreel footage of disasters, urban and nature imagery, and footage evoking the cycles of life and death. It is one of those rare films that succeeds precisely because of its sprawl; raw and open-ended almost to the point of anticipating the postmodern rejection of "master narratives," it cannot be reduced to a simple summary, and changes on you from one viewing to the next." - Fred Camper

Available at KaraGarga.

Martha Rosler - Secrets from the Street: No Disclosure (1980)

2008-06-15T12:18:00.001+02:00

Reading the billboards, the trash, the cars, the people, and the graffitti of the street as cultural signs, Rosler extracts the network of social power and domination that determines whose culture gets represented where, asking, "Whose culture gets in the magazines and whose culture is required to exist in the street?" A collage of super-8 footage shot while cruising the streets of a predominantly Latino neighborhood with a voiceover of Rosler's commentary, the tape successfully combines social analysis with everyday observation, drawing attention to the structure of society's fabric and reevaluating what the dominant culture calls "trash."

Available at KaraGarga.

Martha Rosler - If it's too bad to be true, it could be DISINFORMATION (1985)

2008-06-15T11:30:00.002+02:00

1985, 16:26 min, color, sound
In a collusion of text and image, Rosler re-presents the NBC Nightly News and other broadcast reports to analyze their deceptive syntax and capture the confusion inserted intentionally into the news script. The artist questions the fallibility of electronic transmission by emphasizing the distortion and malapropism that occurs as result of technical interference. Stressing the fact that there's never a straight story, Rosler asserts her presence in character-generated text that isolates excerpts from her sources, rolling over the manipulated images. In Rosler's barrage of media information, the formal structure is inseparable from her political analysis.

Available at KaraGarga.

Jeremy Blake - The Fourty Million Dollar Beatnik (2000)

2008-06-13T13:39:00.001+02:00

Jeremy Blake has added dimension to his 'script' (series of scripted drawings) 'The Fourty Million Dollar Beatnik' by collaborating with British Techno star Neil Landstrumm on a soundtrack album. Landstrumm's own heavy, mechanized beats and hallucinatory atmospherics, are expertly mixed with Blake's lyrics-as well as samples derived from be-bop and bootlegged celebrity interviews-to establish the perfect audio compliment to the script. Musician Mike Fellows formerly of The Royal Trux, and The Silver Jews, joins Landstrumm on this limited edition LP/CD. - Pork Salad Press

Tracks
1. Blue Suede Shoes
2. Falling Everything
3. Fourty Million Speaks
4. The Destructive Character
5. Dayquil Into Nyquil
6. Cocaine Poets

Available at KaraGarga or Pork Salad Press.

T. Minh-ha Trinh - Reassemblage (1983)

2008-06-11T20:42:00.001+02:00

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Women are the focus but not the object of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s influential first film, a complex visual study of the women of rural Senegal. Through a complicity of interaction between film and spectator, REASSEMBLAGE reflects on documentary filmmaking and the ethnographic representation of cultures.

“With uncanny eloquence, REASSEMBLAGE distills sounds and images of Senegalese villagers and their surroundings to reconsider the premises and methods of ethnographic filmmaking. By disjunctive editing and a probing narration this ‘documentary’ strikingly counterpoints the authoritative stance typical of the National Geographic approach.” — Laura Thielan

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T. Minh-ha Trinh - The Fourth Dimension (2001)

2008-06-11T20:38:00.001+02:00

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Today, when one goes on a journey, the travel is ritualized through the visual machine. The image, coming alive in time as it frames time, is there where the actual and virtual meet. In the process of ritualizing Japan's "hundred flowers," it is the encounter between self and other, human and machine, viewer and image, fact and fancy that determines the field of relations in which new interactions between past and present are made possible. Shown in their widespread functions and manifestations, including more evident loci such as festival, religious rite and theatrical performance, "rituals" involve not only the regularity in the structure of everyday life, but also the dynamic agents in the ongoing process of creating digital images at the speed of light.

"Striking visual compositions and juxtapositions and a stunning soundtrack. As we watch and listen to this provocative and meditative piece, we, too, become 'attentive to the infraordinary - an intrusion of eternity.'" - I. Leimbacher, The San Francisco Cinematheque

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T. Minh-ha Trinh - Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989)

2008-06-11T20:36:00.001+02:00

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Of marriage and loyalty: “Daughter, she obeys her father/ Wife, she obeys her husband/ Widow, she obeys her son.”

Vietnamese-born Trinh T. Minh-ha’s profoundly personal documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women historically and in contemporary society. Using dance, printed texts, folk poetry and the words and experiences of Vietnamese women in Vietnam—from both North and South—and the United States, Trinh’s film challenges official culture with the voices of women. A theoretically and formally complex work, SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM explores the difficulty of translation, and themes of dislocation and exile, critiquing both traditional society and life since the war.

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Helga Fanderl - Fragile (2008)

2008-06-03T18:04:00.001+02:00

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Born in Ingolstadt in 1947. Studied German, Romance Languages and Literature in Munich, Paris and Frankfurt/Main (1967-1973). Studied at the Art School, “Städelschule”, in Frankfurt/Main (1987-1992) and at Cooper Union in New York City (1992-1993). Since 1990 her work is represented in film museums, museums of modern and contemporary art, exhibition spaces, galleries, art house cinemas, and other locations she has selected: Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt/Main.; Arsenal, Berlin; Portikus, Frankfurt/Main.; Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Basel; Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/Main.; Centre genevois de gravure contemporaine, Genf; Musée d’Art Moderne, Strasbourg; Kunsthalle Bielefeld; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Main.; Ausstellungsraum Konstantin Adamopoulos, Frankfurt/Main.; Galerie König and Johanneskirche, Hanau; Galerie Agathe Gaillard, Paris; Xenix, Zürich; Filmpodium, Zürich; Kino im Kunstmuseum, Bern; L’Entrepôt, Paris; Centre Bruxelles-Wallonie, Paris; Babylon Mitte, Berlin; Cineteca di Bologna; Mal Seh’n Kino, Frankfurt/Main.; Stadtkino Basel; Forum des images, Paris; Studio Galande, Paris; Goethe House, New York; The New York Public Library, New York; Theater in der Garage, Erlangen; Theater am Turm (TAT), Frankfurt/Main.; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris.

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Markus Schröder & Hermann J Höper - Skulptur Projekte Muenster 07 (2007)

2008-06-01T19:14:00.001+02:00

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The sculpture projects muenster 07 have taken place for the fourth time in the summer of 2007. The exhibition presented the works of 36 artists from all over the world. The curators were Brigitte Franzen, Kasper König and Carina Plath.

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Michael Pilz - Facts for Fiction (Index 027) (1996)

2008-06-01T19:10:00.000+02:00

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The work of Austrian filmmaker Michael Pilz presented in Facts for Fiction questions the viewer's perception of spatial and temporal structures. Situated between fictional and documentary filmmaking, he discovers mistery and fact on the same road.

Ob er nun sogenannt dokumentarisch oder sogenannt fiktional arbeitet, ob mit 16mm, 35mm oder mit High-8-Video: Für Pilz steht das Wahrnehmen im Zentrum, der Film/das Video als Dispositiv, als Bedingung für die raumzeitliche Organisation einer Betrachtung. Damit ist zunächst das bloße Hinhören und Hinschauen gemeint, aber auch ein Gespür für Begegnungen mit Menschen, für deren Umgang mit dem Raum, in dem sie sich bewegen, mit den Dingen, die sie umgeben. Dieser Sinn für die Wahrnehmung zieht sich durch das gesamte Werk. (Christa Blümlinger)

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Klaus Kertess - Trisha Brown Interviews (2003)

2008-05-30T13:09:00.001+02:00

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Trisha Brown was an early participant in the expanded cinema and new dance movements in New York City in the 60s and 70s. For Homemade (1966), she performed a dance with a movie projector to her back that threw a film of her dancing created by Robert Whitman on the wall behind and above her, complementing her movements and fracturing the space of the performance. She continued to have an interest in film and video in reconceptualizing dance and performance art in the 70s and 80s.

This is a companion dvd to the Early Works, 1966-1979 dvd in which she talks with art historian Klaus Kertess about her dance education, her work with the Judson Dance Theater and her fellow choreographers.

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Trisha Brown - Early Works, 1966-1979 (1966)

2008-05-30T13:07:00.001+02:00

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Trisha Brown, one of the most acclaimed choreographers of contemporary dance, first came to notice in New York in the 1960s. Along with like-minded artists,Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton and Simone Forti, she pushed the limits of what was then considered appropriate movement for choreography, and changed modern dance forever. Founding her company in 1970, Brown developed her own choreography and style with her own unique ideas of movement. The first DVD of this two DVD set presents film and video footage by filmmakers, including Babette Mangolte, Carlotta Schoolman and Jonathan Demme, of eighteen of Brown’s major performances from 1966 to 1979.

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Olaf Breuning - Home 2 (2007)

2008-05-20T19:57:00.000+02:00

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Born 1970 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland; lives in New York, New York

Commingling reality and illusion, authenticity and artifice, barbarism and civility, Olaf Breuning creates photographs, films, sculptures, and installations that draw heavily from popular culture and a collective visual iconography. He combines these contemporary aesthetics with more primal shared drives: violence, sexuality, ritual, and companionship. The divergent impulses collide, often with absurd and hilarious results, as Breuning exploits the thin line between humor and pain.

In his 2007 exhibition at Zurich’s Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Breuning employed art transport boxes as supports for his photographs, drawings, and sculptures. The crates and packing material, which also frame the exhibition’s architecture, take on multiple connotations as vehicles of transport and change. Arranged in a plexiglass showcase, dozens of small ceramic pieces, each incongruously fitted with a pair of large cartoonish eyes, comprise The Collectors (2007). These comical figures, mounted on the side of a carton and staring into the exhibition space, conjure comparisons to the collectors who roam international art fairs, frenziedly purchasing and packaging works. In the chromogenic print 20 Dollars (2007), five young African boys, slightly bemused but smiling broadly, present to the camera $20 bills given to them by the photographer. The detritus of a smoldering garbage heap is strewn around their feet. Mounted on and framed by an oversize shipping crate balanced on a smaller box, the glossy photograph appears broadcast from a largescreen entertainment center, underlining the distance between subject and viewer. The disparities illustrated by the image, especially between the entrenched poverty and easily gained currency, suggest the futility— and perhaps offensiveness—of looking to tourism and globalization as effective vehicles for change in this impoverished scene.

At the center of the Migros exhibition is Home 2 (2007), a video in which Breuning expands on themes of dislocation, homelessness, and cultural identity explored in his 2004 video Home. Here the original narrator, again played by actor Brian Kerstetter, joins a tourist group traveling through Papua New Guinea. He stumbles his way through assorted villages and tribes, variously charming or insulting his fellow tourists and the “natives” he encounters. In this foreign environment his mind is transported to locations of previous travel or fantasy as he sifts through notions of identity and belonging. Home is a universal, but also a specific, construct. “Each has a home they want to go to, like me,” the narrator opines as his journey comes to an end. The viewer is left with the distinct notion that neither the traveler nor the world he has left is enriched by the experience. Contextualizing the helplessness of today’s global citizen, Breuning examines a basic human quest for commonality in an increasingly global, but ever more fragmented, world. STACEY GOERGEN

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Harun Farocki - Gefängnisbilder aka Prison Images (2000)

2008-05-14T09:41:00.001+02:00

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A film composed of images from prisons. Quotes from fiction films and documentaries as well as footage from surveillance cameras. A look at the new control technologies, at personal identification devices, electronic ankle bracelets, electronic tracking devices. The cinema has always been attracted to prisons. Today's prisons are full of video surveillance cameras. These images are unedited and monotonous; as neither time nor space is compressed, they are particularly well-suited to conveying the state of inactivity into which prisoners are placed as a punitive measure. The surveillance cameras show the norm and reckon with deviations from it. Clips from films by Genet and Bresson. Here the prison appears as a site of sexual infraction, a site where human beings must create themselves as people and as a workers. In Un Chant d'amour by Jean Genet, the guard looks in on inmates in their cells and sees them masturbating. The inmates are aware that they are being watched and thus become performers in a peep show. The protagonist in Bresson's Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé turns the objects of imprisonment into the tools of his escape. These topoi appear in many prison films. In newer prisons, in contrast, contemporary video surveillance technology aims at demystification. (Harun Farocki)

Full untouched DVD released from Goethe Institut. German audio; Spanish, French, Russian, English, Japanese, Portuguese, Deutsch, Zulu subtitles.

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Ken Adams - Strange Attractor (2003)

2008-05-13T18:08:00.003+02:00

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Reviews:
Trippy psychedelic graphics, weird techno storyline, November 8, 2003
Reviewer: A viewer (Hoboken, NJ USA)

Truly amazing! Better than Alien Dreamtime, but in the same vein. The graphics are even better, and the music is compelling even without Stephen Kent on didgeridu. What this one has that AD lacks is a storyline with characters. If you're familiar with Terrence McKenna's writings, you'll have no trouble figuring out what "blue apple" really is!

Psychedelic experience, September 26, 2003
Reviewer: zap (Austin, Tx US of A) - See all my reviews

very interesting... Lady Miss Kier (of Dee-Lite fame) makes a groovy and bizarre appearance. great CGI stuff here, plus an interesting storyline that weaves in and out of the graphics. philosophical, makes you think...

Neo-psychedelia at its finest. - Patrick Sanders, Movie Mania

An experience that viscerally demonstrates, in
sight and sound, the phenomenal power of the psychedelic imagination and eroticizes intelligence. - Robyn Sean Peterson

One of the most meaningful projects to come out of the Rave culture thus far.... frequently stunning visual mélange. - Alternative Press

Rose X's relentless image mutation is the richest, most nuanced motion picture psychedelia this reviewer has ever seen with his eyes open. - City Pages

... transcends the historical and the anthropological...stretch psychedelic computer effects to new limits. - R.U. Sirius in Wired

Rose X is using the same techniques explored by techno/electronica and applying them to film.

...The psychedelic imagination is on the rise and computers are providing the sounds and images for the journey. - Interview with Rose X in Fringecore Magazine

Cast:
Terence McKenna, Lady Miss Kier of Deee*Lite, Britt Welin, Ken Adams

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Glauber Rocha - Abertura (1979)

2008-05-13T18:05:00.001+02:00

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"One of the most daring and radical show presented in the brazilian television: "Abertura". It was broadcasted between february an june, 1979 with weekly editions, presented by brazilian filmaker Glauber Rocha ("God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun", "Anguished Land" etc). The video is a compilation of interviews, statements and characters about the political and cultural situation of the country during the Mitary Regime."

Directed by: Fernando Barbosa Lima and Glauber Rocha
Broadcasted by: TV Tupi
Runtime: 49 minutes
Color: Black and White
Audio Language: Brazilian Portuguese

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Christian Marclay - More Encores (1988)

2008-05-12T11:30:00.001+02:00

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Track listing: Johann Strauus, John Zorn, Martin Denny, Frederic Chopin, Fred Frith, Louis Armstrong, Arthur Ferrante & Louis Teicher, John Cage, Maria Callas, Jimi Hendrix, Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg, Christian Marclay.

Since 1979 Christian Marclay has been experimenting, composing and performing with phonograph records. His interest in records, both as objects and bearers of sound, is expressed through sculpture, performance, video and music. In performance, he mixes a wide variety of records on up to eight turntables, fragmenting, repeating, altering speeds, playing the records backwards etc.

"One of the best improvisers around" said the Village Voice. Marclay has performed in Japan, Europe, the USA and throughout New York City, often collaborating with such avant-garde composers as John Zorn, David Moss, Elliot Sharp, Fred Frith, Arto Lindsay and Shelley Hirsch among others.

MORE ENCORES was originally released as a 10" vinyl record on No Mans Land in 1988, "composed entirely of records after whom each track is titled. "John Cage" is a recording of a collage made by cutting slices from several records and glueing them back into a single disc. In all other places the records were mixed and manipulated on multiple turntables and recorded analog with the use of overdubbing. A hand-crank gramophone was used in "Louis Armstrong"."

MORE ENCORES is a classic slice of primal Plunderphonia, the natural companion to John Oswald's suppressed Plunderphoncs masterpiece, featuring a series of viciously beautiful vinyl collages from this important and infulential sound sculptor and turntable terrorist.

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Peggy Ahwesh - 73 Suspect Words & Heaven's Gate (2001)

2008-05-12T11:12:00.002+02:00

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Two text videos from a series that distills to a poetic and symbolic core, a variety of texts, source code, search results, and/or coded messages from the unruly databases that glut the net.

Only available on the DVD Pistolary: Films and Videos by Peggy Ahwesh.

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Marine Hugonnier - Ana Hanusova (2001)

2008-05-09T12:32:00.002+02:00

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"In the year 2000, I was asked by Camera Austria, an Austrian art magazine, to contribute to an issue published in response to the election of October 1999. This request gave me the opportunity to rethink, in a context of political and social imperatives, the role of artistic activity. After spending some time envisaging what a gesture in response to Camera Austria would require (a rethink of my relationship to History), I decided to invite a women, who had been part of one of the orchestras in the concentration camps to come and play a piece of music of her choice which would be broadcast live on the Austrian national radio channel, O1." - Marine Hugonnier

"I spent long months doing research which led me to meet a few survivors. I'm not sure that, for the first meetings, I was particularly convincing. Many of them wanted to forget. This raised the question of programmed memory loss and collective amnesia concerning history. These first meetings discouraged me for a time. I suddenly realized that there was certain legitimacy in the desire to forget - my own grandfather had never wanted to talk to me about what happened to him, pushing his refusal to confront the past to the point of never even going to see a war film at the cinema. I remained convinced, however, that it was still possible to confront this history with our everyday existence.

The video recording, which was filmed during the live broadcast on national radio O1 of Anna Hanusova's performance, includes images of Vienna. This images show the International Atomic Energy Authority, the UN building, the oil refinery (Olraffinerie Schwechat), the Sony and Microsoft buildings, the big wheel (the Riesenrad) and the Prater amusement park surrounding it, the Karl Marx Hof, a cinema in Vienna and the number 05 which the symbol of resistance in Austria. These various images, which punctuate the film, enable me to go beyond the political conflict specific to Austria and to place the event in an international context. These different images are to be seen as signs of our contemporary world at the dawn of cybernetics, nanotechnology, biotechnology and the mapping of DNA." - Marine Hugonnier

�Marine Hugonnier�s artworks are infused with her long-standing interest in the discipline of anthropology. They focus on and act out the differences between one type of perception and another: specifically the historical, social, and political ramifications of how we deal with our orientation in the present moment. That Hugonnier�s work does this makes it a covertly socio-political statement that refuses, and seeks to short-circuit in viewers on a one-by-one basis, the consensus of unthinking forward motion, routine of distraction, and easy amnesia prevalent amongst the occupants of big cities. Making works which consistently pull off this trick means never using the same aesthetic approach twice: over the past few years Hugonnier has slowly but steadily constructed an expandix of quiet unassuming and discrete works which viewers are bounced in slow motion, re-orientated and ref-framed in case by the slow, surprising transmission of the artwork�s qualities and its pervasive effect on their perceptual abilities." - Martin Herbert, Today is Yesterday's tomorrow from Marine Hugonnier, CGAC, 2001

Marine Hugonnier was born in Paris in 1969 and grew up in the United States and France; lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized by Centro Galego de Arte Contempor�nea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Kerstin Engholm Gallery, Vienna; and Chantal Crousel Gallery, Paris. Her group exhibitions have included Spiritus, Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall; Travers�es, l'ARC, Mus�e d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Squatters, Fundac�o de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism, Site Santa Fe's Fourth, International Biennial, New Mexico; My Generation, Atlantis Gallery, London; Movimientos Inmoviles, Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; and Marine Hugonnier & Henrik Plenge Jakobson, Centre d�Art Neuch�tel, Neuch�tel, Swizterland.

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Mark Leckey - Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)

2008-05-03T15:02:00.001+02:00

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"Described by one commentator as the best thing they'd ever seen in a gallery, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is an extended paean to the unadulterated bliss of nocturnal abandon. A documentary of sorts, Leckey's video chronicles the rites of passage experienced by successive generations of British (sub)urban youth".
- Matthew Higgs, ArtForum

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore uses found and original footage of discos and raves across Britain during the 70s, 80s and 90s. Details of clothing, technology, music and other cultural references surface briefly like uncanny folklore as the film explores a culture of collective leisure and consumption.

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Francis McKee - In Profile: Mariele Neudecker (2002)

2008-05-01T20:29:00.001+02:00

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In Profile is a new series of monographic DVD publications on contemporary artists working with film and video. Born in Düsseldorf in 1965, Mariele Neudecker has lived and worked in the UK since 1985. Her work investigates the physical and psychological spaces that we, as viewers, carry within ourselves. She uses primary landscapes, representations taken from books or postcards, or those extracted from memory or from imagination. Using sculpture, film and photography she creates a sometimes playful frisson between historical cultural representations of the sublime landscape and our perception, imagination and memory of the reality of experience.

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Ben Lewis - Art Safari: Sophie Calle (2005)

2008-05-01T11:38:00.002+02:00

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Sophie Calle is the Grand Dame of French contemporary art. Her famous works of art usually involve following a set of rules or a procedure – following a stranger to Venice; obeying a set of instructions from writer Paul Auster; or working as a hotel maid.

Her art combines romantic autobiography and detached conceptualism. She gives Ben permission to make a film about her on one condition: he has to think up a ritual or set of rules for her to follow, similar to the rules which govern her works of art.

Ben visits gallerists and theorists to take advice on what to suggest to her. He submits idea after idea. She rejects one after the other. Finally, in a final encounter with the artist, Ben realises that this ritual of rejection is the set of rules he wanted Sophie to follow.

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Helena Almeida - Helena Almeida (2004)

2008-05-01T00:02:00.001+02:00

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Helena Almeida is a unique artist, with an exceptional and exemplary career, at many levels. Helena Almeida’s complex working method flows into the usage of black and white photographs, images of herself, in which the memory of an action, of a performance, seems to be depicted.

In the exhibition Pés no Chão, Cabeça no Céu (Feet on the Ground, Head in the Sky), the connection between Helena Almeida’s course and the physicality of the space that harbors the body is brought into focus.

Sente-me, Ouve-me, Vê-me (Feel me, Hear me, See me), from 1978/9, presented only once (and in an incomplete state) at the Galerie Erike + Otto Friedrich, and the series Seduzir (Seduce), produced between 2000 and 2002, which is presented here, complete for the first time. In both these series, video is used besides photography.

Sente-me, Ouve-me, Vê-me (Feel me, Hear me, See me) is a landmark in Helena Almeida’s work, because it is a polymorphous project that makes use of video, sound and photography, but also because it configured a project that brought together the sensorial side implied in the vocative addressed at the viewer, and the irony of its projective character: Vê-me (See me) is sound; Ouve-me (Hear me) is written on the mouth, as if sown in a suture; Sente-me (Feel me) refers to relations with inanimate objects.

The series of works generically entitled Seduzir (Seduce), of recent production, is composed of a large group of photographs of the artist’s feet, sometimes also of her hands, or even her body, frontal images. The series also includes a videographic work. It consists of a long action around a wooden stool, originally a study for the series – as can be confirmed by the coincidence of some photographs and some of the scenes of the video – but that finally established itself as an autonomous work, enormous in its intensity, and in the magnetism with which it seizes us.

Caught by the wires of Helena Almeida’s work, or suspended in its vocative, the recognition of the inner energy in artistic creation is always remarkable: the certainty of knowing that this is a unique path that cannot be walked again.

Delfim Sardo, January 2004

Biographical Note
Helena Almeida was born in 1934 in Lisbon, where she lives and works, and studied painting at Lisbon’s School of Arts. She started to show her work in the 1960’s. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1967, at the Buchholz Gallery in Lisbon. She as since exhibited in various galleries and museums, not only in Europe (Spain, Switzerland, France, among others) but also in Brazil, Macau, USA and Japan.

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Beat Streuli - Brussels 05/06 (2006)

2008-05-01T00:00:00.001+02:00

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Video installation and photographs exhibited at Murray Guy gallery in New York, 2006.

For more than 15 years Swiss-born Streuli has trained his camera on the modern city dweller: chance passersby, faces in the crowd, details of hairstyle and clothing, a fragile or stern or gregarious look. His photographic and video works examine the denizens of various urban centers, from New York and Krakow to Tokyo and Tel Aviv, plucking visages and gestures from the flow of street life. Though he captures his subjects unawares, in the midst of their daily activities, it would be a mistake to consider Streuli's metropolitan portraits as simply natural, genuine, or purely spontaneous. On the contrary, his images have a certain recognizable look, and bear the mark of artistic selection. His work plays on a whole series of contradictions between the natural and the stylized, documentary and fiction, publicity and privacy, human dignity and mass alienation, glamorized poses and the cruelty of light.

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Harun Farocki - Die Schulung AKA Indoctrination (1987)

2008-04-30T11:40:00.004+02:00

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"This film is about a five-day seminar designed to teach executives how to "sell themselves" better. This course, designed for managers, teaches the basic rules of dialectics and rhetorics and provides training in body language, gesture and facial expression. The aim of selling something has always been a principle of mercantile action. Yet it was only through the marriage of psychology and modern capitalism that the idea of selling oneself was perfected." - Lutz Hachmeister, television journalist and professor of communications.

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Jennifer and Kevin McCoy - Soft Rains & Our Second Date (2003)

2008-04-29T20:29:00.003+02:00

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In this new series of works, the McCoys present electronic installations that examine narrative spaces. Extending from previous work of databased television and film material, the artists new work further explores the idea that thought, experience and memory are structured through genre and repetition.

Entering the gallery, the viewer sees seven platforms each containing a tiny fragmentary film set. The platforms each embody images and sounds from a particular cinematic genre (the eighties slasher, the fifties melodrama, the sixties art film, etc). The platform/genres can each stand autonomously or together they produce a cinema-hopping amalgamation of themes and eras. Over 50 miniature video cameras and lights are suspended over the sets, creating a new filmic entity generated live. By exposing the film sets together with their film, the McCoys expose and yet retain the magic of movie-making. We can see the working parts of the apparatus, but are still won over by the whole. The sets themselves are an exploded spatial view of what one experiences temporally in film.

The images are shot by several cameras simultaneously, each from its own angle, each focused on a different area of the set, and the multipart compound of images that these cameras together create is then sent to a computer running custom software that picks from the range of choices, “editing” it into the seven movies.The McCoys handle the passage of time by spreading “actors” and locations out in space to represent different moments, which are then intercut onscreen to suggest movement in time and place. Each story is told in six to ten shots.

In the rear gallery, the McCoys present “Our Second Date”. This piece extends the form of “Soft Rains” by including the artists themselves within the constructed narrative. In “Our Second Date”, the couple can be seen watching a movie which is being created adjacent to them on a rotating set. This piece begins a new cycle of work which examines the role that media has played in the development of the artists' relationship.

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Martha Rosler - Secrets from the Street: No Disclosure (1980)

2008-04-29T20:27:00.000+02:00

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1980, 12:20 min, color, sound
Secrets From the Street examines the intersection of cultures and classes as exemplified by the street life of San Francisco's Mission District. This videotape, produced for an exhibition held jointly at San Francisco's City Hall and its Museum of Modern Art, argues — against the show's theme, Secrets From the Street: No Disclosure — that accounts of cultural life that omit the question of social power are mythical: The real "secret" is the obscured relation of economic and political domination exercised by one's own culture over the observed subculture. Or, as Rosler states in the tape's voiceover, "The secret is that to know the meaning of a culture you must know the limits of meaning of your own."

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Yoko Ono & John Lennon - Rape (1969)

2008-04-28T13:40:00.002+02:00

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In November 1968 work began on one of one of John & Yoko's most ambitious film ventures, a 75-minute mini-feature called Rape. It starred Eva Majlata, a 21 year old Hungarian actress who couldn't speak English. She cannot escape the prying attentions of the camera which follows her around the streets of London, through a park, allowing her no privacy and almost causing her to walk into the path of a truck. She attempts to escape in a taxi, but is still followed. She is eventually cornered in an apartment from which she apparently cannot escape and her tearful pleas to the camera remain ignored. Rape was shot when John and Yoko were both at Great Charlotte Street Hospital following Yoko's miscarriage. The cameraman was Nick Knowland, who worked on most of John and Yoko's productions.

The film received its world premiere on Austrian Television on 31st March 1969. That year it was also shown at the Montreux Television Festival and the Mannheim Film Festival. A day after the Austrian TV broadcast John and Yoko held a press conference in Vienna. John commented: "We are showing how all of us are exposed and under pressure in our contemporary world. This isn't just about the Beatles. What is happening to this girl on the screen is happening in Biafra, Vietnam, everywhere." The theme of the relentless, clinical camera lens, 'raping' the privacy of individuals or groups for the entertainment of the viewing public intrigued critic Willie Frischauer, who wrote in the Evening Standard; "This film does for the age of television what Franz Kafka's The Trial did for the age of totalitarianism."

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Ange Leccia - Perfect Day (2007)

2008-04-28T11:26:00.001+02:00

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Latest Ange Leccia video. A recollection of almost 40 years of career.
A giant image-jukebox, from early 70s autoportrait to films for Alain Bashung / Elli Medeiros, private karaokes to "video sculptures" applied to John Travolta or Maria Callas, and much much more.

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Marine Hugonnier - Ariana (2003)

2008-04-27T17:13:00.001+02:00

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Ariana was a major three-part film and photographic project that was shown concurrently at Chisenhale Gallery and MW Projects in Shoreditch, east London.

Ariana investigated the relationship between landscape and history. It explored ideas of utopia and resistance, questioning the tools of cinema and western ideas of viewpoint and panorama. Recorded in Afghanistan during 2002, Ariana details a journey to the capital Kabul, and to the beautiful Pandjshêr Valley, a region that has historically resisted the invasions of Soviet and Taliban ideologies.

Hugonnier's 16mm film, which was digitally projected at Chisenhale Gallery, charts the journey of a film crew. On arriving in the Pandjshêr Valley, their intention is to investigate how the landscape has determined the region's history. To do so, the crew attempts to find a vantage point to record a panorama of the entire valley. Access to this viewpoint is refused, because of its strategic value and the crew returns to Kabul to record the ruins and traffic of the city. The crew obtains permission to shoot a final panorama. The view allows them to gaze over Kabul and across to the Hindu Kush Mountains. They realise that this spectacle gives them a feeling of euphoria and totality. They decide to stop filming.

Ariana also featured a suite of large-scale 'portrait' photographs of unnamed mountains in the Pandjshêr Valley and a photographic album, featuring a collection of 36 small-scale images taken by Hugonnier throughout the trip.

Ariana was commissioned by MW projects and Film and Video Umbrella in association with Chisenhale Gallery. It was supported by the National Touring Programme of Arts Council England and was sponsored by Guy and Marion Naggar and Alan Djanogly.

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Harun Farocki - Bewerbungen aka The Interview (1996)

2008-04-27T01:04:00.002+02:00

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"In the summer of 1996, we filmed application training courses in which one learns how to apply for a job. School drop-outs, university graduates, people who have been retained, the long-term unemployed, recovered drug addicts, and mid-level managers - all of them are supposed to learn how to market and sell themselves, a skill to which the term 'self management' is applied. The self is perhaps nothing more than a metaphysical hook from which to hand a social identity. It was Kafka who likened being accepted to a job to entering the Kingdom of Heaven; the paths leading to both are completely uncertain. Today one speaks of getting a job with the greatest obsequiousness, but without any grand expectations." Harun Farocki

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Philippe Parreno - The Boy from Mars (2005)

2008-04-27T01:02:00.000+02:00

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The Boy From Paris By Bruce Sterling

Philippe Parreno's The Boy From Mars is "science fiction." Better yet, it's "architecture fiction." There is no Martian boy in this film. It does feature a rather weird building, however. In some solemn, rural, Southeast Asian retreat, the dark, marshy earth is infiltrated by unearthly lights. A constellation of UFOs wanders the zenith, a pack of gentle flame-beings from beyond. The wind-tattered storm clouds are some how frozen stiff against the sky.

We see no human beings, but some intelligent entity has an agenda in this place. A strange orange glow infests an alien structure. This ragged, rambling creation looks comfortably at home in an Asian rice paddy, but, after a closer look, it makes no sense. Could it be a broken greenhouse? A geodesic aircraft hangar? It is multi-legged like a caterpillar, it has flapping, tattered plastic walls, and rigid stalks for rafters. Plus, it radiates a thick, warm light. This place is clearly unfit for any merely human habitation. Inside this place, some entity has harnessed a patient water buffalo to an electrical generator. It's a bizarrely ingenious device of weights, light bulbs and pulleys straight off the set of Spielberg's E.T. the Extraterrestrial. The gentle soundtrack cannot distinguish between the sighing of the wind and the calm grinding of this alien machinery. Exotic plants dance on the windy slopes of the hills. A healing rain comes, eventually. The foggy sky resumes its motion, the sun peeps in, glares at the invaded Earth, and quietly retreats. Everything seems in good order. The placid water buffalo our hero, if this piece has one calmly endures a close encounter with a swaying alien light beam.

Friends from far away show up: a set of blurry, two-legged tourists, invading the spidery building. They move slowly and meditatively behind their steamy walls of glowing film. Although they're not human, one gets the impression that they've earned the right to visit. Maybe they'll settle down.

The Boy From Mars is about the joys of being alien. Philippe Parreno (playing the intriguing role of "The Boy from Paris") was able to vent his customary ingenuity on the Thai artist's retreat of his friend and collaborator, Rirkrit Tiravanija. This locale was anonymous, off the electrical grid, basically a fertile patch of mud in the middle of nowhere. Anything and nothing was possible there. So, Parreno and architect Francois Roche invaded this timeless Asian farm and boldly created an architectural freak. It's the hybrid of a science fiction film-set, a green design showpiece, an assembly hall, and an international artists' squat. Plus, it's literally powered by a water buffalo. It must be well nigh perfect if Martians happen to drop by.

Furthermore, this construction, whose artsy French origin couldn't be any more alien to Thai rurality, suits its locale remarkably well. Perched in a Chiang Mai rice field, it looks as imperturbable as a pig in mud. This work is especially apt for a period in which machines from Earth are invading Mars. As I write this, Spirit and Opportunity, those twin American hot-rods, are vigorously filming the unresisting Martian landscape. As video performances go, that scientific stream of images from that alien planet: those dull, eroded Martian hills, smears of ancient salt, spinning mechanical drills, ferocious close-ups of Martian pebbles and sand...that is hard for artists to match, but The Boy From Mars makes an attempt

In our epoch, Mars finally became banal. Now we humans are importing all its strangeness. Thanks to this Parreno piece, I can appreciate that simple truth.

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Jeremy Blake - Century 21 (2004)

2008-04-27T01:01:00.003+02:00

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Jeremy Blake studied traditional painting in art school. "If you had asked me if I was interested in computers as a tool to make art, I would have said no," he says. But when Blake graduated from Cal Arts in 1995, he needed a job - and found a gig in New York as a digital photo retoucher. "I worked for a Corsican guy who berated me in French because I was so bad," Blake recalls. "After a few months he said, 'Jeremy, I'm very sorry because you are cool guy, but you have no future in computer!'" The job was a disaster, but the experience of manipulating images pixel by pixel lit a fuse. "The computer is the visual equivalent of an electric guitar," Blake says. "I was trained on an acoustic."

Ten years later, Blake has combined painting and computers to produce a techno take on traditional portraiture. His latest subject is Sarah Winchester, the eccentric heir to a firearm fortune. After her husband and infant daughter died in the 1880s, she concluded that the family was cursed, haunted by the spirits of those killed with Winchester rifles. On the advice of a medium, she built an enormous mansion in San Jose, California, to appease the ghosts. "I had read about it as a kid," Blake says. "I knew it was a house built around superstition - a fear of dead gunfighters - and it seemed to reflect contemporary events." Blake's 51-minute portrait of Winchester is contained on three DVDs, which will screen together in the US for the first time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art beginning February 19.

The first film, Winchester (2002), opens with the family mansion fading in and out of focus as the shadow of a gunman drifts across the screen. Odd elements are juxtaposed - cowboys from old ads morph into tracings of the house's art nouveau wallpaper. The second DVD, 1906 (2003), returns to the mansion after the great '06 earthquake. A maze of cracked plaster, winding corridors, and stairways to nowhere becomes a metaphor for Winchester's deteriorating mental state. Blake widens the view in the final chapter, Century 21 (2004), to explore the sickness - and the sexiness - of American violence. Each film runs in a continuous a loop - no titles, no credits. "Neurosis," Blake says, "is a broken record in your head." The cumulative effect is somewhere between a great expressionist painting and a bad acid trip.

Each frame of the trilogy is constructed in layers, like a conventional painting. Blake combines video, drawings, gouache, still photography, 8- and 16-mm film, and CG graphics. "For me," he says, "the computer is a way to get all your favorite mediums around the dinner table - and get them arguing." The technique places Blake among the new masters working with computers today who have moved beyond whizbang effects to celebrate pure aesthetics. "There are many people working with an individual medium," says Christiane Paul, a curator at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, where two of Blake's DVDs are in the permanent collection. "What distinguishes Jeremy is that he works in a variety of mediums in a very painterly way."

Blake has taken his craft beyond the gallery walls. He designed the cover for Beck's Sea Change album and produced abstract visuals for Paul Thomas Anderson's film Punch-Drunk Love. Trading art-world pretensions for the practicalities of the music and film studio were welcome changes: "I like artists who don't feel superior to the culture they critique."

---

The Winchester trilogy was inspired by my interest in the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. The Mansion is an architectural wonder that Sarah Winchester, widow of the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, constructed over the course of 38 years, beginning in the late 1800's. After suffering the premature death of her child and then her husband, Winchester, informed by her deep belief in Spiritualism, concluded that the angry spirits of those struck down by her family's guns had cursed her. An advisor agreed and suggested that she build an enormously large house--an endeavor that would both accommodate good spirits and ward off evil ones with the sounds of never ending construction. The result is an eccentric, sprawling 160-room mansion, well outfitted for the undead with staircases going nowhere, doorways leading out into open air several stories above ground, and miles of darkened hallways for the spirits to roam.

The Winchester films combine 8mm film footage, static 16mm shots of old photographs, hundreds of ink drawings, and intricate frame-by-frame digital retouching. They are meant to provide an abstract and emotional tour--not so much of the architecture, but of some of the more fearful chambers of Sarah Winchester’s mind. The abstract imagery represents supernatural activity, heightened by paranoiac glimpses of shadowy gunfighters, painterly gunshot wounds blossoming into Rorschach patterns, and a spectrum of images from Winchester rifle advertisements. The entire series is informed by the idea that the Victorian aesthetic (embodied by the Mansion's architecture) and the psychedelic sensibility (referenced through hallucinatory manipulation of the film) are sympathetic opposites.

My interest in the Mansion is rooted in an understanding that the site is more than just a monument to one person’s eccentric preoccupation—it is the tangible outcome from a collision of social and historical narratives. The series ties together several mythic strands fundamental to an American national identity in an attempt to justify Winchester’s architectural free-for-all. The figure of the gunfighter facilitates spiritual regeneration through violence, and lawmen and outlaws are thus treated with reverent trepidation—as are the ghosts of their victims.

Beneath the dreamlike flow of images, the structure of the films is very deliberate:

Winchester combines static 16mm historical photographs of the house, drawings, and laborious digital manipulation to convey a psychological portrait of the house. Accompanied by a moody soundtrack, the piece opens with a black-and-white shot of the architectural facade. Superimposed over the house, the silhouette of a gunfighter fills the frame, alluding to the Winchester legacy. As the film unfolds, both mansion and rifleman are eclipsed by veils of saturated color and kinetic abstractions. Painterly shapes resembling gunshot wounds morph into Rorschach–like inkblots and back again into rifle–bearing specters.

1906 takes much the same approach with synthesized film footage as well as images from my paintings and drawings, but it shifts its focus to the interior of the mansion and the parts of the house that suffered most in the earthquake of 1906. Sarah Winchester chose not to repair certain damaged sections, preferring to build around them, as she imagined that the house's resident spirits disapproved of these accommodations. To shoot live footage for this DVD, I used Kodak 8mm for its simultaneous painterly and touristy quality. The film begins and ends at the highest point of the house, creating a continuous sense of descent, and uses the sounds of construction mixed with period music.

Century 21 moves from the roof of the Winchester house to zoom in on a complex of three domed, space-age movie theaters situated across the street: Century 21, Century 22 and Century 23, alluding to the fact that it is film, TV and the media that perpetuate the icon of the gunfighter. The work consists of three short sections intended to represent what is “playing” in each of the theaters. These include richly layered montages of the Old West and pop-culture imagery, as well as art and film celebrities who appear as phantom stand-ins to embody the specters of the Cowboy and of Sarah Winchester herself.

The Winchester series distills and abstracts American myths of violence and spiritual reconciliation.

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John Baldessari - John Baldessari: Films Transferred to Video 1972-1977 (1972)

2008-04-27T00:59:00.001+02:00

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Baldessari’s cinema works on DVD.

Baldessari’s cinema works primarily in the Space of the spectator and opens up the filmmaking field to other language forms, to other story telling procedures. The film is no longer a narrative progression but rather a succession of near-still, suspended, photographic moments. Baldessari’s film aesthetic is built around his conceptual photographic work, an obsession with the non-link, with fragmentation and gaps. Images are both autonomous and integrated forms, time-image units referring to an ever-evolving film. It is up to the spectator to reconstruct and project a structure, to make up sequences from images.

"Title" is without doubt one his most radical Projects, a juxtaposition of extremely minimal images following each other without hierarchy nor direction. In this work Baldessari isolates and breaks up a classic film into its component parts. First the objects, the characters, the landscapes, then the frames associating two shapes, and finally the start of an action, of a dialogue.
In this way he shows the precise making and manipulation of meaning, the tricks of cinematic space-time.

In "Six Colorful Inside Jobs" he draws a parallel between a double process of life and creation. The video shows a room being painted in six different colors, each color of the spectrum corresponding to a day of the week. This work, which started as a performance/installation, integrates the artist as a comic figure faced with contemporary history—that of American painting—and shifts his function toward that of a house painter. Through this form of irony, Baldessari shows to what extent instruments and materials help him define the subtle limits between art and work, art and life.

"4 Short Films" is the product of the same ironic twist, a free and absurd association between time, matter, and objects. (Stéphanie Moisdon).

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Various - The PureData~Convention 2004 (2005)

2008-04-24T11:32:00.003+02:00

A potpourri of audio, video, audio-visual and documentary works of artists that participated at the 1st international pd~convention in Graz, autumn04.

Collection of works and documents of PureData artists.

Pure Data (or Pd) is a graphical programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works. Though Puckette is the primary author of the software, Pd is an open source project and has a large developer base working on new extensions to the program.

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Åke Hodell & Per Wiklund - Lågsniff (1965)

2008-04-24T11:29:00.001+02:00

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Directed by: Åke Hodell and Per Wiklund
Photo: Per Wiklund
Performers: Åke Hodell, Torsten Ekbom, Bengt Emil Johnson,
Leif Nylén, Sissi Nilsson and Elisabeth Nylén.
Running time: 20 minutes.

This is one of the most essential DVD-releases of 2002, by the controversial Swedish text-sound poet Åke Hodell (1919-2000). "Lågsniff" is only screened once on Swedish television in 1965, and then creating such a stir that the film immediately was put into the dark vaults of SVT, where it has been hidden since.
Now the amazing visual recording of the event has been made available on DVD, 37 years after.
This experimental stageplay is a masterpiece in the use of live voices, (by fellow leading avantgardists of the time, Bengt-Emil Johnson, Leif Nylén a.o.) black and white cut ups and an innovative use of the camera.

Åke Hodell (April 30, 1919 - July 29, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden) was a Swedish fighter pilot, poet, author, text-sound composer, and artist. Son of author Björn Hodell and brother of actor Ulla Hodell.

Hodell was trained as a fighter pilot, but after a crash during practice July 17, 1941, he had to spend the next few years in hospital. This became a turning point and he became a dedicated antimilitarist. Lying in hospital he got to know author Gunnar Ekelöf and Hodell made his debut with Flyende Pilot in 1953. That same spring Hodell and Ekelöf travels to Rome. In his books, Hodell experiments with what he calls elektronismer, while he on stage and in radio in the early 60's works with text-sound composition. During this period he is also active at Pistolteatern in Stockholm. He also creates publisher Kerberos.

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Mores McWreath - The Bud, the Seed, the Egg (2008)

2008-04-20T23:12:00.002+02:00

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"In this video I use the structure of YouTube and vaudeville to directly address ways of challenging the hegemony of capitalism through Roland Barthes concept of the Neutral. Barthes defines the Neutral as “that which baffles the paradigm,” it is an expression of “the right to silence.” The performer/character, played by myself, goes through a variety of performances that touch on a broad range of subjects from the state of artists in a capitalistic society to sex and power to the pronunciation of the word Iraq that immediately degenerates to gibberish. The video takes place exclusively in a neutral space that oscillates between an empty office, classroom, gallery, or retail space. The artifice of that neutrality becomes explicitly apparent as my performances become increasingly antic. Inspired in part by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Happy Days, all of these vignettes come together to form a sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic expression of ambivalence and frustration. It is a portrait of an individual facing a world of decisions and finding only burden, not freedom, in capitalistic notions of abundance. The “neutral” is a place outside of the decision making process, a place of pure potential that I am trying to reach in this video." (Mores McWreath)

Installation shot:

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Andy Warhol - Outer and Inner Space (1965)

2008-04-20T23:06:00.001+02:00

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One of Andy Warhol's most important works of art, one of the very first works of video art, an absolute masterpiece. Sound awful in this version. Hoberman gets a few facts wrong below, but it's a great short review. -mb

FILM; A Pioneering Dialogue Between Actress and Image
By J. HOBERMAN

ANDY WARHOL has so become his own trademark -- and is so much a one-name synonym for the culture of celebrity -- that it can be a shock to realize just how brilliantly original he was as a visual artist. A case in point: The double-screen video-based film installation ''Outer and Inner Space'' at the Whitney Museum (through Nov. 30), which places his glamorous, doomed superstar Edie Sedgwick in a dialogue with her own video-taped image.

First shown in 1966 and largely forgotten for some 30 years thereafter, ''Outer and Inner Space'' is a historical anomaly -- a masterpiece of video art made before the term even existed. The piece meditates on the distinction between film and tape while introducing the issues of real-time recording and simultaneous feedback that would inform much video art from the 1970's on. For the Whitney adjunct curator, Callie Angell, '' 'Outer and Inner Space'' ''creates this classic background for video art that it didn't know it had.''

Mid-summer 1965, a few months before the father of video art Nam June Paik got his first Sony PortaPak, a prototype Norelco slant-track video recorder was delivered to the Warhol Factory. (Its arrival, Ms. Angell points out, is an event in the hectic first chapter of Warhol's ''documentary'' novel ''A.'') The Norelco video recorder was expensive, unwieldy and short-lived. There are no extant machines. Warhol, then producing a 16-millimeter feature every other week, played with the video equipment for a month. A documentary of the Factory scene produced by Bruce Torbet that summer shows a surprisingly hands-on artist -- Warhol himself wielding the white tubular-shaped Norelco camera as he supervises the lighting of the 22-year-old Sedgwick, perched demurely on a stool.

These tapes, as played back on a large monitor, were the basis for a two-reel, 66-minute movie with Sedgwick positioned before, responding to and illuminated by her video image. (Thanks to this lighting, unconventional then, the film seems less black and white than gorgeously black and silver.) Shot in profile and close-up, the video Sedgwick is uncharacteristically earnest, staring off camera with an almost mystical concentration as she talks on and on about . . . something. A typically laconic Factory description explains that her ''duo dialogue'' concerns ''space, mysticism and herself.'' Although the tape is manipulated to produce intermittant video distortions and bar rolls, the most subtle effect has the video Edie slightly larger than life. Space is flattened, perspective destroyed. In a further temporal complication, Warhol arranged for the two 16-millmeter reels to be projected simultaneously side by side.

Suggesting both the silkscreened multiples of Marilyn Monroe or Jacqueline Kennedy, as well as Warhol's vast series of 16-millimeter screen tests, ''Outer and Inner Space'' is one of his great portraits. Her lips glossed and eyes shining, a pair of enormous dangling earrings casting a grid of shadows across her graceful neck, the film Sedgwick was never more appealing than here. Poised and elegant, she acts as though it's tea time on Mars. Sedgwick never stops talking, unless it's to draw on her cigarette or pull a face, presumably in response to something she hears her video self say. The four layers of Sedgwick discourse become a murmuring burble in which only isolated phrases (''We had better times than anybody else,'' ''I don't believe it'') float to the surface of audibility.

''Outer and Inner Space'' had its world premiere at the Filmmaker's Cinematheque in Manhattan. (An advertisment in the Jan. 27, 1966 issue of The Village Voice drolly promises new work by Andy Warhol and the teen-age underground filmmaker Barbara Rubin as ''double screen experiments by double screen experimentalists.'') Later, it was incorporated into Warhol's growing multi-media show, the ''Exploding Plastic Inevitable,'' which featured not only the rock band the Velvet Underground but also the continuous projection of Warhol movies on the walls and ceiling of the St. Marks Place discotheque known as the Dom.

Although Warhol would only once again work in video, Ms. Angell believes that ''Outer and Inner Space'' had a decisive influence on his development. She points out that nearly every film he made afterward was shown in some sort of double screen: ''After a certain point, Warhol thought he could combine any of his films in any way he wanted.'' It was during the spring of 1966 that the artist began shooting ''The Chelsea Girls,'' the double-screen movie that would be his greatest critical (and commercial) success. Still, there are few Warhol movies as concerned as ''Outer and Inner Space'' with their own process.

What ''Outer and Inner Space'' shares with much video art is its sense of immediacy. As in many of the early Warhol films, an onscreen performer can be seen interracting with people offscreen. At one point, Sedgwick visibly responds to a direction, presumably from Warhol, to sneeze in tandem with her video image. The most powerful ''off-screen'' presence is, however, the taped image, which Sedgwick can hear but not see.

Becoming in a sense her own audience, the ''live'' Sedgwick often seems startled, distracted, even sometimes distressed by the effect of having her own voice whispering in her ear. (''It makes me so nervous to listen to it,'' she exclaims at one point.) As its title suggests, ''Outer and Inner Space'' visualizes a fragmented attention, a schizoid disjunction between public and private selves. Never less than animated, Sedgwick appears to approach hysteria -- perhaps annotating her video monologue, perhaps freaked out by it.

The four faces of Edie, ''Outer and Inner Space'' is ultimately the poignant spectacle of watching a beautiful wraith reacting to her own past. (Scarcely six years later, Sedgwick was dead of a drug overdose.) In a way, the piece makes literal the celebrity's dilemma: the superstar is trapped between her own disembodied image and the implacable, voracious eye of Warhol's camera.

J. Hoberman is the senior film critic for The Village Voice.

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Danny Plotnick - Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick (2008)

2008-04-20T23:03:00.003+02:00

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Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick

Danny Plotnick roared into the underground film world in the 1980s. Fueled by his love of punk and alternative culture and infected with d.i.y. spirit, he started making films that captured a
similarly snarly attitude. His films were pegged as bawdy, bad-mouthed and beautiful, straddling the line between high-brow and low-brow art. It’s no surprise that his work has screened from the MOMA in NYC to mortuaries in Baltimore to the Independent Film Channel. With little opportunity to screen this type of work in the 80s, Plotnick took to the road, projector and films in trunk, screening in bars, warehouses and cafes. Plotnick trail blazed a path for the underground film world that exploded in the early 90s, a scene that would ultimately champion his work.

Working in the pre-digital age, Plotnick was a fierce advocate for super 8 filmmaking. He took this 1960s home movie medium with limited capabilities and made work that stands tall regardless of format. The special features on this dvd are an important document for students of film, providing a rare glimpse into the world of sound super 8 filmmaking.

The films on this disc include Swingers’ Serenade, a titillating tale of suburban sexual malaise; I, Socky, a rogue sock monkey hits the town on a big day out; Steel Belted Romeos, a turbo-charged tale of California road rage; Skate Witches, a glimpse into the world of a 1980s female skateboard gang; Flip About Flip, a tribute to comic genius Flip Wilson.

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Anri Sala - Now I See (2004)

2008-04-20T17:10:00.001+02:00

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Upon entering the installation of Anri Sala’s Now I see (2004), his first 35-mm film, the viewer is enveloped in total darkness. The effect is, at first, purposefully disorienting; then a flicker of light flashes upon a 10 x 12 foot screen. A second or two later, the face of a young man emerges from the pitch-black along with the pulse of an electric guitar.

What follows seems to adhere to fairly standard conventions of rock video, with its guitar antics and male posturing, until a dog-shaped balloon falls on to the stage and disrupts the scene.

Despite the film’s opening pretense, Sala is anything but a conventional filmmaker. Trained as a painter in his native Albania before studying film in France, Sala, now based in Berlin, merges an interest in color, particularly black and white, with structuralist explorations of language and sound. - Susan Snodgrass (chicago)

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Joan Jonas - Glass puzzle (1973)

2008-04-20T12:06:00.001+02:00

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This complex and enigmatic work, which is performed by Jonas and Lois Lane, explores female gestures, poses, the body and narcissism. Mirroring each other with synchronized movements as they perform as alter-egos, Jonas and Lane reference archetypal female gestures and poses from popular and traditional cultures. Throughout the performance, space is dislocated and altered as a formal device — segmented by a swinging bar, superimposed in layers, transformed by subtle changes in light and shadow, or flattened by the video screen. With its evocative personal theater and idiosyncratic vocabulary of gestures, ritual and symbolism, Glass Puzzle is a quintessential Jonas work.

Camera: Babette Mangolte. Music: The Liquidators. With: Lois Lane, Joan Jonas.

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Lynda Benglis - Mumble (1972)

2008-04-20T12:01:00.001+02:00

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Part of an ongoing video correspondence with sculptor Robert Morris, Mumble brings together repeated scenes and gestures, featuring Morris and Jim Benglis (the artist's brother), and a narrative of irrelevant, confusing, and often purposefully untrue, statements. Although the viewer is inclined to accept Benglis's narrative as true, such trust is called into question by her statements about actions taking place off camera—actions that cannot be verified. As Benglis's narration degenerates into a meaningless, repetitive pulse, Mumble disrupts the convenient fiction that the image presented on screen is complete unto itself.

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Claes Oldenberg - Fotodeath (1961)

2008-04-19T16:52:00.001+02:00

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16mm film of Claes Olderberg's 1961 Happening "Fotodeath".

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Studio Azzurro - Synchronized Videos (1989 - 2000)

2008-04-17T21:34:00.005+02:00

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Studio Azzurro is an artistic research studio, that bases its expression on the languages afforded by recent technology. It was first set up in 1982 by Fabio Cirifino (photography), Paolo Rosa (visual arts and film) and Leonardo Sangiorgi (graphics and animation). In 1995 Stefano Roveda, an expert in interactive systems, joined the group.
For over twenty years, Studio Azzurro has been investigating the poetic and expressive potential of these systems that have had such an impact on relations in this age. Through video-environments, sensitive and interactive environments, theatrical performances and films, it has blazed a trail that is now acknowledged worldwide, by countless major artistic and theatrical institutions and events. In addition to experimental work, the groups activities are also tied in with more formative experiences such as the designing of museums and theme exhibitions whose cultural value has been recognised at all levels. In both cases, Studio Azzurro has taken care to create communicative environments that require an active and significant participation on behalf of the spectator who is part of the narrative structure, inspired by a use of multitextual approach and a continous shift between virtual and real elements.

The Synchronized videos are made up of two or more videos transmitted simultaneously. The videos are set up in order to restore an organic nature to what is viewed. It is like holding a continuous dialogue at times moving along together, sometimes involving an exchange, and at other times there is a meeting to create a single scene.

Il combattimento di Ettore e Achille (1989) aka The battle between Hector and Achilles (1989)

Two screens, two simultaneous points of view, two eyes that focus on this episode taken from Homer's epic. At times the images match as happens with human vision, and at other times they are separate and interchangeable, as happens with thought. The screens, placed side by side, recreate scenes and landscapes and the images of the actors move from one space to the next in a constant swapping of identities and roles. The emotions are heightened by the drawn out alienated time scale of the narration and the spread out slow motion of the action. The memory of the fight seeps into the landscapes' very texture, winds its way into the dancer's bodies, and a true synthesis is reached, devoid of all mythical allusion or epic reconstruction.

Aleksander Nevskij Video (1989)

Thanks to editing, excerpts from Ejzenstejn’s film and footage of a concert performance of Prokofiev’s cantata come together in the video with the aim of interpenetrating through the use of video processing. The performers in the film and concert appear side by side in the same picture. As was the idea of both Ejzenstejn and Prokofiev, who worked in close contact for the film and composition’s production, the video aims to retrace this co-operation, reinventing a series of associations between the musical content and a number of images from the film.
A particular succession of structural cross-references represent an effort to fuse genres and languages – musical, cinematographic, and the strictly video-electronic one.

Trittico Marghera (2000) aka Marghera triptych (2000)

Porto Marghera, the search for signs in a poisoned, hard, landscape. One finds a few life forms - an embryo of fertility mixed in with the remains of a people that has lived and suffered there, and has found its own identity in this suffering. Small indications of life that are confronted by immense empty or devastated spaces. Vast cathedrals, rusty machinery, reinforced concrete bunkers threatened by minute cracks - small havens for new vegetation. Hell has burnt itself out and left space for the first signs of life. The gaze examines, searches and focuses on the microscopic presences in the pools, beneath the layers of dust, amidst the lightness of feathers. What we see materialises on three screens that synchronise the impressions, emotions, and fears.

Trittico di sale (2000) aka Salt's triptych (2000)

Trittico di sale was specially produced for the “2000 anni luce” exhibition at the Parmigiani Museum in Reggio Emilia. We set up this small piece of work entitled Trittico di sale comprising three opaque glass screens supported by a salt base. The subject, light, was portrayed using the whiteness of a Trapani salt deposit as the starting point. It is so dazzling that it tends to burn the space the image occupies, just as the evocations of the wind in Salvatore Sciarrino's music (La perfezione di uno spirito sottile), wich runs parallel to the image tends to silence. Trittico di sale is part of a series we entitled Miniatures, small works with a clear narrative development that we installed at different historic locations such as Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome.

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Aleister Crowley - The Other Loch Ness Monster (2000)

2008-04-17T20:30:00.000+02:00

A little different view on Crowley then from 'the wickedest man in the world'. This time it focuses in on Boleskine house, the things that he did there and what became of it afterwards.

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Neil Rawles - Masters of Darkness: Aleister Crowley - The Wickedest Man in the World (2002)

2008-04-17T20:28:00.003+02:00

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Robert Garofalo - In Search of the Great Beast 666 - Aleister Crowley (2007)

2008-04-17T20:25:00.001+02:00

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Aleister Crowley, self proclaimed "The Great Beast" and known by the press as "The Wickedest Man in the World", was perhaps the most controversial and notorious individuals in British History. This dramatically reconstructed film unearths the barely believable and shocking facts surrounding a man who was voted in a BBC poll to be one of the most influential Britons of all time. Was he related to US President George Bush? How was he connected to the founder of Scientology, NASA, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jack the Ripper, Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming and how did this Occultist, Spy, Poet, Writer and accomplished Mountaineer come to know and influence so many other remarkable people?

In Search Of The Great Beast 666 - Aleister Crowley.

Featuring the Voice of Joss Ackland and Music Score by Rick Wakeman.

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Mauricio Kagel - Blue's Blue (1981)

2008-04-17T20:23:00.001+02:00

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Various - U.S. Express - Early 21st Century Video Art (2005)

2008-04-17T17:08:00.002+02:00

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1. Sign Movie
Karolina Sobecka 1:10 2001
Sobecka's videos are lyrical metaphors, rich enough to hold many interpretations. To us
they are about seeking connection with the physical world through our senses: sight,
touch, movement. Sobecka transforms her camcorder footage with staccato editing,
pixilated video animation, and other computer techniques. In this 21st century road movie,
a black and white traveler speeds through a lush color California landscape in the blink of
an eye, looking for signs.
Karolina Sobecka was born in Warsaw, Poland and is a graduate of the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago. Her works have been screened at the Women in the Director's Chair
2000 Tour and 19th Annual International Film and Video Festival; Dialogues @ Matthew
Gallery (Edinburgh, 1999); Animac International Festival in Lleida, Spain; Cinanima Film
Festival in Portugal and many others.

2. Welcome to My Home Page
Paper Rad 3:00 2003
High spirited, frenetic music drives an over the top, eyeball-saturating excerpt from
PjVidz#1: Color Vision. Paper Rad, creator of this digital divertissement, is an artist
collective that synthesizes popular imagery from TV, video games, and advertising,
reprogramming the references with an exuberant, imaginative aesthetic. Members
Benjamin Jones, Jessica Ciocci, and Jacob Ciocci have performed and exhibited at Foxy
Productions, Brooklyn, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the NY
Underground Film Festival; the Big Orbit Sound Lab, Buffalo, NY; Space 1026, Philadelphia,
PA and others.

3. Modern Daydream: Islands in the Sky
Mitchell Rose 4:32 2001
Out in the desolate countryside, dancers atop cherry-pickers weave fifty feet in the air,
reaching for the clouds and for each other in extraordinary gestures of yearning that are
amplified by the giant machines and sweeping camera movements. This strong and
beautiful dance video was directed by Mitchell Rose, a choreographer, performance artist,
and now mediamaker, based on the West Coast. He’s made seventeen short films that
have garnered many festival awards and been screened in theatres, television, museums,airlines, the Internet, even on the CBS JumboVision in Times Square.

4. Imprint
Karolina Sobecka 0:48 2003
The artist considers this video to be about human touch but we think it's about reach. Her
editing style collapses time, and merges multiple efforts to connect with the world into one
universal gesture.

5. Docking at X
Anita Thacher 7:06 2001
The artist dreams a silent journey along the coast, through fields and trees and fog.
Mysterious images obscure the view at times; an “X’ appears and disappears; a trapeze
artist swings gracefully through the air and slides down a rope, perhaps to return to her
dreamer’s bed. Docking at X while always in motion means being where you are. Anita
Thacher is a New York-based artist known for her indoor and outdoor multimedia
installations, films, videos, and photographs. Her works have been seen at the New York
Film Festival, Whitney Museum (NY), Berlin and Melbourne Film Festivals, Jeu de Paume,
Belgium Cultural Center and many others.

6. Current
Brian Doyle 6:00 2001
In New York City’s Financial Center, a blizzard of paper and tickertape swirls wildly in the
turbulent air that blows through the narrow streets; satellite dishes sprout from every
building. Paper shows the wind; the electromagnetic currents are invisible. Glimpses of
the World Trade Center twin towers are eerie but merely a background to a serendipitous
free-form paper dance. Brian Doyle is a Brooklyn, NY installation, video and photo artist
who has had many screenings including Lighthouse Museum (Glasgow, UK), Rotterdam
Film Festival, L’Alternativa (Barcelona), Instituto Brasileiro de Audiovisual, Pierogi 2000,
Slamdance 2003, Arte’s Mic Mac 8 and the New York and the Chicago Underground Film
Festivals.

7. One Mile Path
Karolina Sobecka 2:08 2003
In this third video by Sobecka, a barefoot woman walks across many landscapes, taking
careful deliberate steps, as if walking for the first time. Then she lifts her gaze toward the
skies, connecting multiple images of heaven and earth.

8. Weekend in Moscow (unofficial art)
Skip Blumberg 3:00 1990/2002
This short excerpt is the antic opening of a 35-minute non-fiction video about American art
aficionados touring Moscow during the last days of the Soviet Union. The humorous, ironic
first-person travel diary focuses on visits to the studios of an underground community of
talented, courageous and often wacky “unofficial,” conceptual artists. Skip Blumberg produces cultural documentaries and performance videos that have been seen on TV
networks, in festivals and art galleries around the world.

9. There There Square (condensed)
Jacqueline Goss 5:40 2002
Where is there? In this silent video (condensed from the full 14-minute video), Goss
eloquently uses terse text and fluid visual coverage of the U.S. map to present fascinating
facts and personal ruminations. She tells us that when the explorers arrived on our
shores, natives drew maps with circles that filled the square paper. Today the national
map is an indelible image for its citizens, yet they still draw highly idiosyncratic versions of
it. Jacqueline Goss’s videotapes and multimedia projects have been screened
internationally including the New York Video Festival, Rotterdam International Film
Festival, the Hong Kong Film Archive and Flaherty Film Seminar. She teaches in the Film
and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College, Annandale, NY.

10. Language Lessons
Pamela Z, Jeanne C. Finley & John Muse 9:00 2002
Z, Finley and Muse have woven an intricate pattern of narrative fragments about dreamers,
outsiders, and believers. Otherworldly images of ordinary objects - immigration forms,
butterflies just out of reach, toy airplanes and watery baptisms - obliquely illustrate their
words. Viewers must discover the connections and untangle meanings for themselves.
Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and audio artist and has toured
extensively throughout the U.S., Europe, and Japan with her audio works included in
exhibitions at the Whitney Museum (NY) and the Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum
(Cologne). Jeanne C. Finley and John Muse have worked collaboratively on numerous
experimental documentaries and multi-channel video installations since 1988.

11. One Mile Per Minute
Bobby Abate 10:00 2002
Bobby Abate takes us on a sentimental drive through a fictional post-9/11 America where
nothing has changed; it’s a landscape of media, products, logos, and tract homes. Abate’s
work deals with ritual, commercialism, self-reflexivity and contradiction and appeared in
the 2000 New York Film Festival plus many more off-beat venues. His trilogy of Internet
video shorts, Real Videos, was named one of the top avant-garde works of 2001 in the
Village Voice.

12. The Light
Brian Doyle 10:18 2003
This video, by the maker of Current, is an exquisitely photographed, crisply edited,
amazingly detailed study of artificial lights. The fluctuations between darkness and
brightness enhance our awareness of the light emanating from a video screen. At first
there is incidental coverage, then extensive coverage of the World Trade Center memorial
twin towers of light.

13. Cookie Girl in the Hot Zone
Skip Blumberg 4:30 2001
Two days after the World Trade Center twin towers collapsed 12-year-old Jemma Brown,
who lives just a few blocks from the site, baked and served cookies to rescue workers at
the end of their shifts, walking away from the clean-up of the still burning rubble. “Thanks
to all who helped in the recovery efforts.”

14. Robots/Cyborgs/Immortality
(from Act 3 Dolly of the 64-minute video opera Three Tales)
Beryl Korot (video) & Steve Reich (music) 11:35 2002
In this segment the robot Kismet and creator Cynthia Breazeal are featured in a tour-de-
force blending of audio/video fragments of ideas about artificial intelligence. The opera
stars engineers, scientists and philosophers (Ray Kurzweil, Sherry Turkle, Marvin Minsky,
Bill Joy, Henri Atlan, Rodney Brooks, Richard Dawkins, Ruth Deech, and Adin Steinsaltz). It
includes a luscious, rousing Steve Reich score and Korot’s expert intricately woven multi-
screen, multi-media, digital visualizations.
Beryl Korot is a seminal video artist, co-founder and co-editor of Radical Software, the
journal for the 1970's video movement. Her multi channel video installations have been
exhibited in galleries and museums around the world including the Whitney Museum (NY),
the Reina Sofia and the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle. Three Tales, her second video opera in
collaboration with composer Steve Reich, was performed with live musicians and singers
in Paris, London, Berlin, Torino, Amsterdam, Strasbourg, Lisbon, Vienna, Hong Kong,
Perth, New York, Chicago and Charleston, SC in 2002-2003.

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Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller - The Killing Machine and Other Stories (1995-2007)

2008-04-16T10:05:00.002+02:00

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Cardiff and Bures Miller represented Canada at the 49th Venice Biennale with Paradise Institute (2001), a 16-seat movie theatre where viewers watched a film, becoming entangled as witnesses to a possible crime played out in the real world audience and on the screen. The artists won La Biennale di Venezia Special Award at Venice, presented to Canadian artists for the first time and the Benesse Prize, recognizing artists who break new artistic ground with an experimental and pioneering spirit. Cardiff and Bures Miller have recently had exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum (2007) Vancouver Art Gallery (2005), Luhring Augustine, New York (2004), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2003), Art Gallery of Ontario (2002), National Gallery of Canada (2002) and Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Ontario (2000).

More info at: link.

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Vito Acconci - The Red Tapes (1977)

2008-04-15T11:20:00.000+02:00

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The Red Tapes is Acconci's masterwork, a three-part epic that is one of the major works in video. Designed originally for video projection, the work is structured to merge video space — the close-up — with filmic space — the landscape. Acconci maps a topography of the self within a cultural and social context, locating personal identity through history, cultural artifacts, language and representation. Stating that the work moves "from Vito Acconci to a larger Americanism, between a psychological personal space and a cultural personal space," he constructs a dense, poetic text in this search for self and America.
Opening with the image of Acconci, blindfolded, the tapes evolve as a complex amalgam of narrative strategies, photographic images, music and spoken language. The formal system is the alteration of blank screen and image; grey screen is paired with voice, which leads to image, which leads back to grey screen with voice, etc. In Tape 1: Common Knowledge, the focus is on representation and self (as Acconci is seen in close-up), landscape is a photographic image, and the narrative is that of a mystery story. Tape 2: Local Color is essayistic, analytical; the perspective is widened, the body is seen in context, architectural and sculptural space become manifestations of the psychological. In the conclusion, Tape 3: Time Lag, the space is theatrical and the action is communication, as Acconci and actors act out a "rehearsal of America." From the autobiographical to the social, from the "I" to the "we," through the discourses of literature, psychoanalysis, cinema, art and popular culture, The Red Tapes is an extraordinary chronicle in which Acconci locates the self within the mythic constructions of culture and history.
Camera: Ed Bowes. Sound: Tom Bowes. Music: Charles Ives. With: Ericka Beckman, Ilona Granet, Richie O'Halloran, Kathy Rusch, David Salle, Michael Zwack.

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Various - U.S. Express - 1990's Video Art (2005)

2008-04-15T11:18:00.001+02:00

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1. THE 90's
Tom Weinberg & Joel Cohen 55:30 1989-1992/2003
THE 90’s was an eclectic camcorder videozine series of 52 one-hour shows, broadcast
nationally on PBS from 1989 to 1992. In addition to being a variety show of video art styles,
it focused on the sub-cultures and alternate cultures that are rarely seen on TV. It was
produced by Tom Weinberg, Joel Cohen and more than 300 talented independent video
makers, video artists and camcorder reporters.
This specially edited episode focuses on the role of video in our lives and features a variety
of camcorder report styles. Twenty-eight short segments include: Philo T. Farnsworth (an
inventor of television); President Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 home video; Suzi Wehling’s
portrait of Broadside TV in Tennessee; Cherokee poet Charles Burrell; Blading Report:
Chicago Streets; the astounding street dance group House-O-Matics; Phil Morton’s
Yellowstone News: Ice Fishing; Nancy Cain’s Surf Report: Hare Krishna fest; a touching
conversation with Erika Becker and her Dad Eddie Becker; Wired In: Dan Sandin; Todd
Alcott: Television; an excerpt from Antonio Muntadas’ Video Is Television?; Mule Diving
Animal Rights Controversy; Your Tape Here: Boy with a Microphone by Bill Stamets;
Microphone Technique by R. D. Rosen; Ben Hollis’ Mystery Tour #1; Skip Blumberg’s
Personal Shopper; a Public Service Announcement by Laurie Anderson; Attack of the
Flying Logos by Gregory MacNicol; Global TV: Video in the Villages by Vincent Carelli;
Bungee Jump by Patrick Creadon and Randy Jaffe; and others.
Executive Producer Tom “Score” Weinberg and Producer Joel Cohen are TV and
multimedia producers. Weinberg expedited many of the most important broadcast TV
series and shows in video art history. He was a co-founder of TVTV, Fund for Innovative TV,
and the Center for New TV; executive producer and co-editor of the spectacular
performance art event Media Burn; and executive producer of many TV series including
THE 90’s, Image Union, It’s A Living, Radio Faces, Weekend TV, Chicago Slices, and Wired
In.

2. Host
Kristin Lucas 7:30 1997
Lucas blends video game imagery and live action in an ironic story about computer
dependency. The protagonist expresses her frustration to tech support, or is it a cyber-
therapist? “Ever since the power outage that we had on Thursday I’ve been feeling outside
of my self, kind of depressed… not only did the computer shut down but so did I.” Kristin
Lucas is an exciting artist who makes videos, installations and performances that are
anecdotal, mysterious and dramatic. They’ve been exhibited at festivals in Mexico City,
Montreal, New York and San Francisco; the Whitney Museum Biennial, New York; the 7e Semaine Internationale de Video, Geneva, Switzerland; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and
at Dunedin Public Gallery, New Zealand.

3. Summer, or Grief
Mary Lucier 7:30 1998
Mary Lucier’s videotapes invite contemplation. She uses light to signify transcendence and
evoke the sublime. In Summer, or Grief, she has composed a landscape where stillness,
ordinary things, and summer’s warmth itself seem to absorb grief, and to relax its grip on
the heart. Lucier began working in video in the late 1970s after investigating photography,
performance and sculpture. Her highly acclaimed multi-monitor installations and single
channel tapes have been exhibited at the Capp Street Project, San Francisco; Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum Biennial, New York; Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam; Artspace, Sydney; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Lucier was
selected as "One of the ten artists to watch in the '90s" by ARTnews magazine.

4. Todd Alcott: Living in Flames
Skip Blumberg 3:45 1992
Performance artist Todd Alcott assumes a character who rants about his frenzied life in
the metropolis. “I can't do one thing at a time anymore; I have to do two things… It’s like I
have to be two and a half times myself just to keep up." Is it New York, or is it just him?

5. ConCreep
Skip Blumberg 4:30 1995
On LoBro (lower Broadway) in the Soho (south of Houston) district of New York City, a
camcorder reporter’s chance encounter with a street performer, a virtuoso home-
appliance-parts percussionist, is cut short by the NYC Police Department. Skip Blumberg
has produced several hundred camcorder reports for THE 90s, Signal-to-Noise, Inside
Space, National Geographic TV and as an independent producer.

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Richard Serra - Prisoner's Dilemma (1974)

2008-04-15T11:16:00.003+02:00

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This is a rare Richard Serra Video from 1974 using the concept of "The Prisoner's Dilemma" from game theory as a video experiment to, in Serra's words, "expose the format of commercial TV." The video features Leo Castelli, Bruce Boice and Spalding Gray, among others. 40:11min

This a quotation from an article in the Guardian: link

The host of Serra's 1974 parody game show, Prisoners' Dilemma, explains that the loser will spend six hours alone in a basement - "that's about the length of the average boring artist's videotape". Cue knowing chuckles from the studio audience.

The rules are simple. Or are they? Derived from game theory, Prisoners' Dilemma is a casual exercise in arbitrary power. In the first part of Serra's tape, before we meet the studio guests, an enjoyably clumsy amateur cop show dramatises how the prisoner's dilemma works in real life as a New York detective isolates two hippies and makes each an offer: sign the prepared confession. If you sign and the other "prisoner" doesn't, you will go free, and the other prisoner will get 50 years in Sing-Sing. If the other signs and you don't, you will get 50 years. If you both sign, you'll each get 10 years. If neither of you sign, you'll each get two years. What to do? The guests on Serra's game show face an evening in a cellar instead of 50 years in jail. They are, separately, given various supposed private information about the other. It is impossible for the participants, the studio audience or us to know if the guests really decide for themselves or are manipulated into doing what the TV show wants. At a deeper level, their very involvement in a joke at their expense, giving someone power over their lives, is a surrender to television's arbitrary authority. Prisoners' Dilemma is funny and possesses the sombre density of Serra's sculpture. It is a sculpture in which, instead of throwing lead or rolling steel, he moves people about like manipulable objects.

Prisoners' Dilemma is, said Serra in 1974, about Watergate. In an interview given in January that year, when it was not yet clear the president would resign (he did so in August), Serra explained that his game show was designed to reveal TV's mendacity, as epitomised by Nixon: "It's all a lot of shit. Listen, I know television consciousness was developed in the 60s. And yet, in 1974, people still accept what they see on their TV sets as valid information."

Serra dramatises a false consensus by which everyone takes seriously, something they know is "a lot of shit".

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Juan Downey - Las Meninas (1975)

2008-04-15T11:14:00.001+02:00

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Las Meninas (Maids of Honor)
Juan Downey
1975, 20:34 min, color, sound

Las Meninas is a brilliant essay on illusionism, mirrors and perception in art, life and video, articulated by Downey as a subjective interpretation of Velasquez's eponymous Baroque masterpiece. Through a theatrical reenactment of the painting's pictorial tableau and a re-articulation of its complex perspectival structure, Downey brings to life the spatial dynamics, illustrating the psychological tension of the relationship between viewer and subject. Placing Las Meninas in a historical context, Downey relates the painting's thematics to Spain's economic and political systems of the late 17th century.

Performers: Carmen Beuchat, Suzanne Harris. Camera: Elaine Summers. Texts: Michel Foucault, George Kubler, Juan Downey. A production of the Artists' Visitation Program, Synapse Video Center, Syracuse University.

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Various - Regarding Beauty in Performance and the Media Arts (1960-1999)

2008-04-13T18:27:00.003+02:00

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This is perhaps the most important and inclusive collection of video art I have ever encountered. Not to say that it includes everything - far from it. But it has a heck of a lot of really important and interesting works from 1960-1999, compellingly grouped under various themes, and as such, represents a virtual treasure trove of rare material. I've left the compilation intact, and ripped it to keep the file size under 15gb. Like the 40 years of Video Art, this is simply a must-see. Even titles like Dara Birnbaum's Wonder Woman, which I previously u/l here, are more complete.

This was the film and video art component of the Hirshhorn Museum's 2000 show "Regarding Beauty" and by all accounts, more successful than the painting and sculpture section. Thanks to the little bird to flew this to me. Let's release this one into the wild!

-mb

TITLES (I may have forgotten some)

Anthropometries of the Blue Period Klein, Yves
Fire Paintings Klein, Yves
Measures of Distance Hatoum, Mona
Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful Abramovic, Marina
Pinchneck Nauman, Bruce
Performances, 1970-1972 Horn, Rebecca
Through the Large Glass Wilke, Hannah
Predictable Incident in Unfamiliar Surroundings Gordon, Douglas
Loving Care Antoni, Janine
Piano Americano Beecroft, Vanessa
Sketch for "Monster" Gordon, Douglas
Miko no Inori Mori, Mariko
Beauty Trockel, Rosemarie
Diamond Sea [linear version] Aitken, Doug
The Body Song Horowitz, Jason
Snow White Lucie Huyghe, Pierre
Heaven Moffatt, Tracey
The Spiral Jetty Smithson, Robert
Shore Post, Linda
Call Waiting Simpson, Lorna
Shulie Subrin, Elisabeth
Technology Transformation (Wonder Woman) Birnbaum, Dara
Artist + Models Donegan, Cheryl
Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square Nauman, Bruce
I wanna be with you (Annameik, 11 Feb, 1997) Dijkstra, Rineke
Godiva Hodel, Ursula
jewel Smith, Kiki
Kumano (Alaya) Mori, Mariko
Performances, 1971-1973 Mendieta, Ana
Sitting, Flapping, Walking, Swimming Semmes, Beverly
Greetings to Stockholm / TV-Clip Rainwoman (I am called a plant) Rist, Pipilotti
A View of the Roden Crater Turrell, James
Partners Pearlstein, Alix
Mrs. Peanut Visits New York Atlas, Charles
Video Sketch #1 Herring, Oliver
Body Double (X) Dellsperger, Brice

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Robert Smithson - Hotel Palenque (1969)

2008-04-13T13:35:00.001+02:00

Transcription of Hotel Palenque, a lecture held by Robert Smithson in 1969.

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Various - U.S. Express - 1980's Video Art (2005)

2008-04-13T13:26:00.002+02:00

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U.S. EXPRESS : 1980s
8 videos 88 minutes

1. CASCADE (Vertical Landscapes)
MICA TV – Michael Owen & Carole Ann Klonarides 6:30 1988
Landscapes are usually horizontal, but from MICA-TV’s perspective landscapes cascade
vertically, putting the viewer in a seamless freefall. Collaborating with artists Dike Blair,
Dan Graham, and Christian Marclay, MICA-TV created a postmodern depiction of the
contemporary American landscape, a technical and artistic achievement that was way
before its time. Michael Owen and Carole Ann Klonarides began MICA-TV in 1980, and
produced several award-winning, witty and technically sophisticated tapes until 1993.
Their work often mimics TV formats, subverting them in the service of contemporary art.

2. Pick Up Your Feet: The Double Dutch Show
Skip Blumberg 28:20 1981
Skip Blumberg developed his own form of reality TV using the attributes of the video
medium to capture the essence of his subjects. Blumberg aims to “warm up the cool
medium of television,” focusing on action, gesture, personality and the natural humor of
real life. Pick Up Your Feet is a quintessential example of this; it’s an entertaining, classic
documentary video about personal achievement and teamwork, featuring the Fantastic
Four and other championship rope jumping teams.

3. Instant This: Instant That
TwinArt 3:57 1980
Just before MTV began, TwinArt made this early music video. The tape chronicles a day in
the lives of the very stylish Nancy and Susie TwinArt and simultaneously celebrates and
lampoons America’s superficial materialistic culture. TwinArt is the bi-coastal Emmy-
award-winning designer/director team, Ellen Kahn & Lynda Kahn (real life identical twins).
Their work has been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries such as the
Whitney Museum (NY), The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

4. Three Drugs (Abused by Americans)
Chip Lord 2:15 1983
Chip Lord’s work merges social observation with a dry, sardonic humor in this ersatz
commercial spot that darkly defines our pleasures as addictions. Like other video artists,
he subverts TV formats to critique contemporary pop culture and everyday life. Lord is a
prolific video artist who has produced both single-channel videos and installations; he was
a founder of Ant Farm and is the Chair of the Department of Film and Digital Media at the
University of California, Santa Cruz.

5, Love Tapes in New York (excerpts)
Wendy Clarke 13:45 1980
Black & white.
An interactive video booth in the lobby of the World Trade Center twin towers yielded 357
3-minute “love tapes,” tender to rough expressions of and about love. This edit contains
excerpts from 10 of the people who recorded their very personal messages to the world.
Wendy Clarke has produced many interactive video installations in public spaces around
the world and several tapes (including more than 2500 Love Tapes). She has received
numerous awards for her videos including grants from the National Endowment for the
Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. She also makes wearable art.

6. World Eskimo-Indian Olympics (excerpt)
Skip Blumberg 2:30 1983
This excerpt from a half-hour arctic sports spectacular features such sports as blanket
toss, knuckle hop and high kicks, in an effort by an indigenous people to keep their culture
alive.

7. Flying Morning Glory (on fire)
Skip Blumberg 4:00 1985
This tape is a zany, hot, performance cooking video recorded in the Phitsanuluk, Thailand
market. The video’s playful approach to the magnanimous chef delights the viewer and
encourages us to see the magic in the mundane (and to make our own magic).

8. Bye Bye Kipling (Remix)
Nam June Paik 24:45 1986/2004
Nam June is considered the “father of video art.” Bye Bye Kipling was Paik’s second
multicultural live TV satellite special. Today it looks like an early form of channel surfing.
Cultures clash and blend in an international multi-media performance art video variety
show extravaganza, conceived and coordinated by video ringmaster Nam June Paik! With
Keith Haring, Dick Cavett, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Paul Garrin, Kit Fitzgerald, Dan Sandin, the
Phillip Glass Ensemble, Shigeko Kubota’s Sado Island, Dean Winkler’s Celerity, Skip
Blumberg’s Seoul Brother Report, Betsy Connors, Yion Yon Kim, Kyung-Hwa Chung, the
Alvin Ailey Repertory Dance Ensemble, Sankai Juku, Robin Byrd, Konishiki, David Van
Teighem, Samul-Nori, Issay Miyake, Arata Isozaki, Arman, the Lou Reed Band, Mary
Perillo, Jon Sanborn, Calvin Tompkins, Roger Angell, elephant races and incendiary
videographics. Produced by Carol Brandenburg. Condensed from a 90-minute show that
was broadcast worldwide live from Tokyo, Seoul and New York on October 4 in North
America and simultaneously in Asia on October 5, 1986.

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Various - U.S. Express - 1970's Video Art (2005)

2008-04-13T13:24:00.002+02:00

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On 4 DVDs, U.S. EXPRESS includes more than 80 short videos made by 50 artists living and working in the United States.

U.S. EXPRESS : 1970s
7 videos 80 minutes

1. Sunstone
Ed Emshwiller 2:57 1979
Color and monochrome.
Ed Emshwiller drew on his experience in science fiction illustration, filmmaking and
painting to produce this ethereal and spiritual sci-fi video gem. Working with a team of
early digital effects artists, he created visuals that seem to breathe on screen. Sunstone is
a landmark work of electronic art, lovingly created over a period of 8 months in a video lab
at the New York Institute of Technology. Emshwiller, who died in 1990, was a major figure
in the history of video art as an artist and a teacher. In his work he investigated the
expressive capabilities of video synthesizers and computer systems, while demonstrating
the humanistic potential and transformative properties of the medium.

2. Probably America’s Smallest TV Station
Videofreex 5:25 1973-76/2004
Color and black & white.
Formed in 1969, Videofreex was a pioneering collective of artists and community activists
who embraced portable video technology in its earliest days. In 1971 they built the
country’s smallest TV station in upstate New York, Lanesville TV, and broadcast hundreds
of quirky, homemade programs until 1980. Excerpted here are Lanesville TV News Buggy
(1976) and An Oriental Magic Show with a man in a box and a barbarian (1973) in a
Lanesville TV “live” broadcast with guest host Russell Connor (1975). Additional
production: DCTV (Jon Alpert, Yoko Maruyama, Keiko Tsuno).
In the context of the Alternate Culture movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, these artists were
redefining television as a medium for individuals and communities as opposed to
mainstream corporate and commercial interests. According to the Freex: “The better
tapes are just for fun.” Videofreex members included David Cort, Curtis Ratcliff, Parry
Teasdale, Davidson Gigliotti, Nancy Cain, Chuck Kennedy, Skip Blumberg, Carol Vontobel,
Bart Friedman and Ann Woodward.

3. Global Groove (re-edit)
Nam June Paik & John Godfrey 19:55 1973/2003
Wild, intense color.
Nam June Paik is the pre-eminent video artist in the United States and worldwide. Born in
Korea, and trained as a classical musician, Paik came to the U.S. in 1964. He brought with
him wide ranging interests in music, art and technology, an irreverent sensibility, and a
love of collaborating with well-known as well as younger cutting-edge artists. All of his
work shares these characteristics.

Global Groove, designed as a pilot TV program, is an exuberant montage produced with
collaborator John Godfrey, the technical wizard behind hundreds of early art videos. Jud
Yalkut, Jackie Cassen, Karheinz Stockhausen, Percival Borde, and Bob Breer also
contributed fragments of films and videos. Paik weaves performances by art-world
luminaries John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Allan Ginsberg, Charlotte Moorman, The Living
Theater, traditional Korean folk dancers, and American tap dancers, with electronic
processing and global communications theories to create a totally new vision of
multicultural TV. Narrator: Russell Connor. Producer: David Loxton. Edited in 2003 from
28:30 video.

4. JGLNG
Skip Blumberg 5:20 1976
Dazzling black & white.
Fourth generation circus performer Mario Droguett, in his Sarasota, Florida backyard, is
the subject of this high-contrast analysis of the art of juggling. The multi-layered video
creates special effects in the viewer's eye and impossible tricks on screen! JGLNG
(pronounced “juggling”) represents Blumberg’s early experiments in seeking out the
abstract in the real world.
Skip Blumberg was part of the first wave of video artists as a member and collaborator of
Videofreex, Ant Farm, TVTV and other production groups. In addition to video installations
and events, he has produced several hundred cultural documentaries and performance
videos. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the
Pompidou Center, Paris, the Everson Museum of Art, the Museum of TV and Radio. He has
also curated several video exhibitions, including U.S. EXPRESS.

5. First International Whistling Show
Jules Backus & Skip Blumberg 19:00 1978
Black & white.
This entertaining collaboration between Skip Blumberg and Jules Backus showcases
award-winning whistling performances at the First International Whistling Festival in
Carson City, Nevada. The small video cameras and informal style of the makers brings the
viewer up close to these eccentric but virtuoso musicians. Jules Backus was an
extraordinary photographer and videomaker who died in 1996. In 1970, he co-founded
Optic Nerve, a video collective in San Francisco. He also collaborated with Chip Lord, Doug
Hall, Branda Miller, Antonio Muntadas, Joan Jonas, Kathy High and others.

6. The Laughing Alligator: Cameraman’s stand-off
Juan Downey 3:30 1976-77/1979
Color and black & white.
The Laughing Alligator is a seminal 27-minute anthropological art tape from Juan’s Trans
America series; it documents several months he spent living with the primitive Yanomami Indians in Venezuela. In the excerpt, Downey finds himself trapped by two armed hunters
in the forest. His video camera is his only weapon. In this ‘70s precursor to reality
television, it’s hard to tell if this was the Indians’ joke on a foreigner or a serious challenge.
Juan Downey, born in Chile in 1940, came to New York in 1965. As a South American of
European heritage living in the U.S., he produced illuminating, poetic works in which he
sought to define the self, and to discover his own cultural identity. He merged his interests
in autobiography and anthropology, in western art and culture, and in Latin American
rituals. Downey died in 1993. He created a body of work that includes videotapes,
installations, drawings and paintings of international renown.

7. Media Burn
Ant Farm 23:15 1975
Color and black & white.
Ant Farm was an innovative San Francisco-based collective of artists and architects,
working together from 1968 to 1978, on the fringe of architecture, performance, media,
public art, and graphic design. In Media Burn, they organized a huge crew and cast for a
spectacular performance art video and media event, in which a customized Cadillac
convertible crashed into a wall of burning TV sets. The tape both parodies and critiques
television news coverage, while it exploits TV’s enormous power to interpret and define
reality for viewers. It has become a video art classic. Ant Farm members included Chip
Lord, Hudson Marquez, Doug Michels and Curtis Schreier.

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Vito Acconci - Applications (1970)

2008-04-13T13:23:00.002+02:00

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A video performance by Acconci, which illustrates his unique engagement of conceptual art, performance and Body Art. In this piece a woman kisses Acconci's body, covering him in red lipstick traces. Acconci then rubs his body against another man (Dennis Oppenheim), transferring the stains onto him. 1970. 20 min.

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