Spherical Objective

2007-01-21T20:44:00.000Z

CLOSED

2006-09-27T10:47:00.000+01:00

Experimenta Imperialism

2006-09-17T11:58:00.000+01:00

It usually happens around this time of year and it happened yesterday morning: the London Film Festival catalogue flopped onto my doormat. I turned quickly to the ‘Experimenta’ pages to get a first glance of the "...cutting edge cinema, artists’ film and video and the avant-garde..." (they seemed to have managed to collect as many possible cliched generic terms in there as possible) fare on offer, my heart, (perhaps I should have predicted this) sank.

This weekend there is a fascinating series of screenings on at Tate Modern, Cinema of Prayoga, Indian Experimental Film and Video 1913 – 2006, which has been devised by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler following their work with the Indian organisation Filter India. One of their stated aims in the programme notes is to “...challenge the dominant US and Eurocentric histories mainly known in the UK”, presumably the idea is that this can be achieved in a some part by showing hitherto rarely seen experimental works from a non-western culture which ironically has one of the largest film industries in the world, but an all but invisible ‘avant-garde’. A rather ambitious aim perhaps, but a worthy one, and one that would appear to be the polar opposite of the London Film Festival’s ‘Experimenta’ programming.

I did a few calculations: in ‘Experimenta’ there is 1,248 minutes (38 individual works) of programme time (not including the Luis Recoder & Sandra Gibson performance – no duration given), 815 minutes (24 individual works) of this originates in the USA (not including the Luis Recoder & Sandra Gibson performance – no duration given, but also USA). So it certainly seems that US cultural dominance is alive and well at the LFF. Putting aside any residual Iraq/War on Terror driven anti-Americanism that might be somewhat biasing my current attitude towards the USA in general, the figures still add up to something considerably less than anything like a survey of international artists’/experimental/avant-garde/callitwhatyouwill film and video. The exception that serves to prove this rule is the ‘Queer China: An Evening with Cui Zi’en’ programme which looks like one of the few opportunities to see anything remotely ‘different’ in ‘Experimenta’. ‘Queerness’ elsewhere is represented by Mary Jordan’s film about Jack Smith and a retrospective of Kenneth Anger. Nowadays, in ‘the West’, queerness occupies pretty much a cultural centrality, hardly radical or transgressive, and Anger’s films tend to seem rather dated, their aesthetic has been pretty much absorbed by mainstream moving image culture, Scorpio Rising is pretty much classic Americana, and most of his films have been shown to death over the years, so why is it that we need to see them all again? Are there not other international filmmakers whose body of work is under-represented and crying out for the retrospective treatment? Queerness in China at least sounds as though it might have a currency and be genuinely ‘avant-garde’ and transgressive in its particular cultural context. In this particular context its inclusion looks more or less tokenistic.

Elsewhere there is a new film by James Benning. I happen to be a big fan of Benning’s work so will be watching this quite happily, but still, why after such a big slice of last year’s ‘Experimenta’ programming was dedicated to Benning, is he here again with a 120 minute film. The dominance of US film and video makers is problematic in itself, but to compond the problem most of those prominently represented are over middle aged white males whose approach and aesthetic hardly represents a current experimental enquiry or are particularly ‘avant-garde’ (Nathaniel Dorsky, Ken Jacobs) except by some kind of static moribund historical definition of that term. This would not be quite so bad if it weren't for the fact that we see the same pattern at LFF's 'Experimenta' year after year.

Paradoxically I am looking forward to seeing many of these films, but ideally I would want my experimental film festival, rather than to confirm established notions of the ‘avant-garde’, rather than to once again trot out the old names doing the same old work in the same old formulistic formations, to show me work by obscure and unknown artists from obscure and unknown places working in new and different ways with new and different concerns. Why, in what as part of a major international film festival, in what should be an international survey of artists’ film and video, is there virtually nothing (apart from a seven minute piece from Russia) from eastern Europe, nothing from Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, when there is a thriving and situated experimental practice in all these places? What is happening in African artists’ film and video? I certainly don’t know for sure, but I do remember seeing some interesting work from African countries at Documenta a few years ago. Why, when there is so much astonishing video work from central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan - and it’s not exactly a secret, there was a load of it in the Venice Biennale last year) are we not seeing this or work of its ilk?

Instead the ‘Experimenta’ strand with its quaintly titled ‘Avant-garde Weekend’, presents an international experimental practice as being predominantly American and male. I should also note that only six out of the 37 films screening are by women and that even local practice is woefully under-represented by a measly three films. This selection and programming is lazy, safe, unadventurous, conservative and tired. As interesting as any of the individual works might be on their own terms, overall ‘Experimenta’ fundamentally presents a hegemonic distortion of global experimental film and video practice.

Chromacodes

2006-08-24T10:52:00.000+01:00

Chromacodes 1998

2006-08-15T00:01:00.000+01:00

boroughbeamerlooperpooler

2006-08-04T15:57:00.000+01:00

Next Wednesday 9th August the looppool project featuring Beamerlooper, comes close to home to the recently opened Roxy bar and screen at 128-132 Borough High Street, London SE1 at around and around and around 8pm.

writing on water

2006-08-02T23:27:00.000+01:00

Seven Days, Chris Welsby, 1974

My review of the recent BFI DVD compilation of Chris Welsby's films is in Vertigo Magazine's new 'electronic' edition, published on CD-ROM and also available to subscribers to the Vertigo website. I've only seen the website version so far but editor Metin Alsanjak promises that with the CD-ROM version we "will also have a chance try out new film criticism software 'Reframe', which allows clips from any DVD you have in your possession to be played alongside text or audio commentary". Hmmm. I will report back when I've had a chance to try out this digital marvel.

there will be shoulder pressing in the hall

2006-07-11T23:36:00.000+01:00

The Plague of Language

2006-06-25T01:00:00.000+01:00

so, product placement, the connoisseur of the art of valuing: as art theft ranks third amongst property crimes, we begin to suspect that arts main function is to facilitate money laundering. and as ninetythree percent of art thefts remain unrecovered, we have then proof. (logic: i know that the poor are terrorists. i mean ask anyone, language is what you do when you can�t. its a last resort. and yes, All media are forms of therapy, its just that Some (the being an object of art) are more Ethereal, more Portable, more suited to the vagrant refugee..)
from you know, the thing by Chris Mann, new sound and text piece at dispatx

"Language is the mechanism whereby you understand what I'm thinking better than I do. (Where 'I' is defined by those changes for which I is required)" - Chris Mann

writing on paper

2006-06-15T08:56:00.000+01:00

My piece about Matthew Noel-Tod's video 'Nausea' is in the new issue of Vertigo magazine, which will be launched on Saturday with a live event: 'Fingertips', a collaboration between experimental filmmaker Tereza Stehlíková, with an original soundtrack performed live by Touch label's Philip Jeck. The event will also feature a screening of a Stan Brakhage short from his 1994 Chartres series. Curzon Soho, London, 17 June 2006, 6pm. See you there.

CogCollective: Shifting Latitudes

2006-06-12T23:21:00.000+01:00

new regular screenings at Candid Arts

4pm, Sunday 2nd July 2006
videos by sue.k., Marcus Bergner, Mike Leggett and Steven Ball
more at www.cogcollective.co.uk

writing online

2006-06-01T00:45:00.000+01:00

Just published: "Open Play: The Work of Riccardo Iacono" at Axis, Open Frequency (link to full essay at the bottom of the page).

Also starting to collect other writings already published elsewhere online at as a tag on my del.icio.us bookmarks log. I'm trying out del.icio.us as a way of collecting bookmarks. Interesting facility for sharing and linking bookmarks with other people that I've only just found (thanks Sonia). A little random as they appear in the (whimsical) order that they were added, so tags are key.

Art Irritates, Reality Imitates

2006-05-28T14:20:00.000+01:00

Why does anyone bother to watch Big Brother these days when they can get their voyeuristic fill of narcissism from people making intimate soap operas of their lives on blogs? Perhaps the relish with which ‘ordinary’ people seem to persist in jumping at the chance to be parading their insecurities, arrogances and some of the other less attractive aspects of their personalities on public media, is paralleled in the personal diaristic style of many a blog.This year BB also demonstrates a particular tendency of mainstream television, which is to use ideas first explored by artists in experimental media. In this case the BB graphics use a similar digital fragmentation to that which I explored 5 years ago in Sevenths Synthesis.

What took them so long?

Dancing About Architecture

2006-05-14T14:45:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I gave a talk about my video Ex Local Authority as part of Kinetic Fields at Chisenhale Dance Space. The curator of the event Gianluca Bonomo wanted to investigate common grounds between avant-garde and dance filmmaking. As well as me Maxa Zoller gave a presentation about the history of experimental film and video in relation to ideas of space and movement and Gitta Wigro talked about dance film. It was an interesting experience relating ones work to another discipline and the enthusiastic audience, who I guessed were much more familiar with dance and choreography, responded with genuine curiosity and interesting questions.

Below is a transcript of my talk.

When Gianluca suggested that my video Ex Local Authority might be shown in an event concerned with experimental film and video and dance film, I was rather surprised because on the face of it my video has little or nothing to do with dance film: it contains no human movement choreographed to music, in any conventional dance sense. Gianluca has spoken about other works in the Stillness of Movement section but in my own video and those by Fil Ieropoulos the relationship with notions of movement and choreography are perhaps more diffused and abstracted. Fils videos, like mine, concentrate closely on very particular phenomenon of every day subjects, however the 'choreography' in his work takes a kind of ecological approach, using the diegetic or ambient sound - the sound of the space at the time of shooting - collecting and shaping it into a rhythmic and textural dance.

click on the image for an extract from Local Authority (QuickTime 7 required)

There is an expression I’ve heard used occasionally which goes along the lines of “writing about music is like dancing about architecture...” usually followed by “...is impossible” or “...is a really stupid thing to do...” I did a search on this expression and found its origins attributed to a number of musicians, among them Elvis Costello, Thelonius Monk, Frank Zappa and John Cage. The last surprised me the most because if anyone was likely to recognise the potential of applying actions associated with one creative activity as a way of expressing another, it would be Cage, I thought. And besides he often wrote about music. Whoever the originator of this expression was, they displayed a rather restrictive, somewhat conservative lack of capacity for lateral thought, a sort of “place for everything” apartheid of expression (so I’m guessing Costello... whose puns are worse even than Zappa’s).

But 'dancing about architecture' appeals to me as, rather than being impossible, it's a useful way of thinking creatively and spatially about choreography, movement and the moving image. It’s stating the obvious to say that dancers rely on the existence of physical spatial environments within which to move: dance so often happens within, around and about, architecture. Filmmakers also rely on architecture as the setting for the reception of their work: whatever or wherever the screen, it is almost inevitably in a room or at least architecturally located, and movement through architectural space is the default setting for much cinematic subject matter.

Ex Local Authority is dancing about architecture in another way. The video is made from static - but not still - images of a 1920s council tenement estate. The images consist of framed architectural features viewed through the trees in a courtyard. The relationship of stillness to the moving image is a complex one, but suffice to say that in many ways there is no such thing as a ‘still’ within the context of film: in a medium which moves through time. Although we might think of a static image as having qualities of 'stillness'. The video used to Ex Local Authority was shot on a static camera on a locked-off tripod and the motion in most scenes was the branches and leaves on the trees moving slightly in the breeze. Using editing software I was able to move the image from being absolutely still at one point on the timeline, to moving it back and forth along the timeline. The simple process of how I achieved this will be demonstrated later, but it works in such a way that it’s not immediately clear in the video which are the static and which are the still images, until the movement up and down the time line becomes more frenetic. Additionally one of the integral elements in this process was to simultaneously create a soundtrack from the midi music that I had laid along the timeline.

When I made this video - and others using a similar technique - I was aware of the similarity of this process to a practice common in 16mm experimental filmmaking of reworking extant film footage by repeating and changing the dynamics of movement, often using an optical printer. I was interested in the way that processes from the analogue moving image medium of film could perhaps find new life, and new efficacy, in digital media.

The reanimation of existing sequences often work to quite different ends in experimental film. As an example the following extract from Malcolm Le Grice’s 1968 film Little Dog for Roger takes a sequence from some found home movie footage which Le Grice copies in a way that exaggerates and transforms what would normally be considered to be errors, such as frame slippage, dirt, scratches, sprockets, thereby foregrounding the intrinsic material qualities of the medium. This is a classic structural materialist film technique.

frame sequence from Little Dog for Roger by Malcolm Le Grice

So, as well as the film material we still see the dog running around, we still follow its movements reanimated as it leads us on a merry materialist dance. The next example is less interested in the material properties of film and more in the movement of figures in space. In this extract from the 1993 film Passage à l'Acte, Martin Arnold reworks a family breakfast scene (taken from a 1950s film version of To Kill a Mockingbird) by reprinting small segments frame by frame, building up repetitive movements to the point where a everyday activity becomes infected by repetitive tics transforming an otherwise domestic normality into a mad dance.

frame sequence from Passage à l'Acte by Martin Arnold

Arnold’s technique is painstaking, the materialist signifiers of the film media as seen in Little Dog for Roger are largely absent and we begin to imagine that so intense is this mad dance that it expresses some deeper psychological violence. The movement is seamless it is human movement and while the ‘unnaturalness’ is clear we still imagine that they could be ‘real’ choreographed human not machine created movements.

Such effects are not quickly achieved. The passage from re-photographing film to producing visible movement involves a significant time delay. From one piece of film, the backward and forward movement of one frame after another has to be re-shot, slowly pieced together, then chemically processed, perhaps printed again to achieve a viewable copy. The time taken between the manipulation of the material to seeing the result can be days. In Martin Arnold’s case, considerably longer.

In many digital practices which inherit their form from analogue media, there is still a time lag at the processing stage for compositing, rendering and often computer based animation is still carried out at the level of the single frame. With my video however, this was not the case as this demonstration of how I animated the sequences shows:

click on the image for Local Authority demonstration (QuickTime 7 required)

So rather than having to make new sections of digital image, which might then have to be rendered, or re-photograph images frame by frame, with this technique the movement of the image was a direct result of my own physical movement, my dancing with the mouse, playing the video like a musical instrument as I improvise a soundtrack by scrubbing along the timeline. The subtle & not-so-subtle movement of the playback head affects & produces movement in the image.

At the point of realisation, performing the video, I was less concerned with the image, to the point where it could almost be considered to be a side effect/affect of the performance of a music track, a direct improvisational dance, following the physical movements used to improvise the sound.

The dynamics and co-reliance, the correlation or co-relationship of movement, stillness, space and time, are fundamental to both moving image art and dance, with the addition of music and sound, which can have an equally integral relationship.

In discussions of computer based moving image technology, one often encounters notions of the virtual, the cyber, the moving image as an ethereal immanent entity without material form, as though the computer provides some kind of virtual post-physical space and visible form only occurs through the magic of software. But the computer is a machine; it relies on electrons to make it work; it has moving parts and there is still as much of a direct trace of the physical source in a moving image made on a computer be that visual or process based. In Ex Local Authority in using the computer as a kind of real-time optical printer - the moving images were output to digital tape in real time as I performed - I am reasserting the physicality of the relationship between movement and image. I am suggesting that through the use of the computer the physical place can be made to dance in direct relationship with a human activity; moving images that are the result of real time manipulation are essentially performative. My processes have a lot in common with the way VJs work with the live manipulation of moving images and music simultaneously. Although so far I have resisted using a lot of the software.

In spite of this talk being dominated by more formal concerns, the primary impetus of Ex Local Authority was to evoke the uneasy daytime stasis of a 1920s Housing Estate, a stasis that is an illusion of stillness disrupted by the erratic but determined movement. The possibility of an almost imperceptible transition between movement and stillness suggests that both or either are ‘illusory’. It is a kind of image/movement/sound synaesthesia; it is also, perhaps, dancing about architecture.

now it’s personal

2006-05-01T11:49:00.000+01:00

When I started this weblog it was never intended to be one of those “I-spill-my-guts-with-woe-is-me-tales-of-depression-ennui-or-frustration” blogs, or one of those “aren’t-my-friends-and-my-life-so-endlessly-fascinating,-creative-and-clever” affairs, or detail the minutest details of my life for the whole world to see. In short it was never intended to be self-absorbed or particularly personal. As an ‘appendix’ to my main website it was to be a space where I expand on ideas and observations directly or tangentially related to mine and other peoples work, exhibitions, critical theory, etc. Of course there is bound to be a large amount of ‘personal’ opinion and information as a result of this, but this has not been ‘about me’ as such.

Until now.

Recently I had cause to query the amount of journeys debited from my Oyster card. This card is the way we pay for our public transport in London. Through a pervasive campaign and persuasive pricing (it is the cheapest way to get around for anyone who travels by bus or underground on a regular basis) Transport for London has made it all but impossible not to use one of these things. The way it works is that you add cash credit to your card, which is then deducted from your account when you get on the bus or at the ticket barrier of the tube station by some magical technology as the card is swiped over a reader. I was convinced that my credit was going down faster than I was using it and discovered that I could request a statement from TfL. I received my statement and within minutes realised that I hadn’t been ripped-off as I’d suspected, but I also realised that there was a record of all my journeys on public transport. In the case of the bus journeys the date, time of boarding and bus number. The tube journeys are even more detailed as with the tube one swipes when entering and exiting the ticket barrier. As the statement has my address on it, it would be reasonably easy to compile a fairly detailed record of my movements from my Oyster statement alone, and as a result get to know quite a bit about me. I think knowing quotidian details about the bus and trains and patterns of journeys that someone takes is getting to know quite a bit about them, personally. It’s certainly the sort of information that marketing companies and government agencies might find useful.

So here with the address and card number removed to avoid complete disclosure, is the most personal information I have posted so far on this weblog.

There has been speculation about the potential for the misuse of this information and, given that there are now plans to extend the capabilities of the Oyster card to paying for small inexpensive items which in the past may have demanded small change, in this most recent version of the vision of a cashless society the Oyster statement could contain an even more detailed record of the holder’s day to day activities. Obviously this is not that much of a revelation of a new tendency, bank account and credit card statements already provide accurate details about purchases, mobile phone records potentially track not only who and when you call, but also from where; so with access to the range of information about an individual, it would be fairly easy to build up a reasonably accurate and comprehensive profile of their activities, movements, the details of their lives. If they also keep a gut-spilling weblog it’s not unreasonable to speculate that it might be possible to get to know someone better than they know themselves (looking down my Oyster card statement I certainly don’t remember each of those individual journeys, but I must have taken them) and not just the mundanities of public transport and spending habits.

Some people regularly get concerned about encroachments on privacy and the rights of the individual and the pervasiveness of the virtual panopticon of the industrial military complex, while marketing companies and government agencies might equally point out that personal information is protected by law and data mining is illegal. Of course it isn’t that paranoid or an indulgence in fanciful conspiracy theories to point out that it doesn’t take much to legally or otherwise extract this personal information residing on various databases, and I’m sure these systems are less secure than they might claim. And it’s an inevitability that there will be an increase in such information gathering, at least until data overload results in network entropy and the whole thing comes crashing down. And as governments of allies in the US/UK paranoid alliance over terrorism strengthen resolve, one can more or less assume that opinions and statements made in public fora can potentially be scrutinised for subversive or inciting statements and one might just find oneself detained indefinitely without charge or trial at a government holding facility. This is just the bare facts about how the governments might, and do, operate these days.

What might be more shocking about the current ‘intelligence’ networks is not the incursions into an individual’s private information, but the incompetence in not being able to use intelligence intelligently, to avoid making stupid and dangerous mistakes, like, let’s say, releasing thousands of criminals instead of deporting them and then not being able to trace them, or murdering innocent people at point blank range on a tube train at Stockwell. Such levels of incompetence would be laughable if their consequences weren’t so consistently tragic, and the danger is not so much in what is known and accurately deduced about the individual by the industrial military complex, but what it is more likely to get wrong.

Big up Bare

2006-04-22T13:52:00.000+01:00

The twostep/grime explosion of a few years back seems to have run its road, overtaken by dubstep as the languorous rhythms and caverns of reverb of dub infiltrates the jerky twostep, dropping deep sonic bass notes in its path. A music at once raw and expansive. The DJs on the 'pirate style' Dark FM, Sub FM and the veteran pirate Rinse FM play sets that start up slow lazy, morphing into livelier, nervier beats. But there is a foreboding, a darkness, a melancholy, to the music with its minor key shifts with sampled dislocated voices rising through swathes of echo as though out of some deep ketamine hole. It is simultaneously disassociative and brooding, thrilling and uneasy, constantly on the edge of trouble.

At Bare Files you can find mp3s of the best of the latest pirate sets, the barest dubstep.

The word surrounding the Burial album’s imminent release (read an interview with Burial and some mp3 previews on Blackdown) is that it will become the record of the moment, if not the year. Dubstep is set to go overground, and on this sunny weekend, with long term reports that this could be the longest warmest UK summer since 1976, it sounds like becoming the inner city soundtrack of the season as pavements around the Borough melt, the humidity rises, a steamy fug settles and the city slows into an uneasy and frazzled hallucinatory dub daze.

Keep it locked.

scope notes from a work in progress

2006-04-13T00:17:00.000+01:00

51° 31' 08.46" N 0° 07' 14.84"W - distance 34.01m - elevation 133ft
51° 31' 09.12" N 0° 07' 15.69"W - distance 37.63m - elevation 128ft
51° 31' 08.45" N 0° 07' 16.49"W - distance 31.85m - elevation 133ft
51° 31' 08.99" N 0° 07' 16.14"W - distance 27.84m - elevation 130ft
51° 31' 08.91" N 0° 07' 16.72"W - distance 38.27m - elevation 131ft
51° 31' 09.06" N 0° 07' 16.00"W - distance 25.68m - elevation 129ft
51° 31' 08.46" N 0° 07' 16.47"W - distance 34.36m - elevation 133ft
51° 31' 08.46" N 0° 07' 16.68"W - distance 38.25m - elevation 133ft
51° 31' 09.13" N 0° 07' 15.62"W - distance 23.47m - elevation 128ft

so what’s the point of Sam Taylor-Wood?

2006-03-21T00:29:00.000Z

Last week, before the Interval 2, I went to another Deleuze-related event at the Photographers’ Gallery. Part of Catherine Yass’s seminar series The Other Side of Silence: On Silence, Sound and Filmmaking which investigates issues around Deleuze’s notion of the sound-image. Although neither of those that I’ve attended (the other was AL Rees in conversation with Jayne Parker a couple of weeks back) have really touched on Deleuze much at all. Deleuze’s role in these things seems to be little more than to provide the veneer of a spicy bit of theory on the side, a contextualisation at best. This event’s speaker was the redoubtable Professor David Rodowick, presumably chosen as a bit of a Deleuze expert (having published Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine in 1997), but the great man figured hardly at all in the talk. Neither much did the topic of sound. Rodowick’s presence at Interval 2 has already been noted in this blog. He admitted that this series of London talks (he’s based at Harvard) was an opportunity for a public airing of various chapters of his book The Virtual Life of Film, which will be published some time next year. I did rather cynically think that by attending all of the events I would hear enough to not have to buy the book. Alas I can’t make the third talk so I might have to buy the damn thing, which on reflection might be worth it as Rodowick is taking an interesting, complex and useful approach to developing broad theories around (dreaded phrase) ‘moving image art’ practice.

The theme of Rodowick’s talk, following his book’s theme of “film after photography”, was to do with how film as an analogue medium, in particular 16mm and 35mm, is increasingly being used by artists just at the point where it is being replaced by digital media in the film industry; as film disappears from cinema it appears in the gallery in a digital/electronic era. He made some interesting observations about the use of the comparative landscapes of film in b&w, and the saturated colour digital video in Godard’s 2003 film Eloge d’amour, how film deals very well with time and history, but the bulk of his talk was taken up with the work of Sam Taylor-Wood. I wasn’t the only person present to find his choice of artist slightly perplexing, not least because Taylor-Wood, in her role of court photographer to the rich and famous (any friend of Elton John’s is a friend of a friend of a friend...), her use of Hollywood celebrities and the nature of some of her clients (Selfridges to name but one), make her about as establishment as Prince Charles, the very antithesis of where theoretically interesting contemporary art might come from and throw some light upon the state of contemporary moving image artists. Rodowick himself confessed an ambivalence towards her work but found some interesting processes happening which, apparently on being quizzed about, the artist herself was not aware of. There were a number of aspects of her’s and other artists’ works, both still and moving image based that Rodowick drew on, which pointed to interesting ways of thinking about the moving image in the gallery.

Five Revolutionary Seconds XIII is a 1998 work of Taylor-Woods’s that consists of a large panoramic image and a documentary sound recording of its photo-shoot. One of the two main points that Rodowick made was about the nature of the juxtaposition of the fictional/theatrical images, with the documentary, ‘realistic’ sound . But the more revealing observation is the one that might at first sound like the most mundane: that due to the scale of the piece, the size of the photo, it is not possible to take in the whole scene from one vantage point; time is thereby spatialized and the work relies on the movement of the viewer to produce a narrative moving image, and that this was to reintroduce to photography the strategy of time.

Perhaps if we take the long historical view we can see that it is photography that arrested the representation of movement by its mechanic insistence on the momentary, movement reduced to the split second exposure of the shutter, while the cinema took on the responsibility of the time based representation of movement. If, as Rodowick suggests, the analogue is good at representing time through movement with digital image capture better at representing spatial relationships, then perhaps the introduction, or the reintroduction, of the moving image into the gallery, the traditional location for the ‘static’ image, post-photography, is not surprising. But the history of the representation of movement in art is longer than one might expect.

In Philippe-Alain Michaud’s Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (Zone Books, 2004), we learn that the art historian Warburg had excavated a long history of examples of the representations of movement in the history of art. As a near contemporary of Étienne-Jules Marey he might well have been inclined towards the subject of the representation of movement, and he used associative montage in his ‘mnemosynes’ to construct his time and movement based pictorial theories.

His discovery that many of Botticelli’s paintings showing multiple figures were not so much examples of the same model being used to represent different figures in a group, but a deliberate attempt to depict the figure in motion, is quite revolutionary. See as an example, the 'Three Graces' in the foreground left of the painting here. Warburg's forensics indicate that this reproduces the movement of a single figure dancing. The painting represents a temporal passage through the repetition of a subject in a sequence. It is as though one is looking at successive frames of a film. This suggests that the representation/reproduction of movement existed as a practice at least four centuries before Duchamp’s nude descended. The strategy of time was there centuries before cinema or photography.

Rodowick also talked about the work of Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij who exhibited here in London in the Time Zones show at Tate. De Rijke and de Rooij have a very particular approach to the film medium, their works are static fixed duration film shots of locations which have significance not always obvious from the bare images, such as images of the outskirts of cities like Jakarta, where the socio-historical-political references are very particular to a knowledge of the local context. The artists have strict conditions for exhibition, usually the film will be projected in the gallery space with specific seating and at pre-determined times of the day, with intervals of precise duration between the screenings. So the context and conditions of exhibition are part of the work, the film will never be seen outside of these circumstances.

Contemporary gallery based artists are using ‘moving image’ medium in a way that returns to the pre-history of cinema, before the age of mechanical reproduction, before mainstream cinema, before television, before video even. The very specificity of the location of reception (as with De Rijke and de Rooij), the static image animated by the movement of the viewer (such as Rodowick suggests is the case with Five Revolutionary Seconds XIII) takes us back to the picture house, the Victorian painted panorama, the magic latern show; it certainly has more in common with these earlier manifestations of the image in motion than with any subsequent developments in experimental film and video. In incorporating film media they return to a point where the visual arts were engaged in movement, a process historically arrested by the two poles of cinema and photography.

As irksome as it might be to those of us who have been engaged in ‘the moving image’ as ‘artists’ before or parallel with the recent incorporation of those media into mainstream art practice, as the ‘other’ to the mainstream cinema our practice has inevitably been umbilically linked to it. Now, when cinema as digital media is fragmenting across multiple media spaces, gallery artists use of moving image media can be understood, not simply as cinema (or anti-cinema), but as a return to a pre-cinema when, as Aby Warburg's discoveries suggest, the image in movement was an intrinsic, but subsequently lost, part of visual art practice.

A re-invention of the wheel, or perhaps a return to the horse-drawn carriage it perambulates? This might be the point of Sam Taylor-Wood that David Rodowick has inadvertently uncovered. And doesn’t this provide some succour to an experimental practice? A radical practice may go unacknowledged by the mainstream, but why would a progressive, experimental artform want to be acknowledged as an agent by a conservative orthodoxy anyway?

Deleuzian Delusion and the Enigmatic Cinematic

2006-03-18T23:39:00.000Z

About 15 years ago I became very interested in Gilles Deleuze and bought a copy of A Thousand Plateaus. I still have it. There it is as it is today, battered from wear after all these years. Deleuze and Guattari were all the rage back then, name checked and quoted aplenty throughout the post modern artcrit and artists’ crowds alike. At the time, as a relatively recent arriviste in Australia, steeped in ideas about nomadism, migration and mobility, I found A Thousand Plateaus full of analogous concepts, the rhizome as a metaphor for thought and idea formation, deterritorialization as an almost direct description of the migrant experience, becoming a body without organs in the context of questions of identity and individuality, all chimed with the post-colonial complexity of my Australian situation. My super 8 film Periscope 180° was the one that most directly picked up on these ideas, primarily through the voice over which in part lifts snatches of phrases from A Thousand Plateaus; in fact it quotes from many sources but reworks the references into its own semi-poetic essayistic flow of tenuous unresolved concepts, open and connectable, inconclusive yet evocative and with the suggestion of a profundity, however unfounded.

Just over 11 years since he threw himself out of a window to his death, there seems to be been a definite resurgence of interest in Deleuze’s theories, in particular with regard to cinema and artists’ moving image here in London. A series of seminars at the Photographers’ Gallery, organised by Catherine Yass, is premised on Deleuze’s theories about the relationship of sound to image, particularly how this might be used to elucidate contemporary artists’ work in the moving image.

And for the past two days I have been attending Interval 2, a conference and screening event organised by Steven Eastwood, taking Deleuze’s ideas about how the cinematic must have a ‘shock effect’ on thought and the idea of the irrational interval, a cut between two moving images not motivated by movement or action which allows the brain to pass into the not yet thought. The presenters at the conference were an impressive and quite diverse range of professional international luminaries like David Rodowick and Janet Cardiff, alongside PhD students and artists. I haven’t had time to process the implications of all that I’ve seen and heard but a few particular impressions have formed.

My first impression is that those speakers whose presentations were only tangentially related, or completely unrelated to Deleuze’s theories, were actually the most interesting and developed. Rodowick’s presentation in particular dealt with his ideas about the different ‘cosmogenies’ of the digital and the analogue in the moving image and the implications of the transitional period we find ourselves in right now (this was a chapter from his next book so to save time and blogspace you can look forward to checking it out there!). Janet Cardiff and her partner Georges Bures Miller’s assured presentation of their work, which relies heavily on the relationship of sound to image and geographic situation was, particularly in The Berlin Files, full of irrational intervals, and made no reference whatsoever to Deleuze.

It seems though that Deleuze’s theories are indeed so open that they can be applied to more or less any work. This is due to an emphasis on non-conclusion, an interest in mid-points rather than end-points, his own writing as experimental philosophy evinced a great interest in the creative act, creativity as thinking in action, and makes him all but impossible to pin down: in short producing a very useful and adaptable philosophy.

More related to Deleuze, albeit indirectly via Bergson, who was profoundly influencial on Deleuze, was Firoza Elavia’s presentation on Claire Denis’s film L’Intrus. Elavia used Bergson’s idea of the passage of intuition into intellect (or is it the other way around – no matter I suppose) to identify the processes at work in L’Intrus, that somehow this idea that intuition results in an irrational interval that is equally intellectual was all very well but made for a very dull ‘explication’ of the processes at work in what is a remarkable film actually influenced more by the post-Lacanian subjective metaphysical pyschoanalysis of Jean-Luc Nancy (the film being adapted from one of Nancy’s essays). But of course the point is that there can be a Deleuzian ‘reading’ of pretty much anything. When asked if her readings had actually allowed her to reach an interpretation of the Denis film Elavia had to admit not. But was quick to point out that that was not the point, because Deleuze encourages open readings.

So many years after their publication in the early 80s, Deleuze’s books Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time Image are being used as texts to investigate cinema and artists’ moving images. Perhaps in a time when film (specifically 35mm and 16mm) is becoming used by artists’ reinvention of the cinematic wheel in a gallery context, this might be appropriate. Deleuze’s idea of the irrational interval was prompted by an examination of Godard, and his writings rarely stray far from a cinema which, like Godard, while partially disrupting the codes of cinematic dramatic narrative, relies on the understanding of cinematic semiotic codes as a pre-condition in order to conceive of anything like an irrational (irrational in respect to the self-perpetuated rationality of an ‘illusionistic’ cinematic language) interval as disruptive and worthy of investigation. So the veneer of radicalism relies on a deep conservatism, it is a theory that is ‘normative’, as wide ranging and imaginative as it might be, it has to rely on a ground zero of cinematic expression. This is why Deleuze was not equipped to deal with structural film and other practices that eschew the normalisation of cinematic language: partly because they were outside of his purview, and partly because in some ways they had already done the job of philosophy for him.

The kind of film that best suits Deleuzian cinemantics is the enigmatic, which can use that irrational interval in an indefinable and hence poetic way. This cinema is very attractive and interesting precisely because it is either located in the realm of cinematic codes, or borrows those codes to enhance its sense of an internal, perhaps intuitive, and irrational logic which speaks to a subjective poeticism.

What interests me about the Deleuzian irrational interval is how it speaks to contemporary conditions in rather complex and problematic ways. On one hand it is a deeply western notion: while appearing radical and intellectually challenging, it is deeply imbedded within the canon of western, particularly French, philosophical development. Its re-emergence as theoretical currency comes in a recent history of the retreat of post modern moral relativism and a rise of the clash of civilisations and the new religiosity. The failure of relativism was in its inability to take account of a lack of relativism in other cultural formulations. The Deleuzian seems to suggest that it’s all good with a kind of liberal openness and inconclusiveness, but it shies away from idealism and determinacy, this unfortunately seems to be at odds with the contemporary social and political reality. It seems to date from a (pre-neocon, pre-Taliban) time when the (western) world thought it had finally become secular. So perhaps Deleuzian theory, in its anachronism, ironically offers a kind of intellectual certainty, a reminder of a cinematic golden age when post-enlightenment politics were straight forward and secular.

The idea of cinematic coherence, the Hollywood dream, the unproblematic linear narrative, is an escapist myth, which is precisely why it is so attractive and continues to play a role in lowest common denominator mainstream cinema and television. But this is becoming more rare at all levels of both mediated and everyday contemporary experience (is all everyday experience mediated now? I think mine might be), which is already located in the irrational interval. There is a continuous discontinuity in the urban experience as signs, symbols, sounds, referents, signifiers jumble through the landscape, on the television, on the internet, on the radio, in magazines, on the buses, on your Playstations, Gameboys, mobile phones and iPods, everywhere life is more than simple irrational intervals, it is multiple coexisting and competing moving images. Deleuze may prove a vital, important and illuminating historical theoretical touchstone. But the world has moved on.

Directors Lounge Television

2006-02-28T09:11:00.000Z

The first 3 minutes of Metalogue is now online at Directors Lounge Television.

Directors Lounge

2006-02-22T00:22:00.000Z

Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee, which was called Stalinallee until 1961, is known as “the first Socialist street” on German soil. The 2 kilometres between Strausberger Platz and Frankfurter Tor is considered to be the most monumental 20th Century street development in Germany. In the 1950s the road was widened to 90 metres and seven to nine storey buildings were built in accordance with party instructions in an anti-modernist Stalinist/neo-classical style. The two towers at Frankfurter Tor, designed by Hermann Henselmann, became the street’s symbolic landmarks.

In the faded austere grandeur of what must have once been a shop or expansive lobby on the ground level of the imposing Frankfurter Tor north tower, Directors Lounge screened an impressive 10 day programme of film and video. Impressive partly because, unlike Transmediale, the event receives no funding, none of the organisers or curators receive a Euro in payment and there is no admission charge. The only money to be made is from the bar where a 0.5l bottle of Berliner Pilsner will set you back €2, so I did my best to help contribute towards some income there. Of course it’s not as expansive as Transmediale, neither is it as ambitious. The motivation for Directors Lounge is simple. According to artistic director André Werner, at this time of year most people he knows from outside Berlin are likely to be in town for Berlinale, so it is a good time to put on an event where they can get away from the mad bustle of the festival and relax and watch some films the like of which are unlikely to be seen in Berlinale. There is a strong sense of this being the result of a collective effort by dedicated individuals. We only had two evenings there before having to return to London, but if what I saw samples the overall standard it would have been well worth staying for the entire ten days. There was a fascinating programme of experimental film from Bombay and mixed programmes of works from Germany, UK, US, China and elsewhere. Later in the week there would be screenings of Finnish video art from AV-arkki in Helsinki and Chinese works from Yunnan Arts University, and of course the wonderful Intimate Journeys programme curated by London-based Lynn Loo, featuring In Transit by Ooni Peh. André seemed genuinely and pleasantly surprised at the quality of the work and the willingness of people to contribute. It rekindled in me ideas about putting on screenings in London, thinking that with the right motivation and a good collective will it might be possible to stage something regular. A recurring experience for me in visiting ‘artists’ film and video’ festivals in Europe has been that the majority of work I see never gets screened in London or, as far as I’m aware, the rest of the UK.

My video Metalogue screened on Saturday (11th February) night as part of Klaus W. Eisenlohr’s Urban Research project. The thematic nature of his project gives Klaus the ability to programme works drawn from a range of generic types while all broadly speaking independent, experimental and personal. So in the Reading Surfaces programme Diane Bonder’s If You Lived Here, You'd be Home by Now uses documentary conventions to mis-contextualise images and stories from small town USA, while in On a Slow Boat to China by Sonja Lillebaek Christensen imagines the sad lives of the men she stalks with her camera in a park. Rebecca Baron’s How Little We Know Of Our Neighbours is a documentary about the Mass Observation Movement (interesting to reflect on how the roots of market research are in what was essentially a surrealist project). The programme weaves through a range of approaches to surveillance linking the neo-voyeuristic, the fantastical, the mundane. Notions of urbanity are imagined and constructed, not simply in orthodox terms of cities and spatiality, but also in personal and cultural terms.

Metalogue was imaginatively programmed with the 90 minute I Was Born But by Roddy Bogawa in the Where is Memory? session. A long programme to start at midnight, but people stayed, they stayed and watched, intently. Bogawa is a native Hawaiian, whose rite of passage was the L.A. punk scene. This autobiographical personal voyage recovering the past is compelling. Shoot on super 8 the film reminded me vaguely of Jem Cohen’s work, both aesthetically and with its cultural location in around the music scene, but more directly personal and candid. It seemed to share little in common with Metalogue, but Klaus astutely unpicked the theme of memory and its location as reflected in the programme’s title. Bogawa recovers memory through retracing his adolescence and young adulthood through urban space and music, while Metalogue constructs a meta-memory, as Klaus suggested: “...what happens when memory becomes a database”.

Moving into the Garden

2006-02-19T17:21:00.000Z

“Neo-fascististic” (see last post) may be a little strong, but to take one element of culture and posit it as the only valid development of specific cultural forms presumes a political fait accompli. Simon Penny seemed to be presenting a construct whereby media and technology in art, determined by developments in “consumer security culture”, has reached a point where other media technology based artforms are anachronistic. The proclaimed redundancy of the old paradigm of the ‘passive’ viewer’s reception of a single and materially ‘non-interactive’, most often ‘linear’ artwork, and the new age of the viewer as an integral and physical agent in the production of the artwork, is something of a smokescreen. What it masks is the fact that there is still ultimately an artist figure there making the decisions, the interactor can only work within the parameters programmed by the artist. To me it seems that Penny is still working within modernist paradigms of evolution and enlightenment, he has installed himself as one of the authorities and represents the very latest in the evolutionary development, ironically a very linear way of thinking. This is not an argument against his particular achievements and the particular qualities of his artworks, but against his position as representing the only game in town when it comes to the way to do art now. It is not surprising perhaps that Penny is an Australian, emerging from a country in which technological and cultural development have gone hand in hand for some years: a technocratic determinism informed by government cultural agendas and industry, which ignores or attempts to set the agenda for the ‘evolution’ of what actually grows out of the broadest cultural activities. Of course an ‘interactive’ art practice is one of these activities but other practices, which might equally be considered as having currency, lacking the modish veneer of cutting edge technological advances and not speaking the new regime's language of interactivity (a Holy Grail for approved Australian media arts for some years) became marginalised, starved of funding and critical attention. (Apologies for all the ‘scare quotes’).

So it was refreshing to have Hilary Koob-Sassen around a couple of days earlier to present another way of thinking about things. I wrote about Koob-Sassen’s work a while ago, in the context of a screening at the Whitechapel. In that entry I concentrated on the formalistic aspects of his work, and indeed that was the main context for that screening. However at Transmediale the context changed the way I read it and I was able to more fully appreciate the scope of his project. The video exhibited here was Future Garden Structure.

While the formal elements, the lyric/song format of the text performed by his band The Errorists, the layering of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ images, are particularly structured and resonant in themselves, they are used to elaborate complex multi-layered concepts which counter notions of modernist linear development with an ecological analogy, in this case based on gardening and a microbiological appreciation of the internal workings of the organic (human) animal (which as the song in the video states is “...delightfully unfascististic on the inside...”). I hope I’m doing these concepts justice, but I’m sure Hilary will pop up and correct me if I’m not! In the talk afterwards he spoke of two materialisms, that of modernity and that of gardening. He also suggested that the body is a perfect model for global organisation in that it represents the coexistence of multiple economies with mutual benefits. (In this he was positioning himself as the "contra-nutter" to David Icke. Tim Blake’s video Fear and Control in the same programme gave Icke a platform to deliver a talk about his extraordinarily paranoid mother of all conspiracy theories which suggests that everything in the world is, and has always been, controlled by an Illuminati, a secret society behind the activities of the church and most western governments and can be held responsible for the assassination of every free spirit from Jesus Christ to Princess Diana...). Koob-Sassen talked of elaboration rather than evolution and of the possibility of super-humanity; his ideas both in person and on-screen, while apparently eccentric, expressed with breathless enthusiasm and parenthetic complexity, suggest a refreshingly new and undeterministic model for cultural and political organisation and make the self-reflexive modernism of the techno-interactive crew appear like anachronisms.

In a later conference panel session Mistakology Norman White spoke of how increased function in terms of computers does not necessarily lead to more usefulness, how leading edge technology doesn’t lead to a qualitative increase in the work and that there is more opportunity in experiments that go wrong. At one point a questioner asked him if this wasn't "counter-intuitive" when related to computer programming. What a puzzling question. What could be more intuitive than accepting the 'hidden intention' of a mistake when working in an experimental practice? Such a relaxed and accommodating approach to the relationship between art production and media technologies, fits well within a future garden analogy in which political and cultural development is based on growth, coexistence and interdependency and less on dogma, competition and paranoia. Or as Hilary Koob-Sassen poetically puts it:

THE PARACULTURE seeks proposals for THE TRELLIS ECONOMIES: Actual structures in the MATERIALISM OF MODERNITY which will steer the elaboration of Modernity’s inherent (apocalyptic) eschatology, towards a very specific (fruiting) end-point: towards the production of an interior structure-a TRELLIS- on which the MATERIALISM OF GARDENING can manifest THE WORLD ORGAN ECONOMIES. (from the text on the “mouse coffin” box Koob-Sassen gave to the audience, which formed a multi-dimensional polemic which I think might be titled ‘Super Humanity in the World Organ Economies’)

In Berlin at Transmediale

2006-02-16T23:49:00.000Z

I'm starting to gather together impressions and notes from my recent trip to Berlin. The first stop was a crowded Transmediale. Inevitably my view of such an extensive event was partial and the impressions and ideas form a subjective viewpoint. It is interesting though to trace through connections and resonances and riff on their implications. The umbrella theme for Transmediale this year was ‘Reality Addicts’. Reality addicts we are told, among other things

love reality... culture...music... machines, images, words and people... are dependent on manifold realities... enjoy paradoxes... celebrate technical defects... play with the almost possible... subvert the technological paradigm...

as a way of exploring “...how art and society are changing under the influence of media and technology which become more dominant in our everyday lives” Transmediale is no longer concerned with ‘media art’ but ‘art and digital culture’. There’s a fine distinction in there perhaps, but with such an ostensibly wide brief it is probably just as well that the festival didn’t attempt too narrow definitions. The theme becomes a non-theme or an ante-/post- theme: we might pick on parallel practices or contradictory positions, divergence and convergence, it’s all good, it seems, because it’s all ‘real’. This at least is a way of acknowledging that media art, digital culture, call it what you will, has inevitably become a wide field, the only field perhaps in contemporary art that ‘post-medium’ has a specific range of common concerns and media technology (often, but not necessarily, specifically or identifiably digital) but the widest variety of practices and theories.

By upping the 'reality' quotient Transmediale largely dispensed with the old digital media occasional obsessions with the virtual, the immanent – these seem to have become encouragingly unfashionable - and engaged more with immediacy, direct experience and material culture. The centrepiece Smile Machines installation exhibition, while patchy, was nonetheless interesting and entertaining, because of course Reality Addicts also like a laugh! The exhibition included a range of works intended to simultaneously raise a smile through its playfulness and “...expose the power of the media by derision and critique” (Smile Machines curator Anne-Marie Duguet) and traced uses of technology from video to the sculptural to the interactive, from Nam June Paik’s TV Rodin, through Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation Wonder Woman, Michael Snow’s remake of his eighties film So is This as the three monitor tri-lingual, That / Cela / Dat to more contemporary works such as Christian Moller’s Cheese and Jodi’s Max Payne Cheats Only Gallery.

The Smile Machines exhibition suggested a diversity of coexisting regimes of engagement and interaction but some of the concepts artists involved suggested something less playful lurking beneath the work. The Media Addicts 1 conference panel suggested that it would discuss how media transforms reality. Jordan Crandall spoke of the ‘state of readiness’, the affect, the vibe between bodies that can be sensed in a room; that the power of media subsists in the transmission of effects, like music, preconsciously rather than rationally through perceivable meaning, we are suspended in a ‘what will we do next’ state, with a disposition to act in the potentiality of states, like anxiety. In spite of purporting to describe a new state, it seemed all very abstract in a vaguely post-Deleuzian way, suggesting a reductive notion of an history-less audience, not influenced by previous encounters with media artefacts, or that their consciousness, awareness and embodied memory gives itself up to some kind of ineffable cognition suspending immanence: "...we are talking about incorporealization not representation. Implication, not objectivity. Bodily intensities, not linguistic mediation. Motivating power, not meaning or rational logic."

Simon Penny was exclusively concerned with modes of machine presentation and he outlined an evolutionary trajectory through four stages; starting with media works with a linear script, then computer based interactive works that required simple dynamic behaviour such as keystrokes or mouse clicks, then real-time sensory data through interactive behaviour of the user and a machine in an environment (such as his Petit Mal piece in Smile Machines). He spoke of how the computer automotive model rejects ‘passive perception’, and represents a fundamentally different neurological learning process and traced the relationship between ‘preconscious’ learning reactions on a sliding scale from physical athletic training, simulated military training, gaming and interactive art. He described the nightmare scenario where computer gaming was a common activity among the perpetrators of mass shootings in US high schools, where the intended victim was perhaps a girlfriend or teacher but the shooter just kept on shooting everyone in their sight. This he suggested was due to conditioned behaviour, abstract and repetitive, learned from the shoot ‘em up computer games where you don’t stop shooting until all the opponents are dead. He also related this to the processes used in military training. This is behaviour shaped in immersive situations transferred to the real world. His suggestion that this is abstracted and pre-conscious is somewhat undermined by the specifity of the almost exact correlation between the artificial and real situations. However, give him the benefit of the doubt on this one for now.

Penny goes on to suggest that interactive art works operate in the same way, relying on a learned response to environmental stimuli. Because the ‘user’ is ‘trained’ through interaction which results in a ‘feedback loop’ between the user and artwork, this media work is ‘more powerful’, and conventional critiques of representation is rendered inadequate. This of course is the sort of work he is doing thus implicitly placing him at a higher stage of evolution (ironically the older Petit Mal work was quite cute and clunky, presumably because it represented an earlier evolutionary stage of artificial life). Such post-Darwinistic technological determinism left me feeling rather depressed, not least because of the blinkeredness of the theory and also because of the apparent lack of a critical distance. It was as though Penny had decided that this was the way to make art because it represented the way things were going in terms of human/machine relations. When presented with the concern that wasn’t it a little worrying that he was making works which at best mimicked, or worse extended these practices, he seemed unable to reflect on the implications of the effect of the works on the viewer/user.

Apart from reservations about basing a media art practice around ideas of power and behavioural manipulation deliberately extending processes that have the potential to turn people into serial killers, I had serious doubts about Penny’s lazy assertion that the conventional linear time-based media experience is passive. In Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, Warren Neidich develops a biological theory of perception, which suggests that the most basic cognition operates at a neural level, the human brain is never passive but relies on constant stimulation to learn and to construct its own reality from cinematic images. Neidich’s ideas are necessarily a theory in progress, suggesting how things might happen based on ongoing neurological research. It shares with the Andersons' cognitive theory (discussed a while ago over on Brut Smog the Andersons' being particularly opposed to the implicit passivity of the 'persistence of vision' theory), the idea that the perception of moving images is far from a passive experience, but engages the viewer in the active construction of images. Neidich suggests that this manifests itself as physical changes at the neurological level as the brain learns and adapts, constructing its perception of reality. Apart from refuting the ‘passive viewer’ notion, in some ways this, suggests that Penny’s behavioural practice may be less ‘powerful’ than he claims: in Neidich’s formulations the cinematic is often experienced as more ‘real’ than lived experience as it is a more active and heightened cognitive experience. But worse is the implicit intention of Penny’s practice. While we are still discovering exactly how the brain perceives, retrospectively as it were in the case of film and cinema, why would anybody want to produce artworks that explicitly and deliberately work with processes which, by his own admission, have the (proven?) potential to effectively brainwash the user into dangerous acts.

I needed to find a way away from such reductive neo-fascististic control freakery. I found it in the garden....

Mistaken Human Babelfish

2006-02-06T10:35:00.000Z

I am in Berlin spending time at transmediale.06 which has been an interesting mix of fascination, frustration and consternation. But more of that when I'm back in London and have had time to reflect on and process my impressions.

Yesterday we went to one of the conference panels, 'Mistakology', which promised to examine the mistakes and accidents built in to technology, taking the suggestion that "...technical dysfunction is 'repressed' by modern society..." as its starting point. The Canadian artist Norman White has made interactive and computer-based pieces for decades, and came up with some interesting and cautionary reflections on the uses of the latest technology, but more of him in a later post. Claus Pias's talk was in German. I could have had simultaneous translation but, having just the day before had my pocket almost picked by a guy on the S Bahn (he wasn't successful and I fear his career as a fingersmith might prove not too fruitful as I could feel the tugging on my pocket), I was feeling reluctant to leave my passport with the transmediale garderobe as deposit for the radio headphone device. So, instead I made my own translation based on my feebly non-existent German and guessing at what the words might mean from their sounds.

As though translated by a human version of Babelfish in honour of all the bizarre and sometimes poetic results of mistaken online translation, here is an extract from my translation of Herr Pias's talk:

Overfull messing German light, vilest kind of perfection, habitats come after plus minus. Writer the error. They mashed up contradiction and uncertainty. Concept overcomes mistakes.

Forever night.

Rolling over performance competence, the lot of decanters is a mathematical definition. Transcend the lime shine stump? I can't. Unfasten three wagons. Cybernetic technical umbrellas.

The night light arises.

Understanding the crumbling dimension as text for the conservatorium. Unfastening the technical hat, it is not a cider economy.

Tonight Beamerlooper makes a brief appearence at Club Transmediale as part of the looppool project.

"Goodbye Mr Video"

2006-01-30T18:55:00.000Z

from dongA.com (requires Windows Media Player)

Why I Became a Videomaker

2006-01-20T22:42:00.000Z

I found this photograph among the batch of slides mentioned in the entry below; it too was taken some time in late 1979/early 1980. It is an appropriately grey but strangely evocative and almost exotic reminder of the Medway Towns of the late '70s/early '80s, and it bears a remarkable similarity to some work I am doing at the moment. It also played a small role in my becoming a videomaker. If I recall correctly this was part of a slide/sound piece I made with one of those devices that would dissolve between two carousel slide projectors controlled by an audio cassette tape. I made the piece using David Jackman's 'Slow Music' as a soundtrack. I made a large painting, not unlike the one in the last entry but more abstract, leaving a white rectangle in the bottom right hand corner onto which to project the slides. When I showed this to my tutor at the time Paul Richards, his response was that the slide/sound piece was good but I should lose the painting. Jackman's music was, as its title unambiguously suggests, indeed slow, and the dissolves between the images were very long. I later shot the slide/sound piece onto black and white video, shooting off the screen using a low contrast (as they all were then) video camera and a half inch tape Sony videorecorder in the Maidstone Art College video studio. That was my last ever painting and my first ever video.

Why I Never Became a Painter

2006-01-20T22:22:00.000Z

While going through some old slides I found this one of a painting I made while on Foundation in 1979/80.

John Latham (1921-2006)

2006-01-07T19:28:00.000Z

God is Great, John Latham, 1991

"Art is not trusted by society to do anything, and in this distrust the public aligns with common sense."
- from 'Report of a Surveyor', John Latham, Edition Hangsjörg Myor, Stuttgart, London, 1984

"'God is Great' 1991, a work in the Tate Collection by John Latham, which features the Bible, the Koran and the Talmud, was to have been included in this exhibition. However, having sought wide-ranging advice, Tate felt that to exhibit the work in the current climate would be inappropriate. The artist regrets this decision."
- notice displayed at the 'John Latham in Focus' exhibition, Tate Britain, London, 2005 – 2006.

A Conversation with John Latham

Videoblogging: Ten Years After

2005-12-17T02:07:00.000Z

I’ve moved the videos over to their own weblog Direct Language, so in keeping with current trends I now have what is known as a videoblog! The 'videoblog' phenomenon is interesting, but of course using the web as video exhibition space is nothing new and many projects have also used a serial form. It is now more than ten years since Zoe Beloff made her Beyond online QuickTime video serial and Lev Manovich’s Little Movies project predates that:

The project was begun in 1994 when the World Wide Web was just beginning to gain mass exposure. From the beginning, my intention was to create cinema for the Web. I wanted to turn the network limitations into a new aesthetic. Is it possible to create films with the resolution of 1 pixel? Is it possible to have a meaningful and an emotional experience under 1 MB in size?

Of course there have been countless other online video projects since.

I have been involved with web-based video projects over the years, but in my own work have mostly used the web to host short extracts as previews of digital video works intended for exhibition as full screen, full motion video, usually in festivals and screenings in gallery or cinema spaces.

The videoblog moves away from the practice of serial presentation that we might be used to with artists’ work as it marks a move for online video into a different and wider milieu. Many of the factors determining conditions for online video have of course been technical: a lack of bandwidth and server space requirements among the most common. Manovich recognised the aesthetic implications of these limitation and Beloff’s movies were short and black & white, making for small file sizes, but in spite of this back in 1995 it was still a painfully slow process to actually see them over a 14kbps dial-up link.

The convergence of a number of factors now makes online video exhibition accessible to a larger number of people. These include a progressive increase in the availability of consumer level computers with video production software, processor and memory capabilities - standard now in the cheapest Macs - and the increase in cheaply available bandwidth through developments in ADSL broadband technology rolled out at a consumer level. Another crucial factor is the recent Internet Archive decision to open the archive up to anyone who wants to deposit digital media via Ourmedia, apparently without any limits placed on available storage space. So one no longer needs to worry about having access to enough server space (which in itself has been getting cheaper) through commercial hosting or having access to an education institution's server to store the video files.

The phenomenon that is the ‘blog’, which has given countless individuals the possibility of scattering their smallest thoughts, writ larger, across cyberspace, has created a new ‘socio-cultural’ space, which has evolved the photoblog and now the videoblog. The result is the potential for what might be tentatively characterised as a ‘democratisation’ of online video exhibition. (I’m not comfortable with this word ‘democratisation’, as it suggests that ‘democracy’ itself is some kind of naturalised ideal, so it is used here slightly ironically. Wider public access to the possibility of online video is more like the notion of free expression, which is problematic for other reasons mostly as it is so often used as a positive example of the ‘freedom’ associated with western democratic capitalism. Of course I am also taking advantage of these laissez-faire conditions!)

The extension of blogging into video gives birth to a video practice that inherits its processes and impetus from the personal diaristic/journalistic nature of the blog. Taken online this opens up the potential for a sort of freely exhibited wide ranging personal cinema: a form that has previously been the domain of the artist film or video maker. In committing to the interesting challenge of the potential for producing regular small videos for a video blog, this is a context that I am now also working in.

However it has taken years to reach the point where there is this level of potential accessibilty: at least ten years. In the world of ‘exponential’ increases in technological developments where we are borne along in the slipstream of ‘Wired’ digital optimism and cyber evangelism, rather than applaud how progressive and wonderful it is to be living in this egalitarian internet utopia, I am, rather, simply a little surprised that it’s taken so long to get here.

Cucinema

2005-12-06T00:51:00.000Z

At La Rencontres des Labos, Cinema Nova, Brussels, Sunday 4th December. During the day film was drawn, scratched and Letrasetted on, food was cooked, sound was made, spontaneous eruptions of chanting and beating on pots and pans occured. At the end of the day 100 pasta meals were served and the film was projected. Marvellous.

On Location 2

2005-12-02T00:13:00.000Z

In the last entry we started in Eastern Europe, specifically Prague, and eventually arrived, more or less, back in London. Today we start in Eastern Europe again, this time in Plock, in Poland. Plock was the birthplace of Stefan Themerson who along with his wife Franciszka Themerson was a central figure in the Polish avant-garde film scene of the 1930s. The Themersons founded the Polish Filmmakers Co-op and a film journal ‘f.a’ as well as making five films that experimented with the improvisational photographic possibility of light and shadow, influenced in part by Man Ray’s ‘Rayogram’ photogram technique. They came to live in London in 1942 where they made two further films ‘Calling Mr Smith’ (1943), an anti-war film that denounced the Nazi destruction of Polish culture, and ‘The Eye and the Ear’ (1944-45) a light play analogous abstract interpretation of four pieces of music by Karol Szymanowski. The Themersons spent the rest of their lives in London where they died in 1988. Their films are enchanting, playfully avant-garde and poetic, and it’s no surprise to discover that they were active in other media and disciplines. Franciszka was an inspired and skillful illustrator, Stefan a writer of poetry, novels and philosophy. They also ran a publishing house, the Gaberbocchus Press. For more on the Themersons see the Themerson Archive.

While I was familiar with their film work and vaguely aware of their publishing, writing and other activities, it wasn’t until recently that I actually read any of Stefan Themerson’s writings. Specifically his philosophical essays ‘Logic, Labels and Flesh’ (Gaberbocchus Press, 1974) and his novel ‘Bayamus’ (1945). The novel impressed me partly for an affinity it shared with the Oulipo group of writers (which includes the likes of Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Harry Matthews and Italo Calvino) and their aesthetic mentor Albert Jarry, inventor of Pataphysics a ‘science’ that attempts to describe a world beyond the metaphysical in a parallel universes. I recognised in Themerson the same delight in the play of language and the absurd. I also discovered that Gaberbocchus Press were the first publishers of the English translation of 'Ubu Roi' Jarry’s 1896 play, which is widely acknowledged as a precurser to the dada and surrealist movements.

One particular concept, described in both ‘Logic, Labels and Flesh’ and ‘Bayamus’, excited my interest. In the former it is presented as a revolutionary literary form, in the latter, its first incarnation, within the context of a fictional narrative in which Bayamus discovers Semantic Poetry. The innovation of Semantic Poetry is to dismantle the assumptions and over-simplifications contained within nouns in poetry, in essence to remove the ambiguity of the language of poetry by replacing the ‘beauty’ of poetic language with the ‘truth’ of definition. This may have been influenced by two particular facts of Themerson’s situation: that ‘Bayamus’ was his first novel written in English, not his native tongue, and that he had recently left a country devastated by a dictator who relied upon the rhetorical power of language as an orator to inspire and mobilise nationalistic emotions to genocidal ends. Perhaps it is no wonder that Themerson developed a suspicion of the ambiguities of the use of language and dreamed a cure. Semantic Poetry may have sought to clarify and codify the meaning of poetry, however it didn’t necessarily make it more easily understandable. Each noun, for example, had to be written in a form that spelled out what amounts to a dictionary definition. So, for example, the childrens’ poem ‘Taffy was a Welshman’ whose first four lines are:

“Taffy was a Welshman,
Taffy was a thief,
Taffy came to my house
and stole a leg of beef.”

translates as:

“Taffy was a male native of Wales
Taffy was a person who practised seizing the property of another unlawfully & appropriated it to his own use and purpose,
Taffy came to the structure of various materials
having walls
roof
door
& windows to give light and air
he came to that structure which was a dwelling for me
And there he appropriated to his own use
one of the limbs of the dead body of an ox
prepared and sold by a butcher.”

...and so on. It is almost impossible to render in the basic html of a blog, but Themerson also set these translations in typographical form intended to make it possible to read the complexity of their accuracy and their lack of ambiguity. In ‘Bayamus’ there are also SP translations of Chinese Poems, Russian Ballads and passages of the Bible.

I’ve always been interested in language and aesthetic forms that diverge from the colouration of poetic language, moving away from the easy option of the romantic, the expressive, the spectacular, the comfortably aesthetic. Interested more in the difficult poetics of minimalism, or the utilitarianism of concrete poetry. I suppose this has links to conceptualism, dating back (like everything) through Marcel Duchamp, his Readymades and love of functional graphics. I am also drawn to the work of Richard Long and the way his ‘landscapes’ couldn’t be more different to the Romantic Tradition in aesthetic form, or the work of Mel Bochner, which consists of the measurements of the gallery space, on the walls of the space itself. There are numerous examples of 20th Century conceptualism and the literalness of these artists is on one hand a recognition of the ordinariness, of the everyday, of the quotidian, but in a paradoxical way they also draw attention to an aesthetics of anti-aesthetics, conferring the idea that there is an inherent, albeit difficult to apprehend, poetical quality in the mundane. The liberation of Themerson’s Semantic Poetry is that it has the potential to undermine that latent extraordinariness, in a sense it says that it is more difficult to give an accurate description than it is to provide an ambiguous poetic sensation.

I had previously attempted to introduce the idea of a non-poetic language in a ‘poetic’ or ‘lyrical’ context in a song description of a particular place. This song forms part of a larger project, still in progress, which attempts to describe a particular place, in a number of ways, using forms that are not usually considered ‘aesthetic’. For example using the language of a lease, or a statutory legal notice, or a straight forward recitation of measurement, to describe the place; and in some way to attempt the visual equivalent of those verbal forms. This has proved to be a problematic proposition because of course the work of much of 20th Century art has been to ensure that most language forms (and I will include visual language in this), have achieved a level of poetic resonance when the form is used in an ‘art context’.

The place that I was trying to describe in the song is St Helier Estate, a London County Council estate, on the south western edge of Greater London, built between the wars to re-house the poorer and slum-dwelling residents of inner London. My grandparents on both sides of my family were among the first tenants of the estate and I was born there. In spite of its socially neo-utopian original intentions, it is probably no surprise to report that it is the most ordinary, everyday and unglamorous places one could imagine. But it is not without its own charm and inevitably has a nostalgic draw for someone like myself who has been away from ‘home’ for a very long time. Ironic too that the only place that I can with some justification call ‘home’ is a colony of migrants from the great inner-city diaspora (my grandparents thought they were moving to some Elysium, some rural idyll), refugees from inter-war poverty and the result of a social experiment and of course none of the living members of my family remain there.

The song took the form of an old English folk song ‘The Green Grass Grows All Around’ which has a kind of zoom-out from a macro image as the basis of the lyric. Like all good folk songs it has been reproduced in a variety of versions, one was in the film ‘Wickerman’, but the main narrative goes along the lines of “...the bird was on the twig, the twig was on the branch, the branch was on the tree, the tree was in a copse...” etc through to “... and the green grass grew all around”. I was struck by the literalness of the language and the way it could be grafted onto a description of a contemporary housing estate, established in the late 1920s, built on what was previously light agricultural land. The fact that St Helier Estate is built in a configuration that centres upon a large traffic roundabout at Rose Hill seemed to make this spiralling/zooming out of the lyric all the more appropriate.

"...and the yard is by the hedge
and the hedge by the pavement
and the pavement by the grass
and the grass is on the verge
and the verge becomes the gutter
and the gutter’s in the street

the street it has a name
the name’s on the estate

and all the names meet at an enormous roundabout..."

The song I recorded ‘Aroundabout’ was released on Storm Bugs's ‘comeback’ EP record ‘Bugs Are Back’.

A few weeks ago I reworked the lyrics of 'Aroundabout' along the lines of a Semantic Poetry translation, entered on this blog as South Circular.

On Location 1

2005-11-28T22:21:00.000Z

image from 'Image Description' by Martin Blazicek

Martin Blazicek brought a collection of films from Prague to last week’s Lux Salon (Martin Blazicek & Recent Works from Prague, Lux Salon, 23rd November 2005), not all necessarily Czech films but works by filmmakers who have spent some time in the city.

The first film ‘Screen Hatching’ (5 mins, 2005, silent, colour, 16mm, Czech Republic) is by Ondrej Vavrecka, a student of Australian artist Marcus Bergner who spent a year teaching at the FAMU film school in Prague. ‘Screen Hatching’, Blazicek explained, is a not very good translation of the Czech, ‘priming’ or ‘preparation’ might be better words suggesting as they do, the preparation of a canvas prior to painting. The screen in question is not so much literally the area of fabric on which projection is to be focused, as it is the conceptual screen that ‘contains’ the image. Vavrecka prepared for the screen by determining camera movements in advance so that each frame is a single camera movement: up, down, left, right. The programme notes tell us that the film was then shot during a walk around the small village of Lidice that was completely destroyed by the Nazi army during the war. Through the fast colour fields of the blurs it is possible to read the fleeting images of fields, sky, trees, building, the sensation of movement is simultaneously and paradoxically discombobulating and energising.

The rigour and energy of the ‘Screen Hatching’ (‘Priming’/’Preparation’) makes it a fine example of structuralism, as well as an interesting impressionistic landscape film. While its processes have more than a passing relationship to the concerns of Michael Snow’s ‘Back and Forth’ and 'La Region Centrale', it also reminded me of the paradoxical nature of the structuralist project as it was manifested in the London Filmmakers’ Co-op in the 70s, particularly in terms of its relationship with landscape.

In so many films from the height of the structuralist period there was an intentionally problematic relationship with notions of representation and reproduction of location and spatiality. Many of these films, such as those by Chris Welsby, David Parsons, John Blake, Malcolm Le Grice, et al, were theorised in terms of the structuralist project by Peter Gidal. His theories are well documented and don’t need going into in great detail here, but much of them are spent engaged with the issue of ‘problematising’ the ‘pro-filmic’ (the subject or object in front of the camera) and its relationship to the viewer, duration, shape, of the film, the viewing experience, an analysis of just about everything to do with the universal context of viewing of the film, except, one sometimes suspects, the actual external reality of the thing in itself photographed – which is of course central to the problem anyway as it exists only as a representation, and representation is problematic... Of course there are good reasons for serious consideration of the ‘problem’ of photographic representation in moving images, something that Gidal might place within the realm of the “artifice and ideology of meaning” (see his book ‘Materialist Film’, 1989, for much, much more of this). But with Gidal one suspects that he was equally fetishising the meaning of representation by problematising it. I was in attendance at the premiere screening of his most recent film at the RCA a few years ago and in the ten minute parenthetical sentence that it took Gidal to introduce the film, one thing he insisted upon was that the location where the film was shot was inconsequential. The film is called ‘Volcano’ (25mins, 2003, colour, 16mm, UK) and in sweeping, rather lovely, flowing fluid landscape snatches, we do indeed catch glimpses of an impressive looking geophysical structure that does indeed closely resemble what I imagine a volcano might look like had I ever been in sight of one in the real world (and continually moved my head and occasionally closed my eyes for a couple of minutes at a time). But why this flippant reluctance to identify the place? I suspect for fear that by locating it geographically the attention goes back to the pro-filmic, the viewer might decide that here is an object worthy of attention, as much as perhaps considerations of camera movement and representation/reproduction of the place itself. Of course not all of those of a structuralist inclination had such anxieties and many such as Welsby, William Raban and more recently structuralist influenced filmmakers like Patrick Keiller or John Smith seemed to be at home with the idea of location, identifying, or at least acknowledging it as more than just a prop to work out some structuralist phenomenological puzzle.

Recent theoretical studies have observed how representations and experiences of space and location have evolved through the developments of 20th Century media forms. In the book ‘Warped Space’ Anthony Vidler considers these in terms of psychological space, agoraphobia, claustrophobia and so on whereas Mitchell Schwartzer in ‘Zoomscape’ considers how camera technologies have altered how we perceive architecture and location. As interesting as these might be from their positions on the Western European/North American cultural axis they are in danger of falling into the trap of ignoring situatedness itself, including their own. Or at least making the assumption that the mediatedness of perception of place is a common globalised experience.

One might well imagine that in a part of the world where place, names, nationalities, ethnicities are contested, specificities such as names of places, resonances of place and significance might be considered a lot more keenly. These Prague-related films are very much situated and locational in scope. ‘The Threshold of Transcience’ (13 mins, 2004, sound, b&w, 16mm to DVD, Hungary) by Hungarian Gyula Nemes, documents three years of life on the bank of the Kopaszi Dam prior to its demolition. It is more an intuitive kind of documentary as it traces the seasonal rites of passage of a small lakeside community, the weather worn inhabitants with their dogs, cats, kids, houseboats, chopping logs, breaking ice, drinking big mugs of tea, and as the years pass we arrive at the demolition of these rudimentary dwellings. The soundtrack throughout is a recording of a travelling brass band rehearsing trying to play the Egmont Overture; its faltering attempts at a fanfare become a melancholic accompaniment to the demolition.

One of Martin Blazicek’s films is interesting in terms of relation to location. ‘Image Description’ (11 mins, 2003, sound, b&w, 16mm to DVD, Czech Rep) consists of the voices of 7 people answering questions about the way they get oriented in a city. Answering variously in Lithuanian, Czech, English, Russian, Portugese and French they describe urban areas. Blazicek describes the soundtrack as a “linguists’ operette” as the music follows the rhythm of the different languages, while the images are dark, urban, with maps, tower blocks, pedestrian street scenes, subway steps, all located in the everyday experience of living in a city. The sense of the situatedness of the respondents to the questions, heightened by their different languages, suggests a differentiation of experience, one that hints at universality while it resists globalisation and privileges specificity. Blazicek’s film is a great example of how one can approach the question of relationship with place. With its variety of languages, presented untranslated, it reminded me a little of Lisle Ponger’s ‘déjà vu’ (1999) where the clichés of far away tropical exotic places in holiday home movies are set against the untranslated observations of holiday makers.

Blazicek and Ponger have found particular answers to a question that I have often used to frame processes I’ve used in my work. That is how can one make work that explores and interrogates notions of location or place, using forms and processes driven by the media one is working in, which develops new syntaxes in that medium rather than slipping into generic forms? An example of this is in my ‘The Defenestrascope’, where an old Norfolk folk song ‘Go from my Window’ provides a lyrical reference and a musical structure within which to frame the idea of the view of cities and towns from towers. This is done in a somewhat eccentric way; it is as much whimsical and opportunistic as it is following a specific process of enquiry. It doesn’t, however, play on clichéd notions of the folksong, rather to embed it within the conception and processes of the piece, providing structure as well as semantic resonance. Of course the lynch-pin of much post-modern practice is to play (often knowingly or ironically to quote, to appropriate) with generic forms, and there is a danger in this of making a cliché of a cliché of a cliché, or to layer on the irony where there could be a more intrinsic formal relationships.

British filmmakers working in a post structuralist film practice have often applied a post-modern approach to structuralist stylisations. I am thinking particularly of the aforementioned John Smith and Patrick Keiller. Both have incorporated a highly formalised visual style, Smith’s frame is often ‘structuralist’ in composition and editing style, Keiller’s is more like conventionally composed landscape photography, both often rely on static locked-off shots. Both also make much use of voice-over, where Keiller’s redolent with slightly theatrical, ‘voice of authority’ that wouldn’t sound out of place in a television documentary, and Smith’s like a dry raconteur in a pub conversation. In both filmmakers’ work these have become stylistic devices, formal conceits that identify the makers of the film more than they are strategically formal.

In an urban milieu where relationships with place and situations is already highly mediated, and much art practice is (still) often a kind of mediation of mediation, I am interested in work that explores aspects of a relationship with space, with place, urban and rural, built and ‘natural’, movement and media, where the formal qualities of the work is integral yet the work is not just formalist, where the structure of the work has a direct relationship with what it is structuring, but is not just structuralist. I probably haven’t, and may never, achieve this in my own work. Videos such as ‘Local Authority’ and its recent update ‘ex-Local Authority’, ‘Metalogue’ and the above mentioned ‘The Defenestrascope’ embody some of these qualities. A video project that I am developing at the moment is another kind of attempt at doing this. But more of that later.

Double Lunar Trouble

2005-11-23T00:27:00.000Z

Double Lunar Trouble
Whitechapel Gallery 22nd November 2005

works shown:
An Idea For a Universal Trajectory in the Manner of a Proposal for 12 German Popsongs (21 mins, 2004)
Paraculture/Future Garden Structure (13 mins, 2005)
by Hilary Koob-Sassen

Rigadoon (5 mins, 2005)
Down There (4 mins, 2005)
Version (5 mins, 2005)
Sun D-e-a-t-h (2 mins, 2004)
Carousel (2 mins, 2005)
by Ben Callaway

One of the problems of being immersed in the history of experimental film and video is that when one sees new works apparently revisiting certain earlier practices and processes one can’t help but making comparisons. This was the case this evening at this Whitechapel screening of two young video artists’ work. It was not helped by the introduction by the curator (Stuart Comer from Tate Modern) in which he talked about us entering a ‘post-Documenta’ stage of artists’ film and video, where people are eschewing the more austere ‘documentary’ straight-to-camera approach in favour of something more ‘materialistic’, engaging more with the technology of video, in a digital age. What he actually does seem to have done is to fall into the curator’s trap of assuming that we live through linear phases of practices rather than in a multi-level culture that supports a number of quite different co-existing and overlapping modes. So it is convenient for him to overlook, or even be ignorant of, say the digital abstract work that has centred around, but not exclusively to, Vienna over the past ten or so years, in which sumptuous abstraction explores the properties, mutability and possibilities of digital information in glitchy, scratchy, colourful works such as that of ReMi, or Billy Roisz, n:ja, etc. Of course it is in the interest of the tastemakers and gatekeepers of these large art institutions to want to simplify and flatten recent history and contemporary epochs into a linear progression. It makes things easy to deal with and to make important sounding pronouncements about and to cash in on modishness. But of course these people don’t live in the real world where things are messy, complicated and difficult.

‘Post-Documenta’ or not, Comer did make some interesting observations about the work, its engagement with excess, its Baroque qualities. And back to my problem of the anxiety of influence I couldn’t help thinking of Scratch Video, Jürgen Reble and even David Larcher’s video works. Why was this? Because these works by Ben Callaway and Hilary Koob-Sassen have in common a reworking of televisual material that accentuates the particular aesthetic qualities peculiar to the medium. Like in Larcher I saw extremes of excess in the very electronic qualities, like Reble a hallucinogenic quality in the temporal and textural manipulation of found material, and like scratch, images clearly sourced from broadcast video. In the Q&A after the screening passing mention was made of these or equally similar connections and neither of these two sweet young men knew what anyone was talking about. In spite of what some conservatives may think this doesn’t display a general ignorance, they were not lacking insight, they were extremely articulate and capable of situating their works in a cultural philosophical historical context, it’s just that that context didn’t happen to include the history of video art. And why on Earth should it?

For this is remarkable work indeed. Individual and distinctive, yet engaged with the specificities of immediate context and references. Hilary Koob-Sassen’s work is the more complex, and in many ways the more Baroque. It consists of material taken from current affairs, news, natural history and TV documentaries which is mixed in such a flowing multi layered collage it’s often hard to identify precise sources. What we do see is a complex process of association often overlaid with a kind of faux evangelical, post-post-Marxist, post-post-structuralist ostensible critique often sung to a semi hip-hop-esque cello accompaniment. Think Laurie Anderson on fast drugs jamming with an operatic Eminem and a string quartet. Then slowed down. Koob-Sassens doesn’t so much free-associate as collect and reshuffle with eight arms simultaneously. He used the phrase ‘syntax octopus’ which describes the process quite well. The whole thing is allegorical. He writes that he is “...interested to examine a phenomenon which manifests the law of ‘multiple instances’, in experimenting to name the trajectory of an individual culture, and also the aggregate of cultures”. So we see some images that are familiar from the war on television: Condy is there, so are the Twin Towers being pierced by planes, but these are along several shifting axes of images and affects, they can’t be pinned down to easy associations, and we see documentary images of organisms and submarine activity, biotechnology, globalisation, environmental footage in this co-existence of conflicting propaganda which forms a kind of biomorphic criticism. Comer in his introduction mentioned that in Slavoj Zizek’s eschatology most people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. This is the sort of imaginative state that the complex systems of Koob-Sassen’s work inhabits and recreates.

Ben Callaway’s work, while sharing the source material of televisual media, is all the more amorphous and abstract and atmospheric in a resonant ambient way. But also toxic and occasionally scary. He will take a short fragment of a sequence, zoom right in and slow it right down. It becomes like a tenebrous Ketamine video waltz, ripe with video noise, the fracture lines of slowed digital video, hazy, distorted. Figure skaters in a narcotic choreographed crawl, a walker drags their feet, stupefied drops to their knees, a car crawls, menace generated by the languorous grimy obscenity of the video noise and the digital artefacted granular music which sounds like Bach slowed down to 10%, processed by Oval and remixed by Goodiepal.

So here was some new video art. It fits into some history and yet is clearly unaware of the history of the form. What would it be like if it had been burdened by the anxiety of influence? Perhaps if either of these artists knew about Scratch, or Larcher, or the analogue excesses of Cerith Wyn-Evans and John Maybury, they would have been less inclined to make videos the way they do. So their ignorance of the history of the form is our gain, for these are remarkable works that speak to a contemporary condition using the particular qualities of the media in a cognitively sophisticated, yet fluid and dare I say poetically affecting way.

Autumn, South London

2005-11-20T15:02:00.000Z

Breaking the News

2005-11-04T17:04:00.000Z

On Friday November 11th at The Wormhole Saloon at Whitechapel Art Gallery, I will be performing with Tom Wallace (aka DJ Wrongspeed) what is loosely billed as a live version of The War on Television.

A few days later the original video version will screen in the 10th Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin festival in Paris, sometime between 15th - 27th November.

The video was made almost entirely from manipulated sequences of Freeview digital television broadcasts, mostly 24 hour news channels. I had discovered the distortion that happens to digital TV images with variations in the signal strength: the image stutters, freezes, breaks up, reconstitutes itself with fragments of frozen subsequent frames, populates the screen with crawling coloured pixels. Inevitably as they both use MPEG2 video, it’s a little like the distortion one sees on damaged, dirty or degraded DVDs, but somehow more so, and it’s possible to manipulate in real time. When I had collected several such sequences I reworked them through a number of iterations using the ‘scrubbing’ technique I had first used in Sevenths Synthesis (and have used to greater or lesser degrees on a number of subsequent digital video works), literally scrubbing the playback head along the timeline in Final Cut Pro, backwards and forwards fragmenting and confusing temporal continuity and velocity. This combination of appropriated TV images and scrubbing seemed to me to be something like an update on the Scratch Video project of the 1980s, videos made by the likes of George Barber and the Duvet Brothers. However the damage done and the abrasive dynamics are a lot more severe, due to the sheer abstracted glitchiness of digital video gone wrong, than 80s analogue video editing could have achieved.

Here also is a perverse reflection on the nature of contemporary television, whose vast increase in channel numbers has lead to the situation where, on Freeview alone, three dedicated news channels broadcast 24 hours a day. The impression given is that just as news is presumably always happening in greater or lesser concentration, the media can respond to events quickly, rapidly disseminating, acquiring a hitherto impossible immediacy. As reporters with satellite phones on the front line in Fallujah, send pixellated compressed images back to the station to be broadcast immediately, live, or what passes for it.

The War on Television, set against the background of the Iraq war, is something of a delinquent exercise to demonstrate the mutability of the always-on digital reliability and presumption of authority. It takes the news and breaks it. It takes the attempts to make sense of the world and makes them incoherent. It uses the material deficiencies of digital technology to produce digital entropy. It creates jarring abstraction from illusion.

I had been working on the idea of a ‘live’ version of The War on Television, or something that used similar processes. Tom Wallace had achieved some notoriety as DJ Wrongspeed by remixing London pirate radio into a kind of part deconstruction, part homage to the parallel mash up musical universe broadcast across London and managed to get his Pirate Flavas banned from Resonance FM. He seemed like the ideal person to fuck with the sound while I fucked with the picture. So this is what we will do at the Whitechapel as I distort and mix the digital TV news broadcasts from two Freeview boxes, Tom will sample and manipulate the sound. The risky part is that we don’t quite know what will be on TV at that time, and perhaps more crucially, how good, or bad, the reception is in the Whitechapel.

In July this year the video screened at the Hull International Short Film Festival. The festival had done a deal with the BBC which allowed them to present some programmes on the Big Screen, a large TV screen in the centre of Hull that the BBC has thoughtfully erected for the good citizens of Hull who it presumably thinks can’t bear to be out of range of a television broadcast for too long. The screen presents its usual fare within a frame of weather forecasts and ticker tape style news headlines running across the bottom and side of the screen, for not only do the Hullites need to be broadcast to as much as possible they have to maintain a high level intake of multimedia information, they have to be kept informed of as much as possible as often as possible. The festival programmes were no exception to this rule, and I can imagined that some of the more delicate films might have suffered badly, and most filmmakers justifiably irked by this. The War on Television however, already being a parasitic mutant, thrived in its new environment. The fragments of headline text in the video and the broken news images echoed in the big TV headlines and weather forecast text, and it looked as though there was something seriously wrong with the Big Screen. Which of course there is.

Update: Stormbug posts a nice contextualization.

A Patatext remix

2005-10-28T09:03:00.000+01:00

"a humble homage to Dirk de Bruyn"

Wardrobe Place EC4

2005-10-20T23:51:00.000+01:00

1995

developments 1

developments 2

2005

South Circular

2005-10-18T23:33:00.000+01:00

The piece of furniture consisting of a seat, legs, back, and often arms, designed to accommodate one person, is in close proximity to the article of furniture supported by one or more vertical legs and having a flat horizontal surface.

And the article of furniture supported by one or more vertical legs and having a flat horizontal surface, is within the area separated by walls or partitions from other similar parts of the structure or building in which it is located.

The area separated by walls or partitions from other similar parts of the structure or building in which it is located is contained within the structure serving as a dwelling for one or more persons.

And the structure serving as a dwelling for one or more persons is contained within a tract of ground next to, surrounding, or surrounded by a building or buildings.

And the tract of ground next to, surrounding, or surrounded by a building or buildings, is in a row of houses built in a similar style and having common dividing walls (or the street on which they face).

And the row of houses built in a similar style and having common dividing walls (or the street on which they face), is on the public way or road along with the houses or buildings abutting it.

The public way or thoroughfare in a city or town, usually with a pavement or pavements is a channel or conduit to an open, generally public way for the passage of vehicles, people, and animals.

The open, generally public way for the passage of vehicles, people, and animals is in the proximity of the housing development.

And all the open, generally public ways for the passage of vehicles, people, and animals will come into conjunction with an extraordinarily large traffic circle.

And the tract of ground next to, surrounding, or surrounded by a building or buildings is in proximity to the row of closely planted shrubs or low-growing trees forming a fence or boundary.

And the row of closely planted shrubs or low-growing trees forming a fence or boundary, is in proximity to the paved walkway along the side of the the public way or thoroughfare in a city or town.

And the paved walkway along one or both sides of the public way or thoroughfare in a city or town in proximity to the expanse of ground, such as a lawn, covered with grass or similar plants.

And the expanse of ground, such as a lawn, covered with grass or similar plants, is on the strip of land which borders a road or path.

And the strip of land which borders a road or path starts to be the edge of a road where rain flows away.

And the edge of a road where rain flows away, is contained by the public way or thoroughfare in a city or town, usually with a pavement or pavements.

Around and Around

2005-10-17T23:29:00.000+01:00

On the weekend I received a copy of the looppool DVD curated by Graw Böckler. The looppool project was originally presented in the festival lounge at this year’s Oberhausen Film Festival, accompanied by live music by Adam Butler, Christian Fennesz and Tujiko Noriko. Graw invited artists to submit loops for the project. I submitted a loop version of my video 'Beamer'. It seemed an obvious choice: it is minimal, consisting of the occasional two or three frame image of various pale coloured discs, appearing centre screen, like a blip that leaps from the screen slightly startling the viewer, accompanied by a glitch blip sound. The gap between the blip discs is black and silent and each of different duration, it’s impossible to predict when the next blip will appear which adds an element of almost theatrical surprise. The looped version, 'Beamerlooper', is two minutes of 'Beamer', its intermittent quality allows it to be watched for a long time without the viewer being able to apprehend exactly where it repeats. In other words it appears seamless, endless.

In compiling the project onto disc Graw has exploited the programming possibility of the DVD medium so that each title loops and it is possible for it to play indefinitely. With 50 loops on the DVD he suggests that it can be exhibited as 50 loops on as many monitors, or shown on a single monitor, a different loop for 50 days of exhibition. It will be interesting to see if anyone takes up either of these exhibition possibilities.

Of course the use of film loops in experimental film practice, tape loops in music and sound art is nothing new. The paradox of the potential endlessness, the indefinite duration of a work consisting of a short repeated section, the perception of change over time during repetition while the material is exactly the ‘same’ source repeated (an example of this is the soundtrack to Steve Dwoskin’s 'Trixi' where the loop of the eponymous name spoken throughout the film leads one to hear different emphasises in the word, until it mutates into an abstract hypnotic musical sound as its signification as a word slips away).

The great thing about looppool is that it uses the technological potential of an accessible medium but much more than just cute formalist gimmickry it collects an eclectic but elegant selection of works. 'Get Saved Again' by The Books, who are known more for their music combining samples with glitchy folk, evokes early 20th century American protestantism with a looped archive footage magic square of men in their Sunday best lifting their hats to a repeated sung phrase “glory, glory, glory...”; in Mariano Cassisi’s 'Viejo', a man on a beach exercising becomes a one armed windmill; François Chalet’s 'hin und zurück und hin' is a Flash cartoon smiley riding a space hopper in a recreation of the ancient computer game Pong; a Hammer Horror-esque lightning strike is remixed into a percussive systems music rhythm in untitled by Christoph Girardet; superimposed layered and repeated locked off pedestrians and traffic in a never-ending urban dance in Wiebke Grösch/Frank Metzger’s ‘Singapur’; while in Gabriel Malaprade’s ‘Scooter’ a ring of motorscooters seamlessly, endlessly circle a roundabout containing a statue; Myriam Thyes's morphing graphic flags in ‘EU 2020?’. These are just a handful of the titles on this intriguing project.

"...between 6 frames and 10 minutes duration, they all last forever..."

looppool is released by Raum für Projektion