Tag Film

Entries 10 Total

Motion at Seventeen

May 15, ’12 9:56 PM

A group show I co-curated with Tim Steer opens in London on Thursday at Seventeen! We’ve assembled a truly wonderful group of artists for the exhibit, which spans both floors of the gallery. The concept is something we’ve been developing for awhile now. Info below.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Points in Space, 1986. Photo: Robert Hill for the BBC.

Motion

May 17–June 23, 2012
Opening: Thursday, May 17, 6–8pm

Seventeen
17 Kingsland Road
London E2 8AA
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday 11–6pm

T 44 (0)20 77295777
info@seventeengallery.com

www.seventeengallery.com

Participating artists:
Kari Altmann, Merce Cunningham, Harm van den Dorpel, Michael Guidetti, Oliver Laric, Mark Leckey, Sean Raspet, Emanuel Rossetti, Hito Steyerl, Artie Vierkant

Curated by Ceci Moss and Tim Steer.

The object that exists in motion spans different points, relations, and existences but always remains the same thing. Like the digital file, the bootlegged copy, the icon, or Capital, it reproduces, travels, and accelerates, constantly negotiating the different supports that enable its movement. As it occupies these different spaces and forms it is always reconstituting itself. It doesn’t have an autonomous singular existence; it is only ever activated within the network of nodes and channels of transportation.

Both a distributed process and an independent occurrence, it is like an expanded object ceaselessly circulating, assembling, and dispersing. To stop it would mean to break the whole process, infrastructure or chain that propagates and reproduces it.

The object in motion becomes the simultaneous obfuscation and revelation of the points that sustain it. It’s both completely transparent and completely mediated. Transparent because it ignores the different instantiations and embodiments that require it to exist across a material infrastructure and mediated because of its dependency on these multiple parts to exist at all. It flows through networked channels, forgetting any idea of a singular autonomy.

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Rhizome | General Web Content: Cinematic FUIs

Oct 4, ’11 8:02 PM

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are the primary means through which most users interact with computers; but while GUIs help us make sense of complex computational data and allow average users to navigate and manipulate computer systems, human-computer interaction does not easily translate to other visual media such as film and television. It is difficult to dramatize database queries or the kind of intensive and prolonged engagement many describe when programming and writing code. These actions exists on a different scale and in a different time frame, and when dramatized they seem awkward at best, if not simply dull and uninteresting.

Perhaps it is for this reason that film has invented its own form of computer visualization, a kind of visual language of computation that speaks to the language of film. This often involves a very particular set of visual tropes that are intended to signify computation: login screens, chat rooms, loading bars, criminal or business profiles, copying data (often clandestinely), large legible typefaces, 3D interfaces, wireframe models, maps and floor plans, voice interaction, etc. On film the failures of interface design are almost always absent, as protagonists are capable of using almost any UI, data can be transferred and read across multiple systems with ease, and intuition is often enough to accomplish the most elaborate tasks.

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VIDEO ESSAY: CHAOS CINEMA: The decline and fall of action filmmaking > Press Play

Aug 31, ’11 4:09 PM

During the first decade of the 21st century, film style changed profoundly. Throughout the initial century of moviemaking, the default style of commercial cinema was classical; it was meticulous and patient. At least in theory, every composition and camera move had a meaning, a purpose. Movies did not cut without good reason, as it was considered sloppy, even amateurish. Mainstream films once prided themselves on keeping you the viewer well-oriented because they wanted to make sure you always knew where you were and what was happening….But in the past decade, that bit of received wisdom went right out the window. Commercial films became faster. Overstuffed. Hyperactive.

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Rhizome | Codes of Honor

Aug 17, ’11 7:39 PM

When I found the legend of Eddie Lee, I found the center to my film. In order to portray the tension between regret for the time spent playing without a visible legacy and nostalgia for the thrill of the game, I integrate three perspectives: i) a narrator in a virtual world who reminisces about his days as a pro-gamer, ii) a Chinatown Fair regular who recounts his greatest memory, and iii) classic cut-scenes from the games themselves. In this way,  Codes of Honor moves through actual, virtual, and imaginary space and time.

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What is the post-cinematic? « The Pinocchio Theory

Aug 12, ’11 10:36 PM

Such is the context in which I locate the “post-cinematic.” The particular question that I am trying to answer, within this much broader field, is the following: What happens to cinema when it is no longer a cultural dominant, when its core technologies of production and reception have become obsolete, or have been subsumed within radically different forces and powers? What is the role of cinema, if we have now gone beyond what Jonathan Beller calls “the cinematic mode of production”? What is the ontology of the digital, or post-cinematic, audiovisual image, and how does it relate to Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image? How do particular movies, or audiovisual works, reinvent themselves, or discover new powers of expression, precisely in a time that is no longer cinematic or cinemacentric?

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Double Features II

Sep 20, ’10 8:12 AM


Joe Merrell, Cruel Month, 2008

Performing with C.Lavender as part of C. Spencer Yeh’s film/music series “Double Features” for the online contemporary art and culture magazine Triple Canopy at 177 Livingston in Brooklyn on Saturday, September 25th. We’ll be doing a live score to a number of Los Angeles-based video artist Joe Merrell’s 3D films. Full info below!

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Triple Canopy presents Double Features, an evening of audiovisual exchange organized by sound artist and composer C. Spencer Yeh. Improvisor and composer Aaron Moore (Invisible Sports), duo Ceci Moss & C. Lavender, and a German-American quartet composed of double bassist and guitarist Werner Dafeldecker, bass clarinetist Gene Coleman, trumpeter Nate Wooley, and percussionist Ben Hall represent an array of sonic-experimentation strategies, for the second program in this series. They will perform new works guided by (and in opposition to) the films of Italian filmmaker Francesco Paladino, Los Angeles–based video artist Joe Merrell, Llucia Sanchez, and Australian-based media artist Lawrence English.

September 25, 2010

Doors: 7:30pm,
Cover: $7/Donation,
177 Livingston

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Selections from SELEKTION OPTIK

May 6, ’10 11:28 AM

I came across these videos awhile ago via no longer forgotten music. These experimental shorts originally appeared on the SELEKTION OPTIK VHS collections on RRR Video. SELEKTION did a lot of really interesting work with xeroxes, and you can see some evidence of that in these clips. You can read more about SELEKTION here and read their full history here.

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Scores to Matsumoto Toshio’s Films

May 4, ’09 2:25 PM

I’ve been in Oberhausen all this week for the “International Short Film Festival.”:http://www.kurzfilmtage.de/ This year the festival organized “a series of screenings”:http://www.kurzfilmtage.de/index.php?id=3331&L=2 dedicated to Matsumoto Toshio’s work, which has been a real treat. I’ve only ever seen his work “on Ubu”:http://www.ubu.com/film/matsumoto.html, and “I reposted some of those videos”:http://amillionkeys.com/toshio-matsumoto to A Million Keys a few months back. I love the scores used in his films. I was particularly struck by Yosuke Inagaki’s compositions for Connection and Shift, which were screened in the first program (posted below). I asked Matsumoto about Inagaki during the Q&A session, and he responded that he was a graduate student who studied with him. He mentioned that he was a video artist but did not go into much detail. I’d be interested in knowing more, if anyone reading this could provide some insight into Inagaki’s work.

Connection (1981)

Shift (1982)

The scores by “Toshio Ichiyanagi”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshi_Ichiyanagi were also fantastic. I saw these today:

Atman (1975)

Everything Visible Is Empty (1975)

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Ed Emshwiller Day

Jan 27, ’09 6:39 AM

Two films and a short excerpt from Ed Emshwiller.

Sunstone (1979)

Crossings and Meetings (excerpt) (1974)

Thanatopsis (1962)

payday loans online

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Toshio Matsumoto

Sep 12, ’08 1:58 PM


White Hole, 1979 (Still)

I just discovered the work of Toshio Matsumoto today via Chris Coy’s delicious. The videos are accompanied by an interesting interview with Matsumoto. See below for a short excerpt:

I’ve shifted my focus to experiments in context, experiments in deconstructing the contextual system through which people give meaning to or interpret the world. When people create an image of the world inside themselves, they do that through a story. They always narrativize the world. Perception is shaped in the form “X is Y,” and that descriptive form is, in the end, a narrative. That won’t change as along as human beings have language. But the problem is that this way of forming a context is conventionalized and easily confines the relationship between one’s self and the world to a stable law of perspective. For instance, when people are given more than one item of information, they associatively create a story out of the relationships between those items. There’s a part of a game show where they show an image bit by bit and you have to guess what it is, like a picture of Tokyo Tower or the L’Arc de Triomphe. In that case, people try to compare and interpret that partial information with narratives that they know. That method gets stuck in a mold and knowledge only begins to flow through inert conduits.

We have to do more to irritate and disturb modes of perception, thinking, or feeling that have become automatized in this way. I did several kinds of experiments from the 1970s to the 1980s that de-automatized the visual field. But when image technology progresses such that you can make any kind of image, people become visually used to that. That’s why there’s not much left today with a fresh impact. In this way, the problem is that the interpretive structure of narrating, giving meaning to, or interpreting the world has become so thoroughly systematized that one cannot conceive of anything else that is largely untouched. We have to de-systematize that.

Phantom, 1975

Ki Or Breathing, 1980

Enigma, 1978

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