Imagine

allthroughthenight-large.jpg

IMAGINE

CASZUIDAS Urban Screen Festival
4 & 5 September 2009, Zuidas, Amsterdam

Compiled by Courtisane for the first edition of CASZUIDAS Urban Screen Festival, Imagine is a selection of works and artists previously shown by Courtisane. Digital reveries and riddles, the video works in this programme seek to actively engage the « mental » participation of urban spectators, to throw them back upon themselves, opening up the limits of their sight to the freedom of their imagination. They imagine a new sensory language in which meaning is played with, but never denied. Between abstraction and playful transformation, distilling, reinterpreting popular media culture, these works leave way for the countless images generated by each spectator. Parallel worlds for the imagination of the spectator to wander around.

curated by Stoffel Debuysere and Maria Palacios Cruz, in cooperation with Courtisane.

Stephen Gray, Beep prepared, 2002, 5’ (UK)

gray2.jpg

“What is Road Runner without Willie E. Coyote, what is a cartoon without protagonists? What remains of the longest running and most existential series of sketches, once the actors have left the stage? Part one of a deconstructivist trilogy.”

Stephen Gray is a British visual artist. His body of work highlights the growing gulf between the direct and decisive nature of our media conventions and our traumatic, ridiculous and unruly everyday existence. He lives and works in Bristol.

Joseph Ernst, Hip-Hop Movie, 2008, 4’ (UK)

ernst.jpg

Transforming visual imagery into words, this video is a word for word translation of a stereotypical hip hop video. ‘Bling bling’ from a different point of view.

Joseph Ernst (UK, 1974) studied Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, Sci Arc in Los Angeles, and The Bartlett in London. Since 2000 he has worked as an art director at various advertising agencies in Amsterdam, Shanghai, and London producing work for clients such as Nike, Levis, Electronic Arts, Audi, and Coca Cola. Joseph has been directing since 2007. He currently lives and works in London.

Max Hattler, Collision, 2005, 02’30” (DE/UK)

hattler.jpg

Islamic patterns and American quilts, and the colours and geometry of flags as an abstract field of reflection.

Max Hattler (DE, 1976) graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Animation in 2005 and went on to teach at Goldsmiths College, London and Volda University College, Norway. His films have been broadcast on television and screened at over one hundred film festivals around the world. Max also directs music videos. He lives and works in London and Berlin. Award for Best Experimental Film, Halloween Short Film Festival, London, 2006 Honourable Mention, Darklight Festival, Dublin, 2006 Special Mention, San Gio Festival, Italy, 2006.

David O’Reilly, RGB XYZ, 2005-2008, 13′ (IE)

oreilly.jpg

Discovered in late 2007 when a gardener accidentally dug up a hard drive buried somewhere in central Europe, RGB XYZ found its way to David O’Reilly, who compiled its five incomprehensible episodes into what became perhaps the most enigmatic piece of animation ever to leave a computer.

David O’Reilly (IE, 1985) is an animation artist based in Berlin. His unorthodox approach to animation is essentially straight-forward in intention: “I want every idea to justify existing in animation–to be ideas that would be useless in any other medium,” he explains. “Essentially I want to capture elements of life which could never be recorded by camera. If film is ideal for capturing a sense of reality, then animation offers the chance to embrace ideas of perception, which is an entirely different proposition.”

Simon Faithfull, 13, 2004, 5’25” (UK)

faithfull2.jpg

A melancholy journey through a strangely dissolving and pixelated landscape. Created from PalmPilot drawings made while walking along the A13 trunk road, the film presents the journey in the mind of a dog as it sniffs its way back to Barking. A road movie in a parallel universe, populated by ghost lorries in the night and suffused with the pathos of dying light. Sound by Joe Wilson of the Sneaker Pimps.

Simon Faithfull (UK, 1966) is lecturer at the Slade School of Art and lives in Berlin and London. His drawings, videos and installations have been in numerous national and international solo and group exhibitions.

Dave Griffiths, Rogue State, 2003, 02’20” (UK)

griffiths2.jpg

Vetoed UN resolutions hand-inscribed onto DV tape using a magnetic quill. Reinterpreted by the digital apparatus, these marks reveal abstract, lawless sonic and visual explosions – a fluid display of synthetic aerial terror. The action alludes to the shared nature of entertainment and military technology in seeking perfect spectacle whilst shunning error or uncertainty. Compressed light and sound are unleashed in volatile glitches to commemorate the abandonment of conventions in both the digital medium and international law.

Dave Griffiths is a British artist working with film, video, animation and sound. His film works dwell on the physical and fictive borders of media spaces and forms. He combines a rigorous attention to barely perceptible matter in moving images with an aesthetic study of their dramatic potential. Along with political and historical asides, the work is filtered through the languages and strategies of cinema and media art to attempt an ironic critique of our social bond with visual technologies.

Michael Robinson, All Through the Night, 2007, 6’ (US)

robinson.jpg

All Through the Night is described by Michael Robinson as a “charred visitation with an icy language of control; there is no room for love”. In this 4 minute digital video sequence, Robinson recontextualizes appropriated animation footage. In doing so, he successfully merges video effects into textures and glacial landscapes and creates his own kind of melancholic magic.

Since the year 2000, Michael Robinson has created a body of film, video and photography work exploring the poetics of loss and the dangers of mediated experience. His work has screened in both solo and group shows at a variety of festivals, cinematheques and galleries including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival, The Times BFI London Film Festival, Media City, Anthology Film Archives, Viennale, Cinematexas, The Wexner Center for the Arts, ICA London, Impakt, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Chicago Filmmakers, PDX, and the San Francisco, Oberhausen, and Hong Kong International Film Festivals. Michael currently teaches filmmaking at Binghamton University.

Mary Helena Clark, And the Sun Flowers, 2008, 5′ (US)

clark.jpg

‘Henry James had his figure in the carpet, Da Vinci found faces on the wall. Within this Baltimore wallpaper: a floral forest of hidden depth and concealment, the hues and fragrance of another era. Surface decoration holds permeable planes, inner passages. There emerges a hypnotic empyrean flower, a solar fossil a speaking anemone, of paper, of human muscle, of unknown origin, delivering an unreasonable message of rare tranquillity.’ (Mark McElhatten)

Mary Helena Clark is a Baltimore-based filmmaker. Her short films have been shown at numerous international festivals including Rotterdam and Views of the Avant-Garde (New York).

Rebecca Baron & Doug Goodwin, Lossless #5, 2008, 3′ (US)

baron_goodwin2.jpg

Lossless is a series of works that looks at the dematerialization of film into bits, exposing the residual effects of the process that makes file sharing possible. Baron and Goodwin used several methods to alter these works, either interrupting the data streaming by removing basic information holding together the digital format or comparing 35 mm to DVD and examining the difference between each frame. The project considers the impact of the digital age on filmmaking and film watching, the materiality and demateriality of film as an artistic medium, as well as the social aspects of how the online community functions and the audience for such obscure films.

The films of Rebecca Baron (US, 1972) have screened widely in international film festivals and media venues including Documenta 12, Rotterdam, Viennale, Oberhausen, Cinémathèque Française, Anthology Film Archive and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2000 Biennial. Baron teaches documentary and experimental film at the California Institute of the Arts.
Douglas Goodwin is an artist and writer. His work investigates the mechanisms by which language and technology mediate the area between perception and reality. His work has shown in Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, and Denver.

Martijn Hendriks, The Birds without the birds (excerpt), 2007-ongoing, 3’ (NL)

hendriks2.jpg

Martijn Hendriks is fascinated by the potential of negation and the conditions under which a non-productive gestures becomes productive. By drawing the attention to what remains after the objects of our attention have been erased, sabotaged of shown to contradict themselves, he questions our relation to images and the expectations of visibility and availability. In recent video work such as This is where we’ll do it, a series of manipulated You Tube clips, or The Birds without the birds, in which he uses fragments from Hitchcock’s The Birds, the absence of essential elements from well known images brings unexpected notions to the foreground.

Martijn Hendriks’s (NL, 1973) videos, sculptures and installations are often the results of seemingly unproductive acts like displacements, theft, jokes, withholding things, disruptions, obstructions, overdoing things, and attempts at clearly impossible tasks. The work he shows rarely documents those actions directly. Rather, it is what is left over from them or produced by those acts. His work has been exhibited internationally in galleries, centres for contemporary art and museums of modern art, and in 2008 he received the international Kraft Prize for New Media for his ongoing work The Birds without the birds. He lives and works in Amsterdam.

Nicolas Provost, Papillon D’Amour, 2003, 03’30” (BE)

provost2.jpg

By subjecting fragments from the Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon to a mirror effect, Provost creates a hallucinatory scene of a woman’s reverse chrysalis into an imploding butterfly. This physical audiovisual experience produces skewed reflections upon Love, its lyrical monstrosities, and a wounded act of disappearance.

The work of Nicolas Provost (BE, 1969) is a reflection on the grammar of cinema and the relation between visual art and the cinematic experience. His short films have been awarded at prestigious festivals worldwide and he’s now busy with his first long feature film. He lives and works in Brussels.

Stewart Smith, Jed’s Other Poem, 2005, 3’ (US)

smith.jpg

Stewart Smith programmed JED’S OTHER POEM, a music video for a Grandaddy song, in Applesoft II on a 1979 Apple ][+ with 48K of RAM. Seriously. Jeddy-3, a humanoid robot built from spare parts, is a recurring character in Grandaddy’s 2000 album “The Sophtware Slump”. According to Grandaddy, before Jed’s system crashed he wrote poems. Poems for no one.

Stewart Smith is an artist-programmer in New York City. He earned his MFA from Yale University in 2008 and operates Stewdio, a consultancy that approaches art and software through the lens of graphic design. Stewart has also taught introductory Web design at Yale and occasionally advises organizations exploring new interactive technologies and visualization techniques.

We are Time

lloyd-harold-clock.jpg

“All will be now / Dreams are too fast / You are the first / We are the last
No sequence to follow / No fear of tomorrow / Kiss of neverness / Life of timelessness / We’ll break the speed of change / we’ll tame eternity”

The Pop group, ‘We Are Time’

We’re still working on the “Accelerated Living” program for the upcoming Impakt Festival (14-18 October) in Utrecht, which will deal with (changing) perceptions and conceptions of time and speed. How to grasp the temporal complexity that surrounds and occupies us ? What sort of ecologies of time and speed have we developed under the influence of new technologies and the spread of neo liberal globalisation, and what is their impact on our body and senses ? How to create time awareness? These are some of the questions the project will deal with. Here’s a recent source of inspiration, Franco Berardi “Post-Futurist Manifesto” (February 2009).

1. We want to sing of the danger of love, the daily creation of a sweet energy that is never dispersed.

2. The essential elements of our poetry will be irony, tenderness and rebellion.

3. Ideology and advertising have exalted the permanent mobilisation of the productive and nervous energies of humankind towards profit and war. We want to exalt tenderness, sleep and ecstasy, the frugality of needs and the pleasure of the senses.

4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of autonomy. Each to her own rhythm; nobody must be constrained to march on a uniform pace. Cars have lost their allure of rarity and above all they can no longer perform the task they were conceived for: speed has slowed down. Cars are immobile like stupid slumbering tortoises in the city traffic. Only slowness is fast.

5. We want to sing of the men and the women who caress one another to know one another and the world better.

6. The poet must expend herself with warmth and prodigality to increase the power of collective intelligence and reduce the time of wage labour.

7. Beauty exists only in autonomy. No work that fails to express the intelligence of the possible can be a masterpiece. Poetry is a bridge cast over the abyss of nothingness to allow the sharing of different imaginations and to free singularities.

8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries… We must look behind to remember the abyss of violence and horror that military aggressiveness and nationalist ignorance is capable of conjuring up at any moment in time. We have lived in the stagnant time of religion for too long. Omnipresent and eternal speed is already behind us, in the Internet, so we can forget its syncopated rhymes and find our singular rhythm.

9. We want to ridicule the idiots who spread the discourse of war: the fanatics of competition, the fanatics of the bearded gods who incite massacres, the fanatics terrorised by the disarming femininity blossoming in all of us.

10. We demand that art turns into a life-changing force. We seek to abolish the separation between poetry and mass communication, to reclaim the power of media from the merchants and return it to the poets and the sages.

11. We will sing of the great crowds who can finally free themselves from the slavery of wage labour and through solidarity revolt against exploitation. We will sing of the infinite web of knowledge and invention, the immaterial technology that frees us from physical hardship. We will sing of the rebellious cognitariat who is in touch with her own body. We will sing to the infinity of the present and abandon the illusion of a future.

Continuous Music

10545-kmh.jpg

This is kind of an addition to my Minimalist post, which focussed on a series of used-to-be-obscure recording of so-called “minimal” music. Thanks to New World Records – who have also reissued pearls by the likes of Julius Eastman and Peter Zummo – another “lost classic” has been given a new life: ‘KMH – Piano Music in the Continuous Mode’, Lubomyr Melnyk’s debut album from 1979. According to Wikipedia Melnyk “pioneered ‘continuous music’ which employs extremely rapid arpeggios of varying duration, repeated with the sustain pedal to generate overtones and sympathetic resonances. These overtones blend or clash according to the harmonic change in the arpeggios according to a harmony based on Melnyk’s personal geometric models and often create a sombre, stately effect. He is also the fastest pianist in the world, sustaining speeds of over 19.5 notes per second in each hand. In addition he has the record for most number of notes played in one hour with 93,650 individual notes played.” His music has been described by critics as ”the play of atoms bouncing around at supersonic speeds!”. On his personal website (tagline: “first there came Franz Lizst ….. then came LUBOMYR (-: ), it is explained that Melnyk’s Continuous Music is “based on the principle of a ‘continuous’ and unbroken line of sound from the piano — this is created by generating a constant flow of rapid (at times EXTREMELY rapid) notes, usually with the pedal sustained non-stop. The notes can be either in the form of patterns or as broken chords that are spread over the keyboard. To accomplish this requires a special technique, one that usually takes years to master — this technique is the very basis of the meditative and ‘metaphysical’ aspects within the music and the art of the piano.” Although Melnyk’s earlier music was generally classified as ”Minimalism”, Melnyk prefers to call his music ”MAXIMALism”, since the player has to generate so many, many notes to create these ”Fourth Dimensions of Sound”. On the site it also states that “people have often said that, during live performances, they heard trumpets, horns, entire string orchestras emanating from the piano … for Melnyk’s music turns the piano into a veritable orchestra of sound”. Unfortunately, according to Melnyk this sound experience is lost in the digital processing, since the overtones no longer can live freely in their high dimensions, but are, as he puts it, ”plucked out like random feathers off a chicken, leaving the once so beautifully feathered surface, splotched and scabbed with tiny sores” (see here for more explanation). But anyways, here’s some samples…

This is part 5 of ‘KHM’ (available here for try-outs)
[audio:http://chicago1.binarybooty.com/x/$vzQQnzdUunBkn6SnbBdS8tgKCg4crfSo/061dd01aa6/05 – Lubomyr Melnyk – five kmh.mp3]

Also check out this sample of his ‘Voice of Trees’ (1985), a great piece for 3 Tubas and 2 Pianos, composed for choreographer/dancer Kilina Cremona. (available here for try-outs).
[audio:http://www.lubomyr.com/musik/VcOfTrees.%20Pt2-%20B.mp3]

Melnyk is still active, by the way. Here’s an interview he did in March this year, on the occassion of a concert he gave in Halifax. Time to get this man over here…

Update: here’s another interview, conducted by Jon Mueller.

Displaced Sounds

elvins.jpg

“What’s that sound? Is it a noise? Does it bother you? Do you take this sound personally? Can you take a sound or just listen to it? Why interpret? Is it less dangerous? Scary? Impersonal? Why do you want to know the source of this sound? Are you concentrating? On listening? Are you bored? Are you interested?”
— Jeph Jerman

Check out this brand new blog made by a few buddies of mine: Pieter-Paul Mortier (Artefact) and Dave Driesmans (Kraak). Together they started up Displaced Sounds, initially a series of performances and presentations in which “unexpected sounds, exciting evenings where listening and hearing are the keywords. Even before we are born, we are affected by noise invading our safe and quiet space. We are surrounded by sounds that define the rhythm of our world. Artists and researchers will guide you through the labyrinth of sounds that constitute our daily lives”. The aponymous blog documents their research.

(image: Simon Elvins’ ‘Silent London’ project)

On Blood and Wings

blood2.jpg

“The blood thing is the only thing you really have to know to understand capitalism. The Vampire can’t act without the blood, and he can’t keep it. He doesn’t feed on the blood in a way that he would ever be full. He’s thirsty all the time. Because, as you know, he’s already dead.”
– ‘On Blood and Wings. A Study in the Dark Side of Cooperation’

For those of you who appreciated my post on Christoph Spehr & Jörg Windszus’ On Rules and Monsters (2004), here’s the “sequel”, produced in 2006. It’s about the multitude battling capitalism. Giving a vampire twist to Marx in unveiling the crucial mechanism of capitalism (“to make more and more blood out of blood”), it shows the problems of the Multitude fighting the vampires to conquer capitalism towards a free and just society. The video is compiled of footage from a dozen different vampire movies, by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Robert Wiene, Paul Morrissey, Patrick Lussier, Stephen Summers, Michael Rymer, Terence Fisher, Michael Sellers, Len Wiseman, Abel Ferrara and Tommy Lee Wallace. Just like in ‘On Rules and Monsters’ the narration is by Tony Conrad. The clip can be downloaded here, the full transcipt is here.