Archive for the 'art' Category

Archive references

Today, I had a moment to read the introductory essay ‘Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument’, by Okwui Enwezor in the book Okwui Enwezor, ‘Archive Fever, Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art’, International Center of Photography:New York, Steidl: Gottingen, 2008.

The aim is not to produce a theory of the archive but to show ways in which the archival documents, information gathering and data-driven analysis, the contradictions of master narratives, the inventions of counter archives and thus counter-narratives, the projection of the social imagination into sites of testimony, witnessing, and more inform the practices of contemporary art. p. 22

…as part of the a broad culture of sampling, sharing, and recombining of visual data in infinite calibrations of users and receivers. We are fundamentally concerned with the overlay of the iconographic, taxonomic, indexical, typological, and archaeological means by which artists generate new historical as well as analytical readings of the archive. p. 23

Some of the references I noted in this essay:

Books
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
W.J.T Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

MIT Press Journals
Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, October, Fall 2004, Vol. -, No. , Pages 3-22
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/0162287042379847

environmental portraiture - film/video

I had chat with AD about environmental portraiture as a concept of practice within cinema theory. He put me onto some great references:

John Smith (Regeneration?)
Article - On the Street where You Live: The Films of John Smith by Adrian Danks
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/29/john_smith.htm

Film/Video
John Smith, Lost Sound
Stan Brakhage, The Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea,
Ross McElwee, Sherman’s March
Ross McElwee, Bright Leaves (family background in Tobacco)
Ross McElwee, Time and Definate (extends Sherman’s March)
Andrew Kötting, Gallivant (observational essay)
Nick Broomfield

Melbourne Cinematheque, Experimental Landscapes 2008
Peter Forgacs, The Land of Nothing
James Benning, Landscape Suicide

Book
Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine (review on Screening the Past)
Cantrills Filmnotes nos 63,64
Arthur and Corrinne Cantrill

one minute video

A video interview collection of opinions on the duration of one minute for video for the oneminutes project.

vernacular video response

Geert talking to Tom Sherman about his Video Vortex presentation including some views on his notion of vernacular video. This YouTube clip was made by the Masters of Media group.

The Whole World

Tank TV have brought together with the curator Ian White, The Whole World exhibition.

A selection of artists’ film and video that feature lists or different kinds of taxonomies - visual, audio or textual – are presented as an online exhibition of extracts. Works by Dalia Neis, Uriel Orlow, Jean-Gabirel Périot, Michael Robinson and Valerie Tevere take as their subject such wildly diverse lists as depictions of saints, everything on Ebay, magazine advertising, our mediated world, protest, violence and war, the pages of National Geographic magazine and the words spoken by people on the streets of New York. Text scrolls across the screen, images flash past, immersive landscapes ultimately disintegrate. Many things are logged and something is undone.

24/7 DIY video clip

I also had a close look at the opening 24/7 a DIY Video Summit, video clip (that ironically has no poster/thumbnail/preview image as it downloads when the web page is opened). The clip a vox-pox of grabs from speakers and artists attending the event provides an insight into what to expect. Following is links to some of the organisations and people featured in the opening clip. Interesting that remixing as an approach features in many of the videos selected. In the publicity information provided in an interview with the summit co-chair Mimo Ito there is a focus on remixing:

One of the most interesting aspects of online video sharing is the fact that videos are created in an almost conversational mode, where one video is a commentary on or a response to another video, and so on. We see this kind of video and response sequence with popular remix source footage…

As part of selecting these works, curating as a practice is a feature at the summit. Links provided in the introduction video:

Anne Bray (Executive Director) - freewaves.org an alternative exhibition platform

sacha costanza chock who is involved with http://video.indymedia.org/

The Goal and Idea of the Video Network is the distribution of High Quality Videos (vhs/dvd quality) over the Internet. It is based on the Open Publishing principle of Indymedia and will allow the Publishing of Copyright Free Videos under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

eric saks who runs an “alternative cinema” site called flicker He says his aim with his work is to subvert “pop culture”, mainstream approaches towards audiovisual media.

Jonathan McIntosh media artist, activist who is building a website called rebellious pixels. These could be described as activist orientated re-mixes of adverts and news.

tim park doki doki productionshttp://www.doki.ca/ Anime remixes that use text to subvert the message.

laura shapiro whose thing is vidding. From wikipedia:

Vidding is the practice of creating fan-made music videos (sometimes called songvids or fanvids) that edit clips from favorite TV shows, anime series, movies, or even official music videos, to another song. It is a cross between narrative story-telling and visual poetry and their content can range from a simple tribute to a favorite character or delve into shipping/slash.

Paul Marino Thinking Machinima blog

art channel YouTube

Paulo Barros a Brazil based Digital Computer Artist uses YouTube as a place to publish his videos through a designated channel/profile.

paul_barros.jpg

Brady Bunch YouTube remix

.php re-mix videowall Brady Bunch

brady_bunch.jpg

video vortex exhibition

Montevideo are well underway with an exhibition program for the exhibition side of video vortex.

20 October 2007 - 3 February 2008: Video Vortex Exhibition
Location: Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam http://www.montevideo.nl
Curated by: Annet Dekker
Artists: Beatrice Valentine Amrhein, Giselle Beiguelman, Susan Collins, Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar, Graham Harwood, MW2MW, Sonic()ject, and more.
Workshops by: Bricolabs, Furtherfield, Mediashed, and more.
Opening: 19 October 2007, 17:00 FLOSS Party!

specflic 2.0

An audiovisual work the artist Adriene Jenik refers to as “speculative distributed cinema”. Part of the description from the web site promoting the work:

SPECFLIC 2.0 portrays characters in a future library in simultaneous story-layers that provoke the audience to consider the future of reading, writing, the book object and storytelling.

The main story frame represents a near-future 2030 world in which audio-visual media dominate, even as written communication and reading retain important, though narrow functions. The factorial explosion of information and information flows has catalyzed new forms of categorization of material and the next generation of students and scholars is developing within this constantly reconfigure-able info-sphere.