The Double Life contemporary art exhibition opened last night at the RMIT Project Space/Spare Room. With a life in the city and in the country these artist/researchers work with their rural environments. A few pictures from the opening. Curator Lisa Byrne.

An ash stencil on the floor ‘Bastards Neck’ part of Lesley Duxbury’s work.

Talking with the artist Joy Hirst afterwards at dinner Joy referred to the artist Richard Long who has a huge body of work that covers walking, mapping and the landscape.

Title: Peter Greenaway, cinema = dead, From: westframe, Added: June 29, 2007, YouTube, http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=-t-9qxqdVm4

Quotes:

“What the fuck are you doing in the dark”

“post-cinema”

Other references:

No TV about

As a cross-media platform NoTV aims to present new developments in the contemporary Visual Music-scene, researching all possible ”variants” of visual music aesthetics (through the development of new technologies, new kinds of presentation), and analysing the philosophical and technological consequences of this ”synaesthetic revolution”. NoTV Visual Music therefore presents itself as an innovative VJ label, a progressive platform fusing video art with electronic music through our DVD’s , ClubTV broadcastings and live VJ events .

David Wolf and I presented Videodefunct at Footscray Audio Visual Social Club (FAVSC) on Tuesday night (part of the Footscray Community Arts Centre). I stepped in last minute for Keith who was down with a virus. The FAVSC blurb from their MySpace site:

FAV-SC is a regular meeting place for artists, noise makers, sound-designers, electronics boffins, installation artists, film freaks, VHS geeks, performers, programmers, DIYers, phonographers, photographers, holographers, circuit benders, laptop musicians, curators, producers and anyone with an interest in lo/hi-fi new/old-media art.

I was intrigued by theweathergroup_U initiative at the Sydney Bienale. KD said to check them out for potential VD colloboration. I have had contact with David in the group previously through an experimental video screening of ‘The Hazzards’ at UNSW. Part of the summary of what they are about as a collective:

theweathergroup_U is a collective interested in pursuing experimental methods of audio-visual media production, environmental mapping and monitoring technologies, and processes of community-based interaction and knowledge exchange. As artists and media workers, they are primarily concerned with cross-cultural digital storytelling methods. Using the interlocking themes of weather, ecology, climate, geography, communications and collaboration, they seek to explore different ways of seeing, listening and documenting the interactions with natural systems that punctuate our daily existence.

I went to a talk ‘Up Against the Wall: Thinking Jeff Wall’ at CCP the other night given by David Bate on the photographer Jeff Wall. I had a look through a book of collected essays on Jeff Wall which made me think about the obvious idea of a correlation between this style of writing and documenting project-based research. In the talk Bates did a incredibly close analysis on one of Wall’s photographs. It was great to see so much analysis flow out of one image. Bates experimented with the concept of bringing an iconographic and psychoanalysis analysis together. In his preamble to the talk I was reminded of Roland Barthes seminal writing on photography as one of the few types of theoretical writing that focuses in-depth on practice. In a discussion of Barthes writing on authorship Bates also mentioned Focault’s ‘What is an author?’. An online reference on these two points of view The Differences between Barthes and Foucault on Authorship, Monica Lancini. Finally, Bates also mentioned the “decisive moment” where in his example a still is taken from a cinematic (moving-image) work. I recognised a connection here with the thumbnails and posters used in Videodefunct.

http://www.fridayarts.net/blogs/?p=3677

Internet video site YouTube needs no introduction. Its status as
both a branded channel and a medium in its own right has redefined
“new media” on both sides of the art and corporate entertainment
divide. But most of its content resides somewhere in between, and its
currency lies in the vernacular nature of the items posted there–to
the extent that the memes incubated on YouTube are trickling down
into the language of contemporary artists’ work and, in turn, re-
emerging on the site.

http://thekitchen.org

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.

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.

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