Monthly Archives: August 2008
TV on the Youtube
Youtube has become many things above and beyond its basic premise of being a simple video sharing website. It has become amongst others a kinetic repository of the weird, wonderful, mundane and semi-legal; a keyhole voyeuristic platform into others wet film productions; bedroom soapbox; clutter of our culture’s basement; aesthetic belly button fluff; the space between culture’s sofa cushions where all sorts of temporal treasures disappear and, above all, a haven for procrastinators. It has also heralded the aesthetic of blocky, highly compressed flash video and given it definition in a televisual age that is moving away from the pointillist vacuum of the cathode-ray tube towards the crystalline prickliness of the plasma screen. While industry specifications expand so that picture definition can increase proportionally to screen size and television sets can occupy an entire wall of a modest sized room, Youtube wanders quite blissfully in the opposite direction. Set at a default 425 x 350 pixels the viewing area of a Youtube video is smaller than a TV remote. Unless that is you view it at full screen, in which case the picture becomes so pixelated that it is almost as though the identities of the characters have been purposely blocked out so as to protect their innocence. You become witness to a soft focus world free of guilt were everything else beyond the computer screen by contrast harbours its own high definition culpability and shame.
I have been interested for a while now in the space where these two worlds collide. Where television and Youtube mix together their opposing philosophies, clash their aesthetics and create a compromised hybrid of the two. A place of guilt and innocence, where the rapidly scanning lines of a PAL or (even better) NTSC television screen assimilate with the compressed cluster of flash pixels. It is a model that works best when Youtube is the master and television is the servant. For example, instances where footage recorded directly from TV is uploaded, or even better, where someone has put a camera in front of the screen and recorded the TV directly. With luck, and in the best examples, you can still make out the trace lines scanning top to bottom, left to right across the TV set. This bridging of the gap between the analogue and the digital has a unique manifestation on Youtube.
Below are a selection of videos found on Youtube that I have been collecting for a while and that show off this aesthetic: lossy videos that have been transcribed directly from a television screen. More no doubt will be added as and when I come across them so that this might eventually become a celebratory archive of the low quality and pixelated. A refuge for the innocent.
Hackney Wicked
Unfortunately my studio won’t be taking part in the Hackney Wicked festival because it couldn’t get its collective arse in gear – not even enough to organise an open studio. Come on people! It is a real shame, I have a feeling that this is going to be a very good event, it’s certainly well organised, and it seems to be feeding off some of the collective energy that has materialised around the place in the last few years.
Everything the press release says is true:
Hackney Wick, described by Time Out as ‘The New Hoxton’ is an area cut off from Central Hackney by Motorways; Canals; The River Lea; The Big Breakfast House and the Blue fence which separates Hackney Wick from the Olympic park development. All this makes Hackney Wick a rather unwelcoming place, until now that is, with the launch of Hackney Wicked. Hackney Wick boasts a huge artistic community including Gavin Turk who has his studio there, photography genius Stephen Gill whose many books and field studies of Hackney Wick have appeared in national press, until recently Amy Winehouse lived in Hackney Wick resisting the temptations of the Camden drug scene and Laura May Lewis whose ‘Hackney Wick’ Hollywood style sign is central to the Hackney Wicked Festival and almost 50,000 artists live or work in Hackney Wick. This is the first ever Art Festival in Hackney Wick hosted by Decima Gallery, Elevator Gallery Mother Studios The Residence and Oslo House.
Hackney Wicked will be set over three days the 8th 9th and 10th of August 2008.
More details here. Some highlights include:
- The Elevator Gallery – ‘The Tomorrow People’
- The Residence – ‘Hackney Wicked Museum of Revised History
- Hackney Wicked Art Olymics 9th August Coinciding with the Beijing Olympics. Art Olympic events suggested by artists are being run in conjunction with ‘The Decima Gallery Art Olympics’. Gilbert & George suggested Cycling Polo which was an actual event which featured in the 1908 Olympic Games hosted by Britain will be held in Victoria Park amongst other events including Callum F. Kerr’s Pole Vaulting over the Blue Olympic Fence; Hackney Wicked Cricket hosted by Aaron Barschak the Comedy Terrorist; the Olympic Dog Fight in human sized dog costumes; the Olympic Quiz at the Top o’the Morning; Laura Mays X-Factor and much much more Olympic fun and games. Stephen Gill will be holding an exhibition of his ‘Hackney Wick’ Pictures works as well as a special ‘Hackney’s Wicked limited edition print created especially for ‘Hackney Wicked.’
- Graffiti Tour 9th August. Banksy started his career as a Graffiti artist in Hackney Wick and many of his little known about Graffiti gems will be shown in this exclusive tour. Banksy used to have his studio at Mother Studios. Sweet-Tooth is Hackney Wick’s most prolific graffiti artist whose work litters the Bridges and banks of the River Lea as well as quite a few vehicles around the Wick, these works will be shown for the very first time on a pubic tour.
- The Art Car Booty Fair, Coracle Regatta & Closing Party 10th August. There will be an Art Fair at Wallis Road (close to the home of Fun-times Swingers Club so if you feel all arted out you can pop in for some Wicked Wicky Fun-times) with hundreds of artists stalls selling everything from art curiosities to gardening seeds. Harry Meadows will be also be hosting the ‘Coracle Regatta 2008′ at the Eaton Mission Boat House 127 Wallis road from 2pm. There will also be lots of Wick Pick-Nicks and a live music stage.
- Open Studios 9th and 10th August Mother Studios, Oslo House, Maryland Studios, Lion Works, Decima Cell and Wallis Studios will all be opening their doors for the duration of the festival. Space won’t be :(
Show me the money
I have renewed my interest in Wyndham Lewis since reading the first edition of Blast magazine. An interest later cemented after I had the opportunity to read the second and final publication. Dense and single minded as it was, it is a fascinating (and conceited) read as it endeavours to unearth the style and rhythmic pattern of modernist writing as well as a precept for Vorticism itself. Reading around the web, Lewis appears to be quite a contrary person, at odds with, and actively seeking animosity amongst many of his contemporaries – no doubt this within the discretion of anyone high minded enough (and I mean that nicely) to write a manifesto. Manifesto’s of the avant-garde are one thing though, economic reality is another.
I love this show me the money quote from the Guardian’s review of Paul O’Keefe’s biography:
The one thing even less likely to meet with gratitude than a loan was an outright gift. At the end of 1923, a group of well-wishers established a joint fund to provide Lewis with a stipend of £16 a month for as long as he might remain in need of it. The result was the usual mayhem, as dark suspicions flourished, and lifelong friends fell out. On one occasion, a delay in the dispatch of the monthly cheque elicited an unforgiving response: “WHERE’S THE FUCKING STIPEND? LEWIS.” O’Keeffe dismisses this story as apocryphal, but he does not seem in much doubt as to the brutality with which Lewis often treated those who sought to help him. Earlier that year, Lewis had spent some time in France with one of the people who was to contribute generously to the fund, the painter Richard Wyndham. Sitting outside a café in Toulon, he told Wyndham that he was a ‘Narcissus’ and probably a ‘bugger’. People, Wyndham remembered him saying, are only friends insofar as they are of use to you. Lewis, it seems, did not so much bite the hand that fed him as mistake it for the main meal.
[Mute-announcer] Automated response: Mute Vol 2 #9 (Poetry jam)
The Mute magazine mailing list went a little crazy yesterday with summer out of office replies bouncing back to the servers of its automated mail distributor and then out once again to the inbox of everyone on the mailing list. Read together there is a kind of dada-ist poetry to the dialogue it generated. One that underscores the passive language used in both the automated response and the press-release, and one which beautifully unites the tension between the sell and the apology.
please do not respond, since it will not be read.