Category Archives: Video
I’m a computer
Accompanied by a really nice electro soundtrack and a nod to Toy Story, this video found on Channel 53 chronicles as well as any the introduction of the personal computer into the leisure arsenal of the child’s play chest. The pseudo educational tone of the clip is echoed by the argument used by every parent in the early 1990′s that a computer, for educational reasons, was a necessary tool for their child’s learning. The video, perhaps prophetically, has the computer’s grand entry accompanied by a puff of smoke and flash of lights like a genie from a lamp (note the Aladdin style trousers). Every child knew about the genie within.
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.
Bruce Conner – rip
An obituary is a strange way to meet, but until last week when the platitudes poured in, I had not been aware of Bruce Conner – his art, his collages or his videos. But perhaps it is not such a strange way to meet after all, because Conner, over the course of his life, advertised his death on several occasions. The first was in 1960 when he titled an exhibition of his work “The Late Bruce Connor” and the second 7 years later in 1967 when he quit being an artist for the remainder of the decade – “…At that time, whenever I’d get any letters about art related events, I’d send them back or throw them out. Sometimes, I’d write deceased on them. I was listed in Who’s Who in American Art and I sent back all their correspondence with “Deceased.” After three years, Who’s Who believed me… So the artist is definitely dead.””
By all accounts Conner was a bit of a control freak during his life when it came to matters concerning his work; on one occasion pulling out of an opportunity to hold a retrospective at SFMOMA because of disagreements over the conservation of his assemblages and the fee being charged to get in – Conner wanted the show to be free. From Open Space, the SFMOMA blog -
“They practically informed me it was a post-mortem,” the artist said – invoking, in part, the avant gardist cliché of the museum as mausoleum, or morgue. More to the point, however, Conner was hoping to retain, or recover, some determination over his work, and his public image. “Everything was being run as if I did not exist,” he declared.
This seems to be a concern he had a contingency for. Being opposed to the display of his work online during his life, lawyers have been instructed upon his death to request the removal of as much online content as they can get their hands on. The SFMOMA’s collections access online page for Conner is blank, all 10 images removed. Likewise there have been cease and desist messages to numerous blogs to remove embedded Youtube videos. The request has also gone direct to Youtube.
This appeared in the comments of Chris Ashley’s Looksee blog -
“At the direction of Jean Conner, Bruce’s wife (wdow) and the copyright holder on Bruce’s work, I request and demand that you remove the video “TEN SECOND FILM” from your blog and or website. I am an attorney and made similar requests for Bruce, who was adamantly opposed to on-line display of his films. Ms. Conner is of the exact same view. Please remove the video. Thank you for your anticipated prompt cooperation with this request. Steven Fama”
Zero de Conduite, Elevator Gallery
Mother Studios have rebranded their gallery/project space under the moniker “Elevator Gallery” and launch one of their first events, Zero de Conduite under their new guise on Friday as a regular platform for video and performance art. Mother have been putting on some good shows on an ad hoc basis for a while, always with an emphasis on the experimental and performative; Magical Thinking last October springs to mind as a good example. This one they promise is going to be a “very special evening of live art, performance, film screening and sonic experimentation”.
A Hackney Wick scene?
Update: Apparently, the name change took place last October. I just hadn’t noticed until now.
Marcus Coates & Matt Stokes Artist Film Screening + Talk
WORKPLACE GALLERY and Picturehouse ArtSpace present:
SCREENING OF ARTIST’S FILMS & TALK
MARCUS COATES: ‘RADIO SHAMAN’
MATT STOKES: ‘CIPHER’
Wednesday March 5th, 6.15pm – 7.15pm,
The Gate Cinema
87 Notting Hill Gate, London W11 3JR
Tickets £6 full-price / £4 concession / £3 members
Box office: 0871 704 2058
www.picturehouses.co.uk/artspace
In association with Picturehouse ArtSpace, Workplace Gallery is pleased to present recent films by Marcus Coates and Matt Stokes.
Marcus Coates’ 2006 HD film ‘Radio Shaman’ is documentation of an interview on Norwegian Radio where Coates, a polite Englishman in suit, spectacles, and stag skin, continues in his role of Shaman to provide his services to the people of Stavanger, a middle class Norwegian town dealing with a sudden influx of Nigerian immigrants bringing with them the social problems of poverty, prostitution, and a spread of HIV. Coates’ film explores these issues, taboo in Norwegian society, by performing a Shamanic ritual in the local centres of Religion, Politics and on the street corner. Coates’ role as Shaman in the film meets straightforward acceptance, with strangely no questioning of the authenticity of such a figure regardless of his deadpan self-mocking delivery. We as audience are given a persuasive middle class gentleman of an idol in whom we can choose to believe.
Matt Stokes’ film ‘Cipher’ is collaboration between the artist, pipe organists Kevin Bowyer and John Riley, and ‘Fimbulvetr’, a Dark Ambient musik (sic) club in Edinburgh, Scotland. The resulting compositions and subsequent film combine the club organisers’ music interests and fascination in Norse mythology, with the improvisational skills and classical training of the organists. Using the name ‘Fimbulvetr’ (which translates as the three winters without a summer preceding ‘Ragnorok’, the rebirth of the world) and its connotations as a starting point, the organists worked closely with the organisers to compose two original and contrasting scores created specifically for the city’s grand concert pipe organ housed in the Usher Hall. Visually, the film explores the mechanics of the Victorian-styled instrument and physicality of the playing, and shifts from the usually hidden interiors of the blower room and pipe lofts, to the organists and expansive façade of the organ case. Both the hall and instrument are seen under fittingly lowlight and cool colours, whilst the music descends into unusual discordant sounds or drones akin to Dark Ambient or Doom Metal, many of which stretch both the organ and players abilities. Subtly, this combination suggests something of the chaotic history connected to the location (and the instrument itself), which since 1914 has been the scene of political rallies, classical concerts, to riots and rock concerts.
Disorder of the week #3
Satyriasis:
Egg study 1