Monthly Archives: November 2013

Lauri Warsta • Dictaphone Parcel

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Animated short film, Royal College of Art, London, 2009

Dictaphone Parcel is an animation based on a sound recorded with a dictaphone travelling secretly inside a parcel. As the hidden recorder travels through the global mail system, from London to Helsinki, it captures the unexpected. We hear a mixture of abstract sounds, various types of transport and even discussions between the mail workers. The animation visualizes this journey by creating an imaginary documentary.

Dictaphone Parcel was awarded the Passion Pictures Prize in London, in February 2010.

An Xiao

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“An Xiao makes conceptual and performance work on and about social media networks. Some of her works return electronic communications to analog forms, such as “Morse Code Tweets” (2009) which brought together the two technologies to highlight shifts in both the means and content of communication. Likewise, “Nothing to Tweet Home About” (2009), is a series of “status updates” sent as postcards, with postmarks as “timestamps.” On the flip side, she also plays with moving physical interaction into the digital realm. Spoofing the Marina Abramovic piece that allowed visitors to sit in silence with the artist, Xiao’s “The Artist is Kinda Present” (2010) invited visitors to communicate with the artist via text or Twitter.”

ECVP Vol.2>> Transformations

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The Exquisite Corpse Video Project (ECVP) is a unique video collaboration among artists from all over the world, inspired by the Surrealist creation method, the “Exquisite Corpse”. Coordinated by Brazilian artist Kika Nicolela, invited participants create video art in response to the final seconds of the previous member’s work. Each artist is asked to incorporate these seconds into their piece, creating transitions as they please, until everyone’s vision is threaded together into an instigating final “corpse.”

The ECVP Vol. 2 was made in 2009 and was based upon 12 different themes.

TRANSFORMATIONS is a collaboration between the following artists:
Simone Stoll (Germany)
Mike Bennion (UK)
Michael Chang (Denmark)
Alison Williams (South Africa)
Mads Ljungdhal (Denmark)
Alvaro Campo (Switzerland)

http://exquisitecorpsevideoproject.wordpress.com

Maria Niro

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Sequence 2
click here to watch video

While filming on the Manhattan Hudson River pier one day an older gentleman claiming he was “the real Leo Bloom” insinuated his way into my film. Perhaps like James Joyce who saw Ulysses as his favorite hero my Leo sees himself as Joyce’s Leopold Bloom. A self-possessed character wandering about town on a journey of introspection, like Joyce he is full of puns, allusions and a broad humor. My Leo is in juxtaposition to the cityscape and the politics of space around him -constantly in flux and changing. The radio frequencies of the sound design were influenced by a sense of nostalgia he inspired in me.

www.marianiro.com

JULIE PERINI

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This film is the result of a collaboration between Julie Perini and the Earth. Julie used an old advertisement by General Electric about a woman alone on a dark street who seems scared but at the end of the ad she looks up to see lights have gone on and she feels safe. Julie cut this film into two-second strips (48 frames) and buried it in the ground. Each day for 20 days, she unearthed a strip of film and she then pieced it all back together. The dirt, water, worms and other earthly forces decayed the film and this final piece shows this gradual deterioration over time.

http://julieperini.org

Judith G. Levy

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Memory cloud

Memory Cloud
“The past is never dead, it’s not even past” — William Faulkner

My work is about history, culture, identity and remembrance. Memory Cloud explores the explicit and elusive nature of private and public memory. My most recent installation of this work is currently included in Memory Theatre at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY.

Each Memory Cloud is comprised of hundreds of small, plastic, souvenir viewers that each hold a unique 35mm slide. This first souvenir viewer that I’d ever seen was the one that was given to me to commemorate a family visit to a dude ranch, when I was a teenager. The slides in this work are from my collection of thousands of found images of Midwest life taken from the 1950’s to the 1970’s. The plastic viewers hang on metal chain to form a very large cloud. This installation explores how photography helps to capture and preserve memories and provokes museum attendees to retrieve memories of their own. Some of the plastic viewers are out of reach and represent memories that cannot be recalled, while other plastic viewers allow partial glimpses of the photos inside to acknowledge the elusive nature of some memories. The viewers that are within reach can be held up to the light to see clear images inside, and they honor the individual experience of remembering.

The effort to create memories via photographs acknowledges our desire to transform experience into something that can be retrieved at a later date. Photographic images, even those depicting the most ordinary events, play a significant role in creating individual identity and affirming cultural heritage. Memories often become more powerful, when they are shared with others. Many of the photos demonstrate how ordinary moments feel extraordinary to the person taking the picture, even if the photo is badly lit or poorly composed.

The pleasure and pain of remembering remain an integral part of human experience. We grieve memory loss, both in ourselves and in those we love, in the belief that forgetting robs us of our humanity.

http://judithglevy.com

From The Margins, This, Unmentioned

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FROM THE MARGINS, THIS, UNMENTIONED, is the story of a troubled girl’s personal search for identity and redemption in a complex and oppressive world.

Based on original poems by writer Kat Mandeville, and inspired by an original score by composer Bryan Senti, this video was produced and directed by the collective, SATAN’S PEARL HORSES. The video features a lone protagonist, model and actress Tara Wallace, as she shifts roles, reflecting the changing identity of the Girl through the course of the narrative.

FROM THE MARGINS, is at once a documented performance piece, a nightmare, a seductive thriller – taking inspiration from theater, performance, and video art, while taking visual cues from cinema and large scale art installations. The entire production was done with no CGI, with all set pieces created inside an empty brownstone in Brooklyn, NY (and exteriors shot in Brooklyn as well). All visual effects were done in camera, experimenting with lens and glass distortion, video projection, and light manipulation. The only digital process was the edit (Final Cut Pro) and color correction.

FROM THE MARGINS, is a multimedia collaboration, that began modestly as a collection of original poems by Kat Mandeville. Moved and stirred by the poems, composer Bryan Senti created an original, operatic score, creating an aural interpretation to Mandeville’s written word. With these elements in place, the collective SATAN’S PEARL HORSES created a visual response, acknowledging both the original source material and the music, while creating their own collage of environments and performances.

Credits:
Produced and Directed by SATAN’S PEARL HORSES.
SATAN’S PEARL HORSES is: Nikolai S Antonie, Kohta Asakura, Jimmy Sakai
Writer (original poems): Kat Mandeville
Music: Bryan Senti
Director of Photography: Kohta Asakura
Editor: Nikolai S Antonie
Production Coordinator: Jimmy Sakai
“Girl”: Tara Wallace

Runtime: 9:57

satanspearlhorses.com