Religions are like cactus. They look like flowers, but with bare blades.
Religions are like cactus. They look like flowers, but with bare blades.
2010-10-10
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Guy Ben-Ner, one of Israel's foremost video artists, gained international recognition with a series of low-tech films, starring his family in absurdist settings carved out of their intimate spaces and their everyday surroundings. Many of his videos are inspired by screenplays for films, folktales and novels. Analyzing these literary and cinematographic passages allows him to exploit the conventions of film narrative: how to tell a story, captivate an audience through a tale, sustain a degree of tension and entertainment, and so on. At the same time, he corrupts the magic of fiction by openly showing us the entrails of everything he records, without worrying about revealing the tricks of the trade. A large part of his filmic oeuvre features a conglomeration of cinematic and literary references which the artist quotes, adapts or interprets. Ben-Ner self-referentially links the great themes and their literary, cinematic and artistic realization.
An experimental re-edit of Jack Frost, starring Michael Keaton.
A quiet mediation on the sea (and what might lie beneath the surface?) from the late 70s.
Decoherence is an audiovisual composition made with sound waves, water, and granular and spectral processing. A 60 cycle drone from a speaker cone below creates subtle patterns on the liquid surface, which grows increasingly turbulent. This piece explores interference patterns, the interplay of macro and microscopic patterns, chaos and continuua.
Light is the first bodily form pays homage to the philosopher of light, Robert Grosseteste. The title is intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek since this video was made entirely in the dark, using only a circuit bent Webcam. No additional computer effects were added to the video. The music is the song “Rain Serenade” by Natural Snow Buildings.
Inspired by the “psychic and physical toxicity of life in late capitalism,” Evan Caminiti’s Toxic City Music utilizes sounds sourced from daily life in NYC. These found sounds are heavily processed and woven into instrumentation ranging from electronically treated guitar to modular synthesizers. Toxic City Music evolved over the course of several years, resulting in a wealth of material which will be re-processed and uniquely presented in an improvisatory manner in live performance. The Wire describes the new work as "The sound of things falling apart with unbearable slowness…[with Caminiti] reporting his observations with acuity, integrity, and artfulness."
A series of shots from six 1970s and 1980s horror films are slowed down to near-still moving images. First feature-length piece in the video art series "The Devonsville Train."
"In an effort to explore the flexibility of Telidon, Canada's videotex system, Pierre Moretti, animation artist from the National Film Board, used, in the graphic mode, the geometric figures which form the basis for Telidon's picture description instructions. Thus he created this short animated film."
Confined to an endlessly burning waiting room, a dying sedentary woman experiences herself blurring in and out of her body. In her last remaining fragments she tries to make amends with her spirit before her remaining fragments either decay or create.
A portrait of Alan Vega as painter, drawer and sculptor of light
#11 (Marey Moiré) is a film in which all images were generated by intermittently recording the movement of a line. It is a film about the discontinuity that lies at the heart of the film medium.
The video debut of experimental musicians and culture jamming artists Emergency Broadcast Network.
In this film, Nauman bounces his testicles with one hand. Shot in extreme close-up, the work is perhaps an ironic reference to an earlier film Bouncing Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms, in which he bounced rubber balls. Along with Black Balls, Gauze, and Pulling Mouth, Bouncing Balls is one of Nauman's "Slo-Mo" films which are shot with an industrial high speed camera.
"Plasforms" is above all a visual composition, the relevance of the camera's absence, continuing in its time the plastic tradition of seeing. It is the exposure of the digital medium itself, a choreography of ghost images mechanically imitating the artificiality of a process.
In Untitled (Pink Dot), Murata transforms footage from the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood (1982) into a morass of seething electronic abstraction. Subjected to Murata's meticulous digital reprocessing, the action scenes decompose and are subsumed into an almost palpable, cascading digital sludge, presided over by a hypnotically pulsating pink dot.
The goddess Diana and her two attendants traverse the rugged terrain of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains in pursuit of the elusive wolf. An Engraver (Matthew Barney) furtively documents their actions in copper engravings and provokes a series of confrontations. The characters communicate through dance, letting movement replace language as they pursue each other and their prey.
Returning to the primal source of language, Hill explores the physical and subconscious origins of speech. In a continuous shot of a rhythmic, linguistically inspired chant-performance by George Quasha and George Stein, the camera wanders from mouth to face to hands to figure in an open-ended visual search. The performers use the body as an acoustic instrument of sound and abstract utterances.