2024-09-20
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Manipulating a variety of sources, Vasulka uses creative imaging tools to situate historical images against Southwestern landscapes of incredible beauty. Contorting the images into a variety of isomorphic forms, Vasulka creates a literal shape for these memories, developing these shapes as metaphors for the processes of fragmentation, condensation, and inversion, that inevitably contort fact into memory. While much of the raw material for the tape is drawn from World War II and its rehearsals, the Spanish Civil War and the Russian Revolution, The Art of Memory is really an extended meditation seeking to reconcile the blurry, banal photographs of historic figures with the mass destruction they helped engineer.
SHIFTING VISIONS is a video essay that revolves around the transition between the different stages of human consciousness. From the most intense state of full attention to the most abstract and dreamlike state, passing through all its nuances. We know that the mind remains a mystery to science, but, through combining neuroscientific theory and personal perceptions, we represent these mental dynamics transferred to images, sounds and metaphors. We thoroughly analyse each of these stages to translate concepts and create audiovisual imaginaries through symbolic mental limbos. A piece that drags the viewer on an inner journey to their own lucidity.
The virtual world generated by the real world of the twentieth century is growing exponentially, like an organism in a Petri dish. Crossing its own borders in to new zones, it absorbs its founders and mutates in to something absolutely new. In this new world real wars look like a game on americasarmy.com. Prison torture appears more like the sadistic exercises of modern-day valkyries. Technologies and materials transform the artificial environment in to a fantasy landscape of a new epoch. This paradise is a mutated world where time is frozen and the past is neighbor to the future.
Rhythmically departed from Murata's usual assertive cadence, No Match employs footage from the 1980's game show, Classic Match. The seamless loop of an unyielding contestant's ineptness solidifies as an almost cruel experiment, as the stretched time limit imprisons him in a fruitless guessing game. As 1000 seconds tick off the clock, our relationship towards the disembodied head of the contender shifts from sympathetic support to uncomfortable pity. One cannot help but wonder if this humiliating effort is really worth the grand prize at stake.
In this animated video Shiboogi, American artist Takeshi Murata transforms TV commercials from the 1980s that he had discovered by chance in a record store in Japan. Just as commercials pop up on television screens for 30 seconds and then fade from memory, the imagery used by Murata pixelates and melts into a colorful digital sea. Takeshi Murata produces extraordinary digital works that build upon the experience of animation. His innovative practice and processes range from intricate computer-aided, hand-drawn animations to manipulating the flaws, defects and broken code in digital video technology. He alters appropriated footage from vintage horror films, commercials and movies, and creates fields of color, form and motion, redefining the boundaries between abstraction and recognition.
Motorcycles and cars are lost in the sound of traffic and disappear in bands sliced into film footage of Jakarta’s roads. The horizontal and vertical lines or checkerboard patterns emphasizing the density and chaos of the crowded roads were made by optically printing 16mm film.
The death of the minotavr talks about the concept of the heroine's journey. Suffering, horror and exhaustion lead the protagonist to a process of transformation, abyss and expiation, because only murdering to minotaur and everything he represents is possible to return to life. From the female gaze, it shows the depth of the emotional wounds caused by domestic violence; the same one that the surrealist Dora Maar lived and that ask why, as a society, instead of killing the minotaur, we blindly continue to send him women only to be devoured and ask them why they simply did not fight, why they did not try get out of the labyrinth.
“Requiem pour le XXè siècle” is a manifesto against war. It is an elegy. The photograph is connected with images that are part of our collective memory: extracts from newsreels of World War II that have been reworked and transformed through various optical and electronic processes. World War II was a condensation of violence (biological and environmental destructions, racism, ethnic clearing, and persecution of people who are different…) and ongoing wars perpetuate that violence. This work is a metaphorical representation of all past, present and future wars. Constructed on the dramatic tension between the violence of wars and the presence of the intersex hermaphroditic “Angel”: Their eyes are bandaged; they are a symbol for difference, having an ambiguous position: observer, witness, victim or judge.
Poet and artist Vito Acconci points his finger towards the camera and his own reflection in an offscreen video monitor.
Anémona and Pisces live a capicua experience: they are at the same time the woman who looks, the woman who is looked at, and the very act of looking. Between fractal scenes and images multiplied in reference to Man Ray, Anémona assumes the will to, through the state of trance, always be a foreigner within herself, while Pisces goes in search of an alien vision, to assume herself as the self and otherness to understand the world.
Furio’s Furious Fragments & Friends - Furio Jesi (1941 Turin -1980 Genoa), enfant prodige moving between a plethora of disciplines – egyptology, history of religions, German philology, literary criticism - passed away prematurely, not without leaving bright fragments which throw light on mechanisms beneath many socio-cultural practices, for instance regarding cultural belonging, the functions of myth in modern society. He saw kind of “mythological machines” at work underneath our cultural production of meanings, historically determined, departing from a void, something that is still in culture but as residue, a missing link to an alleged authentic experience nowadays compromised up to the point to became just rhetoric, a byword, which is in no way neutral, but a tool, a macchina, for maintaining the status quo and serving the power apparatus. As in the case of holidays, celebrations and festivals.
Strange things occur tonight whether the paranormal phenomenon is the invisible invasion of aliens from outer space or light flashes of another dimension? We will never know. Are we alone or may we encounter extraterrestrial species that are coming at night to conquer our dreams, our body and mind? What are you afraid of?
STEINA: “My background is in music. For me, it is the sound that leads me into the image. Every image has its own sound and in it I attempt to capture something flowing and living. I apply the same principle to art as to playing the violin: with the same attitude of continuous practice, the same concept of composition.
data-verse is a data-driven audio-visual trilogy by artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda which marks a two-decade culmination in the artist’s research. The trilogy addresses the layered dimensions of our world, from the microscopic, to the human, to the macroscopic. Through Ikeda’s process, massive scientific data sets have been transcribed, converted, transformed, de/re/meta-constructed and orchestrated to visualise and sonify the different dimensions that co-exist in our world between the visible and the invisible. Each variation immerses visitors in the vast data universe in which we live, capturing hidden facets of nature and the vast scientific knowledge underpinning our existence. This large-scale data-driven trilogy is generated by extremely precise computer programming and features a minimalist electronic soundtrack, harmonised with Hollywood-standard, high-definition, 4K DCI video projections of scientific data onto a large screen.