You’ve got until the end of the month to ‘run don’t walk’ and see 10 x 10, a fascinating video screened at the new Carroll/Fletcher gallery just off Oxford Circus.
The camera of 10 x10 slowly scrolls down 100-storey building, going from one floor to the one below, looking through the windows, room after room. The result looks like a strip of film
It took me longer than most to discover the work of Anri Sala but once i looked into it, i started seeing his work everywhere. A few months ago, i was invited to the Absolut Art Award in Stockholm to see some of his videos, attend a screening with popcorn of 1395 Days without Red and interview the artist. A few weeks after, Anri Sala had a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The show is now closed. I’ve waited far too long to write about Anri Sala’s work
Some researchers have observed that apes held in captivity watch tv programmes. Some of them are fond of the Teletubbies, others favour emergency room dramas or Disney cartoons. But is it possible to script, shoot and screen cinema just for primates? That’s what Rachel Mayeri set out to discover with her work Primate Cinema: Apes as Family
Thirty years ago, a peg-legged motorcycle mechanic walked into the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. They had not returned his calls. The police were summoned. Forty-five minutes later he walked out with an academic appointment. Since then Joe Davis has sent vaginal contractions into space to communicate with aliens, encoded poetry into DNA, and designed a sculpture to save the world
Le Cadavre Exquis, a digital re-interpretation of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse and the parlour game Consequences. In the interactive installation designed by Brendan Oliver and Brendan Randall, members of the public are invited to record a short stop-frame animation as a response piece to a previously recorded submission. The texual narrative is then created by online participants
Presenting animation as a distinctive and highly influential force in the development of visual culture, Watch Me Move offers a timely insight into animation as a cultural and socio-political phenomenon and will delight visitors of all ages
ASPECT Magazine releases periodically DVDs documenting works by 5-10 artists working in new or experimental media. The videos of the pieces can be viewed in their original version or accompanied by the audio commentary of an expert. The commentators usually start with a description of the work then they go deeper by bringing the work in the broader context of history/art history/history of technology, by revealing anecdotes about the career of the artist, by explaining the technological challenges of the work or highlighting the issues the artist wanted to raise
The drama is set in a fictional future that looks very much like today’s London. Here, however, all exchange transactions and social interactions are overseen by a system called ‘the Spirit’. The film explores a world in which the self is reduced to physical biology, directly subject to the needs of capital. Hotels offer bed-warming servants with every room, people are fined for not preventing foreseeable illness, weight watching foods eat the digester from the inside and the unemployed repay their debt to society in physical energy
The implied narrative of this experimental fiction is communicated through voiceovers, wire tapped telephone conversations and snippets of a job interview between Mr. Holz and his prospective employer, Mr. White. It becomes evident that the character is controlled by a city and the code he is working on, as the course of the story is controlled by the code that edits the film
The similarity between fireworks and movies is at the very heart of this exhibition. Both are intermittent ephemeral projection of light in the darkness. Fireworks are yesterday’s action movies. They used to last 90 minutes and followed complex, narrative structures, often telling a story of war and chaos upon which the hero would prevail
Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) is a 1987 film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss following a 30 minute long, uninterrupted chain of physical and chemical experiments. One explosion leads to a fire that heats up a teakettle until its steam whistle flies away and hits a bottle that falls and pour its content over a… It goes on and on. One chemical trigger leads to another or sparks a physical phenomenon. The film watches like a thriller (even if you’ve seen it twice already) because every single step can go wrong
With this installation, Riley Harmon went for the visceral and the powerful. Each time a player dies in a game of Counter-strike, a popular online first person shooter, electronic solenoid valves open up and dispense a small amount of fake blood. The trails left down the wall create a physical manifestation of virtual kills, bridging the two realities. During the show’s run players who have a copy of Counter-Strike can join the game and cause the sculpture to active
Over the last two years Karen Guthrie & Nina Pope of the London art collective Somewhere have been working on a research and documentary project focusing on pedigree cat breeding. They followed pedigree cat owners at cat shows, worked with breeders, and interviewed Dr Leslie Lyons, an internationally-respected authority on feline genetics who ratified the world’s first cloned kitten and the first GFP (“glow-in-the-dark”) transgenic kitten
Today i return to the GAMERZ festival in Aix-en-Provence because 1. i want to remind you that this truly unique event is going to close on Sunday 2. i just interviewed the lovely Isabelle Arvers who not only curated a machinima show for the GAMERZ exhibition but is also one of the most respected experts in art and video games, 8it music and free + opensource culture in France
The Documentary Real was probably the most satisfying conference i attended this year. I had planned to write down my notes from some of my favourite talks when Robrecht Vanderbeeken from KASK (the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent) informed me that the videos of the symposium were online
To many of their fellow Israelis, they are traitors. They are attacked, arrested and demonised. Yet Israelis like Yehuda Shaul, leader of Breaking the Silence and Jonathan Pollack from Anarchists Against the Wall continue to struggle for a more peaceful Middle East. They believe that they can save their state by putting an end to the military occupation
The movie that received most attention from both the public and the members of the File Prix Lux is War of Internet Addiction, a machinima advocacy production that voices the concerns of the mainland Chinese World of Warcraft community. Although the machinima was created with WoW players in mind, the video strikes a chord with the broader public by pointing the finger to the lack of Internet freedom in the country and conveying a general feeling of helplessness
As her pop musician alter ego “Sputniko!” Hiromi Ozaki showcases 3 manga-inspired characters who design objects to fulfil their own particular complex needs — Crowbot Jenny builds a crow-shaped robot to communicate with crows, Sushiborg Yukari, a sushi-serving cyborg who modifies her body to become a lethal weapon, and Menstruation Machine (Takashi’s Take), a boy desiring to become more ‘feminine’ who builds a suit in an attempt to experience the bleeding of menstruation
Hwang Kim’s sbtly subversive fake documentary aims to introduce North Koreans to diverse aspects of western culture: pizza, Christmas, suitcase packing and dancing on pop music. The film also explores how design can contribute and impact on a social and cultural level, subtly challenging an ideological status quo
Laurent Grasso’s movie, shot in 2009 in The United Arab Emirates, looks at traditional hawk hunting. This time however, tthe hawk gets equipped with light and sophisticated surveillance equipment. The camera records every dune and village the hawk flies over. The images are fascinating but they are also threatening. Who is the man tracking the bird with an antenna? What is he trying to uncover?
The Iraqi-Finnish artist Adel Abidin has major solo exhibition, in Kiasma, Helsinki. In his art, Abidin focuses particularly on “themes such as cultural alienation and marginalization”
Shaina Anand’s and Ashok Sukumaran’s work suggests that technology can follow paths different from the ones imposed by a purely capitalist perspective. When radio, electricity or CCTV is “pulled” in this way, it reveals a different set of properties, a vivid materiality and expanded parameters
Last and overdue notes from the Japan Media Arts Festival which took place last month in Tokyo. I’m just going to do a lazy post and glaze over he entertainment and animation categories
Who would have thought i’d end up blogging about a splatter movie on wmmna? I’m not talking about any horror movie, i’m talking “gay-porn zombie film”, a genre which i assume is under-represented in contemporary art. Written and directed by Bruce LaBruce and starring porn actor François Sagat, LA Zombie is on view at the Peres Projects gallery in Berlin, along with a dozen new works on canvas
Broomberg and Chanarin’s works questions the role of embedded reporters today. Their task is to take photographs of what happens in the war zones but in accordance with the rigid directives of military command. The images that do not comply are eliminated and only those that make it through the strict censorship process are published
Developing projects on the net, filming with mobile phones, remixing common moments and figures of today`s culture in an VJ-like audiovisual rhythm, Amerika redifines the characteristics of today’s culture and opens up the possibilities for new interpretations and thoughts from the audience itself
Nathalie Djurberg makes candy-coloured plasticine puppets who have have orgies, who torture each other and suffer alien, abusive relationships. Djurberg, who won the Silver Lion award for best young artist at the Biennale, was the super star of Venice. I went to see her video installation 3 times and the room was always jam-packed with people drooling over her animations and taking photos of her monstruous flowers as if their lives depended on it. Not that i acted any differently
First stop: the show MADDESTMAXIMVS at the Australian Pavilion. I wasn’t expecting to like that one as much as i did. A 1:1 ‘sculptural’ replica of the V8 ‘Interceptor’ car driven by Mel Gibson in Mad Max 1 and 2 parked at the entrance of the pavilion almost made me run in the opposite direction
No one dons the moustache like Fernando Llanos. He’s a video artist, a musician, a writer, a blogger, a curator, he makes drawings, he’s the über macho-looking Mexican guy who walks around the city with a chihuahua in his bag. He also produces tv shows, a competition of animation movies, and the moto of his own radio programme is “There’s no need to talk about art in order to talk about art”. When he’s not performing Llanos is always impeccably dressed. He’s probably the one and only media artist whose sense of style i admire
Filmed during more than three years on location in Hebron in the West Bank, Terje Carlsson’s documentary shows the impact of the occupation on everyday life in Palestine
Cruel Weather explores artistic responses to crisis and the role of the moving image in today’s Middle East. The festival showcases a series of award-winning documentaries, experimental and mixed genre work
Over the course of two years, Muzi Quawson attempts to uncover the reality of this outlandish, boondocks location. Her camera silently follows Ivar “Duke” T Pederson: an aging cowboy who incarnates the Old American West of our most used and abused cliché.
20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the biennial for Moving Image advocates the importance of history (in relation to what the curator calls our “culture of present-ism”) and revolves around questions of historical representation and historiography
In fast and witty episodes, Filmmaker Ben Lewis meets some of the most discussed contemporary artists and challenges their work with the kind of provoking questions you can expect from someone who recently penned an article titled ‘Who Put the Con on Contemporary Art?’
The exhibition reveals how what sociologist Avery F. Gordon calls “the ghosts of memory” reach out from the past through the present, influencing how we understand and construct it. More precisely, the show investigates the mutual influence between this phantom of memory and the territory
The Moon Goose Experiment (MGE) is based on an excerpt from the book The Man in the Moone, written by Francis Godwin in 1603. Godwin was the first person ever to describe weightlessness – long before Newton’s theory of gravity. The protagonist in the book flies to the moon in a chariot towed by geese. These special moon geese migrate every year from the earth to the Moon
When Norwegian artist Kjersti Andvig initiated a collaboration with someone called Carlton A. Turner, who at the time was on death row in Texas, she aimed to expose a system which she perceived as a unjust mix-up of right wing politics, strange religious beliefs and cruelty. After their artistic work had ended, they fell in love.
The audio file of a lecture by Prof. Wendy Brown who explains how the building of walls around the world today is so starkly at odds with images of a world that is ever more connected & unbordered. Bonus! Videos of Shooting Back, the project of an Isreali NGO that gives Palestinian families across the West Bank video cameras to document how they are treated by Israeli soldiers and settlers
I’ve never had any interest in football (that’s soccer for you, American friendz.) Never ever. I come from a country that never won any championship (and if they ever did, well… i still don’t care), i find men in shorts a rather pathetic affair and i just don’t get sport on tv anyway. There’s been just one exception to this until last week and it was Eric Cantona, his sardines, his iced tea commercials
