Video Art

Oh, I remember another now in the Palais du Tokyo in Paris where it was a screeching aspic Vietnam plane frying through the air as it fell but played at a still-a-minute rate. This was pretty and infuriating, if nothing else. As I say, I like it. I've had no bad experiences yet.

I want to make video art installations. Someone give me a gallery space to do it in.

I am appearing onscreen in a two channel video installation at Cal State Long Beach.

Also LOL I don't remember being called "Barnet's greatest ever pimp" but that is typically hilarious of me

Any more for any more? I am wondering if anybody here has seen anything relatively new and good.

Yes, ok. Ryan Trecartin. But what else? I was thinking more essayistic work.

what's with the recent trend for karaoke video art?

has that not been a trend for a while? There was a karaoke themed piece installed in the top floor of SFMOMA around 2006/2007 by Phil Collins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTB9hic3ueU

yeah, i know, i saw it multiple times - there was also another one there more recently (forgetting the artist) that was a series of monitors spanning a wall each featuring a different person singing along to "Working Class Hero"

Yes that one is Candice Breitz

and by "recent trend" - I meant in the past 3 or 4 years. Who knows, maybe the media art curator at SFMoMA is just a fan of karaoke video art.

lol

there was another one that was people re-enacting activities at a nightclub but in a neutral space with dance music on the soundtrack

it made me wonder whether the Guggenheim sequence in Cremaster 3 with Murphy's Law/Agnostic Front opened up the floodgates for this stuff being shown in a museum context

Favourite up and coming video artist i've seen is Magali Reus, tho his(?) videos only make sense in the context of the sculptural work and unfortunately the best stuff isn't googlable (the video in the ibid projects show this year was amazing)

http://www.magalireus.com/current.html

(one video on this page but you have to scroll down)

http://api.ning.com/files/bKBecWHO59ThsMjXX-HO8a5ShQ1fNGoMIjAQbkcfKRXww0nU9mnF-anTcsBkvS5UsXyEgAS0HGNstzYEWkPLQ5zRzMMgVtpZ/Background2009web.jpg

here's a still, it was of all these buff army dudes in a desert w/ these plastic and steel abstract sculptures, just sitting around or working out and *interacting* w/ the sculptures

did we ever discuss the popularity of projection technology and flat screens in the context of video art becoming more painting-like vs. sculptural?

the otolith group are i guess not that new or w/e but still awesome. kinda chris markerish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3Btba88cxU

xp i dont think so, u got some thoughts bc i'm not gonna pretend this is something i'm too knowledgable on but that sounds v. interesting

i think it came up for me a while back when we were talking about Jeremy Blake, actually

well we kinda mentioned the relaysh w/ painting but i dont think we really got into it.

i love getting into it.

Jesper Just should give it up and start making david lynch movies btw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgsrPn0F754

but like, the origins of video art - it came out of performance art and was also sculptural, primarily because it was most often exhibited on monitors.

or it was commentary on television ...

i dunno, i stopped making and paying attention to video art when it became a lot more prevalent due to cheapness of technology.

stopped paying attention as much ...

Anyway, now it feels like everything is projections and flat screens, which resembles painting or photography, and for some reason I find it harder to concentrate on.

i like a lot of stuff in projections but yeah flatscreen blech in most cases

heh, for me the non-narrative and non-objective stuff is hard to watch for a significant period of time, unless it involves text. however, under the influence it has more appeal.

I know I'm getting predictable, but I am way more likely to stick with non-narrative work if it is on film and projected properly! There are certainly exceptions, but I don't actually think this strategy works so well for video - I'm thinking more about visual abstraction than fragmented narratives

Yeah experimental film probably over video art for me, though I'm trying to learn the difference. Are they really two different beasts these days. My main reference points are: Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Harry Smith, Stan Brakhage, Oskar Fischinger, Erkki Kurenniemi, Jan Svankmajer. I try and make videos inspired by these guys but i've never been able to afford working in actual film, so i use video.

I know everybody likes to say video isn't like film, it's like painting, but I don't think the documentary qualities of video have been totally exhausted/subverted yet in a fine art context. Especially now that with HD "documentary" doesn't have to mean "cruddy-looking" and even if you just have a Flipcam (I just got one of these btw, amazing!), you can still put it on a tripod.

xp

Experimental film is definitely still separate from video art, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing. I think they definitely need to come together, dialectically of course!

So they really are two different beasts these days? My knowledge only goes up to, maybe the 80s work of Paik.

i really wanna see some stan brakhage, tempted to buy that recent dvd set.

btw i just watched that mixtape video someone posted AND IT IS AWESOME. also i had never heard (of) that terry riley song on it (omg)

I saw a bunch of Kenneth Anger's new stuff and I would say he's more of a video artist now than anything like an experimental filmmaker. I don't know who Erikki Kurreniemi is, Finnish?

omg that song is awesome! I am glad you got to hear it =)

There are definitely crossovers, Adam B, but it does seem like (maybe just in the US?) people are still very keen to keep experimental filmmaking close to its roots, galleries are seen as money-grabbing, "trendy", etc., video as cheap, quick and shallow.

Brakhage - both DVD sets are fantastic. I would love to see the second one on Bluray.

Erkki was a Finnish electronic musician & R&D engineer for Nokia. Known mostly for his synthesizers but he also made wonderful films and videos and they are featured in a documentary called The Future Is Not What It Used To Be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6ml7RME-GU

is anger actually shooting in video for his 2000s stuff?

Brakhage- a weird example. Maybe the big daddy of US exp. filmmaking, spoken of in hushed tones by people in darkened auditoriums and yet by all accounts he DID see himself as a painter as opposed to a filmmaker.

Brakhage working on Super 8 with sharpies = Jeremy Blake's Wacom tablet?

xp- yes, HD

a lot of experimental filmmakers are still very caught up in the aesthetic differences btwn film and video (eg michael snow refuses to issue his films on dvd)

I have The Future Is Not What It Used To Be! Miika Taanila!

oh okay i saw a doc. about erkki a few years ago. he went mental and records every detail of his life now or was that fiction or

New Anger I saw featured lovingly shot Mickey Mouse memorabilia, guys playing soccer and guys fucking each other in a dark parking structure...all HD =)

i actually know ppl who have grumbled about brakhage's stuff being on dvd because SB didn't much care for video but i'm also a "widest-audience-possible" kinda guy so

TBF seeing the films projected from good prints IS something else.

I really really want to see the Harry Smith films projected from good prints one day...

xp true

i saw a print of 'early abstractions' years ago and still vividly remember a lot of it

haha these harry dodge videos are great! maybe i should pay more attn to ubu than i do huh

To illustrate - I made a hand-processed 16mm film last year and had a good transfer made for screeners, but on video it is NOT the same. The bits of "white screen" you see on a monitor are in fact parts of the film where the image has been bleached away to leave clear. it's two entirely different things. I never really got this distinction until I had to go through it myself.

I cannot possibly follow UBU, it's too much

For Adam B. to prove that film doesn't have to be expensive:

http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/otherzine4/hh.html

oops

http://www.angoleiro.com/cine_texts/recipes_for_disaster_hill.pdf

oh well. Worth buying!!

Niiiiice!

yeah that has about a million things i wanna try now in it

btw stanya kahn is hilarious

<3 helen hill

She is great. I'm not a full-on direct techniques guy but I love to dabble. I taught a class of kids at an all female high school in East LA some of this stuff early this year and their reaction to it was one of the awesomest moments of my year. Seeing them go from shock and frustration at how each tiny frame was 1/24th of a second in screen time and then watching them view the final pieces and go crazy. Many many many hearts and boyfriends' names scratched into emulsion or flashing up in hot pink crayon haha

Cameras and projectors aren't that easy to find or too cheap (IMO of course, and compared to VCRs/VHS tapes at thrift stores). It's a shame you can't use painting techniques on VHS tape, they are so cheap these days. Is there any way you can work directly on VHS tape and then have it run back through a VCR to produce a new image? Perhaps with magnets or something.....?

vhs is tough, even trying to make tape loops was a dead end for me bc of how it wraps around the spool. im sure it can be done tho

Haha, probably. Or you could do tape to tape stuff. Have you heard of Animal Charm? They do live VHS mashing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwgMGExlfMw

http://vimeo.com/user1677919

This guy does live VHS tape loops, going between multiple VCRs even!!

okay fuck that's exactly what i was trying to do!

http://destructuralvideo.blogspot.com/2010/03/vhs-vcr-loops.html

Sweet Jesus i want one of these

http://www.greentreegazette.com/uploads/Remember/pixllll.jpg

haha what is that pixelvision?

I heard the lens on those is SWEET actually

yes. records straight to audio cassettes. if only you could route some effects pedals into it!

u should figure it out

you could probably hack one of those yourself would that work?

Bruce McClure uses effects pedals sometimes, I think:

http://vimeo.com/2462299

I have other things i want to figure out first. Apparently it can record to audio because it spins the tapes pretty fast, as video is sent at a much higher frequency than audio. Years ago I tried recording video to a WAV file and then playing that back into the input of a VCR and nothing came of it. Perhaps i should try again at a higher bitrate...

i really liked Harun Farocki's Parallel I-IV, which is about 42 minutes in total. the first (below) begins with a brief overview of the evolution of trees in video games. the rest of the series focuses on boundaries and internal logic systems. there's a lot more to be said about it but i know i won't be able to describe it very well. there was a good essay in this month's artforum (behind a paywall, sorry) that brought my attention to it. i have always been an emotional person but for some reason i have been getting broadsided lately by things like this that seem intended to be analytical. late night tears over watching his film partner's son glitch out ocean wave surfaces. so who knows, maybe others will enjoy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzc3OPc8gUM

any other recommendations? preferably stuff that i can watch online?

this is so cool, i would love to see it in person

http://jsteinkamp.com/quicktime/html/blind_eye.html

it might take a few seconds to load, but wait to see the video