Posts Tagged ‘video’

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Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Watching Martin Kohout, a work by Martin Kohout recently exhibited on jstchillin.org’s year-long “Serial Chillers in Paradise” online exhibition space, is a YouTube channel consisting of (as of the current date) four hundred and thirty uploaded videos.

Kohout began uploading videos to this channel in April 2010 and is still actively doing so.

The content of each of the videos on the channel consists of (in all but a few cases) a webcam capture of Kohout as he himself views another video on YouTube (some of which are his own earlier videos from this very series).

Each video acts as a sort of loop from YouTube to Kohout back into YouTube (and sometimes looping back out to Kohout again if, as just mentioned, he chooses to watch one of the videos of himself watching another video).

In a gallery setting, the playlist would presumably be run through chronologically (although not necessarily); however, for the viewer of the work on a personal computer, there are any number of ways to engage with it.

I, personally, began by viewing the most recent video – Watching Liam Crockard – Hugh Scott-Douglas – ABSOLUTELY @ CLINT ROENISCH.

In this particular video, one views Kohout – whose distinctive physiognomy is anchored by a pair of glasses with large, rounded frames – looking down towards the webcam and the computer screen which displays the video he’s watching.

Because he’s looking down to the webcam, a source of tension in each of these videos is the way in which Kohout’s gaze almost meets the viewer’s own.

It’s sort of like being on the side of a one-way mirror which allows one person the ability to look directly at the other without the other’s ability to look directly back.

As the video goes on, Kohout’s eyes scan over different parts of the screen with a dead-pan expression; at one point, he fidgets and, then, smirks; a bit later, something catches his eye out the window; and near the end, he gives a little smile before again returning to his default dead-pan.

Generally, though, there is only very little variation in Kohout’s performance (he’s just watching the videos) and this minimal, vaguely uncanny fascination persists through the playlist (or at least through the eight videos I personally viewed in full and the four videos I viewed in part).

As one views through multiple videos, the lack of variation in action nudges one towards elements outside of the central action documented in the videos including a heightened awareness of the shifting architectural scenarios, slight changes in Kohout’s hair style and clothing, and, finally, reflective thought regarding the conceptual apparatus of the work.

His seemingly unaffected performance brings up a source of tension in the work regarding the degree to which what one views here is, in fact, an unfiltered view on Kohout as he naturally watches the video or else if it’s a performance of someone as if he was naturally watching the videos.

Kohout knows that his watching is being recorded and is destined to be uploaded to YouTube as part of an art project – does this fact preclude one from saying for sure that he’s naturally watching the videos, and, furthermore, is there a normalizing process in which Kohout’s awareness of the recording process diminishes as the actual naturalness of the performance increases?

Additionally, as one views Kohout responding to the videos, to what degree does the viewer participate in the viewing of the videos he watches (particularly if the viewer is familiar with the content of the video)?

Is one just watching Kohout or is one to some extent watching a version of the video viewed, as well?

To the work’s credit, there aren’t any concrete answers to any of these questions.

What one views here, then, is perhaps a self-portrait demonstrating the ways in which the lines between being and being watched are increasingly blurred.

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Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Guthrie Lonergan created two videos composed solely of the a cappella vocal tracks of famous pop songs mashed-up with appropriated stock footage clips.

Both of these videos are titled Acapella.

In the first video, one views, to start, stock footage with burnt-in time code depicting an hourglass spinning on a pedestal in front of a blue background, which is itself probably designed to be used as a generic “bluescreen” in video postproduction.

The blue background in the clip, though, is creased and wrinkly which would make it difficult to use for a seamless bluescreen effect.

Also, the lighting is generally harsh, casting an entire half of the blue background in darkness, again defeating the point of bluescreen as an even, unchanging field of blue which can be easily keyed out in a single gesture in post-production.

Each of these qualities give one the impression that this is an amateur production, perhaps a single person hoping to sell cut-rate stock footage from their bedroom.

Following this introductory shot, the soundtrack opens with an a cappella rendering of the Police song “Message in a Bottle” as the view on the hourglass itself zooms in, focusing closer and closer on the sand dripping from the top of the hourglass to the bottom.

The viewer watches these sands of time drip away as Sting sings:

Just a castaway, an island at sea, oh
Another lonely day, with no here but me, oh
More loneliness than any man could bear
Rescue me before I fall into despair, oh

*****

It should be noted that as an a cappella version of “Message in a Bottle,” these lyrics become simultaneously more isolated and more rawly emotional than they would come across in the original song; and, furthermore, despite the seeming incongruity of the hourglass imagery and this raw vocal track, they begin to quickly make some sort of emotional sense together as they’re each sparsely produced and they each reference a certain threat of being alone in the world.

As the song continues, this hourglass imagery dissolves to a shot depicting a man (whose slicked back hairdo is visible in the bottom of the shot, incidentally) holding his hands above his head, demonstrating the idea of “growth” by placing his palms close together and, then, spreading them far apart over and over again.

At this point, the chorus of the song kicks in:

I’ll send an S.O.S. to the world
I’ll send an S.O.S. to the world
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle, yeah…

*****

When the man’s hand motions are juxtaposed with these lyrics, the viewer can, then, almost read them as themselves an “S.O.S.” – a ritualistic signal to a distant viewer, asking to be saved (or at least acknowledged).

This becomes poignant when one considers that – again – this particular stock footage is amateurish and naïve – one more drop of water in the ocean of non-professional or semi-professional user content on the Web, one more person expressing themselves in an environment of endless amounts of other personal expressions.

This is the problem of trying to express oneself in what Lonergan has termed “The Big Database” in which even what would otherwise be “amazing” content is flattened out; expressions (any expression – the videographer’s, Lonergan’s, my own) are consumed and, then, almost instantaneously forgotten.

As such, anyone trying to get their ideas heard in Internet-land is a sort of castaway.

Related to this point, Sting sings:

Walked out this morning, don’t believe what I saw
Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore
Seems I’m not alone in being alone

*****

What work like this video by Lonergan does, though, is start from the idea that everyone working on the Web is sending out their own S.O.S. and, by self-reflexively picturing that, a different lens and set of criteria for thinking about work in The Big Database might open up.

In Lonergan’s words:

[…] Something very real struggling beneath a heavy and ancient structure of corporate software defaults and cultural banality…

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Thursday, June 17th, 2010

Sand Saga by Shana Moulton, a ten-and-a-half minute video with a family resemblance to Moulton’s own Whispering Pines video series, is the story of a vision quest through a landscape involving not the traditional natural environment of the Native American vision quest, but rather a mishmash of the natural environment, new age kitsch, mirrors, vaginal Georgia O’Keefe iconography, archetypal myth, psychoactive skin creams, digital effects, time travel portals, and an extended hallucinatory state.

The narrative opens with two views of Moulton’s alter ego, Cynthia, viewing her own represented reflection in, first, a large bathroom mirror, and, second, a small personal mirror which (due to its ability to magnify facial details) morphs her face, stretching it and compressing it into bizarre forms.

Cynthia, then, returns to her reflection in the larger mirror as she applies a brown-green facial mask while, in the meantime, various objects in the bathroom – a Georgia O’Keefe “cow skull” poster as well as masks and sculptural busts depicting mythological figures – look on.

After putting on the finishing touches, she turns over an hourglass and, as the sands of time drip away, Cynthia – continuing to stare into her own reflection – watches the facial mask transform into a portal which itself leads to a lush landscape in which a shamanic figure drips sand onto a Native American sand painting (perhaps there is a Jackson Pollock reference here).

The shaman, represented to Cynthia as herself wearing an O’Keefe cow skull mask and a red jump suit, directs her to lie down on the painting as she applies consumer-quality massage gadgetry and polished black stones to Cynthia’s back.

Through the stages of this ritual, the shaman is able to extract both symbolic representations of blockages to Cynthia’s chakras as well as a contact lens from her eye – actions which, then, set off a cathartic, carnivalesque montage composed of dancing figures wearing mythological masks in the midst of a blissful void space composed of imagery from O’Keefe’s flower paintings.

This montage, accompanied by rhythmic new age music, continues for roughly three of the video’s ten-and-a-half minutes and, then, in a final scenario, Cynthia returns to her bathroom as “a new woman” and proceeds to eat her facial mask, taking what was initially a synthetic cover to her face and ingesting it, symbolically destroying it by absorbing it into herself.

Now, on the one hand, Sand Saga is a bildungsroman in which a young, seemingly dissatisfied character gains confidence through a mystical journey into the archetypal depths of herself.

On the other hand, though, the constant, knowingly jokey references to borderline quackery, “cheesy” special effects, and sham new age commodity culture casts the sincerity of this vision quest thesis into doubt – like, oh, it’s all a joke.

So which is it?

Well, at a recent artist’s talk at E.A.I., Moulton made several references to the television series Twin Peaks, citing it as an inspiration and ironically claiming that her own best video was a remake of the “Black Lodge” scenes from the final Twin Peaks episode which she made as an adolescent (unfortunately, that tape is now lost).

The appeal of Twin Peaks at the height of its meteoric rise in the 1990s was its tone of, on the one hand, absolute vulnerability and sincerity, and, on the other hand, absolute detached coolness and irony.

The viewer of Twin Peaks is invested in following the case of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” not because they intrinsically care about Laura Palmer nor because they care about the show’s detached hipster humor, but rather because of the satisfactory collision between these two elements in which it’s impossible to tell which one is the true Twin Peaks.

Similarly, Moulton’s videos are perhaps best considered as operating in the cracks of a collision between sincerity and irony and a lot of that has to do with Moulton’s skills as a performer.

Like Kyle MacLachlan in the role of Special Agent Dale Cooper before her, if one views Moulton’s character enough, it doesn’t matter if she’s serious or goofing or if the truth will ever be revealed; the pleasure is in following her figure it all out for herself.

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Friday, May 28th, 2010

Surveying the American Cultural Habitat by Hayley Silverman is a video composed of a short clip appropriated from a Bollywood musical which the artist slows down, plays in reverse, plays in forward motion again, and, then, in reverse again in an endless loop.

The action of this slowed down, reversed, and endlessly looped clip involves a South Asian woman holding a video camera in front of her face as she slides horizontally into the middle of the frame, removes her eye from the camera viewfinder (which is pointed directly at “us,” the viewers of the clip) and, then, smiles at “us” in a sort of half-awed, half-patronizing gesture of approval.

Also, the soundtrack of the video is a piece of music which is itself slowed down, played, reversed, and looped, resulting in a low, ominous undercurrent to this otherwise brightly colored and happy imagery.

As one begins to view through this loop, perhaps the first thing one tries to do is rationally understand it – to deconstruct all of these elements described above and, then, piece them back together into a satisfying story.

For example, the collision of the anthropological-sounding title – Surveying the American Cultural Habitat – with imagery involving a South Asian woman pointing a video camera back at “us,” the viewers of the clip, might lead one to say that the work is in some sense, anyway, inverting the practice of “othering” back out to the “American” viewer who is watching the clip.

It is not the “American” who is surveying her cultural habitat; but she who is surveying the “American” cultural habitat.

Perhaps.

But, as one continues to view through the repetitions of the loop, one may realize two additional things:

1. First of all, as one watches the repetition of the clip, one’s understanding changes each time – each repetition involves the present experience of the clip – yes – but also both the viewer’s ever-increasing past understandings of the clip as well as their future predictions for their understandings of the clip.

Thus, each time one views through the loop, one experiences a different clip with a different understanding which it affords.

2. And, second, due to this continuous change in understanding, it becomes difficult to assume that any effort at rationally understanding the clip will ever come to any ultimate fruition.

Every time one thinks they understand it, the next time one views through the loop, that understanding is mutated by the experience of comparing the understanding to the actual viewing of the clip.

And, at that point, one might catch on to another level of understanding in the work:

What the viewer is shown to be othering here is (in its own way) the video itself.

By looking at the work in the hopes of decoding it, dissecting it like a forensics report, one is going to miss it every time as it continuously slips out of one’s grip.

As such, one’s attempts to understand the work must then be conducted with a certain humbleness – an automatic understanding that no understanding is final.

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Friday, May 21st, 2010

Pre-Sensation by Hayley Silverman is an approximately four minute video in which one views a laser pointer track over the projected image of another video which itself depicts rhythmic hand-held camera movements over sculptures representing “natural” forms and abstracted nude bodies.

The motion of the laser pointer here is composed of improvised, arcing motions which reflect the improvised, arcing motions of the camera over the sculptures depicted in the projected video.

Additionally, the video is paired with an improvised jazz score by a band named “Willendorf” and is also intercut at one point with several shots of a male sculptor as he washes the dirt from one of his sculptural tools and, then, from his hands.

Silverman’s movements with the laser pointer are legible as a sort of pre-intellectual, pre-sensational sensuality harmonizing with the shapes of the sculptural forms.

The fact that she is pointing her laser beam and her camera lens all over these sculptures, though, is not a neutral gesture.

Rather, the aggressive scopophilia on view here in which the laser and camera ogle over representations of breasts, thighs, penises, and asses is an act of primitivist othering which mirrors and, thus, brings to the forefront, these sculptures’ own participation in this process.

That is to say, as one views the laser pointer and camera scope-out these sculptures as if they were sexual conquests, one feels, perhaps, empathy with them as in – hey, you’re basically raping it with your eyes instead of considering the object as an equal being.

In turn, the sculpture’s own problematic relationship to idealizations of otherness is, then, almost unavoidably brought to the forefront of one’s view on the work.

The history of primitivism in 20th century art, after all, (of which the sculptures depicted in this video are in sincere dialogue) is (it is widely thought) premised on an illusion in which non-Western cultures are presumed to be closer to nature and, thus, more pure than self-loathing technologically-tainted Western cultures.

What was intended as praise for these cultures, is received – in reality – as the worst kind of imperialism in which anyone outside of Western culture is reduced to a myth or a symbol of purity – that is, non-existent (or if existent, then existent only in order to serve as a reflection for Western culture).

Now, it’s important to emphasize the fact that the performance here is intercut with images of a white, male sculptor (ostensibly the sculptor of these sculptures) as he washes the dirt of the sculptural process off of his tools and hands.

By including this particular footage, Silverman both upsets the rhythmic flow of the performance, as well as nudges one’s view on the work towards the fact that the sculptures here were created by a white male artist as an instance of primitivist art.

Additionally, the fact that the name of the band who scored the video’s improvisatory jazz score – “Willendorf” – is presumably taken from the twenty-four thousand year old nude sculpture, the Venus of Willendorf, also nudges one in this direction.

As such, the performance’s physicality and sensuality activate one part of one’s mind, while the artist’s careful critical framing of this very physicality and sensuality, activates another part, a counterpoint, calling into question its own premises.

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Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

No Fun by Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.org) is an approximately sixteen minute video depicting a diptych of video images.

In the video to the right of the diptych, one views a young man who has (it appears) hung himself to death.

In the video to the left of the diptych, one views a continually changing series of random computer users who are responding to the sight of this hanging man.

More specifically, the video is a documentation of the Chatroulette interface in which one of the artists (Franco Mattes) performs the role of the hanging man and leaves it up to the algorithms of Chatroulette (and the pool of Chatroulette users online at the time) to generate the bulk of the video’s subsequent content.

The first thing to note is that one’s focus through the duration of the video is nudged further away from the video of the hanging man and closer towards the video of users’ varied reactions to the sight of the hanging man.

What one takes away is the picture of a virtual public responding to the possibility of a real suicide.

In most cases, a legible pattern forms in which, first of all, a shock occurs where the user confronts the image of the suicide and exhibits a strong reaction.

The sight of a suicide online or off is obviously going to be unsettling, but, there’s something about placing a suicide in this context which is unsettling in a very particular way.

For example, the hanging man here is “live” in the sense that their virtual persona is functioning, but the user (the actual hanging man, himself) is “dead” in the sense that his biological body is no longer functioning.

So, can one really say that he’s definitely not there?

(Like a ghost, his presence in the bedroom is palpable.)

But, can one really say that he is there?

(Of course not, he’s dead.)

So, one asks one’s self:

Is a dead body the same thing as the real person?

And, then:

Is the online persona of a person representing themselves as their own dead body the same thing as the person?

Furthermore, the body here is suspended in the air – both floating, free from the laws of gravity and falling, on the precipice of physical collapse, which only adds to this confusion regarding its location.

After this initial shock effect, then, a range of reactions occur from apathy, to pondering, to sexual excitement, to denial, to the need to take a picture of the screen with a digital camera, to amusement, to vicious insulting, to hilarity, to confusion, and, in one case, to calling the police.

Some people assume it’s a joke, some people think it might be real, and most people aren’t quite sure.

Within this range of reactions, though, there is one underlying theme which remains as constant as the presence of the hanging man himself:

The question:

Is this real?

That is to say, first of all, is this really a dead body or is it rather a clever fakery perpetrated by, say, a performance artist?

And, second of all, is this real, as in is this the sort of real human situation wherein I – as a real human being – am ethically called upon to really act (whether it’s real or whether it’s fake)?

That question is by far and away the most common theme brought up by the users throughout the video’s runtime.

Is this real?

NOTE: This post might be read in conjunction with the essay “A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a Hatian Trickster Sprit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society” by Julian Dibbel (1993)

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Friday, April 16th, 2010

Avatar in 3D by Artie Vierkant is a slowly-spinning animated 3D sphere.

On the surface of the sphere, the entire one hundred sixty-two-minute runtime of the film Avatar has been warped and stretched-out in order to cover the total surface area of the sphere.

By turning Avatar into an image object – a “thing” – the work illuminates how Avatar itself is not just a movie, but a gigantic meme, an entire world, extending well beyond the runtime of the film.

One of the most significant developments in film history is George Lucas’s recognition that Star Wars is not just a movie, but a franchise that fans can wander around in via all of the extra media and merchandise that surround it.

In a hyperreal world of endless media unreality, consumers have the desire and now the ability to amble through metaverses, consuming media franchises in ways that diverge from simply sitting in a theater and watching projected light for two hours.

The slow, painful death of movies is a testament to this as consumers now prefer the scope of entire television series or massively multiplayer game universes like Halo or World of Warcraft.

In the event that someone wants to go to the movies, it’s to see a new installment of a franchise that expands the world of the characters; in the event that someone wants to read a book, it’s to read an installment of a series like Harry Potter, Twilight, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books.

Films are still on some level stretches of time told through cinematic language, but they are now also, perhaps primarily, things, objects expanding through the Internet and culture at large.

This is what Vierkant’s work shows me.

An avatar for Avatar.

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Friday, March 12th, 2010

As .*` .* ;`*,`., `, ,`.*.*. *.*` .* ;`*,`., `, ,`.*.*. *.*` .* ;`*,`., `, ,`.*.*. *, the left video of Sparkling I and II, a video diptych by Petra Cortright, opens, one views a character in a lush garden world wearing sunglasses propped-up on the top of her head (played by Cortright herself) who nearly fills the frame.

Likewise, the right video of the diptych – :’ |._ ~**~ _.:’ |._ ~**~ _.:’ |._~**~ _.:’ |._ ~**~ _.:’ |._ ~**~ _. – opens with the same character in a (different but similarly lush) garden world, wearing sunglasses propped down on the lower-bridge of her nose as she – again – nearly fills the frame.

Within the first ten seconds of each of these videos an identical plot point, then, occurs:

After re-adjusting her sunglasses so that she views the world through their lenses, a jump-cut catalyzes all perceptually-realistic motion represented in the video to be trailed by an automatized “sparkle” animation in which plus-signs (+’s) and ex’s (x’s) flare up and down in flurries of syncopation which read as the sparkle of, say, light on water, light through trees, stars at night, or the Web-native “sparkle” of star field wallpaper.

The bulk of each video’s subsequent actions, then, occur through these automatically animated sparkle animations as Cortright, whose moving body is now trailed by sparkles, walks away from the camera towards a tree and begins to casually – poetically, but almost aimlessly – pull at its branches, run her hands through its leaves, amble through its shade, and generally interact with it in a pas de deux of sparkle showers emanating from both her body and the tree parts she performs with.

Cortright makes work that is often indistinguishable from vernacular forms of culture.

There are lots of videos of young people using a default effect and then acting silly.

She does it with a style, humor, and somehow very human sincerity that makes each of her works a very good example of whatever cultural form she is working in.

This piece is a good example.

For someone who doesn’t look at it as art, it would be a pretty good example of an amateur video.

By putting it in the context of art and the context of her larger body of work, though, the video takes on a different meaning.

It works as a readymade almost, demonstrating for the viewer part of the visual language of the moment so that the viewer can see it.

What is more powerful, though, is that it doesn’t do it in an academic way.

While being a work of art, it is also a work that is not “of art.”

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Monday, March 1st, 2010

Showreel is a video by Harm van den Dorpel.

He uses an intensified Ken Burns slide show tool to collage found images and screen captures he collected along with a handful of artist friends – Charles Broskoski, Constant Dullaart, Martijn Hendriks, Pascual Sisto, and Ola Vasiljeva.

There are three automatic functions that he uses in the editing process:

1. A slow dissolve into and out of a palimpsest of three to four (or more) image layers composed entirely of imagery appropriated from digital image archives.

2. A slow lateral movement over the majority of these image layers in both varying directions as well as varying rates of speed.

3. A slow zoom both into as well as out of approximately half of these image layers.

There are a lot of recognizable images, but generally it is abstract.

These layered, abstracted images function as an allegory of the time in which the image sharing took place.

It was not one event causing another event like a cue ball hitting an 8 ball into a corner pocket.

It was an overlapping, networked series of events.

It is a picture of shared time.

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Friday, February 12th, 2010

Exotic-A by Kari Altmann is a video of continuously fracturing digital imagery depicting a natural “exotica” of tropical flora and fauna.

Video documents move in, out, and through one another in a continuous flux. They are bound by both a static, “bedrock” background image, as well as a static, diaphanous foreground “gauze.”

The views shift in and out of focus and it all remains dreamy and illusionistic.

The work, thus, mirrors the indeterminacy of the natural world.

It is not a coherent form with an essential focal point; it is an ecology – in motion.

Altmann’s broader project works with these same ecological principals.

When one views Altmann’s website, most of her projects are listed, but not linked to as they are either works in progress, or research for future projects, or simply not available to be viewed.

But, go back to her site a month later and something’s changed.

Some of the work from the more distant historical past is made available, and some of the work from the more recent historical past is made unavailable.

Altmann understands her personal archive of work to be mutable, taking advantage of the instantaneousness and general ease of change in the digital, to place her own history in flux.

Projects are listed; projects are taken away.

All one can do is describe the view as it slips out of one’s grasp again and again.

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