Hollywood

In this 1993 contribution to the On Art and Artists series, artist Art Jones describes his entry into the world of activist media, and the genesis of his belief in the potential for a democratized street-level media. Hailing from the Bronx, Jones recalls his personal dislocation during college, when he began studying film and video at SUNY Purchase. At that time, Jones experienced a cultural isolation, which he mobilized to fuel his practice. This willingness to confront issues of representation and absence, asserting the validity of his own subjecthood, would become a defining characteristic of his work.

Stutter the Searchers is an undulating re-edit of John Ford's "frontier saga" The Searchers (1956). Ford's violent narrative is restructured through the use of condensation, repetition, and the oscillating de-location of the image's place within the frame. This work pursues a spiraling, percussive search where flashing images endanger assumptions about home and wilderness.

This title is also available on Reconstruction Trilogy: Les LeVeque.

This tape is a critique of the blockbuster film Top Gun and the attitudes of macho militarism that it embodies. The tape uses the unpopulated space of a fast food chain parking lot and the runway at Miramar Naval Air Station to present facts about the vast wasteland of American military spending. These segments are contrasted with promotional clips from Top Gun that condense the ideas of the film into 30-second spots.

as the waves play along with an invisible spine (the workers die) is a stroboscopic work that pulsates black and white at approximately 14 Hz. Buried within that field of pulsation is a 90 second algorithmically condensed version of John Huston's 1956 film Moby Dick. Huston's minimal close-ups of the doomed sailors flicker as afterimage ghosts as approximately 4Hz in the visually unstable field of alternating black and white frames.

So long as the creature lives

it must carry forth its vertebrae

as the waves play along

Revolving around a movie mogul’s familial intrigues, Made In Hollywood tells the story of two artists selling out to make movies, and a simple country girl’s angelic rise to fame despite it all. As a copy of a copy, this tape critiques what it mimics, and, by revelling in the glitz and glamour of image-obsessed stars, exploits the love/hate relationship viewers have with their media icons: simultaneously viewing them as perfect models and ridiculous trumped-up figures existing only in the fantasy-land that is Hollywood.

This high octane drama that I made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute chronicles the moral decline of it's heroine, as the love of a man she obsesses over drives her over something else: a cliff into hell.  It's a free fall all the way to the bottom destination, and there's a heck of a lot of nice looking, young people along for the ride.

white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston is a stroboscopic work made from fifteen films starring Charlton Heston. Each film has been algorithmically condensed down to thirty seconds in length. These fifteen condensed movies have been frame-by-frame chronologically organized and metrically inter-cut with two Heston film frames followed by two white frames.

RECKONING 3 is the first in a series of investigations into:

1. Terror and wonder in big-budget virtual worlds

2. The mutability, fragility and loneliness of technologically mediated social identities and friendships

3. The queerness and malevolence of archetypal masculinity

4. The diminishing distance between "real" and "artificial" humanity

5. The poetics of blockbuster aesthetics

a little girl dreams of a new pluralism meanwhile the old war continues V.1  2009, 67:00

Revolving around a movie mogul’s familial intrigues, Made In Hollywood tells the story of two artists selling out to make movies, and a simple country girl’s angelic rise to fame despite it all. As a copy of a copy, this tape critiques what it mimics, and, by revelling in the glitz and glamour of image-obsessed stars, exploits the love/hate relationship viewers have with their media icons: simultaneously viewing them as perfect models and ridiculous trumped-up figures existing only in the fantasy-land that is Hollywood.

The result of over five years of Super-8 and 16mm filming on New York City streets, Lost Book Found melds documentary and narrative into a complex meditation on city life. The piece revolves around a mysterious notebook filled with obsessive listings of places, objects, and incidents. These listings serve as the key to a hidden city: a city of unconsidered geographies and layered artifacts—the relics of low-level capitalism and the debris of countless forgotten narratives. The project stems from the filmmaker's first job in New York—working as a pushcart vendor on Canal Street.

Walt Disney's re-imagineering of Martin Scorsese's classic film Taxi Driver follows Mickey Mouse-obsessed Travis Bickle as he looks for love in a rapidly transforming New York City. A 'fair use' parody by Bryan Boyce.

"A brilliant video essay."

-- Roger Ebert

In Reunion in Los Angeles, George Kuchar visits his friend, actress Virginia Giritlian. As the two drive around Beverly Hills, Kuchar is treated to the full Los Angeles experience, ranging from sitting next to the writers of Poltergeist at Il Fornaio to considerations of Al Pacino taking part in one of his films.

This film is an appropriation from the 1949 movie On the Town. Each sync sound frame of the Overture, "I Feel Like I’m not of Bed Yet" and "New York New York" is repeated 32 times and reoriented.

Meatballs - (Bill Murray + leading cast) = Marbles. A Hollywood classic re-visited and re-edited until our hero is no longer in sight.

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 2, Hot Mirror Mix.

Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford's The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film's temporal structuring to render a kinetic “painted desert” of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it.

A big splashy rendering of Hollywood in hot action. The babes, the boobs, the boo-boos and the inner triumphs all brought to the screen by the uncorked youth and uncouth old bats of the San Francisco Art Institute.

Stardust is the second part of the trilogy where Nicolas Provost investigates the boundaries of fiction and reality by filming everyday life with a hidden high resolution camera and turning the cinematic images into a fiction film by using cinematographic and narrative codes from the Hollywood film language. The first part of the trilogy was the award winning Plot Point (2007) that was shot entirely with a hidden camera and turned everyday life around Times Square, New York into a thriller film.

This film is an appropriation from the 1953 movie Gentlemen Prefer Blonds. Each sync sound frame of the opening song "A Little Girl from Little Rock" is repeated 32 times and reorientated.

Displaying a broad range of Golden Age Hollywood animation, Manifestoon is an homage to the latent subversiveness of cartoons. Though U.S. cartoons are usually thought of as conveyors of capitalist ideologies of consumerism and individualism, Drew observes: "Somehow as an avid childhood fan of cartoons, these ideas were secondary to a more important lesson—that of the 'trickster' nature of many characters as they mocked, outwitted and defeated their more powerful adversaries.

Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford's The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film's temporal structuring to render a kinetic “painted desert” of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it.

Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escourts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi.

With Strain Andromeda The, video artist Anne McGuire has created an awesome and spellbinding film that throws everything from story structure to character motivation into question. Put simply, McGuire has taken Robert Wise's entire 1971 virus from outer space classic The Andromeda Strain and re-edited it shot-by-shot precisely in reverse, so that the last shot appears first and the first last, though nothing is actually running backwards.

This film is an appropriation from the 1965 movie The Sound of Music. Each sync sound frame of the Prelude and opening song "The Hills are Alive" is repeated 16 times and reorientated.

An experimental portrait of a lighting stand-in and body double for a famous Hollywood actress, and a glimpse at the behind-the-scenes of cinema production

Music by The Velvet Underground.