The sonic fabric of 2nd Person, [originally] a multi-channel video installation, is formed through an array of women’s voices orchestrated as parallel tracks in a musical composition. The speakers, all women I have intimately known at different points in my life -- my child, my mother, my best friends, students, mentors -- talk with me about aging, growing up, death, motherhood, love and loss.
“Fouteen-year-old bone collector Maxine Rose is looking for validation from her heroes, amongst them the primatologist Jane Goodall, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the New Zealand teen pop star Lorde. Offering them a gift of language, Maxine Rose stands for the desire to be visible and understood, not unlike the desire of an artist. We are particularly impressed by the multilayered story telling structure, the freshness of the characterization, and the honest exploration of an artists` vulnerability."
From A to Z in this mock cooking-show demonstration Rosler 'shows and tells' the ingredients of the housewife's day. She offers an inventory of tools that names and mimics the ordinary with movements more samurai than suburban. Rosler's slashing gesture as she forms a letter of the alphabet in the air with a knife and fork is a rebel gesture, punching through the 'system of harnessed subjectivity' from the inside out.
"I was concerned with something like the notion of 'language speaking the subject', and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity."
— Martha Rosler
Directed by artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia, The Sojourn imagines a restless landscape film in Taiwan. Visiting scenic locations shot by King Hu, the short experiments with the road movie genre and its intersection with the martial arts epic. Sia meets actor Shih Chun, who played the protagonist in Hu’s Dragon Inn, Touch of Zen and other wuxia films, as he guides the quest to re-encounter the iconic landscapes where Dragon Inn was shot. He counsels on the perfect conditions of mist and weather.
This strange, lyrical performance video diary is a millennial reflection on the impossibility to "reveal" one’s self in stormy times such as ours. The piece is also about the intricate connections between performance and everyday life; about language, identity, love, nostalgia and activism amidst the California apocalypse.
"A group of students and teachers gather in an historical mansion in the woods of West Virginia for a week-long retreat in spoken Latin. I observe and I participate while navigating the errata with my camera."
— Sky Hopinka
A chilling and revealing look at bureaucratic techno-speak, Finley provides a course in “official” media rhetoric, presenting terms and decoding for the audience (i.e. "soft target = city”, “involuntary conversion = crash”) against a slow-motion collage of military imagery. This intensely visual video illustrates how the urban environment has become the site of tactical language, rendering our daily lives in a science-fiction state of constant fear. The visual elements create a rhythm of threat that is punctuated by high altitude shots of military jets.
Investigations of a dog: An ever-growing list of canine-related idioms flash on the screen.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Gustavo Vazquez, Daniel Salazar, Patrick Litchy, Jethro Rothe-Kushel
I'm here to bring you the Truth and the Pleasure
Here to show you the meaningful form
It's going to feel like a new kind of leisure
It's going to smell like a freshly mown lawn
I'm installing a personal toolkit for thinking
Especially customized only for you
You enable it just by the action of blinking
From now on your thoughts will be focused and true
A portrait of the artist as a not-so-young man. The filmmaker attempts to enter the digital age by making a new video version of one of his old films.
"The award of the Short Film Festival goes to a video in which the reflection of artistic work becomes a form itself. John Smith manages to give us a self-ironic humorous experiment about art and time."
—Prize of the International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen 2000
This title is also available on John Smith: Program 2.
As an ominous voice guides us through Best Is Man’s Breath Quality, we are confronted by dense and complex images and sounds that appear and disappear before us. From primates engaging with their reflected selves to glowing jellyfish drifting through deep and dark oceans, our visual perception of the human figure is decentered, leaving only the grain of analog and digital voices recognizable to our senses.
"Ad Vice consists of a succession of colored projection surfaces with segments of text from the worlds of advertising, sport and popular culture. These projection surfaces in turn alternate with images of a rock band whose music continuously frames the whole. As regards form and content, the video looks like a commercial, an advertising spot for SWIPE country. The fast changing images, the continual music, and the starting and ending credits refer to it. The viewer is greeted with the words: welcome to SWIPE country... enjoy the sound... make contact...
The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity is a documentary about the search for four lost treasures buried on a single farm in Missouri. These treasures include a Spanish explorer's gold, silver from the Civil War, mysterious stone carvings, lost texts, and a wife's attempt to heal her husband and protect herself and her children. Part personal documentary and part historical essay, The Disappointment traces the patterns of cultural forgetting etched in the landscape of the Austin Farm.
Sentences is a beguiling, hypnotic meditation on the poetics of space.
2@ is part of the Pop Manifestos series, a five-video project realized in collaboration with Cokes' former students Seth Price and Damian Kulash, and originally conceived as part of a series for the conceptual band SWIPE.
A poetic meditation on distance, Come Closer is a short and peripatetic film, casting an affective web between the locations of Lisbon, San Francisco and Brazil. Focusing on Brazilian-Algerian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz, musician Derrick Green –– the filmmaker’s brother and lead singer of Brazilian band Sepultura –– and her own work produced in Lisbon since 1992, Come Closer can be thought as a meditation on friendship and saudade.
“Ursonate 1986 is the result of a transference process which utilizes computer and video technology to transport a 1932 phonetic poem, Ursonate, by the German artist Kurt Schwitters into a contemporary context. The poem is recreated by translating the original German phonetics into English for performance by a Macintosh computer. In the early 20th century, Dada artists who experimented with phonetic poetry were exploring the concepts of pre-language and pre-consciousness. The title of Schwitters' piece, Ursonate, translates as a primordial sonata.
When everyone has forgotten the romantic refrains of the Internationale sung in different languages, Pablito, a blue front Amazon parrot, capable of living to 100 years old, will remember. He rings bells and is learning to whistle, hum and sing the Internationale in French, Spanish and German.
In 2006 I began to think again about the handwoven canvases based on the biblical Babel text that I created in the 1980s. But now, using the same coded language and working at the computer, I created Babel: The Seven Minute Scroll. The scroll, created in the computer (48 feet wide x 2 feet high), is animated from right to left across the video screen for the duration of seven minutes, and then printed to paper.
Images of friends and landscapes are cut, fragmented, and reassembled on an overhead projector as hands guide their shape and construction in this film stemming from Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia. The voice tells a story about a not too distant past, a not too distant ruin, with traces of nostalgia articulated in terms of lore; knowledge and memory passed down and shared not from wistful loss, but as a pastiche of rumination, reproduction, and creation.
Using footage from a trip to the Orient, images of objects, products, the city and nature, Rankin investigates society's reverance for the "exotic" and the "pure" as manifested in tourism, Communism, Coca-Cola, Las Vegas, the Civil War, Hollywood, and photography. Examining the common idealisation of things distant in time or space, The Pure didactically reflects upon our societal penchant for categorization that begins with childhood games and is reflected in the way our culture organizes itself and the world around it.
"A major influence for generating ideas for me was not what I could contrive on my desktop, but being open and receptive to “accident”. For instance, one evening in 1972 while typing a syllabus for a class on my old Smith Corona typewriter, I happened to see on the TV a documentary by Leni Riefenstahl. German troops were marching, and I found that I could duplicate the “ta ta tum, ta ta tum, ta ta tum tum tum” of the drumbeat by typing “mar mar march mar mar march.“ Had not the broadcast of this film taken place while I was typing, I would never have thought of this concept.
"This video in two parts is a newcomer's portrait of Montréal, and focuses on two of my architectural obsessions: the Hydro Québec building and the Métro. I spent my first winter in Montréal in a cold, dark, first-floor apartment. I sat in the kitchen beside the electric heater, drinking coffee and watching the disk on the electric meter spin faster and faster, all the while wondering how I would manage to pay the bills. At night, I lay in bed and looked at the enormous illuminated 'Q' on the Hydro Québec building and wondered how much it cost to keep it lit every night.
Identically dressed, and with sibling-like resemblance, performance artists Trevor Martin and Kym Olsen shift between spoken word and athletic dance choreography in a collection of 29 scenes. Set in various locations--including a gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, and a trailer park circus--Martin and Olsen slip between a ventriloquist and his dummy, a seducer and his surrogate, a doctor and his patient, and synchronized dance partners. The film examines a complex social psychology--questioning the colonization of the human body for various political, medical and religious agendas.
