DINCA » watch video

Percy the Persian Blue and the Sinking Sand by Arran Ridley

Andrew Rosinski — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:34:16 +0000

Percy the Persian Blue and the Sinking Sand, Arran Ridley, 2010, 2 min, video

For me, this is nostalgia, evoking memories of my first years of web design, wherein I used free, visual-based .html editing services, e.g., expage, angelfire, geocities, and tripod. I believe all of those services are now defunct, with the possible exception of geocities, I think. My first website website was “Gecko Land,” a website containing an eclectic mix of gecko and salamander care-sheets. After global success with Gecko Land — the proof was in the guestbook, people from around the world sent their thanks — I launched a second website, Gecko World, another success. Those websites were up for seven or so years. This video by Arran Ridley reminders me of my first two websites, considering its elements of the auto-play midi-music that plays in the background, the animated .gifs, and other kitsch elements. That, and the cat subject is akin to my gecko and salamander subjects. So there is my subjective analysis of this video, not much I can add, other than I suggest you watch this video for shits and giggles.

Visit Arran’s website here.

Official Synopsis: Our 2 year old Persian Blue is a fussy fellow. Percy has always had hissy tantrums when faced with baths, grooming, food and vets visits but he’s a beautiful, proud cat with bundles of character. He’s a tentative mouser too but the one thing he cannot resist is chasing birds.

We have a sand pit in our back garden, which has a cover to keep it safe from Percy and other cat’s messages. It attracts insects and in turn birds which only makes it more interesting for Percy.

Anyway it’s been very stormy here recently and percy has been reluctant to go outside, he gazes out of the window and look at me all sad eyed and bored that there’s nothing to chase and no kingdom to survey as it’s covered in water- something Percy avoids at all costs!

I put Percy out the back door, early, one morning, after a very rainy night where thunder had made it impossible to sleep. Having got overtired I completely forgot about him until I sat down with a cup of tea mid-morning in the conservatory. I noticed the cover of the sandpit cover had been blown off and was lying against our garden fence. I ran into the garden to right the cover, only to find Percy, neck-deep in quicksand, there were a few feathers half sunk in the sand. Percy was very upset, he mewed loudly and gave me an expression so infuriated and was very grateful to be scooped out of his quicksand nightmare. The storm had been so powerful it whipped off the sand pit cover, and most of the sand, then pouring rain had made what was left into some very dangerous quicksand! I imagine a bird must have been flitting around on one side and Percy must have pounced in and become stuck!

Percy is no longer so keen to chase birds and respects the sandpit at a safe distance and he got a lovely thorough bath and grooming, which he reluctantly endured. Now he’s back to being a pretty kitty having learnt his lesson.

Video Interview: Peter Hutton, Robert Gardner, the Screening Room (1977)

Andrew Rosinski — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:10:48 +0000

Peter Hutton (At Sea, 2007, Skagafjordur, 2003, Looking at the Sea, 2001), an eminent experimental filmmaker from Michigan, visited the Screening Room Series, in March 1977, to screen excerpts from his films and discuss his experiences with filmmaking and education; Hutton is interviewed by Robert Gardner. Gardner is a eminent visual anthropologist who is widely known for his 1965 ethnographic film, Dead Birds (1965). Throughout the years, Dead Birds has functioned as essential referential material and a common case study in the world of anthrology, visual anthropology, and ethnographic filmmaking. Dead Birds in referenced in essential ethnographic readings, including Karl Heider’s book, Ethnographic Film, and Jay Ruby’s book, Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. (Click here to visit Gardner’s website.)

Gardner developed and hosted The Screening Room, and the program ran from 1972–1981. The Boston-based program offered independent filmmakers an opportunity to screen and discuss their work on a commercial (ABC-TV) affiliate station. Gardner interviews the filmmakers in a minimal-intellectualist setting that’s somewhat comparable to the aesthetics of the Charlie Rose show. The Screening Room also featured filmmakers Robert Breer, John Whitney SR, Jean Rouch, Jonas Menkas, Bruce Baillie, Jan Lenica, John and Faith Hubley, Emile DeAntonio, Ricky Leacock, Yvonne Rainer and Michael Snow, and other notables.

In this interview, excerpts from Hutton’s films include: July ’71 in San Francisco (1973), Images of Asian Music (1973-1974), Florence (1975), New York Near Sleep for Saskia (1972), and footage from New York Portrait: Chapter One (1978–1979). (Click here to view Peter Hutton’s filmography.)

The featured video above is only an 11 minute excerpt; the original episode ran 72 minutes, and is available as a digital download, rental or purchase, from the Documentary Educational Resources website. Enjoy!

Five Question Interview with Vimeo

Andrew Rosinski — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 03:47:24 +0000

I recently interviewed the founder of vimeo, Blake Whitman, for Inspired Magazine, a daily selection of graphic design and web design inspiration. We briefly discussed the current the 2010 Vimeo Film Festival and Awards.

Click here to read the five question interview.

L’Internationale by Marianna Milhorat

Andrew Rosinski — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 17:47:51 +0000

L’Internationale, Excerpt from Marianna Milhorat.

Here is a 48 second excerpt from Marianna Milhort‘s L’Internationale, which won Best Experimental Film at the 2010 Chicago Underground Film Festival. Marianna primarily works with 16mm film; she is a Montréal-based filmmaker.

Shoot

Andrew Rosinski — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:54:51 +0000

Filmmaker Chris Burden shoots himself with a live round of .22 ammo.

Interview with Rosa Menkman, Dutch Visualist

Andrew Rosinski — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:32:03 +0000

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch filmmaker and artist; Rosa is a trailblazer in the glitch video scene. Rosa experiments with video compression, feedback, glitches, and other forms of noise to create visuals unique to the realm of digital media.

Most discern visual glitches — i.e. buzzing lines on interlaced video, video lag, digital blocks, particles, and pixelation — as a detriment to video aesthetics. Rosa, however, embraces these glitch-bits, and contrives them in her work, which is multivalent, and may be described as subversive fidelity, technicolor, synthetic yet organic, and at times, raucous.

Rosa has shown her work at Blip (Europe and US), Haip (Ljubljana 08), Cimatics (Brussels 08/09), Video Vortex (Amsterdam ’08 + Brussels ’09), Pasofest (Ankara 08), and collaborated on art projects together with Alexander Galloway, little-scale, Govcom.org, Goto80, and the internet art collective Jodi.org.

Rosa has written many words on glitch, including manifesto on glitch, which you can download in .pdf format here. In 2009, Rosa completed her master thesis on digital glitch under the supervision of Geert Lovink.

Dear mister Compression from Rosa Menkman on Vimeo.

1) Please tell us about the glitch genre. What is glitch video and why should someone watch a glitched video?

Glitches are the uncanny, brutal structures that come to the surface during a break of the flow within a technology; they are the primal data-screams of the machine. In the digital these utterances often take form following the “vernacular of file formats” (the encoded organizations of data). A file format signifies what protocols (formal descriptions and semantic rules) are used to structure or encode the information. Many different file formats exist, for different forms of information and every one of these formats possesses its own encoding structures, which can be understood as a grammar or idiom. When this idiom is broken, for instance by a glitch or a wrong encoding, the data in its basic/primal structures of encoding comes to the surface. Visually glitches show themselves through organizational structures like rasters, grids, blocks, points, interlacing vectors and frames and therefore often look complex, repetitive, discolored, fragmented and flickering.

Glitch art is a practice that studies and researches the vernacular of file formats in exploitative manners to deconstruct and create new, brutalist (audio)visual works. However, glitch artists often go beyond this formal approach; they realize that the glitch does not exists without human perception and therefore have a more inclusive approach to digital material.
The materiality of glitch art is constantly mutating; it exists as an unstable assemblage that relies on the one hand the construction, operation and content of the apparatus (the medium) and on the other hand the work, the writer/artist, and the interpretation by the reader and/or user (the meaning). Thus, the materiality of the glitch art is not (just) the digital material that follows the vernacular of file formats, nor the machine it appears upon, but a constantly changing construct that depends on the interactions between text, social, esthetical, political and economic dynamics and the point of view from which the different actors make meaning.
Digital artists exploit their digital materials thus also metaphorically or critically (showing the medium in a critical state or criticizing the medium and its inherent norms) and not just formally.

I think it is an interesting choice of you to use the words “glitch genre” – more and more people are indeed referring to glitch art as a genre. But I also think it is kind of a problematic choice of words. In the coming month there will be a conference about “noise art”. Jon Cates (a teacher at SAIC [The School of the Art Institute of Chicago], Chicago and opinionated contender within the glitch scene) asked me what I thought about this just last weekend, and now when you ask me this similar question I could give you almost the same answer. This kind of genre-fication (Gentrification?) is in my opinion a contradiction interminis: noise and glitches are (often) about breaking or pushing boundaries and relaying the membranes of what is socially accepted as categories or genre. Noise and glitch “categories” are thus in a constant state of flux and pinpointing them down as a genre feels like an act that defies their inherent nature.
However, as more and more people are starting to use the term “glitch genre”, I think it has become apparent that the question of what constitutes a genre, and how a genre should be studied needs to be included in Glitch Studies. Also, in the case of a “glitch genre”, I think there is a need to research the process of stylization of glitch – the point where the formal creation of glitches are not unknown, new utterances but are becoming stabilized, new commodities and even filters.
This kind of study involves more then just a vernacular of file formats or a research into technology but also includes culture, individuals, politics and the history of the technology.

But I still wonder if there is really anything consistent within the glitch art “genre”. If so, then I think it is the critical use of error, perceived or non perceived, real or designed. And I think when I watch a glitched video, or any other glitch work, this is what I find most interesting to look for: what critical elements play a role in the work – does the work criticize something, or does it show the technology in a critical state?

staircase to nowhere

2) Your inspiration: who, what, where, when, and why.

One important moment in my personal glitch-history is when I visited the exhibition “World Wide Wrong” by the art collective Jodi (Amsterdam, NIMK, 2005). This is where I had my “paradigm-shifting” encounter with glitch art – although I did not realize it at the time. The exhibition touched me, even though I didn’t understand it at all – I went home sort of shattered and confused.
What I learned when I came home and took some space to think, was that the digital world of the moving, audiovisual imagery did not just exist out of images striving for perfection, but that there is also a space for unknown, unaccepted or plainly wrong possibilities – which was a revelation to me – (I knew about the videoart from the 70s, but never thought about a digital counterpart). I used to perceive breaks within digital transmissions as annoying, or even scary, but now I suddenly saw that the glitch can also be understood as a special event. This discovery created a lot of questions, like “what is a glitch?” and “what is glitch art?”, which inspired me to write my master thesis about Jodi, a research that that I later also continued in formally driven, practical work.

While I used to be a commercial photographer, focussing on how to make the best framing and technically perfect photo, now I didn’t need to be perfect anymore. A catharsis of broken, creative energy challenged me to map and explore new possibilities. In my first explorations of the broken image I just saw ruins of lost meaning. After a while I found more than just damage, ravage and chaos; I saw a not yet existing aesthetics and beauty. Lately I am moving away from just formal experimenting and am trying to tell stories about beauty through collapse, tipping points and the tragedy of lost, ‘just not good enough’ signals of obsolete technologies.

I realize now that the constant search for complete transparency, or perfect transmissions brings ‘newer’, ‘better’ media. Yet, still every one of these new and improved techniques have their own fingerprints of imperfection. While most people experience these fingerprints as negative (and sometimes even as accidents), I can emphasize their positive consequences, by showing the new opportunities they facilitate.
These breaking points in development intrigue me; the tipping points of failure give space and perspectives for changes that go further then just the creation of new forms. Renovations and new forms have a deeper potential in which artistic opportunities, technical knowledge, social norms and academic research can come together. This is what I call Glitch Studies; a study into other forms and other possibilities that are not yet accepted.

Broken Heart

3) Your videos are leavened by the process of video compression. Describe your process of glitching and how you wish to refine your process (and please tell how you use the animated .gif in your work).

Video compression is a very important part of the vernacular of file formats. Every compression follows another encoding; a different syntax, dialect or language. Even developers cannot learn all these different ‘slangs’ by heart – they can only understand or recognize certain parts or tropes.
This is why different glitch-works have a very different material feel. For instance, when I use the animated gif in Radio Dada, the transcoding from one compression to another (.avi to .mov to .avi to .mov to .gif) resulted into some very specific ‘slang’ traces, like interlacing and dropped avi-pixels. I also often exploit the .gif interlacing when I databend this image format, because I really like the aesthetics of the file formats interlacing that come to the surface.

My process of glitching is not always the same, however I do sometimes give in to the relaxation of habits – I have to admit glitching has also become some kind of relaxing/catharsis-activity to me. For instance, the playing with different file formats and encoding and decoding can be done via some very standard trial and error scheme.
The question of refinement is interesting too, indeed I do not want to get stuck in an only formal investigation of the vernacular of file formats. This is why I am happy I also contextualize what I make through my Glitch Studies and lately moved into telling “stories” or embedding some kind of “narrative” within my audiovisual work.

Rosa Menkman

3) How does glitch video tell a story?

It really depends on the kind of video. A new work of mine, “The Collapse of PAL” is an example of how I try to tell a story through the use of glitches.
I developed The Collapse of PAL on request by SOUND & TELEVISION (in Copenhagen, Denmark). SOUND & TELEVISION is a transmission art project that explores the performativity of television in light of the challenges brought about by a converging mediascape. Signal, noise, liveness and flow along with standardized production formats are all aspects of the television medium which are reshaped in digital, networked media. Rather than a stream-lined sound-image of digital convergence, SOUND & TELEVISION strives to act as a springboard for an aesthetic “media-clash” reflecting on the political-aesthetic of old and new media forms.

SOUND & TELEVISION invited me to work with the materiality of audiovisual flows to realize a performance exploring the performativity of television. In this performance, the “transmission” itself became part of the artwork. The performance reflects on different significant aspects of the changing conditions of broadcasting. In the new DVB-T (digital terrestrial television) environment, the very transmission format of TV has changed, from symmetric analog to asymmetric data flows, encoded in the MPEG format and decoded through software implemented in everything from flat-screen TV’s, set-top-boxes and PC’s. “The cracking of LCD screens” …all is not smooth in this world of digitally compressed TV.

In “The Collapse of PAL” (Eulogy, Obsequies and Requiem for the planes of blue phosphor), the Angel of History (as described by Walter Benjamin) reflects on the PAL signal and its termination. She concludes that in the end, the signal still exists as a trace left upon the newer “better” technologies. PAL can, even though the technology is terminated, be found in these newer encodings, as a historical form that newer technologies inherited and appropriated. Finally, the Angel also realizes that the new DVB signal, that has been chosen over PAL, is differently, yet also flawed.

The Collapse of PAL (1. Eulogy, 2. Obsequies and 3. Requiem for the blue plains of phosphor), as performed at TV-TV on the 25th of May 2010, Copenhagen, is based on analogue PAL video, compressions, glitches and feedback artifacts and is complimented with (obsolete) soundscapes that come from both analogue and digital media.
For the video-part I used a NES, some image bending, a broken photo camera (CCD chip is loose), digital compression artifacts and video bending artifacts (DV, interlacing, datamoshing and black bursts) and feedback. For the sound I used a cracklebox, feedback, a telephone eurosignal, morsecode an old Casio keyboard, feedback filters and a couple of DV-compressed video soundbends.

glitch studies manifesto Live ft Goto80

4) What are your thoughts on film festivals, the film festival circuit, and how does glitch video fit into the aforementioned? What art scenes, festivals, communities and suchlike, are most receptive to the glitch genre?

I have not had an art education, but instead studied in the University (in Netherlands there is still a strict difference between practical and theoretical schooling). I used to think this could be a good thing, because it allowed me to develop my own artistic norms, styles and working methods, but lately I have been experiencing the drawback of this very heavily. Many art based-institutions and funding opportunities don’t accept my work, solely for the formal reason of having an art school education.
Right now I am doing an unpaid practical PHD at the KHM in Cologne, Germany, but the place of my practical work is still very insecure; it will not be challenged or judged in my final PHD work and as such still does not really count, or has a defined place.

Because my work is interwoven between theory and practice, I can show it in academic conferences, symposia, festivals or in the disco – and when this works out well, the different forms of appreciation are very interesting. What is most interesting however, is that within the academic world (at conferences and symposia), I am the one who has to pay to take part, publish and attend, whereas in art-festivals, where I sometimes give payed workshops, gigs or lectures, – it is such a different reflection from the formal criteria by which the funding institutions judge me.
This definitely proves the fact that Glitch Studies and glitch art are still not incorporated in any of the institutionalized paradigms, but still operates between the cracks of different institutions and circuits. I realize that I am lucky that I get some opportunities, but working in this rigid academic and art climate is a struggle.

5) Seemingly a glitch artist has to spend many hours in front of the computer to be creatively productive and to carry a fecund spell. How much time do you spend with the computer; how does the computer help and hurt creativity?

My computer sleeps when I sleep, we have a very committed relationship.
Although my computer is my medium of choice, I don’t feel stuck in this medium. I also use many other, analogue media. But even when I make my work completely analogous, I still often digitize (photograph or scan) it, so I can also show on the internet (through for instance flickr).
As a material the computer of course has its limitations, like any other kind other canvas or material. I think that glitch art plays with the concept of limitations and tries to push them forward, so I don’t feel like these limitations hurt my creativity; I feel like they help me and make me more aware of my material and its potentials.

6) Internet video exhibition and distribution: viewers are under no obligation to watch an entire piece, beginning to end. Right now, everyone reading this holds the power of the mouse — and unlike the theatre, we can click away at any time. For the filmmaker/visualist, does uploading an entire piece weaken its eminence, or make it any less noteworthy?

I never really bother to see if anybody watches my videos from beginning to end. My videos are only a particular part of my personal, larger work, my Glitch Studies, in which my theory and practice come together. The videos can stand on their own, but also function as an illustration of a possibility, or concept within Glitch Studies.
The Collapse of PAL was an audiovisual performance, of which I made a render for the web. To me, there is a big difference in doing the piece live and then rendering it for the web, I am still searching to find a way to translate one to the other better (this is why I did not upload the ‘final’ render yet. However, I don’t feel like the two undermine each other.
I think that when an online or live work captures the interest of an audience at first, than I would like to offer them the possibility to take a step back and see the context of the work, which is my Glitch Studies. Glitch Studies is however complex and still growing larger, so I think it is only natural for people to click away at some point.

7) When you hear the word “DINCA”, what is the first animal you think of?
Lastly, what is your favorite beverage?

10 minutes ago a “Eurasian Jay” flew into the window. I will dedicate this one to the poor bird, may god rest his soul.
My favorite beverage is a cocktail: 2 sips of nirvana, a pinch of emotional memories and a gallon of self deception topped of some self-serving bias.

More:

Rosa Menkman Website

Rosa Menkman on Vimeo

Rosa Menkman on Flickr

The Glitch Studies Manifesto

Suddenly Great Winds of Water

Andrew Rosinski — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 23:23:28 +0000

Video via Craig Shimala.

Last night, June 23rd, a spectacular storm boomed through Chicago. From the bottom my heart, it was the most marvelous storm I’ve seen with my two eyes. I watched the storm from my deck; I watched 80 mph wind gusts rip the shingles off my neighbors roof. My new roommate, Juan, was storing many things in that neighbors basement, and the basement flooded. Looking at the door afterward, a half-foot watermark. Their basement and Juan’s stuff is destroyed. Juan had to throw away many things (talk about Summer cleaning).

Three lightning bolts hit the three tallest buildings in Chicago — the Willis Tower (formally the Sears Tower), the Hancock Building, and the Trump Tower — the three bolts hit the three buildings simultaneously.

Soon after the storm lulled, it revealed one full-arching rainbow, and soon after, second rainbow, one atop the other.

“Wednesday’s storms towered up to 63,000 ft, unleashed 80 mph gusts, local 3″+ rains and 15,000 cloud to ground lightning strikes in a single hour.” — Chicagoweathercenter.com

Amazing video.

The Importance of Editing in the Avant-Garde: A Note to Pati (1969) by Saul Levine

Andrew Rosinski — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:10:47 +0000

Saul Levine, 1969, 8mm, 7 min, silent, color

The edit is the impetus for Saul Levine’s silent seven minute short, A Note to Pati (1969). With his jaunty edit, Levine creates a unique juxtaposition of weltering, home video imagery with brush cutting gat-gat image tracing. Levine’s edit, with alacrity, leavens the film into a visual visual poem, which otherwise would simply be a few dusty 8mm reels of an individual’s home memories.

The edit is the vise of this film, and this surely is a technical edit, therefore let’s briskly analyze this film afore.

Film editor’s curiosity compelled me to watch the film multiple times while tallying the number of film splices. Clearly, it’s impossible to get an exact number, but according to my tally averaged, the film has approximately 400 splices — this is wild — this is a seven minute film.

The duration of the film is 6:51; and let’s say the film contains a 400 number of splices; 400 splices. Ripping it with math, we’ll round 6:51 to seven minutes and divide that by 400 — this equals one splice per 1.75 seconds.

Here we see the divergence of experimental/underground/avant-garde film from the Hollywood or mainstream independent film. Mainstream film editors, on occasion, have reign to experiment with the edit here and there, obligations attached, affecting their edit in a tame manner, constricting it to moments, 1-10 seconds, because they have to play it safe, because they have to ‘keep the story moving’ ‘long. Avant-garde film is A-1 because there’s experimentation, and experiments lead to discovery and newfound creation, and newfound creation is boundless — it can enkindle all sorts of tropes, and emotions, and might even dust some dusty glyphs and dusty arcana.

It’s apparent that Levine had scant amount of footage to work with, and arguably this project may have started as an editing exercise for Levine, but what is evident is that Levine’s edit leavens this footage into ink which pens a letter visual letter to a girl. Perhaps he writes to the titular Patti, perhaps he writes this letter to others or everyone, perhaps this letter is perennial.

Levine writes a letter and this letter is a letter of human movement, progress, it pushes forward. In his letter, he paints, splats, and crosscuts between images observing the movement of children whereabouts wintry white hills and the snowy front of a homestead; particular focus drawn on a child in red, and a lingering shot of a bird in a tree. The mise-en-scène of the film is a punctuating red against snow white — red and purity — linked with the sturdy, organic color of brown. Mother earth. Mother Earth earth and whatever place we feel at home.

The film lingers most on the images of the child in red, the movement and shoveling and excavating of snow, children with snow, and the bird in the tree. Gluing this imagery together is the splicing of black leader flashes, film splice marks, deformed celluloid, and sometimes 1 to 5 frames of weltering camera movements of extreme-close-ups that tumble all over the screen, throwing eye-tracers hither and thither.

Near the end is an image sequence worth ponder: children sledding; the main child in red frolics in the snow, lots of forward movement, and subsequently the child is warm-washed by sunlight.

In the closing shot, the standalone treetop bird flies away toward something. The same closing shot caps with a pan-left to the sturdy trunk of a tree, solidly rooted in the earth’s soil.

From a narrative standpoint, Levine’s letter is multivalent; however, the editing in A Note to Patti constructs a lovely letter of human progress, writing of the parallel existence of human life and all life housed by mother earth; a friendship us humans, consciously or subconsciously, share with mother earth and all living creatures. That is one person’s subjective interpretation vis-a-vis this film stripped of its constructivist edit just be an old, dusty 8mm home movie.

More:

Saul Levine on Vimeo

Saul Levine on Mubi (formally the auteurs)

Harvard Film Archive: Recent Restorations, including the films of Saul Levine

jupiter’s eye

Andrew Rosinski — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 09:57:53 +0000

jupiter’s eye

duration: 1:25
2010
pair part one with part two.
Watch synchronously; synchronize part one and part two.

Also, try watch the fullsize here: part 1, part 2

Also, try watching fullscreen.

timefaall

Andrew Rosinski — Sun, 30 May 2010 19:54:34 +0000

timefaall from andrew rosinski on Vimeo.

2010, video, 20 sec

fall in time / fall in line

“Reality is Psychedelic.” Seven Question Interview with Ali Hossaini, American Philosopher, Filmmaker, Ouroboros Artist, Seer

Andrew Rosinski — Tue, 25 May 2010 20:11:51 +0000

Artist Interview: Ali Hossaini, (interviewed by Andrew Rosinski, April/May 2010)

Ali Hossaini is an American philosopher, a filmmaker, an artist; an innovator, a pacifist, a seer; a visionary. A warm-hearted man with a mystical, ubiquitous vision for progress. Common themes in Ali’s work include, “a commitment to freedom and innovation that breaks disciplinary boundaries.”

Ali serves on the Board of Advisors for Anthology Film Archives and the Water Mill Center for the Arts. He is an Associate of the Liverpool-based FACT, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, where he serves in a development role.

Ali Hossaini (view his IMDB page here) works on the cutting edge of film, television and interactive media, and in addition to his 2010 Ouroboros exhibit, the 6-channel 3D video exhibit collaboration with SWEATSHOPPE, Ali has been involved in the launch of several television channels, including LAB HD, the only TV channel devoted to video art, Equator HD, Gallery HD, Oxygen, TechTV, NOW, and LinkTV. He is currently proprietor of Pantar, a media production company that specializes in talent-driven projects of artistic merit. Much of his work involves organizing international production, financing and exhbition.

Hossaini’s productions include the Voom Portraits, directed by the avant-garde visionary, Robert Wilson, which includes performances by Johnny Depp (one of my favorite actors, who starred in one of my all-time favorite films, Dead Man (1995) — a film by the brilliant Jim Jarmusch), Salma Hayek — Brad Pitt — Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr, Princess Caroline of Monaco, Sean Penn, and other cultural icons. He has produced numerous documentaries and factual television series relating to travel, natural history, culture and sustainable living. In 2009 he produced Self-Portrait, a short film by Dennis Hopper.

Johnny Depp in "Voom Portraits (watch video)" by Robert Wilson

7 question INTERVIEW: Ali Hossaini

ArtTV (now Lab TV), Single-channel video, 2001 - 2003

(1) Please tell us about your artistic process and how it has evolved throughout the years.

For me the first stage of inspiration comes through adventure. My fundamental drive is curiosity – I’ve always wanted to know everything. I love reading, and I might have been very bookish, but (fortunately for my love life) that intellectual drive is matched by a robust physical and emotional urge to see the world. So I’m constantly exploring, whether through mind or body, then reflecting on what I’ve learned. In the course of this process one naturally makes connections. Some of these connections are straightforward, following established rules of analysis or synthesis. And some are poetic: associative with resonances that are more generative than conclusive.

It is through the latter process that I produce something people call art, though for me it’s more precisely called poetry. I like calling myself a visual poet because the term relates to poesis, which for the Greeks was very specific kind of creative process. (Also the words “art” and “artist” today imply a lot of things I find horrible.) For me poetry arises from a process of disintegration in the fullest sense of that process: the coherence of things breaks down, and previously unrelated structures start bumping against one another, adhering and forming new structures which may or may not make immediate sense.

When I’d started trying to express myself I had a lot of trouble coming up with ideas. And I was unconfident about them. Creativity is a natural secretion of consciousness, and, now that I’ve had a lot more experience, new projects flow faster than I can realize them. One way I think about the creative process is alchemy, the transmutation of dross into gold, an image I love. (This is silly, but I secretly think of the need for artistic expression as a full bladder—you just gotta do it.) In Hindu culture the transcendence of creativity is represented by the lotus, a beautiful flower that rises from muck. Years of reading and travel has enriched my daily experience. When I look at things, I see the thing in front of me, for sure, but it’s in the center of a vibrant, fluctuating, utterly delightful web of connections – historical, scientific, aesthetic, emotional, literary, social and philosophical. My rich inner life contrasts with my Spartan approach to possessions. I live very simply because have a lot of trouble with stuff. Material possessions make my heart sag and distract my thinking, so I find living plants and organic forms to be the best environment for creativity.

ISE Cultural Foundation is pleased to present an exhibition, “Ouroboros: The History of the Universe”, curated by Koan Jeff Baysa, MD.

Video artist Ali Hossaini teams up with artists Blake Shaw and Bruno Levy, aka SWEATSHOPPE, to present Ouroboros: The History of the Universe. Over 30,000 images combine to tell the story of cosmic evolution in an immersive 3D video environment generated by SWEATSHOPPE’s own software. The artwork was inspired by Hossaini’s investigations into the psychology of vision and SWEATSHOPPE’s interest in the hypnotic, meditative and mind-altering potential of the moving image.

Visitors will be handed 3D glasses that reveal mesmerizing arrays of animated holograms, created by seven channels of video, within a 2,000 square foot gallery. Original compositions of ambient sound have been produced by the artists, and a limited edition of 3D prints will be available for purchase.

Aesthetics and craft are very important to me, so I work hard to make experiences that are beautiful. Beauty has been an unpopular category in art for some years, with the justification being that aesthetic criteria have less validity than concepts. I take the diametrically opposite view, as I don’t think artists have much to contribute in the way of original concepts. What the artist can offer is a rigorous craft based on trained manual skills and aesthetic principles. The mandate of art is to create something beautiful – this doesn’t mean that it can’t be critical, provocative or idea-based, but those qualities emanate from the relationship of art to disciplines better equipped to handle them.

Some might say I am dumbing down art, but to me beauty relies on processes that are far more sophisticated than the verbal ability required to appreciate the irony, cynicism and self-referentiality of conceptual artworks. Beauty arises from the innate mathematical abilities of our mind. While our verbal brain lumbers along with kludged linear processes, our visual faculties contain dedicated neural circuits that instantly analyze multidimensional fields. To say concepts are more sophisticated than beauty ignores the fundamentals of cognition, and it also disrupts the organic connection between our intuitions, life processes and the physical world.

Ouroboros, 6-channel 3D video, by Ali Hossaini and SWEATSHOPPE, 2010

(2) The process in creating Ouroboros: when did the concept arise, what do you wish to explore and unveil, and what is the aim of the exhibit? How did you secure funds for the exhibit?

The concept for Ouroboros arose in summer of 2009, not long before the exhibition. The Ouroboros is a powerful symbol in hermetic traditions. As an object for contemplation it’s meant to evoke the self-sustaining nature of the cosmos, eternal life and the unity of being. Since childhood the Ouroboros has been one of my favorite images—that snake has such a self-confident expression – but before last summer I’d only considered as a potential tattoo. Then I started thinking about the degradation of our school system, particularly right-wing attacks on cosmology and evolution, which I think is a real problem because it creates ignoramuses who are ill-prepared to be responsible citizens. It’s kind of weird that the same people who are crying patriotism want to turn America into a ignorant theocracy incapable of technical progress.

This provoked a strong desire to do a work that drew on science, especially the threatened theories of the Big Bang and evolution. At the same time I reflected on why social conservatives and a lot of other people rejected science, and I thought maybe it’s because they don’t feel how scientific theory connects to their own lives. Scientific theory excites me, and it evokes a sense of wonder that makes me feel at home in the cosmos. It sings. How could I convey these feelings to a mass audience? Not by talking about them – BORING – but as a direct experience so they could feel what I feel. It occurred to me that I could do a “history of the universe” animated by images drawn from the Internet. Why not show the unity of being by creating an immersive visual mix poem that stretches from the Big Bang to Lady Gaga?

When the curator Koan Jeffrey Baysa offered the Ise Cultural Foundation as a venue, the project was off and running. Koan generously agreed to split his curatorial fee with me, which provided about 5% of the budget, and my collaborators SWEATSHOPPE covered another 5%. The balance of cash expenses were covered from my savings.

Conceiving of Ouroboros was a lot easier than creating it. It seemed like the faultlines of modern experience run through the boundaries of matter, life and spirit, so I made storylines corresponding to physical, biological and psychological evolution. I wanted to create a visual mix of these three realms, and 3D video was the obvious way to do it, particularly since I’d just produced a 3D film of Robert Wilson’s Kool: Dancing in My Mind. But existing technologies were too expensive and difficult to execute.

(SWEATSHOPPE VIDEOS — Live 3d video/av performances)

Then I met SWEATSHOPPE aka Blake Shaw and Bruno Levy. They are an art collective that do remarkable live performances that combine music with live 3D video. Their work bowled me over the instant I saw it, and I instantly knew they were the friends and collaborators I needed to make Ouroboros.

SWEATSHOPPE has created a cool 3D aesthetic based on Chromadepth technology. Within it you can assign any set of images to layers within a holographic space. Layers are coded red, green and blue, and the effect is incredibly robust – you can walk up to an image, and it maintains the illusion of depth. And you can view it in 2D without glasses, and it retains its sharpness, so it’s perfect for a standing piece of art.

We had a lot of discussions about how the concept of Ouroboros could be expressed through the SWEATSHOPPE aesthetic. The tripartite layers neatly fit the three realms of Ouroboros, so the aesthetic provided the perfect grammar for the poem. They taught me how to use their software tools, which was easy, but I also had to learn how to make crisp, coherent sequences, which was a lot harder. Fortunately we share a lot of the same interests, and we were completely receptive to each other’s ideas. The expression of Ouroboros got even larger, as it expanded to include SWEATSHOPPE’s focus on mandalas, hypnosis and primary shapes, and the installation evolved into two triptychs, one of which was representation and the other abstract. SWEATSHOPPE and I both aim to make art that is complex and provocative yet accessible, and I think we succeeded. The audience for Ouroboros was completely universal – it’s appeal didn’t break down across educational, class or generational lines. Sure we got the art audience, but the building’s maintenance staff, babies, toddlers, seniors citizens all responded positively, and creating something that appealed to everyone was our most important goal.

(3) Would you say that some of its content chases the chimera?

When I was a kid my mom would sing, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream,” to help me fall asleep.

Dinca note: The word “chimera” is chiefly known to be, “(in Greek mythology) a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail”; our intended usage of the word is in its lesser-known definition, “a thing that is hoped or wished for, but in fact is illusionary, or impossible to achieve.”

(4) Ouroboros certainly is psychedelic, top-to-bottom. Why?

Reality is psychedelic. I guess I should explain what I mean. Many people treat psychedlia as an aesthetic, and I think the art world mirrors society by marginalizing psychedelia. They seem to think it’s a simple-minded or lacks conceptual rigor. However I am grounded in philosophy, psychology and cognitive science, and I’ve done a lot of introspective work on my perception, what some might call phenomenology. It is easy to go through life accepting the world as appears in normative experience, but scientists, mystics and, yes, a lot of old hippies will attest to the fact that normative experience is a mental construct. That mental construct makes a lot of sense because it evolved to maintain the continuity of biological and social life. With a little poking this construct comes unraveled, and then we confront primordial questions. What am I? What is reality? What should I be doing? Within psychedelia these questions appear as living presences. It is easy to shrug them off in the dry setting of Philosophy 101 or when given ironic distance in yet another piece of conceptual art. Psychedelia confronts Being, and it does it directly with an intellectual, scientific and emotional discipline that I find unmatched in other movements. At the same time, it’s a lot of fun.

SWEATSHOPPE and Isabella Rossellini

Isabella Rossellini in "Guy Maddin's Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair", a film by Guy Maddin, (2010)

(5) You premiered Guy Maddin’s Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair in Times Square last December of 2009. Was it a party? When and how did you meet Guy Maddin?

My connection to Guy is through Isabella Rossellini, whom I met several years ago during my production of the Robert Wilson Video Portraits. Bob portrayed Isabella as a wild anime character, and while we were in makeup she insisted that I check out the films of Guy Maddin. The Saddest Music in the World had just opened. Of course I loved it, and then I found out that my friend Jody Shapiro produced a lot of Guy’s work, so I was able to see Sissy Boy Slap Party and a lot of other Maddin classics. I’d recruited Isabella to be chief juror of the Metropolis Art Prize, a project of Babelgum Networks, and I’d decided to screen the winners in Times Square.

I wish I could take credit for the idea, but it was Isabella who suggested we premiere Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair as part of the program. Of course I jumped at the possibility, but it took some diplomacy on my part to make it happen because the film shows Isabella being jolted into an ecstatic state (to put it mildly) after being strapped into an old school electric chair. I won over the gods of Babelgum and midtown Manhattan by arguing for the artistic merit and press worthiness of Guy’s work. For an hour we watched the winning videos, which were really wonderful, and then we premiered ‘Lectric Chair over an installation that contained the actual electric chair from the film, which was incredibly campy. The crowds loved it, but for me it was a delightfully perverse thing to do. Watching Guy’s visuals detour over Times Square is one of the high points of my professional career. It was a doubly great night for me because I met SWEATSHOPPE right after Guy’s film premiered. My client had recruited them to perform the afterparty at Jonathan Levine Gallery, right after Isabella gave the art video awards.

Epiphany, Immersive video, 2008

(6) What is next on the art plate?

I’m working on a bunch of projects, but two stand out. One is the final realization of my video installation Epiphany. I started working on Epiphany in 2006. It was shot on location in Greenland, Iceland, France and the USA, and I edited it into an 85 minute film set to the Renaissance composer Palestrina. The film is about cycles of life and rebirth, so I used a requiem mass and a beautiful motet based on the Song of Songs, a Hebrew poem that celebrates sexuality and life. But my goal was always to collaborate with a composer on an original mass in the motet style. Then I would edit the Epiphany visuals into a 4-channel immersive piece that created a visual motet. Last year the composer Paola Prestini, whom I think is one of the great talents of the 21st century, recruited me to create the visuals for her opera, Oceanic Verses. And this year she agreed to compose the Epiphany Mass.

Another project that stands out is Alternative Cognitions. Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be dyslexic, autistic or synaesthetic? Our shared world is build around cognitive norms, and I’m researching the ways people deviate from them. My plan is build environments that recreate the worlds of people who perceive or think differently than we expect. There’s great literature on these topics, but I’m starting to interview people about their experiences, and the process is really inspiring all kinds of reflection on other issues. It’s a place where philosophy, politics and practical matters interest. I’m a philosopher of science by training, and I’m working with Koan again, who’s an MD with a research interest in olfaction, so we’ve got a really strong collaboration going for this topic.

(7) What is your spirit animal?

You’d think it would be the snake because the Ouroboros has always held a lot of significance for me. And I do like snakes. But it would definitely be the cat, traditional antagonist of the serpent. I’ve cats across the spectrum in my mythological self, falling under Leo in Western astrology, the Tiger in Chinese and Lion in Burmese. I’ve got a lot of admiration for the grace, determination and self-restraint of cats.

(7.2) The Ouroboros is …

… a cosmic key.

Ali Hossaini Artistic Statement:

I am strongly drawn to the sublime and the absurd. My life has been spent trying to reconcile these qualities, and consequently my work is driven by contradiction, paradox and mystery.

When I was young I was sure that I would become a scientist. When offered the choice I trained as a philosopher, a discipline that combined analytic rigor with humanism, and I now find myself as a hybrid media artist and mediamaker. But my work ultimately derives from philosophy, with the threads of science, spirituality and the quest for truth that drove the evolution of that discipline.

At this stage of history I think art might express philosophy better than writing: academia neuters exciting, dangerous ideas, and art can spark more debate in the public sphere, particularly as the boundaries between high art, popular culture, mass media, fashion and design begin to reconfigure, blur and even disappear. By embracing the visual, the poetic and the experiential I’ve found a way to integrate the explosively different impulses that constitute my inner world.

More on Ali:

The American Museum of the Moving Image maintains a permanent exhibit devoted to LAB HD. Other productions have been exhibited at theLincoln Center, the Tribeca Film Festival, the Montreal Festival of Film on Art, PS1/MoMA, The Hackney Empire, SF Cinemateque, Pacific Film Archives, the Beijing Borderlines Festival, Couvent des Cordeliers, and many other international venues. His production of Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30 appeared in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. His directorial debut, Epiphany (2006), premiered at Anthology Film Archives.

As a vice president at the women’s TV network Oxygen Media, Hossaini developed numerous initiatives related to programming and social networking. At TechTV, he launched Chat Day!, the first application to merge chat, webcams and live TV in a virtual environment. Hossaini is a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the National Association of Television Program Executives.

He regularly speaks at conferences in the United States and Europe. In the 1990s he was a regular guest on The Site, an award-winning MSNBC newsmagazine. Hossaini recently completed a manuscript, Vision of the Gods: How Optics Shaped Histor y, and he contributed three entries to the Encyclopedia of Photography, published by Routledge in 2005.

His writing has appeared in Village Voice, The Nation, Verlag Spotlight (Germany), openDemocracy (UK), New York Newsday, Maclean’s Magazine (Canada), Logos Journal, and Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt). He is anthologized in the textbooks Passages and Considering Cultural Difference, and his essays on photography are frequently included in college coursebooks.

While working as an acquisitions editor at the University of Texas Press, which publishes books and journals, both for a scholarly audience and for the people of Texas, Hossaini published one of the first electronic books in conjunction with the Coalition for Networked Information.

He also developed Surrealist Women, an anthology of suppressed female artists, and he successfully funded the Texas History Series.

As a graduate student, Hossaini was awarded fellowships for poetry, photography and philosophy. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994.

His dissertation, Archaeology of the Photograph, traces the history of geometric optics from Sumer to the Classical Era.

Talk about about merit — I recommend clicking every hyperlink in this article. It’s well worth your time.

Ali kindly participated in the following seven-question interview, and his responses are insight, not only for artists, but for any and all striving to achieve their golden vision, and progress.

More:

IMDB page for Ali Hossaini
Ali Hossaini — Wikipedia
Art Lab TV
Pantar Productions
SWEATSHOPPE
SWEATSHOPPE on Vimeo
NY Times: Exhibition Review: Ouroboros — The History of the Universe
Interview: Rotterdam 2009: Guy Maddin Will “Send Me To the ‘Lectric Chair”
Anthology Film Archives

a beach

Andrew Rosinski — Mon, 17 May 2010 04:25:44 +0000

a beach

duration: 2:11
2010
pair part one with part two.
Watch synchronously; synchronize part one and part two.

A Running Cheetah

Andrew Rosinski — Sun, 02 May 2010 23:22:18 +0000

Cheetah Run from andrew rosinski on Vimeo.

A running cheetah

Alpine Ascend by Petra Cortright

Andrew Rosinski — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:51:50 +0000

2010, 21 sec, video

By Petra Cortright. Fullscreen it.

Radio Dada by Rosa Menkman

Andrew Rosinski — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 07:20:47 +0000

(Rosa Menkman, 2009, video, music by Extraboy)

This video, by Dutch visualist Rosa Menkman, is quite lovely, considering it’s glitch video art. This piece is most forceful when, one minute in, we begin to see RGB tiger-stripe-slashing and Extraboy’s music finds stride. I highly recommend reading of Rosa’s process (below) in making this video.

Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum.
— Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” 1985.

Synopsis: The video-images are constructed out of nothing but the image created by feedback (I turned a high-end camera on a screen that was showing, in real time, what I was filming, creating a feedback loop). Then I glitched the video by changing its format and subsequently exporting it into animated gifs. I (minimalistically) edited the video in Quicktime. Then I sent the file to Extraboy, who composed music for the video. The composing process started with a hand held world radio. Extraboy scanned through frequencies and experimented with holding the radio in different parts of the room while touching different objects.

Eventually he got the radio to oscillate noise in the tempo that he perceived in the video. The added synthesizer sounds were played live to further build on the non-digital sound and rhythm. This was later contrasted with drums which were digitally synthesized and processed through effects with a very digital sound to them. Just like with the video, the digital and analogue media and aesthetics of sound are mixed into one coherent whole.

Artist Bio: Every technology has its own accidents. Rosa Menkman is a Dutch visualist who focuses on visual artifacts created by accidents in digital media. The visuals she makes are the result of glitches, compressions, feedback and other forms of noise. Although many people perceive these accidents as negative experiences, Rosa emphasizes their positive consequences.
By combining both her practical as well as an academic background, she merges her abstract pieces within a grand theory artifacts (a glitch studies), in which she strives for new forms of conceptual synthesis (synesthesia) of the two.
+++
I have shown my work at festivals like Blip (Europe and US), Haip (Ljubljana 08), Cimatics (Brussels 08/09), Video Vortex (Amsterdam ’08 + Brussels ’09) and Pasofest (Ankara 08) and collaborated on art projects together with Alexander Galloway, little-scale, Govcom.org, Goto80 and the internet art collective Jodi.org. In 2009 I finished my master thesis (on digital glitch) under the supervision of Geert Lovink, and started a PhD at the KHM Cologne (on the subject of Artifacts).

A Dog Portrait: Shane (1974) by Jack Goldstein

Andrew Rosinski — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 05:34:50 +0000

1974, 16mm, Color, Sound, 3 minutes

JACK GOLDSTEIN

BIOGRAPHY (from Jack Goldstein website):

Jack Goldstein was one of the most important artists of the 80′s in New York. He returned to California in the 90′s and slowly disappeared from the art world until renewed interest in his work began to happen in 2000. He, sadly, died on March 14, 2003 just as his dreams for his work were being realized.

He was one of the first graduates of CalArts and went on to experiment with performance, film, recording and painting. This exciting early work of the late seventies, eighties and early nineties influenced many artists who came after him. Jack moved from California to New York in the early 70′s and was shown in New York at Metro Pictures and John Weber Gallery as well as in numerous other galleries and museums in the United States and Europe.

His writings and a new film will be included posthumously in this year’s Whitney Biennial Exhibition in March 2004. A new book published by Minneola Press on his life was released in January, 2004. After many years of being overlooked, Jack Goldstein’s work is finally beginning to be reviewed and recognized for the importance it holds for so many young artists working today. His work is included in many of the most important public and private collections of art in the United States.

More:

U B U W E B: The Films of Jack Goldstein
Jack Goldstein Official Website
Jack Goldstein Filmography
Jack Goldstein on Wikipedia

Video: Ouroboros: A Psychedelic, Phantasmagoric History of the Universe

Andrew Rosinski — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 05:58:58 +0000

Ouroboros
6-channel 3D video, 2010
Ise Cultural Foundation, 555 Broadway at Prince St, New York City March 9 – April 23, 11 am – 6 pm, Tuesday – Saturday

Do you live in New York City? If you answered yes, you absolutely have to visit this video installation: Ouroburos: The History of the Universe, curated by Koan Jeff Baysa, MD, is a holographic 3-D visual installation that tells the story of cosmic evolution. Some 30,000 found images we’re used, and the 3-D video environment was rendered by Bruno Levy’s (no relation to Eugene Levy) software. According to artists Ali Hossaini, Bruno Levy aka SWEATSHOPPE, and Blake Shaw, “Compiling and processing the images requires hundreds of hours of effort and attention to detail on every frame of video.

The artwork was inspired by Hossaini’s investigations into the psychology of vision and SWEATSHOPPE’s interest in the hypnotic, meditative and mind-altering potential of the moving image.

Visitors will be handed 3D glasses that reveal mesmerizing arrays of animated holograms, created by seven channels of video, within a 2,000 square foot gallery. Original compositions of ambient sound have been produced by the artists, and a limited edition of 3D prints will be available for purchase.”

March 09, 2010 – April 23, 2010 at Ise Cultural Foundation in SoHo.

Artist(s): Ali Hossaini, Blake Shaw, Bruno Levy
Curated by: Koan Jeff Baysa, MD
Artist Talk: Wednsday, April 7th, 6-8PM
Artists Ali Hossaini, Bruno Levy and Blake Shaw will discuss the inspiration, influences and technical processes used to make the installation.

Video: Ouroboros: The History of the Universe

Ouroboros Artistic Statement:

Nowhere is the fragmentation of the human psyche more evident than in how we treat the environment. We know we’re pillaging our habitat, but we can’t make the leap from knowledge to right action. I attribute this disconnect, and many others, to the factionalizing of culture that began with modern science, industry and art.

I’m not saying we should turn our backs on the Enlightenment. But neither should we take it as dogma – we need to rethink its foundation, integrating our psyche into the cosmos in a way that builds on pre-modern wisdoms as well as modern science. The Enlightenment freed physics, astronomy and eventually art – think “art for art’s sake” – from tradition, spawning remarkable advances along with deep alienation.

It’s time to produce culture in a more holistic, organic way. For now science, art and religion – and I use “religion” here to mean a generalized psychology – lie in private tracks, each requiring extensive knowledge for appreciation let alone practice. How can these disciplines work together more effectively?

The answer doesn’t lie in the rejecting, merging or reconciling science and spirit. Instead we need to create a framework for integrating our experiences of these different realms, and this is precisely what artists can do. Art needs to step out of its self-referential confines, the safe house of galleries, museums and markets. It needs to be Saturday night and Sunday morning, be the new church, and it needs to invade pop culture. Mass appeal is critical.

Most of all art needs to rejoin itself to science. Both embody urges to explore, understand and create, and both have become specialized, mechanized and self-absorbed, given to destructive irony. Art cannot be science, but it can convey the sense of wonder that drives scientists. It can visualize the worlds of science while honoring our sense of self as beings that transcend the mundane.

Our experiences of spirit and matter cannot be reconciled, but they can be represented. And they can be represented in a way that sheds light on the complexities and responsibilities of being self-aware. Artists can rise above the dilemmas of modern life: they can comprehend the contradictions, integrating them into new levels of experience where knowledge, desire and energy meet the limits of human freedom.

_ Ali Hossaini

More:

Exhibition Review — ‘Ouroburos – The History of the Universe’ — NY Times
SWEATSHOPPE on Vimeo
SWEATSHOPPE Official Website
Artlab.tv
ISE Cultural Foundation

Early Computer Generated Video Art: Sunstone (1979) by Ed Emshwiller

Andrew Rosinski — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:54:11 +0000

Ed Emshwiller and Alvy Ray Scott, 1979, 16mm, 3m

Born in Lansing, Michigan, and a graduate of the University of Michigan, Ed Emshwiller (1925-1990) was a pioneer in the development of video technology. He was one of the first to experiment with synthesizers and computers in his quest to ‘sculpt with technology.’ Sunstone (1979) is film version of computer animation: it was made using a digital paint program at New York Institute of Technology — a collaboration between Emshwiller and Alvy Ray Smith. Sunstone exhibited at many places, including SIGGRAPH ’79 in Chicago, New York’s WNET television show video/film Review, 1979, and the Mill Valley Film Festival, Mill Valley, California, 1981. Originally released as a videotape.

Synopsis: Sunstone is a prime example of Emshwiller’s artful use of technology to create stunning images. A timeless face, carved from stone as a ‘third eye’, appears radiating color and forms that are computer generated.

Ed Emshwiller and Alvy Ray Smith work on Sunstone at NYIT in 1979

Biography (from the Video Data Bank):
Born in 1925, Ed Emshwiller studied graphic design at the University of Michigan and L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. By the late ’60s Emshwiller was working as a science fiction illustrator, and had established his place in the American avant-garde cinema with such works as Relativity (1966) and Image, Flesh and Voice (1969). His early films featured collaborations with dancers and choreographers—a theme he carried over into his videoworks. As both an artist and a teacher, Emshwiller’s pioneering efforts to develop an alternative technological language in video were enormously influential.

His early experiments with synthesizers and computers included the electronic rendering of three-dimensional space, the interplay of illusion and reality, and manipulations of time, movement, and scale that explore the relationship between “external reality and subjective feelings.” Emshwiller was among the first artists-in-residence at the TV Lab at WNET, where he produced the groundbreaking Scape-mates (1972). Sunstone (1979) was made over a period of eight months at the New York Institute of Technology. Emshwiller passed away in 1990 and an extensive collection of his work is housed by Anthology Film Archives.

Illustration by Ed Emshwiller

Alvy Ray Smith on making Sunstone with Emshwiller:
Ed was an abstract expressionist when young, then did early avant-garde 16mm filmmaking, then became one of the earliest video artists. He also made a name for himself in the 1950s illustrating the covers of early science fiction magazines (which he signed “Emsh”). I knew of him because he lived near NYIT on Long Island, in Levittown. I expected that if he were the artist I thought he was – out on the edges of the culture exploring – he would show up at our lab one day. He did, of course. His proposal to us, that he use his new Guggenheim grant, to make a 3-hour computer graphics movie, sent us into gales of laughter, much to his consternation (after all, he was trying to talk his way into our facility). We explained that he would be lucky, in his 6-month timeframe, to make a 3-minute film, considering the state of the technology. Sunstone is that piece, and it is a little more than 3 mintues long, including a live (digitally processed) video section.

This collaboration was the most important of my artistic life, Ed serving as my mentor. And I am still most pleased with this computer graphic work over all others I have been involved in with partners. We used one frame from the video as the cover of a very well-known computer graphics text by Foley and van Dam.
Created at NYIT in Old Westbury, Long Island, in 1979.

More:

Video Data Bank: Ed Emshwiller
Expanded Cinema: Ed Emshwiller
Alvy Ray Smith on the Sunstone Collaboration
Wikipedia: Ed Emshwiller

Brief Thoughts on Collision (2005) by Max Hattler

Andrew Rosinski — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:58:50 +0000

Max Hattler, 2005, U.K. & Germany, 2 min, color

Collision is a short, award-winning animation from Max Hattler, a London-and-Germany-based animator and artist, whose work we have blogged before, e.g., 1) 1923 (2010), and 2) Live A/V Performance by Max Hattler & Noriko Okaku. Hattler’s minimalist approach to graphical forms, pattern, and the RGB color palette are bright.

Collision deploys a deft arsenal of shapes on path, stars-and-kaliedoscope-striping geometry, with textures and forms culled from the ensigns of Americana and Islamism. Animators crackle and explode; pattern and cadence enkindle war paradoxes between the U.S. Government, the special interests of the U.S. Gov. (some say Israel), and their Islamic adversaries. The sound design is slick and significant, and this crackle-crisp sound imbues extrasensory depth, while punctuating the graphic.

I presume this was made in-part with Adobe After Affects: We must note that Collision was made in 2005, which is many year before the ubiquitous use of kaleideoscoping in digital motion graphics software nowaday — therefore, here is true innovation in our current epoch of digital motion design. The film has won copious awards and nominations, and has screened at a hundred or so film festivals and events of note.

In this day and age of Adobe After Effects, Cinema 4D, Maya and so forth, you can make a compelling short film without even touching a camera — and without money — and without actors. The challenge isn’t money or what software you have, it’s a matter of your work innovating or replicating. Something to consider, aspiring film makers.

Know your thesis, antithesis, and conceptualize themes before designing motion. Do that, and you make great work like this.

CREDITS

Directed and animated by Max Hattler © 2005
Production: Royal College of Art
Additional animation: Ian Mackinnon
Sound design: Max Hattler
Sound mix: Christopher Wilson
35mm film recording: Andreas Schellenberg, Pictorion das werk
Available formats: 35mm, HD, Beta SP, DVD
Length: 2’30″

Official site: http://www.maxhattler.com/collision

A ‘Surrealistic’ iPhone App from Sébastien Tellier, Mr Oizo, Myzyk, and Moriceau

Andrew Rosinski — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:17:42 +0000

“Look” by Sebastien Tellier, visuals by Myzyk & Moriceau, 4 min

I do not own an iPhone, I can’t even text-message, but for those of you who have iPhones, French independent label Record Makers created an iPhone application/game (they dub it “surrealistic”), and apparently you can win prizes by playing. That’s right, you heard right, you can win prizes. And here’s the best part: this iPoop application is f r e e.

Artists Mrzyk & Moriceau created the game; in the game you create random art by swiping different parts of the drawing. Your experimentation paired with your creative iPhone can WIN BIG.

It’s widely accepted by scientists and mathmeticians that our iPhones have and always will be smarter than us. Having said that, we must examine if the iPhone is more creative than the human.

Find it on iTunes

In this game:

* You make your own picture combos by sliding the 3 different images.
* Then you save the created images for your iPhone background or send them to your friends.
* All whilst enjoying the incredible game sounds by Sebastien Tellier and Mr Oizo (oi oi!).

Concept and Design: Mrzyk & Moriceau
Sound Effects: Mr Oizo
Opening Theme: Sébastien Tellier
iPhone Development: Sam Vermette

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0
Cost: Free
Developer: Record Makers

Find it on iTunes

TREES ARE DOWN (2008)

Andrew Rosinski — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:17:17 +0000

Andrew Rosinski, 4 min, found footage, 2008

Synopsis: A feverish montage-meditation on the national identity of American Citizens, the culture and trends of American consumerism, the relationship of man to machine, and the abstract relation of machine + wilderness. Americans define their individuality and lifestyle through their consumerism; corporations create sub-cultures, niches, and they market and sell this lifestyle, sending the consumer concealed messages that we need to buy the best to be the best.

Supplementary Notes: Taking a bathroom break from chopping wood out at my cabin, I discovered a number of VHS tapes buried inside a chest.

The catalyst of this project was during the Summer of 2008 when I visited the family cabin to help my father chop wood and haul brush. Later on, I was digging through a bin of antiquated VHS tapes — I soon stumbled upon a handful of snowmobile, ATV, and chain-saw instructional videos. I immediately knew that I wanted to cut up and mash these materials into a short, 4-6 minute film. I also wanted to experiment with faux branding (e.g. the Ginga, Dinca, Chooga, and Targis logos featured in the film).

However, as I reviewed the footage, I realised that the material was far more mundane than I initially had expected. I knew what I wanted to create: An ugly — and embellished — trash bag filled with American video trash-timber porn. After multiple screenings, I began cutting, and after multiple edits, the film was completed.

With heavy image manipulation, experiments in frame size, deconstruction, and juxtaposition, Trees seeks to explore trends in consumerism — e.g. the thought processes of the deliberating potential consumer, their weighing thoughts, how they come to make the big purchase.

DINCA Tv

Andrew Rosinski — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:22:49 +0000

I want my DINCA Tv!

Please visit the official DINCA Tv Vimeo channel. DINCA Tv is your station for sacred visions internet nation. All videos posted on DINCA will be added to DINCA Tv; however, if the video is not available on vimeo, it will not stream on DINCA Tv. Unfortunately, not all videos are available on vimeo (… yet).

If you are a registered vimeo member, you can subscribe to DINCA Tv, and you will be alerted immediately after a new video has been DINCAdded to the channel. You can sign up for free here.

Click here to watch DINCA Tv.

Cowboys Were Not Nice People (1990)

Andrew Rosinski — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:53:28 +0000

Larry Kless, 1990, 7 min, 16mm

Artist’s Statement: I produced this art film in 1990 completely on an optical printer reshooting 16mm film frame by frame. It won awards at various film festivals and was screened internationally. Here’s the artistic description, “History paints a heroic picture of the so-called “cowboys” of history. Using the hero as a metaphor to questions his validity, this film explores the mythical frontiers of western culture and the romanticism of colonialism.”

Larry Kless on Vimeo

Paper: The Art and Animation of Jen Stark

Andrew Rosinski — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 06:15:22 +0000

Papermation, Jen Stark, 2005, 38 sec, with music by Eddie Alonso.

Papermation (2005) is an impressive stop-motion animation by Jen Stark, a Miami-based artist and animator, whose work channels phantasmagoric tropes of the extrasensory, with motifs of psychedelia, the rainbow spectrum, geometric forms, and other extrasensory phantasms that defy classification.

Jen made Papermation entirely from paper, hence the title Papermation. Jen is prolific with paper, using it in her animations, sculptures, and of course, her drawings. Her work has colorful zest, and her work explores the extrasensory in a playful manner. These days, most kaleidoscopic animations are rendered synthetically; however, the tactility of Stark’s approach carries organic warmth; the warmth endures its digital conversion. Charming.

Other Animations by Jen Stark

Tunnel Vision Inside View, Jen Stark, 45 sec

Artist’s Synopsis: This is a view of the inside of a sculpture I created called “Tunnel Vision” that hangs on the wall and has a peephole you can look into. It was made using kaleidoscope mirrors, with a drawing on a motor and a light.

Streaming Gradient, 2008, 38 sec

Artist’s Statement: This is a stop motion animation I created in 2008 using only paper. Music by Eddie Alonso.

Jen Stark | Sculpture

Double Take

24″ x 24″ x 24 / hand-cut wood, acrylic paint / 2009

Coriolis Effect

12″ x 12″ / hand-cut paper / 2007

Purple

20″ x 20″ / hand-cut paper / 2009

Afterglow

12″ x 12″ / hand-cut paper / 2007

Over and Out

19″ x 19″ x 5″ / hand-cut paper / 2008

Drawings by Jen Stark

Explosive Expansion

26″ x 40″ / felt-tip pen on paper / 2009

Space and Time

22.5″ x 30″ / felt-tip pen and pencil on paper / 2008

What Does Organic Matter

22.5″ x 30″ / felt-tip pen and pencil on paper / 2008

Jen received her BFA in Fibers / Animation from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore, Maryland, Magna Cum Laude.

More:

Jen Stark Portfolio

Jen Stark on Vimeo

Live A/V Performance by Max Hattler + Noriko Okaku

Andrew Rosinski — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:47:43 +0000

This audio visual performance premiered at the 2010 London Short Film Festival. The performance is titled (O) and is a collaboration between motion design hot-shots Max Hattler and Noriko Okaku.

London SSF Synopsis: Max and Noriko first met when studying Animation together at the Royal College of Art. There are parallels in their animation-based experimental, semi-narrative, non-dialogue approach to working with film and video. Apart from their live work, they have collaborated on several projects ranging from tour visuals for The Egg and Basement Jaxx to stop-motion film Aanaatt and Max’s latest short film Spin. With (O), their third collaboration, Max returns to his teenage roots in sound/music-making and makes a first foray into live audio performance, complemented by Noriko’s surreal animated visuals.

maxhattler.com
norioka.net

Noriko Okaku

Video: 1923 by Max Hattler (2010)

Andrew Rosinski — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:10:21 +0000

Background Information / Synopsis: 1923 is one of two new animation loops directed by Max Hattler, inspired by the work of French outsider artist Augustin Lesage. 1923 is based on Lesage’s painting ‘A symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World‘ from 1923.

The second loop, 1925, is based on Lesage’s painting ‘A symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World’ from 1925. It will be available soon.

The films were created during 5 days in February 2010 with animators and CG artists at The Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark.

Director: Max Hattler | Technical Director: David René Christensen | Sound: Blake Overgaard | Previz/Layout: Thorvaldur Gunnarsson | Modelling: Thorvaldur Gunnarsson, Arnold Bagasha, Blake Overgaard | Animation: Casper Michelsen, Mikkel Vedel, Thorvaldur Gunnarsson, Blake Overgaard, Arnold Bagasha | Produced by: Max Hattler & The Animation Workshop

Length: 1’50″ loop

Video: Flooded McDonald’s by Superflex

Andrew Rosinski — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:32:49 +0000

by Tuan Andrew Nguyen & Superflex, 2009, 20 min, HD Video

From the Superflex vimeo page: Flooded McDonald’s is a film work in which a convincing life-size replica of the interior of a McDonald’s burger bar, without any customers or staff present, gradually floods with water. Furniture is lifted up by the water, trays of food and drinks start to float around, electrics short circuit and eventually the space becomes completely submerged.

Flooded McDonald’s is a film by Superflex. Produced by Propeller Group (Ho Chi Minh City) in association with Matching Studio (Bangkok) and co-produced by the South London Gallery, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark) and Oriel Mostyn Gallery (Wales) with generous support from the Danish Film Institute.

Flooded McDonald’s Video Excerpt

More:

The Official Flooded McDonald’s webpage

The Independent UK: Superflex: Flooded McDonald’s, South London Gallery, London

RSA Arts & Ecology: Superflex | Flooded McDonalds

Superflex on Vimeo