Jacqueline Goss and Jenny Perlin retrace the journey of two 18th-century astronomers tasked with determining the true length of the meter. From the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel, The Measures explores the metric system’s origins during the violence and upheavals of the French Revolution. Along the way, Goss and Perlin consider the intertwining of political and personal turmoil, the failures of standardization, and the subtleties of collaboration.
Our Non-Understanding of Everything is a series of 16 videos that explore how the structures of architecture, semiconductors, and circuits become forms of expression reflecting hierarchies, cognitive processes, and relationships to the natural environment.
Taking its title from a sound design maxim and using it as a conceit to grasp the desire for connection, See A Dog, Hear A Dog probes the limits and possibilities of communication. In this liminal cinematic space, the fear of conscious machines is matched with a desire to connect with nonhuman entities. Algorithms collaborate and improvise. Dogs obey/disobey human commands, displaying their own artistry and agency in the process. Technology, from domesticated animals to algorithmic music to chat rooms, reflects human desires but has its own inventiveness.
Zach Blas is an artist, writer, and filmmaker whose practice spans technical investigation, research, conceptualism, performance, and science fiction. Currently a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, Blas has exhibited internationally, including at the Walker Art Center, Gwangju Biennale, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Whitechapel Gallery.
Located on the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway, Acoustic Ocean sets out to explore the sonic ecology of marine life. The scientist as an explorer and important mediator of the contemporary understanding of our planetary ecosystems is a central figure in this video. She makes her appearance in the person of a Sami (indigenous of northern Scandinavia) biologist-diver who is using all sorts of hydrophones, parabolic mics and recording devices. Her task is to sense the submarine space for acoustic and other biological forms of expression.
The first video of the installation Touch Parade, which as a whole explores “plastic love” or fetish culture and the assimilation of marginalized sexuality on the internet. In questioning what is an explicit and/or illicit image, fetishes found on YouTube that consist of banal gestures, are re-performed. Unlike other pornographic content, these videos evade censoring because they are not culturally recognized as representations of sexuality.
Earthglow is a poem written for the character generator and switcher that conveys a writer's internal dialogue through both subtle and dramatic color changes and through movement, size, and placement of words. The ambient soundtrack evokes the confluence of past and present perceptions.
2 Channel Land is a north-western docu-fiction film exploring the history of analogue signals spilling across the borders of Ireland and Britain. Guided by a mysterious threshold deity, we take a journey through Ireland's borderlands in search of community.
In Laser Games with Shirley Clarke, the Videofreex visit the apartment of independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke. Someone brings out a laser pointer, which they then use from the top of their building to shine on the sidewalks below in an attempt to distract the passersby. After returning indoors, they experiment with optical distortion by shooting the laser directly into the camera lens while listening to psychedelic raga music.
This is an edited excerpt of Eiko and Iris McCloughan's experiment working over Zoom on May 5, 2020 as a part of Eiko's Virtual Creative Residency hosted by Wesleyan University.
Iris is both a dramaturg and a collaborator in Eiko's The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable. Iris is in their studio in Brooklyn, New York and Eiko is in a suburb of Tokyo, Japan, 6761 miles away. Both are restricted under the emergency order due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth installment of the Transformers movie franchise directed by Michael Bay, was released June 27 2014. But for months ahead of the release, on YouTube one could already access an immense trove of production footage recorded by amateurs in locations where the film was shot, such as Utah, Texas, Detroit, Chicago, Hong Kong and mainland China. Transformers: the Premake turns 355 YouTube videos into a critical investigation of the global big budget film industry, amateur video making, and the political economy of images.
Shot in a creaky, wooden floored Parisian recording studio at an inaugural three-day “forum of ideas” focusing on the manifold possibilities of Resistance (the title of Jean-François Lyotard’s unrealized follow-up exhibition to his 1983 Les Immateriaux), occasional collaborators Ben Rivers and Ben Russell have produced what initially appears to be a structuralist document of a philosophical discussion in-the-round. This “appearance dimension” is deceptive, of course, and with the aid of an immersive 5.1 sound-mix, a Green Man, a Green-Man-shaped
RECKONING 4 is the second in a series of investigations into (among other things)
Our Non-Understanding of Everything is a series of 16 videos that explore how the structures of architecture, semiconductors, and circuits become forms of expression reflecting hierarchies, cognitive processes, and relationships to the natural environment.
This eight-minute video is part experimental video art, part sketch comedy routine, and part informational lesson on the advantages and disadvantages of owning Sony's latest video technology. In it, David and Carol participate in a brilliantly theatrical, seemingly improvisational conversation, in which each one adopts the specific identity and perspective associated with a particular video technology: David plays the part of the Sony Camera AVC 3400, while Carol takes on the personality of the Sony Portapak AV3400.
Fashioned out of home movies recovered from failing hard drives, this glitch-art video makes comparisons between different forms of memory - suggesting that, while error and decay may keep us up at night, they might also be the way we put our ghosts to bed.
-- Evan Meaney
Flesh meets robotics in this early video documentation of Survival Research Laboratory’s spectacular exhibitions of collective invention, anti-corporate technology, and satirical mass destruction. In the performances documented here, various animal corpses are integrated into the action as the clawed and spiked machines attack dummies, each other, and, occasionally, the audience. The video begins with the song Stairwell to Hell, an appropriate prologue.
This is the vision from the “chinampas", the hectic life in the floating gardens, an ancestral system of audiovisual planting.
A billboard looming over the 5 Freeway advertised a mortuary called “Eternal Valley.” In Green Valley, California, the road stops, eroded and dysfunctional, but continues to be nothing other than a road.
Camera: Ramzi Hibri, Matthew Lax
Edit: Matthew Lax
County Down is a cross-platform, episodic, digital video, exploring an epidemic of psychosis among the adults in a gated community, coinciding with a teenage girl’s invention of a designer drug. A rave-culture period-piece that harnesses the unwarranted optimism of the 1990s, County Down presents a society so obsessed with novelty and consumerism that it euphorically sews the seeds of its own destruction. Tracking the genesis of our current political climate, the ensemble cast banks on cultural appropriation and a constant din of micro-aggressions.
This film is a recording of a live signal analog video/audio synthesizer performance with a voiced narration made in collaboration with an AI program. A speculative machine guided psychedelic broadcast of an astral floral projection. A fictional telepathic transmission that saturates the boundaries of perception with interlacing signals of interconnected consciousness.
— Les LeVeque
Shot in a creaky, wooden floored Parisian recording studio at an inaugural three-day “forum of ideas” focusing on the manifold possibilities of Resistance (the title of Jean-François Lyotard’s unrealized follow-up exhibition to his 1983 Les Immateriaux), occasional collaborators Ben Rivers and Ben Russell have produced what initially appears to be a structuralist document of a philosophical discussion in-the-round. This “appearance dimension” is deceptive, of course, and with the aid of an immersive 5.1 sound-mix, a Green Man, a Green-Man-shaped
This tape includes footage of one of the first broadcasts of Lanesville TV, as it appears on the television set of Lanesville local, Todd Benjamin, and a television set installed in a public bar. Interwoven with shots recording the program’s reception, are segments recorded for Lanesville TV itself: Bart (playing the part of “Russell”) approaches Parry, dressed as a hillbilly car mechanic “fixing” the VW Van; nearby, Nancy opens the door to a cabin, wearing a bonnet, while Carol and Chuck, crowding behind her, play the part of other Lanesville TV protagonists.
Two bizarrely costumed characters – a human ‘chicken’ in a fat suit, and an elaborate folksy creature called an ‘authenticity fetish’- meet and debate their plight. In an attempt to reconcile themselves with some unspecified trauma of mass biotechnoviolation, these two beings quiz one another in rhyme and animation on the origins and ontologies of their species. A sardonic meditation on the nefarious reality of intensive farming, Artificial Intelligence, and the perils of denying complexity.
