HANNE'S ART AND CULTURE BLOG

Michel Gondry's music video for the Around the World features robots walking around in a circle on a platform (which represents a vinyl record), tall athletes walking up and down stairs, women dressed like synchronized swimmers (described by Gondry as "disco girls" moving up and down another set of stairs, skeletons dancing in the center of the "record," and mummies dancing in time with the song's drum pattern.

This is meant to be a visual representation of the song; each element in the video represents a different instrument. According to Gondry's notes, the androids represent the singing robot voice; the physicality and rapidity of the athletes symbolizes the ascending/descending bass guitar; the femininity of the disco girls represents the high-pitched keyboard; the "itchy" skeletons serve for the guitars; the mummies represent the drum machine.

"Welcome to The ricepainters home page! This page is going to have some of the world's smallest paintings and carvings done on single grains of rice, some of which are in the "Ripley's Believe it or Not" museums. You will have to see it to believe it! There will be many paintings the size of a penny and in great detail. Come back often to see the updates! All the work shown here will be the works of Dave Stevens."

From the EAI archives online, 'A Kindetic History':

Howard Wise was an innovative art dealer and a visionary supporter of video as an art form. His seminal embrace and fostering of video artists and projects contributed to contemporary art history. From 1960 to 1970, the Howard Wise Gallery on 57th Street in New York was a locus for kinetic art and multimedia works that explored the nexus of art and technology. The gallery featured several groundbreaking exhibitions, including On the Move (1964), Lights in Orbit (1967), and the landmark 1969 TV as a Creative Medium. The first exhibition dedicated to video (or television) in the United States, TV as a Creative Medium included artists such as Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, and Aldo Tambellini. In addition to defining an emerging artistic movement, this influential exhibition revealed the need for new paradigms to support artists working in video. In 1970 Wise closed the gallery to lay the groundwork for Electronic Arts Intermix, which he founded the following year to foster creative pursuits in the nascent video underground.

Read more here

Since its inception in Spring 1997, the Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium at UC Berkeley has presented numerous evening lectures from invited artist and media theorists. Through its international mailing list, web pages and posters, the series has established an international reputation for fostering intellectual dialogue at the intersection of Art, Technology, and Culture. Ken Goldberg (Professor, College of Engineering) initiated this lecture series with Kevin Radley (Art Practice).

Since 2001, BAM/PFA's Conversations program, in collaboration with the Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium, has been proud to produce and present this online video archive of Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium talks.

These talks are available in both QuickTime video format, for watching online, and MP3 audio format, for downloading and listening offline. Enter site.

If you are nearby, the next talk will be by Pierre Huyghe. It will be presented jointly with CCA at 7pm, 22 Jan 2007, at Timken Hall, California College of Arts, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco.

Canyon Cinema's unrivaled collection of more than 3500 films traces the history of the experimental and avant-garde filmmaking movement from the 1930s to the present.

Ed Halters essay about James Fotopoulos and his films:

"The films of James Fotopoulos examine heady esthetic and existential concerns through a unique hybrid of contemplative, delicate avant-garde formal effects and brutal low-budget body-horror, set within meticulously plotted structures that eschew typical experimental serendipity in favor of calculated auteurist rigor. At age 24, he’s completed 12 shorts and two features that play like the unlikely progeny of Stan Brakhage and Richard Kern, set in dingy urban environments that would make Ed Ulmer proud. Obsessed with the philosophical problems regarding sex, violence, extreme psychic states and unnerving atmospheres, as well as the classic formal issues of 16 mm lensing, Fotopoulos’ films wed a youthful fixation with the overpowering nature of primal drives to an uncommonly mature certitude of vision and technique." Read more.
Interview by Brian Frye here, James' website here.

Michael Bell-Smith and Cory Arcangel asked some people what their top ten links of the year were for 2006. This is what they said.

Mamas and the Papas sing California Dreaming on Hullabaloo. Features go go dancers in bathtubs.

You can find 148 different versions of Moon River on this website.

During the making of Signs of Life, Herzog also shot the experimental short Letzte Worte (Last Words, 1968), about a hermit who is brought back to civilisation, where he refuses to speak; meanwhile, other members of society obsessively repeat themselves to the point of nonsense. This film would mark the start of Herzog's investigation into human language, and his continued steps toward increasing narrative stylisation.

The first movie about movies? Directed by Edwin S. Porter, Produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company. Read more here

The Video Data Bank Catalog of Video Art and Artist Interviews
Edited by Kate Horsfield and Lucas Hilderbrand

Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, the Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The collections include seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960s and continuing to the present.

The first printed catalog of the Video Data Bank's complete holdings, FEEDBACK offers readers essays on the history of media arts, the Video Data Bank, video activism, experimental performance art, and the On Art and Artists collection. It includes 325 frame grabs and stills from some of the collection's most important titles and outlines the styles and directions taken by artists throughout the entire history of video art. An indispensable guide and reference for artists, students, teachers, and collectors, FEEDBACK is an essential book for any film and video bookshelf.

"FEEDBACK should be in the library of every media scholar, teacher, and curator who ever addresses late twentieth century media art, performance art, or documentary. I would certainly recommend it to anyone in that position and will be delighted to possess a copy myself."

--MARGARET MORSE, University of California, Santa Cruz

Read the introduction and/or buy it here

Feedback: The Video Data Bank, Video Art, and Artist Interviews
January 25–31, 2007

Taking place on the occasion of the publication of Feedback, The Video Data Bank Catalog of Video Art and Artist Interviews and MoMA’s The Feminist Future symposium (see pg. 36), this exhibition offers screenings of video art and interviews with women in the arts drawn from the Chicago-based Video Data Bank. The Video Data Bank (VDB) was started in 1976 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a collection of student productions and interviews with visiting artists. Around the same time, VDB codirectors Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield began conducting their own interviews with women artists who were underrepresented critically in the art world; these interviews soon became part of the archive. In 1980 VDB began distributing video art due to the growing need for artists’ representation. Over the past thirty years both collections have grown and are annotated in their newly published catalog. For this presentation, interviews and videotapes were chosen to reflect women’s art making and the evolution of feminist theory over the past thirty years. Interviews are by Kate Horsfield and Lyn Blumenthal, and the videos are produced in the U.S. unless otherwise noted.

For program, go here

Go here and here.

Youtube comment:
"Just when you thought it was safe to be an American! The legendary Sondra Prill once again shows that no classic is safe from her unique stylings! This clip should be mandatory viewing at schools and prisoner of war camps around the world. Weapons of mass destruction? Forget it! Drop this baby into the Middle East and they'll just give up on the spot! "

Via Lars Laumann: http://del.icio.us/billy_liar

Timi Yuro was an American soul and R&B singer. She is considered to be one of the first blue-eyed soul stylists of the rock era. Timi Yuro is known primarily as a one-shot artist for her fantastic version of Hurt in 1961. Timi was born Rosemarie Timotea Aurro (thus, Timi Yuro) in Chicago in 1941. She moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1952, where she sang in her family's Italian restaurant. She had a Mediterranean heritage and was influenced by some of the great Blues singers, to the extent that many people mistakenly thought that she was black.

Comment from YouTube:
"goddess Timi Yuro singing If ...
If Timi Yuro would be still alive most other singers could shut up!"

Lars Laumann is a very interesting Norwegian artist living in Oslo. In February, he will screen his movie “MORRISSEY FORETELLING THE DEATH OF DIANA”, which is based on conspiracy theories. The movie is great, and you should check the White Columns website for upcoming details about the opening.

Back in 1976 Molly Roth owned a plant shop called the Green Earth (the liner notes of her album mention that the store had a free jukebox for the plants), and made regular appearances on TV and radio. LIsten here.

The Space Lady writes:
My whole approach of playing on the street was to make my music available to as many people as possible for free. Now the Internet has the potential to dwarf the persistent and diligent efforts I made over 20 years ... and keeps my music alive without the wear and tear on my poor aging body! "The Space Lady" tape is now available as a CD, and I'm actively recording more songs, including an album of originals. You're right, TSL was recorded in early 1990, although I had been playing those same songs on the streets and in the subways of Boston/Cambridge and San Francisco/Berkeley for 5-6 years previous. I just had no opportunity (or money!) to make a recording, until our upstairs neighbor-friend offered to do it for free on his newly-acquired digital equipment. "Major Tom" was one of my most requested songs, but I did lots of other covers having some otherworldly theme or outer-space reference, even mouldy old standards like "Fly Me to the Moon" or "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" ... most of which didn't make it onto the record. But the 16 that did are probably my best and my favorites. Listen here

The Billie Jean Collection is a compilation of Billie Jean covers, collected by the great 808, who was participating in the Copy and Paste Show.

Yellow Magic Orchestra were a Japanese electropop band, formed in 1978. The band was originally conceived as a one-off studio project by Hosono, the other two members being recruited session musicians - the idea was to produce an album fusing orientalist exotica (cf their cover version of Martin Denny's Firecracker) with modern electronics. However the first album (with its cutting-edge production) was very popular, and the studio project grew into a fully fledged touring band and career for its three members.

Making abundant use of new synthesizers, samplers, digital and computer recording technology as it became available, their popularity and influence extended beyond Japan. Generally the band are highly regarded as pioneers of electronic music, and continue to be remixed and sampled by modern artists.

'Firecracker' was sampled by Jennifer Lopez:

From Bobb Trimbles website:

Born ten years too late to attract the attention he deserved, Bobb Trimble created an utterly unique body of work that merged psychedelia, folk-rock, space music and sound effects into rock's most convincing depiction of a disturbed mind. As with most tortured artistic souls, Bobb's distinct vision is filled with much more than just fear and self-loathing. It drips with beauty and heartbreak, and his high, fragile voice bleeds with passion. The music evokes the sixties yet sounded contemporary when released in the eighties and again when re-released in the nineties. Bobb's two impossibly rare albums change hands for ungodly sums of money, and for years his reputation grew among collectors as his music was heard via tape trades (often on unlabeled tapes, which led to one male collector falling in love with the beautiful voice only to be informed that the singer was actually a man). In the mid-90s, Bobb's music was finally made widely available when the bulk of the two albums were released on CD as Jupiter Transmission. Die-hard fans of psychedelia rate Bobb's music as the finest in the genre from the 80s.

Listen to the music here.
Radio special here.
Via Anders Nordby.

Ida Ekblad is my best friend. She makes interesting art, often based on the Internet. We have also curated shows together. This is her new website!

Igor Kopystiansky: Painterly Studies, 1975, detail. © Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London
Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky: Pink & White, 2006, detail. © Courtesy of the artists and Lisson Gallery, London
IIgor & Svetlana Kopystiansky: Pink & White, 2006, detail. © Courtesy of the artists and Lisson Gallery, London

Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky began their careers during the 1970s in Moscow. In 1988 the artist couple moved from what was then the Soviet Union to New York and today they spend their time between New York and Berlin, usually working together. The Kopystianskys are interested in the traditions of 20th century avant-garde, recycling, dismantling and reassembling its cultural codes in film, video and photographic works. They are also interested in the intangible and invisible such as giving time a visible and almost tangible form. Despite the outwardly harsh form of their work it contains a great deal of warmth and humor.

Go to ART/ New York here.

I've gotten into golfing lately. And everyone at the golfing bubble was talking about Tiger Wood's new swing. So I did a bit of research. Here is Tiger, two years old:

And here is the 'New Swing Portrait':

Also, it's true what they say; golfing makes you addicted at first try.

From its beginnings the Millennium offered various programs and services such as filmmaking workshops, equipment access-which includes facilities for editing, screening and shooting. In addition, the Millennium has continuously presented ongoing film-talks and screenings in its Personal Cinema Series. Go to Millennium here. Also, go to the great Millennium Journal (first published in 1978) website here. You can read many of the articles online.

PDF from the first National Video Festival: www.radicalsoftware.org/volume2nr4/pdf/VOLUME2NR4_art16.pdf

My good friends in Norway finally got themselves a website!
Go to index of to visit Willy Wonka Inc.!
:)

Joao Ribas has curated a show that is opening at Bellwether Gallery in New York on Thursday February 8. Artists include Carol Bove, Aaron Curry, Christopher Deeton, Jack Goldstein, Jonah Groeneboer, Alice Könitz, Adelina Lopes, Anthony Pearson, Nathan Mabry, John McCracken, Stephen G. Rhodes, Emily Sundblad & Gordon Terry. Read more here. Image: Dyadic Cyclone by Carol Bove.