Art in General 10 Year Anniversary Video Marathon
January 10-12, 2008 Art in General Organized by Hanne Mugaas Art in General's 10th Video Marathon explores the current state of video art, situated in-between institutionalized 'Video Art' and the work emerging from the flow and dynamism of the Internet. Taking the title of Haskell Wexler's film of 1969, which suggested a critique of Marshall McLuhan's distinction between 'hot' and 'cold' media, Medium Cool suggests that video is an idea rather than a technology – as an umbrella term for a particular set of practices, it promises democracy while at the same time threatening to reduce images to information. Through screenings, lectures, and a dedicated website, the Marathon looks at a range of video practices, including early experiments within the media itself, while dealing with issues of video distribution and copyright, the making of (art) history and legacy through moving images, and the general impact of technology on contemporary culture. In keeping with this tenth anniversary of the Video Marathon, the screening Transitional Objects, curated by Thomas Beard, looks back on the past decade of electronic art as a way of thinking about a medium that has remained in flux—politically, aesthetically, and technologically—since its inception, while Artist Looking at the Camera, curated by Hanne Mugaas and Fabienne Stephan, includes the work of artists who use the medium to explore the creation and distribution of facts and history. The Marathon opens on Thursday 10th January with a lecture by Ed Halter, and ends on Saturday 12th with Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet) an event by Hanne Mugaas and Cory Arcangel, and Flipped Chips, an event curated by the artist collaborative LoVid. Artist Looking at Camera The exhibition Artist Looking at Camera highlights artists who use the tools of re-enactment, appropriation and moving image manipulation to question how history is produced and how facts are modified and reinforced through distribution. Lene Bergs’ video The Man in the Background explores art and propaganda during the Cold War. Focusing on the undertakings of the Congress of Cultural Freedom (1957–1967), Berg's approach calls into question what is defined as a "liberal conspiracy" and what is otherwise deemed a successful state sponsored cultural effort carried out by a power intelligence agency. The video Champions is a “self-portrait” of the artist group Bad Beuys Entertainment. Living in the suburbs of Paris, and working with issues of identity and media, the group hired actors ,dressed them up in tracksuits, and made them pose in front of the camera. The video seeks to problematize the stereotype image expressed through media of the troubled and violent young man from the Parisian suburb. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s video Walking after Acconci references the seminal video work Walk-Over (Indirect Approaches), made in 1973 by performance artist Vito Acconci. By working with Plan B, a sharp-tongued young MC, Forsyth and Pollard has updates the script and re-shoot the video, liberally adopting the style and aesthetic of contemporary urban music videos.. Guthrie Lonergan’s video Artist Looking at Camera is a compilation of video clips from Getty Images, the results of the search line ‘artist looking at camera’. The video exposes the cliché of commercial imagery, and how moving images are standardized into formats before being distributed to the consumer. Also commenting on online imagery is Anders Nordby, who in Digital Balaklava (All Rites Reversed) explores the paradox of exhibitionism and privacy online through a compilation of images found on the web. The images depict individuals conducting illegal actions, but with their faces digitally erased, visualizing the paradox that the digital erasure can be reversed to reveal the individual’s identity. Commenting on the current situation of digitalization and copyright, Annika Larsson’s video Pirate was filmed on May 1, 2006 during an action by the Swedish anti-copyright movement (Piratbyran and the Swedish Pirate Party) in Stockholm, Sweden. Discussing issues such as ownership of culture, and the nature of art and creativity is Nate Harrison’s The Amen Break, which narrates the history of the "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music -- a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Ida Ekblad explores the imagery of nature channels and magazines. Through poetic constallations of imagery and text, she is in the video National Geographics commenting on the fact that nature is increasingly arranged and experienced through media. Haris Epaminonda’s video Turmoil V is based on re-shot excerpts of film and television footage – principally the Greek soap operas and kitsch romantic films from the 1960s that used to fill up Sunday afternoons in the artist’s Cypriot childhood – which she then subtly reworks. In Bach-Gould-Hahn Sascha Hahn offers a kaleidoscopic montage of existing visual material, thematically arranged in thirty ‘chapters’ (a direct reference to the thirty key variations of Bach’s Goldberg Variations) providing a broad associative inventory of decisive moments in contemporary cultural production. Steven Sutcliffe’s Come to the Edge is rooted in his interest in archival footage, audio and film. Through a process of association, added imagery and music from different sources, the video leads to a reassessment of the construction of meaning in-between imagery and sound. Lars Laumann’s Book Store Scene examines hidden meanings in popular imagery, in this case the Zucker brother’s 1984 comedy Top Secret!, where the original footage is recorded backwards in one of the scenes, as the filmmakers thought that English language played backwards sounds like Scandinavian. This lecture takes its starting point from the work of Washington,DC-based videomaker Jeff Krulik, maker of the legendary video Heavy Metal Parking Lot, and many other works. Topics addressed include the utopian hopes and mundane realities of public access television, the question of fandom and subjectivity, underground VHS bootlegging as proto-file-sharing, criticism of art and comedy, and the problem of current definitions of the artist, more particularly the video artist. For this event, Mugaas and Arcangel have sorted and collected video from the Internet in order to discern where art and art history on the web is situated right now. The findings will culminate in a video screening presented with a live directors commentary. Without the guidance of institutions and armed only with the ability to crudely search through text, the Internet's version of art history only slightly differs from the academic version. For instance, on the Internet, actual artist videos are placed next to user generated karaoke remakes. The control systems that normally govern the systematization of art is dismantled by search algorithms and whims of home users. The intention of this event is to explore how art production and histories are changed by the growing use of the Internet as a platform and resource. Curated by interdisciplinary artist duo LoVid, Flipped Chips includes single channel videos as well as clips by artists from around the world who custom make their own hardware video instruments. Dan Sandin, Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Matthew Schlanger, Jim Wiseman, and Bill Etra represent a generation of pioneers who explored video and moving image synthesis. In an era of idealism and utopian views of communication, where video and television were regarded as the ultimate new creative medium, these artists developed hardware instruments and other image processing technologies as a way to reflect widespread cultural and social change. Their work will be shown alongside that of a new generation of artists who have returned to hardware-based video instruments, such as Billy Roisz (NTSC), noteNdo, Jon Satrom, Paul Slocum, Karl Klomp, and LoVid. Departing from their predecessors, the latter set approaches technology with personal and global nostalgia as well as a romantic infatuation with the media-generating object. Inspired by noise, extreme music, glitch and hacker culture, as well as the fragility, unpredictability, and limitations of technology, they choose to work with decades-old electronic components for personal aesthetic reasons and as a reaction to the dominance of technology and media in mainstream culture. Website Hanne Mugaas is an independent curator based in New York, where she is currently assisting Associate Curator Barbara London in the Media Department at the Museum of Modern Art. At the MoMA, she recently organized the screening The Artist and the Computer. Mugaas' recent independent projects include the screening Extended Animation: Digital Effects, Corporate Logos and Style, at Gallery F15 in Moss, Norway; the exhibition Paris was Yesterday, at La Vitrine in Paris; and The Copy and Paste Show, for Rhizome at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Fabienne Stephan is a curator, born in Switzerland, based in New York. Recent projects include the exhibitions Early Works (co-curated with Marilyn Minter and Matthew Higgs) for White Columns, and New Works, Aloïs Godinat for Artist Space in New York. She is currently Director of the gallery Salon 94. In 2006 she was an Associate Producer for Laurie Simmons, and she co-curated Anime!, a screening series of Japanese animations at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NY. Thomas Beard is a writer and curator of film and electronic art. From 2005-2006 he was Program Director of Ocularis, a non-profit media arts organization based in Brooklyn. Prior to that he served as a programmer at Cinematexas, and has organized screenings and exhibitions at such venues as Aurora Picture Show, MassArt Film Society, the New York Underground Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, and the Museum of Modern Art. He is also the editor of Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader, which will be published next year by San Francisco Cinematheque. Ed Halter is a frequent contributor to the Village Voice and a curator of film and media. His writing has appeared in Cinemascope, Arthur, The Believer, the New York Press, Out Magazine, Millennium Film Journal, Kunstforum, indieWIRE, Filmmaker, Vice, Rhizome, Computer Gaming World, Cinemad, Paper and elsewhere. From 1995 to 2005, he programmed and oversaw the New York Underground Film Festival, and has curated for venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Eyebeam, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Flaherty Film Seminar, and Cinematexas. He is a visiting assistant professor in the department of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, NYU, and other schools. His nonfiction book From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games was published by Thunder's Mouth Press in 2006. Cory Arcangel is an artist and performer who works with early computers, the Internet, and video game systems. He is best known for his Nintendo game cartridge hacks, and his reworking of obsolete computer systems of the 1970s and '80s, such as the Commodore 64 and Atari 800. Arcangel often works with the art collective/record label Beige, a loosely defined ensemble of artists and programmers who work collaboratively in digital media. Beige has produced videos, Web projects, and albums of electronic music, as well as modified Nintendo video game cartridges. Arcangel is also a member of the collective Radical Software Group (RSG). LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) overwhelms the senses with their new media performances, videos, objects, and installations. Touring the US and Europe extensively, LoVid has performed, exhibited, and lectured at The Neuberger Museum, The Butler Institute of American Art, PS1, Evolution Festival (UK), The Kitchen, RISD, Massachusetts College of Art, Kansas City Art Institute, Chicago Art Institute, University of Wisconsin, Futuresonic Festival (UK), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Ocularis, The Happy Lion, and Institute of Contemporary Art London among many others. LoVid has been part of the artist in residence program at Eyebeam, Harvestworks, iEAR, Alfred University, and Stevens Institute of Technology, has received grants and awards from Experimental TV Center, NYSCA, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Greenwall Foundation, and are a free103Point9 transmission artist. ----------------------- Art in General's Video Marathon is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency and The Experimental Television Center's Presentation Funds program, which is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and mediaThe Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). |
