Microcinema DVDs - Aspect - The Chronicle of New Media, Volume IV

Catalog Number: MC-315	Type: Shorts Compilation	Genre: New Media, Modern Culture
Copyright: 2004	Length: 52 minutes	Format: DVD Region: 0 (All)
TV System: NTSC	ISBN: 0-9749657-1-5	UPC: 825346642796
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Films In Compilation

Shrink2.demo4 directed by Tony Cokes USA, Experimental, 2002, Color, Magnetic Stereo, 00:00:00 "Shrink" consists of three video projections synchronized with one musical soundtrack. The finished installation will have 12 sections per channel with a total running time of approximately 60 minutes. "Shrink" takes a structuralist visual approach related to Andy Warhol's film "Empire," or perhaps more similar to Chantal Ackermann's "News from Home." Each of the three simultaneous channels' video section is a continuous take depicting the same location at different times either before or after September 11, 2001. The full project loosely circumnavigates the Manhattan skyline from a slowly moving tourboat. The video is overlaid with short texts; theoretical and anecdotal, from several authors. The text in the featured excerpt "Shrink2.demo4" is from an interview with artist Martha Rosler. As Rosler discusses the role of the artist, the place of writing, text, and criticism within her artistic practice, and considers how her work may impact audiences, my use of her words suggests a reflection on my influences and related methods and attitudes toward viewing and constructing work. The soundtrack for the project are songs by the Bavarian experimental pop group The Notwist, mostly from the CD "Shrink" (1998.) The songs freely mix tropes from rock, jazz, and electronica.
Hinaus:: In den, Wald. directed by Bernhard Gal Austria, 2004, Color, Magnetic Stereo, 00:00:00 The electro-acoustic composition and multi-channel sound installation Hinaus:: In den, Wald. is based on the work of Swiss art brut artist and schizophrenic mental patient Adolf Wölfli. In Hinaus:: In den, Wald. (which translates into: ‘Out:: Into the, forest.’, deliberately written with ‘Wölfliesque’ punctuation) I transfer Wölfli's written transformations, abstractions and creations into my own sound language. Points of reference are Adolf Wölfli's idiosyncratic punctuation and orthography, the rhythmic-repetitive character of his listings and testaments and Wölfli's biography and megalomania in general. I tried to express his permanent creative urge through an additional recording, which is based on my own walking, running and breathing "out there in the woods". Different text passages are interwoven on several layers - from totally untreated phrases to modified elements. Language always oscillates between functional clearness and sonic abstraction, but also between conscious and unconscious perception. As a listener you enter Adolf Wölflis mind, hearing voices whispering inside your (his?) head, running through the woods, breathing. All texts were spoken by myself or by Stella Kao, a Taiwanese girl who didn’t understand German at all. Stella’s voice can be seen as a cross reference to a) the voice of young Wölfli himself or b) the voice of one of his victims. As a sound installation ‘Hinaus:: In den, Wald.’ was presented in a completely dark environment, the resulting perceptual situation (to be listening to close-up voices in a quite intimate - even claustrophobic - setting without any visual cues) made some visitors feel quite uncomfortable and might be regarded as a spatialization of Wölfli's subconscious. For Aspect Magazine I created a 5.1 surround mix in an attempt to re-establish the spatiality of the original installation version. A full-length CD-version of this piece was released by the Austrian label Klanggalerie in early 2004.
Funerals for a Moment directed by kanarinka USA, 2004, Color, Magnetic Stereo, 00:00:00 Experiments with cartography and infinity The world is full of things: Boston, marmalade, February, the neighbors, tomorrow, zoology, Penn State, theater. Before things form in the world, there is the pre-thing, the formless, the space of intuition, the richness of vagueness (the joy of the unspecified), the virtual, the potential. In this infinite space, there is an overfullness of possibility for which other worlds might soon come into being. So many worlds are in fact (concretely) possible that we need maps and guides, compasses and cartography. I develop websites, maps, guidebooks and performative frameworks that destabilize things (communities, sites, objects) and re-gather them in new locations and configurations. The goal of my projects is always to experiment with new ways of traveling with the world, creating the world at same time that we, collaboratively, traverse it. It's possible then that a new world would be one in which funerals are performed for moments that have passed away or one in which infinitely small things are of utmost consideration. The important thing is simply that we ask research questions experimentally and collaboratively. The artist acts as everything but master: facilitator, producer, worker, participant, collector, engineer, archivist. There are no viewers, only participants. This video was produced by Michael Hall
Text Rain directed by Camille Utterback USA, 1999, Color, Magnetic Stereo, 00:00:00 Text Rain is an interactive installation in which viewers play with the falling text of a poem. The text responds to motion and can be caught, lifted and released to fall again. If participants accumulate enough letters along their outstretched arms, or along the silhouette of any dark object, they can read words and phrases formed by the falling letters. With active participation the text of the poem Talk, You, by Evan Zimroth* can be gradually reconstructed. The Text Rain interactive installation developed out of AbacusParts – a series of theatre and dance collaborative workshops produced and directed by Romy Achituv and Danielle Wilde in New York City in 1997-98. An early idea for the piece was to create an interactive installation for the stage, which would display a handwritten classical manuscript about perspective, possibly by Brunelleschi or Durrer. The manuscript was to scroll into the screen from the top and slowly “disintegrate” into letters and diagram-parts, which would flow around the captured image of the performers. After developing a number of initial prototypes - Romy began collaborating with Camille Utterback on the installation. Utterback’s work at the time was inspired by linguistic metaphors which referenced the physical world, and often involved the creation of digital systems to allow for unusual encounters with text or language. The collaboration resulted in the current Text Rain installation, which was further developed by Utterback and prototyped at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, where she was then a researcher. As the piece evolved, the focus shifted from developing a piece for use in performance, to a free standing installation. While we watched people engage with the prototypes it became clear that the interaction between the viewers and the text created a unique dynamic suited for both individual and collaborative exploration. We are constantly amazed at the individual methods people develop to engage with the text. Some stand still or freeze a pose, letting the letters slowly accumulate on their heads, shoulders, arms and legs; others move quickly or jump up and down, using their whole body to affect and alter the display; still others link arms or stretch garments across the screen in an attempt to catch as many letters as they can. Viewers work together to decipher the poem, communicating with each other through their projected/mediated image, or alternatively, distrupt the ‘reading’ of the poem by stealing letters from one another. The poem Talk, You was selected for Text Rain due to its resonance with the structure of the piece. Zimroth’s poem creates metaphorical bridges between the physical and the linguistic. It employs images of the body moving through space to speak of interpersonal relationships, illustrating how “meanings” come together and fall apart through transient “syntactical” spatial relationships. Talk, You eloquently blurs the boundaries between the physical and virtual, echoing and complimenting the structure of the interactive experience within the piece:
Screen directed by Wardrip-Fruin, Carroll, Coover, Greenlee, et al USA, 2003, 00:00:00 "Screen" was created in the Cave, a room-sized virtual reality display. It begins as a reading and listening experience. Memory texts appear on the Cave's walls, surrounding the reader. Then words begin to come loose. The reader finds she can knock them back with her hand, and the experience becomes a kind of play -- as well-known game mechanics are given new form through bodily interaction with text. At the same time, the language of the text, together with the uncanny experience of touching words, creates an experience that doesn't settle easily into the usual ways of thinking about gameplay or VR. Words peel faster and faster, struck words don't always return to where they came from, and words with nowhere to go can break apart. Eventually, when too many are off the wall, the rest peel loose, swirl around the reader, and collapse. Playing "better" and faster keeps this at bay, but longer play sessions also work the memory text into greater disorder through misplacements and neologisms.