96 Results
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Boswell in Space: Interactive Boswell in Space: Interactive Documentary
- From: ejlenn
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Description:
The ancient philosopher certainly gave a wise counsel when he said, ‘Know thyself.’ For surely this Knowledge is of all the most important… A man cannot know himself better than by attending to the feelings of his heart and to his external actions, from which he may with tolerable certainty judge ‘what manner or person he is’. I have therefore determined to keep a daily journal of which I shall set down my various sentiments and my various conduct, which will be not only useful but very agreeable.
James Boswell,
15 November 1762
Such a busy time I'm having just now- and lots of interesting things still to come, but most of all I am looking forward to the rather charming and eccentric project Boswell in Space, for which work will begin at the end of September. I have a lot to live up to (see above quote) as I will be taking on the documentary stylings of a great writer/observer of human character, James Boswell. If you want to know the ins and outs of the project, read Mitch Miller's blog here. But for my part I am expecting to eke out the drama from this bizarre ride, bring the characters we encounter to life and find beauty in some odd corners of Britain. Not much to ask then! But I am looking forward to the challenge and to meeting some inspirational collaborators.
I am interested in the narrative aspect of the documentary, for while there will be plenty of facts and historical elements, there is also the story of the journey to tell. I recently wrote about American road movies for The Drouth magazine, where I explored the fascination between the motion picture camera and the rolling freeways of the US in the last century of American cinema. I find that celluloid is an aesthetically pleasing, modern medium for travel, and I wonder in the post modern days of high definition, if movement blur has lost something of its esoteric quality. Online documentary or what the industry is calling ‘interactive documentary’ has yet to find a familiar format. This makes it incredibly exciting for me to think of all the elements that can help construct the journey; animation, photography, film, sound and writing will all play their parts, but the task is a little daunting!
There have been a couple of interesting documentaries this year that have approached their subjects with multimedia methods. American: The Bill Hicks Story dispensed with talking head shots in favour of quirky animations which brought a young Bill Hicks back to his childhood years through animated photography. Amy Hardie’s Edge of Dreaming enters the filmmaker’s subconscious through beautiful animations and reveals some of her darkest thoughts. Online, I’ve looked at Maisie Crow’s multimedia project Hunger: Living with Prader-Willi Syndrome which is a simple but very effective use of photography, sound and moving image. These are all techniques I’ll be considering in the depiction of Boswell in Space, as we hope to create an interactive experience for the viewer, and make some room for online passengers on this picaresque adventure.
- Blog post
- 2 days ago
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International Espionage International Espionage
- From: adamwb
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Description:
International Espionage was a game I ran in Edmonton in summer 2010, commissioned by the Edmonton Arts Council as part of their transitory public art programming. The game recasts the narrative of clashing modernist avant-gardes as an international spy narrative and invites players to make moves in overlapping spaces of unclear rules, personal motives, historical references and the contested spaces of the downtown city.
In this clip, parts of two competing teams have joined together after the game became more complicated than they thought, and are making a plan to move against some of their former comrades.
- 2 days ago
- Views: 14
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The Konami Code The Konami Code
- From: benwerd
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Description:
This year's Book Festival has been concerned with the future of narrative, and of books themselves: with the publishing industry apparently taking a flaming nosedive at the hands of digital culture and participatory media, what can it learn from its inadvertent assassins?
It's perhaps an overstated question, because books aren't going anywhere anytime soon, and the likes of McSweeney's have shown that publishing, literature and storytelling can benefit from thoughtful innovation. However, there's no doubting that digital culture is taking over, and games are at the forefront. In terms of financial turnover, games are bigger than movies; they're bigger than music; they're bigger than books or art. Yet, at the same time, they're often still considered to be nerd territory: a form of culture far away from the mainstream, to be feared and questioned.
Tom Chatfield is an arts writer, most notably for Prospect Magazine. He participated in two events in order to promote his book, Fun, Inc: Why Games are the 21st Century's Most Serious Business.
Chaired by play theorist Pat Kane, the first session asked many of the now-familiar questions about digital culture. Swathes of the conversation could easily have been subtitled: Video games: they're not as good as going outside, are they? Despite this, Chatfield gave a good overview of gaming culture for the older audience in attendance, although he oddly concentrated his focus on the implications of World of Warcraft on sociological research and population modelling. Sure, participants' activities in massively multiplayer online games can be measured and statistically modeled, but games have other things to tell us about who we are.
Like most people in my generation, games were my introduction to computers. I can readily remember when the term video games wasn't a quaint anachronism. I stared in fascination at the Afterburner machine at my local swimming pool; was responsible for a series of horrific crash landings in Timex's Flight Simulator on my ZX81; spent a year living in North Carolina coveting my neighbour's NES. For my thirteenth birthday, I asked for a source code compiler, and for most of my teens I traded homemade computer games with my friends. We ran Spire Magazine, one of the first hypertext-based online magazines, which led to coverage in the Financial Times and in other places, which in turn led to my Internet career. Just as some kids learn to play the guitar and end up writing their own songs, I learned how to program. Code and games are arguably the new rock, for at least a subset of my generation; for me, Peter Molyneux and the Bitmap Brothers were every bit as cool as Kurt Cobain.
Games aren't just about death, although there's always been a heavy emphasis on bloodsport, which can be cathartic or unsettling depending on your point of view. Take The Secret of Monkey Island: released in 1990, this was part of an adventure series produced by LucasFilm. You can't die, and there is no scoring; playing these games is about the experience itself, and the only thing you need to do to win is persevere. They crossed a line between movies, interactive fiction and game-playing, becoming ever more sophisticated. Portions of Monkey Island were written by Orson Scott Card, the science fiction author responsible for the classic novel Ender's Game. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was based on an unproduced movie script, but easily made the transition to a more interactive format. As you progressed, your decisions shaped the kind of gameplay you experienced; if you were more orientated towards action, you could fight your way to the end. If, on the other hand, you were more interested in puzzles or character development, those were also available routes.
The Dig was in some ways the culmination of this genre; it was based on a story idea by Steven Spielberg, and took a psychological, atmospheric approach to weaving a story. Backgrounds were hand-painted, and characters were sparsely animated. Dialogue and plot took a front row seat.
Unfortunately, as the games industry evolved and consumers wanted bigger bangs and fancier graphics, LucasFilm started to focus more and more on flashy, fight-centric Star Wars titles. Their adventure games - undoubtedly classics, both of storytelling and gaming - were discontinued.
All, however, is not lost. The indie games movement only got a brief mention in Tom's talk, but similarly to the indie film movement's role in the wider industry, this has become the new home for quieter, more artistically expressive gaming ideas - for example, the breathtakingly beautiful Machinarium.
The second session, Where's the Fun? took over the Spiegeltent for a discussion about what fun is, how it's evolved over time, and whether we're having more or less fun than we used to. Barry Miles discussed the fun he had in sixties London, in underground clubs with the likes of the Rolling Stones, and wondered if the corporate influence on the culture of fun is having a detrimental effect. Digital culture in general, both authors noted, is largely owned by large corporations.
This is actually changing - by technical design as well as through the rise of the indie movement. Just as the corporate managers aren't the people actually playing or composing music, they're also not the people genuinely innovating in digital culture. This is still the domain of hackers, who treat it as more of an art or a political endeavour than business. (The open source blogging platform WordPress makes this point succinctly in its motto: "Code is poetry.") In fact, many people responsible for games, social networks and platforms are unsettled by the corporate influence, and are actively seeking to do something about it. The likes of OStatus are specifically designed to ensure that Facebook and its monolithic ilk will be less relevant in the future than they are today. Similarly, we are likely to see decentralized massively multiplayer games, where different parts of the game universe are crafted by completely separate artists, hackers and designers. The gaming world is evolving, and it is as artistic as it is lucrative.
It's become obvious that there is a generation gap that affects understanding of digital culture, but it's not insurmountable. Like most things, you have to experience it to really understand it: Facebook and Twitter, for example, is a terrifying idea to people who don't actively participate. I'll fully admit that war games like Call Of Duty scare me, but I know that if I played them, I'd grok their significance and purpose.
Just as rock and roll was a new, envelope pushing culture in the fifties, sixties and seventies, digital culture is remaking who we are in the 21st century. Games are an integral part of that, and are an artistic medium to embrace and explore rather than fear and question.
- Blog post
- 2 weeks ago
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BLOOD BLOOD
- From: MichaelLacey
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Description:
The first time I noticed it, we were in the kitchen. My wife stood at the window chopping carrots for soup. She was hypnotized by the boring landscape outside, sheet rain and grey hills, and ignored my repeated requests to bring me my fucking pipe. I tore a page from my newspaper, screwed it up, and threw it at her head to disrupt her reverie. I succeeded in attracting her attention but also caused her to plunge the knife into her index finger. She jerked it up the air and I watched blood arch out of the wound in the surprising form of a tiny steam train, which briefly held its shape in mid-air before spattering onto the counter, dangerously close to my pipe. I hastily wrote down the train’s serial number next to the crossword, and congratulated myself on remembering to wear my vari-focal glasses. While she bandaged her finger and quietly sobbed, I retired to my library and took down an old photograph album, acting on a hunch. In a photograph taken when I was a younger man, I found a train with a matching serial number to the one written in haste on my newspaper. My interest piqued, I wandered back through to the kitchen. My wife hovered nervously around the fridge as I inspected the stains on the counter. Doubtlessly she expected me to be angry at her for not yet having cleaned them up, but my mind was elsewhere. At first glance, they looked like ordinary smears of human blood. Closer inspection revealed complex series of fine lines, illustrations rendered in the impenetrable hand of a madman. This one depicted the house where I had grown up, and the overgrown grass surrounding it.
Time went by, and I would furtively inspect my wife’s bloodied tampons, the occasional discarded plaster, seeking further hidden images which I would sketch in a private journal. The more impressive specimens - like the bandage from when she stood on a broken milk bottle, which I had crept down i the ight o retrieve from the bins - I kept in a large stamp album which I had never come close to filling with stamps. Occasionally I would tear a page from my newspaper while she chopped vegetables and throw it at her head. If she cut herself, I would inspect the blood and disappear into my study to update the records. Over time she not only found this increasingly irritating, but became much better at withstanding the attacks.
I hatched various plans to obtain more samples. I staged an elaborate romantic picnic in a rowboat for the sole purpose of attempting to catch her on the back of the head with an oar. I spent all day roasting an enormous ham, in order to slip with the carving knife and jab it into her wrist, or anywhere with a lot of veins. This all proved monstrously impractical, and yielded very little success. Eventually, I struck upon a perfect scheme. I would grind up sleeping pills and put them in her food, so that she would fall easily into a deep sleep. I would then extract her blood using a syringe which I could spray onto blotting paper at my leisure. The patternations in the bloodstains were of the same type, and this method gave me a much more effective means of cataloguing them. I would explain the blotches and red marks as insect bites, usually, and offer to rub cream on them. She had become paler, and weak, and I suggested we try cutting wheat from her diet.
In her increasingly soporific state she barely noticed that I was spending my every waking hour alone in my study, behind closed doors, poring over my now gargantuan collection. Each stain, when looked at carefully, would reveal to me a long-since forgotten memory. Some from my childhood, others the forgettable minutae of my recent life. The important thing was that when they were collected together and observed in this manner, the patterns of life seemed tantalisingly close to my grasp. I had spent my useless existence blundering from one thing to the next, ignoring the important things, forgetting the painful things where possible, generally doing everything I could to obscure the narrative of my life from myself. It wasn’t really the life I had wanted, after all. I hated the countryside, I hated my wife. I hated our house and our stupid fucking dog. I hated soup. If there was any reason for my being in this mess, it was contained within this archive of darkening maroon patches on cream paper. While she failed to notice my absence, I too failed to notice her faltering health. Now and again I would see her in a certain light, the sharp contours of her bones newly visible beneath sagging, grey skin. Her eyes bulged from their sockets in a frozen expression of bloodshot apathy. With each fresh pang of guilt, I would disappear into my research, but increasingly found myself drawn to the same conclusions. I was not yet seeing the full picture. I was trying to complete a jigsaw with half the pieces. The other half were still dragging themselves through her veins and arteries.
The harsh wail of police sirens alerted me to the fact that I had become indiscreet in my pursuit of answers. At 2am or thereabouts I had awoken with a new idea, one which I determined warranted immediate execution. I hurled all the white beds linen from the airing cupboard out of the bathroom window and onto the front lawn, where I carried my wife’s sleeping body and laid it down in the grass. It was extremely light. Next, I arranged the sheets to cover the lawn completely, and stitched them together lightly at the edges. Finally, I bound her hands and feet, and hung her upside down from an overhanging branch. I covered her mouth with duct tape, even though she remained sound asleep, and slit her throat with a kitchen knife. The blood gushed in steam trains, umbrellas, smiling faces, rainclouds, sad old dogs, rotting flowers, rope-swings, bras, cigarettes. It began assembling itself on my prepared canvas as an illustration of byzantine complexity. I had been staring at it for hours, long after the sun had gone up, and of course a neighbour eventually noticed. I had to admit that from their point of view, it could be considered quite a disturbing tableau.
I saw enough then, and during the trial, to commit it the vast network of images to my memory, and daub it into the walls of my cell in red ink provided by a kind guard. Other inmates now remark upon my upbeat nature - I am no longer dour, irascible. I live amongst the contours of my life, I lie on my narrow bed and let my mind wander amongst them, unencumbered by distraction. I am finally, terribly free.
the end - Blog post
- 2 weeks ago
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Narrating the future Narrating the future
- From: benwerd
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Description:
David Shields has a compelling proposition: that long-form fiction, at least popularly, has not really evolved past the 19th century novel. He argues that our lives are more complex, demanding and overloaded with strands of information than ever before, in a way that the fiction - and art as a whole - that attempts to describe our lives hasn't so far managed to tackle. The title of his book alludes to his hunger for art that tells truths about the world we're living in, blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction, and throws away established conventions about what a story should be.
He shared the podium on Sunday with Eli Horowitz, managing editor of McSweeney's, the publisher founded by A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius author Dave Eggers. They have managed to escape the tumbling fate of the publishing industry as a whole by turning their publications into things of art and beauty in themselves: whether it's their in-house hardbacks, their literary quarterly, Panorama, their newspaper, or Wholphin, their DVD video periodical packed with unseen and awesome short films, the form feels almost as important as the content.
I've been a big fan of theirs for the best part of a decade, and the thoughts that Horowitz shared at the Book Festival were fresh, intelligent and refreshingly bullshit-free. He dismissed, for example, the idea that ebooks were somehow inferior because reading a paper book is in itself a magical experience (something I've heard over and over in my role as a technologist). If books are going to compete, he noted, their form has to compete with the convenience of ebook readers, and their content has to continue to innovate, and to strive to be vital.
We're a new generation, empowered by technology to transform the world around us. What both Shields and Horowitz seemed to be doing was calling out for writers and artists to be true to themselves instead of the established norms - particularly the commercial norms - and do what we feel we have to do. It's the story, the reality and the issues that count, rather than the framework that we put them in. Ignore genre and write what you need to write.
That message was echoed by both Garry Trudeau and Alan Moore, who took the stage with Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell on two consecutive days. (Sasha's written a great overview of the Alan Moore event over here.)
I grew up reading Doonesbury, and can't claim any pretense of objectivity about Trudeau. I love everything he does. The strip is a very different kind of narrative, but it presents an impressive body of work: a continuous story, updated four panels a day, for forty years. Doonesbury manages to be cuttingly satirical, intelligently human and almost zen in its artistry: as Alan Moore pointed out, often the art will be static from panel to panel except for some small detail, which will change for either comedic or emotional effect. It's a style that Moore's seminal graphic novel From Hell deliberately mimicked. As accomplished as Moore's novels are, however, I doubt he could keep the same group of characters growing, changing and never losing their power for four decades.
I approached Garry after the talk, my heart beating and head buzzing, and managed to say about three intelligible words before giving up and collapsing in an awkward heap of admiration and linguistic malcoordination. They say you should never meet your heroes; perhaps that's because you'll spend the rest of the month kicking yourself for being such a dork. (However, he - along with everyone else here - was polite, articulate, intelligent and very friendly.)
Both Trudeau and Moore heeded a version of David Shields's call to action in their respective times. Trudeau took the newspaper cartoon, at the time saturated with the likes of Little Orphan Annie and Blondie, and turned it into affecting real-life commentary. Alan Moore took pulp comic books and turned them into sophisticated literature that discussed what it means to be human. Both became the voices of their respective generations by writing what they felt was vital - what they felt people needed to hear, rather than what they said they wanted.
As both Shields and Horowitz were quick to point out, this generation - digital, disparate and respectful of long-tail individuality - has yet to find its voice. There's perhaps an argument that, thanks to personal publishing and the Internet, the voice is actually the whole generation. Nonetheless, there's all to play for, and it's time for artists to shed their inhibitions.
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- 2 weeks ago
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My Artist My Artist
- From: stuartdfallon
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Description:
MY ARTIST
In his contribution to the catalogue accompanying the Martin Creed exhibition at Fruitmarket, Alex Coles refers to Creed as ‘my artist’, adding that ‘everyone has one’.
My understanding of the term used by Coles is the artist whose work provokes an instinctive reaction of familiarity and affection – the notion is a romantic one. It goes deeper that ones favourite artist- it suggests a degree of ownership over them and their work. It’s the artist whose work you return to time and again, and who is always there in the background.
It may be comparable to an old, strong friendship.
It might be love.
Throughout the Edinburgh Arts Festival I have been collecting thoughts and idea on this concept from artists and curators. The responses will be collected and added anonymously below.
-to add your own contribution, email to stuartdfallon@yahoo.co.uk
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In 2000 I visited the Royal Academy’s Apocalypse show in London and saw an installation by Mike Kelley titled ‘Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene)’. It was a darkened stage set featuring a room with a bed and an oven. On a monitor in the corner, a play was shown that used this same room with two high school students enacting an absurd psychosexual narrative overacted to the point of hysteria. It was camp, tragic and hilarious and it was also a kind of epiphany for me. Shortly after that I went and bought his Phaidon monograph and took that along to the Fine Art course at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee where I produced a lot of art that bore his influence, both directly and indirectly. In 2002 he released a book called Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism and that still influences my art writing too. I also share his deep mistrust of the entertainment industry in general, and identify with his declaration of being an avant-gardist. Maybe that’s idealistic and romantic but I think it’s beautiful.
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When I was 10, My Artist was Rembrant and Van Gogh. I had a poster of The Potato Eaters on my wall (alongside a photograph of a piglet in a wicker basket).
When I was 13, My Artist was Cezanne. I went to his house in Aix en Provence and I felt I ‘knew’ his vision.
When I was 15, My Artist was Goya. Beauty and pain and drama.
When I was 17 I really discovered MY ARTIST. Willem De Kooning. I was painting and he made me understand painting. Painting was all there was for a bit.
When I was 19, it was suggested everyone had an abstract expressionist phase and I suddenly questioned it, became embarrassed by it.
When I was 20, I developed a more up-to-date, but conservative taste. I thought Koons was a bit like the art world’s equivalent to Coke (a-cola) and didn’t really want to ‘have’ an artist at all.
Later that same year I found Fishchli and Weiss, Jenny Holzer, Jeremy Deller, Grayson Perry - the list could go on.
Since then I have not ‘had’ an artist. If I admire one too much I start to see their failings, if I dislike another I begin to see their strengths. Though that doesn’t stop me falling in love with one or another every now and again…
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**Hans Haacke**.
Unflinching integrity, stood up in the face of censorship at a time before controversy could be used launch or enhance a career- instead could seriously damage or effectively end one.
Still politically engaged and artistically relevant after 50 years. Works have resulted in ongoing, contentious discussion- both publicly and in parliament.
Pioneer in multi-disciplinary practice- opting to use only the medium appropriate for the individual content and context.
If I could return to any past exhibition- from any time or place in history, high on the list would be Haacke’s Germania, from the Venice Biennale in 1993.
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Running around charity shops to gather books for a young boy’s bedroom; carefully stacking them to form the foundations of a memory; pencils, teabags and rulers, creating a maze of rituals
These were my first experiences of Mark Manders, working as an intern on an exhibition of his work. I was drawn to the familiarity of the materials he used, the safeness of this other world then surprised and awakened by the sudden sight of a cat split in two or the slumped form of young girl.
Now I am always anxious to find his work at any art fair I visit, tired of the bright lights, the endless stands and throngs of people. Sinking into a borrowed memory, filling my head with the flickers and reflections of a life imagined. Comforting, re-assuring and strangely familiar, like a memory created from looking at photograph, I know it isn’t mine, but it feels like it could be.
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There is a real sense of thrill when you discover a young, emerging artists work, in an art fair or a provincial gallery, who noone else knows about yet.
The exclusive, secret relationship creates a real sense of ownership over the artist and their work.
I discovered mine last year.
But I can’t say who it is.
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I discovered Jean-Michel Basquiat not in an art history text but through the many graffiti magazines and retrospective vhs tapes floating around in skate shops in the 90's. I, like him, had no interest in high school and was drawn to street painting long before I had ever entered a proper studio space meant solely for the purpose of making art. It's not that his work itself
struck me as much as the comfort and confidence his path to the world of professional art gave me during my own period of self-discovery and articulation of ideas. Seeing Basquiat's work even now resonates like and familiar song or scent: warm memories of clay-and-paint-caked cassette tapes, all-night studio sessions, and my wild enthusiasm for making anything and everything I could wrap my thoughts around during my introduction to the new world of art. I still want to draw each and every time I see one of those familiar SAMO crowns. Basquiat was the bridge I crossed and, more importantly, my personal memory-jogger that sometimes it's not a bad idea to go back and cross that bridge again.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've never been a fan of celebrities.
Mike Nelson and Roman Signer in some way have induced a level of conjecture over my work. They have affected the development and lineage of my thoughts and I see them all as milestones in my perceptions.
I would not call either of them 'My artist'.
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- Blog post
- 2 weeks ago
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Neil_
Rolland - Views: 50
- Since: 3 weeks ago
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Timelapse Experiment Timelapse Experiment
- From: iamrollo
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Description:
The first in a series of experiments on the nature of still photographs vs motion and the principle of a single film shot acting as a still photograph would. The full ongoing experiment is housed here: imastrangerheretoo
An excerpt of the blog is as follows:
I’ve been studying and re-evaluating a key interest, that of the unique and blurred relationship between still photographs and moving image representations. I recently discovered some old contact sheets of mine which have more in common with an exposed filmstrip rather than a collection of individual photographs.
To this day the blurred boundary of the two forms of representation continue to fascinate. The more I study the greater the divide between them seems to grow, whilst technology seems intent on drawing the two practises together. I have on my desk a photographic camera that is capable of shooting around 10fps and on the floor a video camera capable of taking A4 stills from its chip.
Yet to look at a photograph and to experience a film couldn’t feel more different. A photograph, once taken is seperated from ‘life’, it becomes a moment that is detached from the continuity of time. It is an event that has no history based in the real world, but what we place on it. Just one click of the shutter and the real world becomes representational, now if one starts to click that same shutter a few more times, that representational image becomes part of a sequence, its literally given life – but more so, it becomes part of history, a moment we believe existed; in the words of Laura Mulvey ‘bound into an order of continuity and pattern’, unable to break free from the confines of time, will only exist until you stop clicking the shutter. After which it is literally history.
Im talking here predominately about images and sequences in singularity, rather than a collection of each that goes on to form a narrative – those uninflected images described by Eisenstein ‘A shot of a teacup. A shot of a spoon. A shot of a fork. A shot of a door. Let the cut tell the story’ (David Mammet on Directing)… What then, outside a narrative, is the strength of a moving image representation of an object over a still one? Moving image has the power to evoke a sense of finality, time, to control and manipulate your engagement. Of course also the study of movement as purely beauty, as so many videos of super-slow motion ballon bursts will attest. But will that moving image shot ever be as powerful and arresting as the still image, in which you can look at whilst wandering around its possibility in your own mind, imbibing it with a sense of your own history, allowing that scene to become representational? Certainly a question I’ve been trying to answer in my own mind for a number of years, and seems ever more relevant now with the incredible increase in popularity of time-lapse / slow motion photography. Im shooting my first practical study now as I write this, to begin to answer the question for myself…
“I was concerned with the way Hollywood eroticised the pleasure of looking, inscribing and sanitsed voyeurism into its style and narrative conventions. Now i am more interested in the representations of time that can be discovered in the relation between movement and stillness in cinema.” - Laura Mulvey, DEATH 24x A SECOND
- 4 weeks ago
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Dance, Dance, Dance 2010 Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
- From: stuartdfallon
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Description:
Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
June 2010
- 2 months ago
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Narrative Plate II (post) 201 Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
- From: stuartdfallon
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Description:
Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
June 2010
- 2 months ago
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Dance, Dance, Dance 2010 Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
- From: stuartdfallon
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Description:
Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
June 2010
- 2 months ago
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Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
- From: stuartdfallon
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Description:
Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
June 2010
- 2 months ago
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Dance, Dance, Dance 2010 Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
- From: stuartdfallon
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Description:
Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
June 2010
- 2 months ago
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Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
- From: stuartdfallon
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Description:
Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
June 2010
- 2 months ago
- Views: 9
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Dance, Dance, Dance 2010 Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
- From: stuartdfallon
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Description:
Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
June 2010
- 2 months ago
- Views: 8
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Dance, Dance, Dance 2010 Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
- From: stuartdfallon
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Description:
Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
June 2010
- 2 months ago
- Views: 6
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Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
- From: stuartdfallon
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Description:
Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
June 2010
- 2 months ago
- Views: 9
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Dance, Dance, Dance 2010 Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
- From: stuartdfallon
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Description:
Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
June 2010
- 2 months ago
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Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010 Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010
- From: stuartdfallon
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Dance, Dance, Dance 2010
Narrative Plate I (pre) 2010, Narrative Plate II (post) 2010
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
June 2010
- 2 months ago
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Q&A: Andrew Kötting Q&A: Andrew Kötting
- From: gailtolley
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Description:
Image: Still from Ivul
Andrew Kötting is one of the few artist filmmakers in the UK whose work explores and challenges both the cinema and gallery space. This week his third feature film, Ivul, comes to British cinemas. Through a loose narrative structure and limited dialogue it explores a lyrical treetop landscape where a teenage boy has banished himself to following an argument with his father.
Kötting talks to Central Station about the themes present in his latest film, why he still prefers the creative community in the UK (despite his latest film having been shot in France) and his next project which involves pedaling a giant swan pedalo from Hastings to Hackney.
Your latest film Ivul is the second part of a trilogy following on from This Filthy Earth (2001) - tell me how this film relates to the other two?
I think half way through [making This Filthy Earth] I had the sense that we could perhaps open it a little bit and make another piece of work which is earth or landscape related, I think all my work is inspired by the landscape and about the landscape. It seemed to connect with this other shoot I’d been commissioned to work on for BBC Scotland at the time, the story there was really inspired by my tree-climbing escapades as a kid. I suddenly thought, hang on, there’s a beginning here of a trilogy: one of which is set very much on the ground and this one was going to be set very much off the ground and the third part which would be a piece of work that would be set beneath the ground. So that’s how it evolved.
There’s a character in Ivul called Lek who’s quite mysterious, quite enigmatic and he’s the same actor and the same character I was working with in This Filthy Earth so I’d love to work with him again and design the third part, the subterranean part, around his character. Perversely he’s a French character who’s classically trained and is used to working with a lot of dialogue and yet in both This Filthy Earth and Ivul I deprived him of language. The idea of the third part of the trilogy would be to construct a monologue around his experiences of having been in the two films, not literally, but as the character, and what he’s seen as he enters the underworld, [in] a Cocteau-esque vein. I’d like to give him the ability to reflect, I guess in a metaphysical way, on the earth and landscape in general.
And you made the film in France...
Yeah, it’s a French Swiss production. Initially it was going to be a UK-French production but we could never really get the funds together here. I had a bit of a fan base in France and also in Switzerland. The people that run Box Productions, a Swiss production company, had programmed my work and were very familiar with it from way back when I just started out and I had a couple of short film retrospectives in Lausanne. There was a connection there and eventually we got the script to the actor Jean-Luc Bideau, who they felt would make a really good Andrei Ivul. He carries a lot of clout and I think as soon as he fell in love with the project the Swiss money was very easy to acquire.
Many directors have expressed frustrations at working within the British film industry, in particular in securing funding. Did you find that it was easier working abroad?
It would be nice to say yes but I’ve always been outside of the industry. I’ve been very lucky in the sense that I made Gallivant (1997) which was a feature-length project with the BFI, sadly the production ring of the British Film Institute closed but then I was lucky to have got This Filthy Earth off the ground through the Film 4 lab. Most of my work is outside of the industry, I’ve always looked at it as some kind of weird gulag and I’ve always been beyond the perimeter fence. Most of the work I’ve made in the last twenty-five years has been as much geared towards a gallery, installation, performance and occasionally I get to make a feature-length project. I’ve never really been that frustrated.
Working both in France and the UK do you notice different approaches towards the arts between the countries?
They have a far healthier funding community, they’re always putting money into festivals and short films, you get development money and so on and with that comes a sort of rigour and professionalism that can be quite intimidating. As a result, sadly, I’ve sat on juries in France and the work that seems to come out is of a particular style that is far less experimental. My background is in performance, structuralist filmmakers and materialist filmmakers and I feel that what happens here in the UK is infinitely more interesting. The work over there seems to be narrative driven and there seems to be very little experimentation or hybrid visionary voices. Whereas over here we do have a plethora of people who have moved on either to feature films or have been happy to work within alternative spaces, like Matt Hulse and Ben Rivers and even Clio Barnard who’s about to have her first feature released which is called The Arbor. I feel that the work over here is harder to get funding for but it’s a lot more interesting.
Your work has been known to explore this notion of Britishness – do you see this theme present in Ivul even though it was shot abroad?
That’s a hard one. The story originally was to be shot on the Island of Jura in the Hebrides and I think if this story had been told up there it would have come across as being something quite British and eccentric and odd and the French and the Swiss would think ‘that’s a very quirky story’. As soon as the story was transposed to the French Pyrenees it gives it a very different feeling. There’s always a sense of people getting very frustrated by the work because they want to know where it is whereas I’m very careful to make sure the realities I’m creating are poetic realities. It’s very hard to think, where is this manor house? Where is this forest? Where’s the story unfolding? I think it’s outside any British or Englishness, it’s just a world that I try to create. Maybe it’s quite dark, there’s something very absurdist about the work and that comes from a sense of Britishness, you know there’s a smidgen of The Goons and Monty Python and certainly Vic and Bob in there. There’s always something dark and menacing and foreboding and yet funny.
Another idea explored in the film is the relationship between the father and son – do you see this as a key theme?
I think it’s there as a theme but I think the vital theme, the catalyst, is the sister being in love with the idea that the brother is in love with her. For me the father figure is based on the father figure I wish I’d had. I loved the idea of having a father that was wantonly eccentric and ‘other’. His back story is always enigmatic and unclear but he’s from Russia he’s an emigree who’s arrived in this part of the world. I was very interested in that. Yet to a certain extent there was also elements of King Lear. He’s obviously madly in love with his daughter and son and what happens through this cocooning, this hermetically sealed world [is that] this tragedy unfolds. Without the sense of closeness and bonding with the family the tragedy wouldn’t resonate as much. Albeit that the story’s very simple I’d like to think there’s other meta-stories at work around the disintegration of the family.
Gareth Evans has said your “features to date stand in significant opposition to almost all contemporary British production”. Has this been a conscious desire on your part? And where do you see your work sitting in the bigger picture of artists’ film?
It’s very hard to locate, it certainly sits outside the industry. Shane Meadows arrived with a mini feature up in Edinburgh when I arrived with a short. He was feted in the same way that I was feted. I was never that interested in the conventions of narrative storytelling and all my earlier work and even the work I do now is as informed by non-narrative pieces, what I call implied narrative, so there’s always more than one narrative at work. When you’re editing you’re putting bits together and that takes you on a very different journey in terms of the making of it. It can be very potent, it can also be very infuriating I think because most people that go to the cinema sit down and they want to be taken from A to B to C, they want there to be drama. I’m not doing it by design but I don’t feel that I’m interested in trying to make that kind of work. I guess the work has always sat outside of that arena, certainly in terms of work that’s being funded in the UK.
At the same time sometimes it’s difficult for gallerists or curators, they also find the work maybe too narrative, too linear, there is too much going on which is driven by the experience of single screen to really appreciate or support the idea of it being deconstructed and represented in a gallery space. All the work I’ve been making works both as single screen and there are versions which start working in a gallery. It’s what I call a deconstruction of the story [with] notions of expanded cinematic language. It’s something that belongs to the cinema yet it’s not, it’s as important to wander into this space and out of this space without feeling you have to sit down and have the front credits and the end credits.
You also did a project called mapping perception which worked across media and had an online/digital element. Do you feel excited by the opportunities that the digital medium can offer?
Very much so - with technology now you can digitally run videos on loops, things can be interactive, there can be sensors which trigger images or sounds within the space and all this is what I was experimenting with with mapping perception. It’s something I’ve continued to explore with other works since then, especially a bigger project called In the Wake of a Dead Dad which is very sculptural, it’s wantonly Dada, a kind of travelogue closer to Gallivant (1997).
And a new project I’ve been working on which straddles the gallery space and the cinematic space too, is called Swan Down. It’s something I’ve been working towards for 2 or 3 years now, it’s a project whereby I’m proposing to pedal a giant swan-shaped pedalo from Hastings to Hackney. It’s a waterbound journey in a very Herzogian Fitzcarraldo sort of way. It’s a performance, a happening which will be documented and presented on the website and I hope there’s a feature length project there too.
Ivul is on selected release in cinemas from 23 July 2010.
You can find out more about Andrew Kötting at Lux Online and his Swan Down project at www.swandown.info
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