Animated abstracted synthetic sound-to-image/image-to-sound digital materialist parsing experiments collide with trad pagan Beltane folk dance remixed Seven Step Polka in fragmentary, fractured and fast digital scratch mix. A hybrid of materialist and spatial exploration.
The video begins with very short snatches from a combination
of colourful abstracted sequences and a grainy low light night
time shot through a distant window, with a television flickering
behind translucent curtains. The sound is glitchy and fragmented.
These sequences gradually become longer until images of traditional
English dancers appear set to sampled traditional music. Gradually
these dancing shots come to dominate flickering alternating
single frame cutting with the previous images. The piece winds
down as the short abstracted sections again become shorter and
fragmented, echoing the beginning of the piece.
screenings:
• FACT Liverpool, UK, May 2006
• S1 Salon S1 Artspace, Sheffield, UK, February 2005
• 25hrs, Barcelona, Spain, May 2003
• UK-Canada Video Exchange, South London Gallery, London, UK, April 2003
• 3e Festival des Cinémas Différants, Paris, France, December 2001
• Cinema Auricular, Elektronic, Barbican Centre, London, U.K, October 2001
• Waste, Experimenta Media Arts, Nova Cinema, Melbourne, Australia, October 2001
Local Authority 8:00, 2001
remixed as ex Local Authority 7:00, 2005
The fidgety movement of objects in the view from the window, which belies the uneasy stillness of the scene, is the scrubbing of the video track improvising a soundtrack of scratch manipulation of midi audio. Local Authority is punctuated by a montage of snatched read selections from London County Council's 1950s publication Tenants' Handbook provides a shifting refrain in this song portrait of a 1920s housing estate.
Beamerlooper, a version of Beamer reworked as a 2 minute loop, is included on the looppoolDVD published by Raum für Projektion, commissioned by the 2005 Oberhausen Short Film Festival. Read more at Spherical Objective
Looppool:
• Club Transmediale, Berlin, 6th February 2006 • Raum fuer projektion & Deutz Air, Cologne, January 2006
• International Film Festival Rotterdam, January - February 2006 • Blindemuur, Chaseé Theater Breda, January 2006 • Kunstverein Wolfsburg, November 2005
• Lounge der Internationalen Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, with Adam Butler (live), May 2005
Phase
Space Pacer 2:30,
2002
Multitrack black and white rotating microdots, plus layered
time shifted granulated electro fuzz music, equals temporal
spatial phasing, in an intense stroboscopic digital abstraction.
screenings:
• Impakt, Utrecht, The Netherlands, June 2003
• Tagawa International Short Film Festival, Japan, June 2002
Metalogue 26:37, 2003
Passing through tunnels and foyers; on trains, buses and ferries; in elevators, airports and city streets - transitory environments. Metalogue is a travelogue that uses formal techniques to explore spatio-temporal resonance and phenomena. Interspersed with interludes that combine digital excess, abstracted text and voice reciting information relating to the digital video material, and collages of public announcements. Pursuing the notion that the normally backgrounded or hidden information, instructional, metadata and other quotidian media, rising through the digital database editing logic, becomes part of the poetical structure and language in an intermediate realm between description and material.
screenings:
• Index Generator 2, ReverberAções São Paulo, Brazil, November 2006
• Directors Lounge, Berlin, 11th February, 2006
• exposure, Lux, Candid Arts Trust, Islington, London
September 2004
• VIPER, Basel, Switzerland, 21 to 25 November, 2003
(...(a) video poem pervaded by the smell and taste of metal. - VIPER catalogue)
The Defenestrascope throws the view through windows from monumental towers, in contemporary and medieval European city and town. This eccentric exploration of urbanised space revolves around a sample ensemble setting of the traditional 16th century Norfolk song ‘Go from the Window’, framed by a fragmented clapping rhyme. A neo-rococo vaudevillian romp dedicated to Alan Lomax and Gus Elen.
go from the window, throw from the window
downsteps upstairs, upsteps downstairs
down in the street, out in the street
the wind is in the west, the cuckoo's in the nest
along the canal, down from the torre
bicycle piazza, amphitheatre
through the agora, crossing the ringroad
a ladder and some glasses, a rope and a pulley
crossing the platz, along the strasse
out of the window, down from the window
The Defenestrascope is included on the PureScreen DVD *01 produced by Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, UK. The DVD has screened at the following:
• Radiator Festival, Nottingham, 4 December 2005
• Residence Gallery, London, 18 November 2005
• Side Cinema, Newcastle, 18 October 2005
• Antimatter Film Festival, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, September 2005
• Itau Culture, Brazil, 17 August, Belo Horizonte and 24th August 2005, Porto Alegre • Catalyst Arts Video, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 28 July 2005
• Slack Video, Hull, 13 June 2005
The Defenestrascope is also distributed by Lux in London.
The War on Television durations vary, 2004 Breaking news
The War on Television is made almost entirely from images derived from interference fractured digital television broadcasts. These are randomly processed and manipulated through layers of scratch techniques exaggerating the stuttering fragmentation.
The pristine digital veneer, the authority and reliability of the always-on 24 hour news channel fucked-up, becoming abstracted into a flow of jarring noise and stammering incoherence. A celebration of digital anti-aesthetics, excess and entropic fallibility.
performances:
• The Wormhole Saloon, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK, Friday 11 November, 2005: The War on Television (improv Freeview remix) performed by Steven Ball (video) and Tom Wallace (sound).
Eutopia video
performance collaboration with Martin
Blazicek (Czech Republic),
17th November 2006
Live
streaming video performance, with Martin
Blazicek at KP Skolská 28 in Prague and Steven
Ball at Central St Martins College of Art and Design in London,
using KeyWorx
software to manipulate the video in each city, projecting
simultaneously in both. Live
recording of the performance on Google Video
No-Way
Street
1:00 (sound)/7:00 (silent for installation), 2007
Cordoned areas and blocked streets have become an increasingly common occurrence in urban centres. The strategy of producing public spaces of exception disrupts the pedestrian's everyday practice of writing the city. As regular pathways are rerouted along side streets and down unfamiliar alleys, the city starts to become a strange place, a more abstracted experience. No-way
Street enacts the discombobulating effect of such orientation
realignment through a series of multiple short video and audio
loop sequences of blocked streets, diverted pedestrians and
police cordons, constructed as a spatial and temporal matrix.
This video reworks photographs, super 8 film, sound and anecdotal text from a series of bush and outback locations across Australia during the 1990s. It takes the form of extracts from an imagined first person journal, layered over extruded experiments with composition and movement constructing a synthetic shifting landscape. Moving through discrete but related sections, the abstracted view shifts vertically through 90 degrees between the closeness of the local, the ground, and the claustrophobia of the distant colonizing horizon. As it travels east from the South Australian desert, through bush, tablelands and rocky range, the video becomes a subjective essayistic meditation, in absentia, on being in the landscape, the problem of attempting to reproduce these landscapes and the uncertainty of their representation. At its inconclusion we arrive on K'gari (Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland) where we reach the edge of the known world, a space being made in an open future.
Over Magnetic Island 2:39, 2009 Over the Borough Island 1:52, 2009
These two videos were made for the third volume of the One Minute series curated by Kerry Baldry. Both videos layer sequences shot in a specific single location, each using a different formal technique, as a way of experimenting with representing spatial qualities of a landscape and the specificities of the place. The places could hardly be more different and distant from each other. Over Magnetic Island was shot on the island off the coast of Queensland, Australia and consist of superimposed pans of a view from an abandoned fort on the island, built during the second world war to guard Australia against a feared Japanese invasion. The soundtrack was also recorded on the island, on the walk to the fort. Over the Borough Island takes a similar approach but uses digital mattes from a static shot south along Borough High Street from a traffic island. The soundtrack consists of redacted directions home.
One Minute Volume 3 screenings
• Foyer Gallery Space, Hull School of Art and Design, October - November 2009.
• All BBC Big Screens, July- August, 2009
• Project Gallery, Marseille, France, September 2009
• Directors Lounge, Contemporary Art, Ruhr, Essen, Germany, June 2009
• The Big Screen, Hull, June - July 2009
• Live at the Apollo, Herne Hill, London, June 2009
