September 2009 Archives

Flyp "is a proof-of-concept experiment in digital storytelling," says Jim Gaines, editor-in-chief of the Web-based publication that is trying to reinvent journalism online. "What we're trying to do is show how all the media that the Web can accommodate can be used at the same time in the service of one story," he continues. "It's about using video, audio and information graphics and Flash animation in service to a storytelling experience that's much like a magazine storytelling experience but uses more than paper, ink and still photographer." The wonderful new project resembles a magazine in gathering timely information and offering it in multiple formats, with short- and long-form reporting. However, the publication is rich with media, incorporating photography, video, sound, graphics and music in a compelling design very attentive to what works - and what doesn't - in an online forum. Thanks to its focus on an emerging form of journalism, Flyp will join nine other projects (including KCET's own Web Stories) this Friday, October 2, 2009, as part of the National Arts Journalism Summit, dedicated to interrogating the future of arts writing. I'll be presenting a new software application called Sophie, and my colleagues Ana Shepherd and Gabe Peters-Lazaro created the 10 videos that will showcase each entry. The event will take place at the Annenberg School at USC, and will stream live starting at 9:00 a.m. Please join us to see the future of journalism!

An algorithm is "a machine for the motion of parts," says Alexander Galloway very elegantly in his book Gaming: On Algorithmic Culture. He writes extensively about video games, arguing that they offer us insight into the structures of today's information culture. I wonder, though, if the rise in video projects that call attention to their structure isn't also a reflection of that information culture... Why? Because these projects overtly invite us to think about how information is organized...

Anyway, these thoughts are sparked by the upcoming screening of LA-based artist Cindy Bernard's film Year Long Loop, which screens at USC Thursday night (September 17, 2009). The film compiles a series of video recordings collected by Bernard, whose work includes photographs and projections that explore the relationship among cinema, memory and landscape. Captured between October 2004 and September 2005 from a ridge in Mt. Washington, the video in its full length version is made up of 12 two-hour segments in a continuous 24-hour loop. Each five-minute shot captures a day; you'll be relieved to know that the shorter, two-hour version of the film will screen at USC; in this version, the five-minute shots are reduced to 24 seconds. Find out why Bernard felt compelled to make the video, and why it can be so neatly shortened...

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Ronald McDonald is the gun-toting badass wreaking havoc on a Los Angeles depicted as - and inhabited solely by - logos in H5's ecstatically apocalyptic short animation Logorama. The red-headed clown tyrannizes the city, the Michelin Man tries to counter, but they're well-matched, and soon, it looks like a lot of logos are going to die. The hilarious short by the directing team from France revels less in the wild antics of its characters and the superb 3-D animation spun by its makers than in the dizzying, thrilling effect of insouciant trademark violation. And it doesn't stop - the story unfolds, the city splits into pieces, and still the logos continue, well into deep space. The not-so-subtle commentary deftly punctures consumer culture, managing to dazzle at both the low and the high end; it also marks the Flux Screening Series as, again, the place to find the best in contemporary moving imagery. The next show, coming up Tuesday, September 15, at the Hammer Museum, also features work by Jonathan Glazer, Spike Jonze, Synola and more. Oh, and if you want to read a bit more about Logorama, check out this nice interview with the makers on the Creativity site.

"Beaver! Beaver! Beaver!" shouted a rowdy group of tourists in a Starline doubledecker cruising Santa Monica Boulevard last night. They were cheerfully heckling the crowd gathered outside the Regen Projects II gallery in West Hollywood watching Doug Aitken's dual projection of a 24-minute video titled Migration, which features luscious close-ups of a bevy of wild animals - including a beaver - all of whom are uncomfortably poking around various roadside motel rooms, pawing at the ugly carpets, romping in the scratchy bedding and, in the case of the beaver, enjoying a bath. "Video installation can be this workshop where ideas can collide and combine and be released again," Aitken said to me in an interview a few years ago. "And I think that's what I'm always striving to do - to use these opportunities to engage a series of challenges and questions." But what are those challenges and questions now with this new project?

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Corporate imagery surrounds us, especially in LA, so it's a pleasure to find great big moving pictures made by artists on the walls and screens usually dominated by advertising. Projections on Lake brings artist-made videos outside as projected images on a giant wall on Lake Avenue in Pasadena, and tonight's screening features a live performance by LA artists Anne Bray and Jon 9, who will mix their visuals live through the inspiration of music by Eve Beglarian. Bray is the founder of LA Freewaves, a 20-year-old media arts festival, as well as an artist who often works with video. "The arts are a place to experiment," Bray said two weeks ago at a seminar at USC. She went on to explain that she's interested in the ways in which art can communicate ideas and get people to think; in her own work, she functions primarily through right-brain provocation, using the senses and bringing together personal and political notions in spellbinding performances. Jon 9 also works with video, and describes himself as a multi-screen video designer and technologist. Together, the pair will liven up Pasadena tonight - don't miss it!

Lines of text float against a milky white background, the words hovering just beyond perception and remaining images of text rather than words to be read. The images in turn embody a handful of ideas - about language, metaphor, communication and the ability or inability to see - all of which constitute the 10-minute video by the LA-based video artist Tran T. Kim-Trang called Alexia. The term designates "word blindness," a condition that afflicts stroke victims and prevents them from perceiving individual letters. Rather than explaining the condition, Alexia instead enacts it through its visuals, its sound and its use of text, and the video becomes a means for exploring a nexus of ideas without culminating in a polemic or concise conclusion, and it contributes to Tran's stature as a videomaker who works with care on complex ideas. The video can now finally be found easily - it was just released by Video Data Bank, the great Chicago-based distributor of video art; it's one of the eight videos that constitute Tran's The Blindness Series, which, as a whole, embodies a video genre know as the "essayistic," a term used since the early days of cinema to designate films and videos that follow in the footsteps of the written essay and the work of writers such as Montaigne, who eschewed the careful arrangement of a convincing argument in favor of loosely structured explorations. The cinematic essay boasts a long and venerable history, with some of the most respected filmmakers tackling the genre and crafting extraordinary films. The video essay has enjoyed a shorter lifespan but also claims a significant segment of overall video production and critical attention, especially from 1980 onward with the eruption of autobiographical video pieces offering insight into notions of identity and subjectivity. Tran has played a key role in the evolution of the essayistic, both as a maker who has shown her work extensively at festivals and museums around the world, and as an Associate Professor in the Art Department at Scripps College. The two-DVD boxed set showcases her contributions to the genre, highlighting especially her attention to the role of text-as-image...

Cockroaches, pigeons, dogs, cats, ants, bears, baboons, rats, spiders and trout are just a few of the creatures included in the show Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art, which opens tomorrow at UCR's Sweeney Art Gallery. Co-curated by LA artist Rachel Mayeri and gallery director Tyler Stallings, the show features the work of 20 artists and is a stellar collection of projects, including the fascinating "animal cam" videos made by Sam Easterson, who attaches tiny cameras to the bodies of animals to gather fascinating footage, and Jim Trainor's quirky, sublime animations that unite hand-drawn imagery with unusual, often highly sexual narratives. Beatriz da Costa's work with pigeons is also included; the artist outfits pigeons with sensing devices and enlists their help in tracking local pollution. LA-based artist Sean Dockray is represented in the show with his video portrait of Argentine ants; to make the video, titled Ameising 1, Dockray created a software app that captures the paths of the ants. The resulting video is compelling at once as an unfolding motion drawing and as a scientific study. Hilja Keading will show her video installation The Bonkers Devotional and Mayeri presents Primate Cinema, a video that juxtaposes footage of baboons with that of humans reenacting the animal imagery. Rather than delineating human and animal, culture and nature, the paired videos instead blur the boundaries, pointing to the impossibility of seeing the "natural" without the lens of the cultural. And that notion seems to capture the show as a whole. Can't get to UCR any time soon? Go to the Web site, click on "images," and look for the video excerpts included on many of the artists' pages. While it's not as good as being there, it's still pretty great...