Nicaragua/Alaska

Student Nick Cahill has shot and edited a couple travel videos worth sharing. Together, they make for a nice contrast in climates – the top video was shot in Nicaragua, the bottom in Alaska.



Nick has a video production company with fellow SNC student Trevor Jackson – MHMM Productions. Click the link to see more of their work.

The Green Man

Danny Kern directed a video that won honorable mention in Herman Miller's 2012 student video contest. The theme for the contest was "What Makes Your Campus Green?" Below, the green man will let you know:

In the Flow

Since leaving SNC, student Drew Satin has gone on to be the Global Video Manager at Flow Snowboarding.

He shot, produced and edited the new snowboarding flick "Was Here" -- and here's the trailer:

Don't want to be an ugly dead body

I'll have a write up on Nick Geankoplis' BFA show, but in the meantime, here's a video he prepared as a sort of BFA defense:

Semiotics from Nick Geankoplis on Vimeo.

Starland, Bambi and the rest

Via the Burning Man Class blog, here's a video tour of the class encampment, created by Logan Lape and Tom Grana in the Video Practices class.

NWGN 430 Starland from Tom Grana on Vimeo.

More Burning Man documentation to come -- three students who went to Black Rock are in my Documentary class, and are polishing up some mini-docs about the experience.

Shooting & Asking

The first show up in the Tahoe Gallery this semester, "Shoot First and Ask Questions Later," featured the video work of Julie Perini. She gave a fun, engaging talk, tracing her development as an artist, coming up through the DIY ethics of college radio and zine culture and later mapping that desire for immediacy and authenticity to the tactics of conceptual artists like Adrian Piper, when she was exposed to their work in graduate school. At one point she re-enacted Piper's Catalysis IV, in which Piper stuffed a towel in her mouth and rode on public transportation, injecting an odd and alienating behavior into the stream of the everyday (Perini, who claims to be somewhat introverted in public, said she found the experience far more difficult than anticipated).




The dominant piece in the gallery was "They've Got a Name for Girls Like Me," projected on the largest open wall. Regardless of its status in her oeuvre, it positions itself very literally as a "signature piece," consisting of snippets from dozens of films that feature a character named "Julie." Perini has edited together all the instances in which someone calls out "Julie" (and also, drolly, some instances where we see the name written down on some important plot-nudging note). All the emotional modulations of the name (breathy, commanding, romantic, remonstrative) become a one-word arpeggio. The effect is humorous and a bit diabolical -- once you've seen the piece, you're guaranteed never to forget the artist's name (or at least her first name). It brings to mind pop songs that chant a name as the chorus, in catchy OCD delirium, like "Barbara Ann" or "Jolene." It also speaks to the way we personalize mass movie experiences (if your name is "Julie," you'll see movies that have characters named Julie in a different light, hearing -- at least on a subconscious level -- all the exhortations to Julie as a sort of intimate address. But that's just an overt example of the externalized narcissism that is a fundamental part of movie-watching.)



To segue on a note of catchy pop music, "Johnny, Are You Queer?" records Perini trying to memorize the lyrics of the Josie Cotton song of the same name (in her talk, she mentioned it was filmed as a sort of act of procrastination for going to the gym). The camera is trained on Perini's face as she mouths the lyrics and replays the song, trying to set the words in her mind. It gives an anthropological distancing to a private undertaking, the kind of thing one would do in your bedroom as a teenager, acquiring a piece of pop culture like an article of clothing, adjusting the trim so you can wear it naturally.



"Watch Me Break it Down" stars Perini's feet, dancing in a variety of public spaces in and around Buffalo, NY (a library, a street corner, a skating rink, etc). Perini set up a camera at foot level and broke into a dance (most of the people in the background either fail to notice, or feign not noticing -- in her talk, she said she was originally unhappy with the piece, because she ended up using the other people as mere props -- but she's made her peace with it). And "Guy at a Coffee Shop" is a perfect example of using video as a sort of sketchpad -- not gathering staged material to a pre-planned end, but capturing a moment that seems fleeting, genuine. While sitting in a coffee shop, Perini noticed a young man who appeared to be sketching her. She had her video camera, and surreptitiously filmed him in the act. His eyes keep flicking up from the drawing pad (hidden from view), in a compulsive tic that's somehow reminiscent of a fish gulping for air. Rather than a mouth grasping bits of air, his wide-flung eyes grasp bits of sight. Subtitles appear over the footage, clarifying the audio when Perini or the guy speaks, and reconstructing Perini's thought process while observing. Drawing and filming are given an equivalency. At one point, the guy, realizing he's being filmed, assents that, drawing or videos, it's all basically the same thing. He gives her a thumbs up, and a second later a subtitle flashes on the screen: "Why did he do that?"




Lastly, her piece "Suffragette Slasher" is a reconstruction of an act of artistic and political vandalism by the suffragette Mary Richardson. In 1914, Richardson slashed Velasquez's painting "The Rokeby Venus" (hanging in the National Gallery of London) to protest the imprisonment of Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the Women's Social and Political Union. Richardson released a statement after the fact:

"I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas. Mrs Pankhurst seeks to procure justice for womanhood, and for this she is being slowly murdered by a Government of Iscariot politicians. If there is an outcry against my deed, let every one remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs Pankhurst and other beautiful living women, and that until the public cease to countenance human destruction the stones cast against me for the destruction of this picture are each an evidence against them of artistic as well as moral and political humbug and hypocrisy."

In her video, Perini plays Richardson, getting dressed in preparation for the assault, and carrying it out. A news item quoted at the above Mary Richardson link has the terrific sentence "The woman, producing a meat chopper from her muff or cloak, smashed the glass of the picture, and rained blows upon the back of the Venus." That sentence, despite the reserved diction, evokes the sensationalistic sex-and-violence combo that drives the disrobe-and-hack dialectic of slasher films. Perini intercuts the preparation and attack in a stroboscopic flurry of edits, paced like a climactic horror-movie sequence. Here, when the cleaver hacks into the naked female form, it's wielded by a suffragette rather than a masked bogeyman; the sequence itself appears to chop itself up like a whirring cuisinart of emancipation and attack.

The staged and scripted qualities of "Sufragette Slasher" would seem to set it apart from the other work, but Mary Richardson is an apt surrogate. The woman, unnoticed at the margins of culture, hanging like an asterisk at the edge of a great painting, suddenly does the unexpected and occupies center stage. It may be other people's music, other people's paintings, other people's movies, other people's spaces, but Julie still gets to be the star of the show.

GoPro or Go Home!

I have been searching around for an all purpose video camera that will get the job done! I was looking for a camera that I could use for a variety of things; including ski filming, video projects for school, animation projects, and obviously recording random life occurrences that will pile up on youtube and never be watched. After a bit of research, I was stoked to come across this mini treasure loaded with perks.

The camera itself is called the HD Hero which is made by the company GoPro. Its a super compact, high definition, (1080p) SDCH flash memory, video camera. The camera itself is tiny considering it has a battery, memory card slot, LCD screen, and 170 degree wide angle lens all in one small unit. The fully waterproof housing for the camera allows you to mount it in a ton of different places. This video camera also doubles as a 5 MP still shot camera. One of the modes lets you shoot in timed intervals, making time-lapses too easy.

There are a couple of quick edits that my friends and I put together with my GoPro along with the link to the web-site for more info and sample videos. This guy is awesome!

GOPRO WEB-SIGHT CLICK HERE!

Sharing Powder with Friends from Tom Grana on Vimeo.

bringin in the new year from Tom Grana on Vimeo.

Back Country launch to fall from Tom Grana on Vimeo.

VIDEO DADA & YouTube as "Gallery"

This coming week is the last week to catch a show at UC Irvine that's featuring one of my pieces -- something I did for the YouTube Commentary Project. I very much wish I could make it down to see the show -- it sounds both fascinating and overwhelming.


Here's the press release on it:

UC Irvine, University Art Gallery / Room Gallery Presents:

VIDEO DADA
An exhibition and project by Martha Gever

Opening Reception Thursday, January 7, 6-9 pm | UAG
January 7- February 6, 2010

VIDEO DADA: No repeat of history, not neo-Dada, but still wreaking havoc with conventional parameters of art. Nowadays inventive, intelligent, and aesthetically sophisticated videos can be seen far afield, outside traditional art venues like museums and galleries. And artists circulate their videos on a much wider scale than that achieved by any television network. VIDEO DADA asks how these changes complicate the conceptual and aesthetic contours of art. The exhibition features 300 plus videos — playing on eight screens — by individual artists and art collectives that circulate in the hurly-burly multiverse of the internet. Some serious, some humorous, and some both at once, these works exercise manifold strategies: absurd drama, wry animation, politically astute collage, wild performance, and uncategorizable others. Some play with music; some incorporate extraordinary written or spoken texts; some prefer silence and all the noise that offers. In sum, VIDEO DADA surveys the internet’s amalgamation of popular culture and art, calling into question the difference between the two.

And, yes, there may be echoes of Dada: “Dadaism was no ideological movement but an organic product that came into existence as a reaction against the cloud- cuckoo -land tendencies of so-called sacred art.... while military leaders painted in blood.” — George Grosz, 1924 .

Gever has written a thought-provoking essay for the exhibition, examining the qualities of YouTube as a sort of art-delivery mechanism (unfortunately, the essay isn't online). She has a clear eye for some of the cultural repercussions of YouTube, ranging from copyright struggles to contested notions of democratization to the elevation of amateurism beyond aesthetics into a kind of basic phenomenological fact. The essay is admirably free of the kind of blinkered utopianism that usually comes with technological appraisals -- without being closed off to some of the exciting possibilities bubbling up through the chaos of the new. I can't reduce the essay to a pithy one-liner, but she does have a good summing up of the biases of YouTube as a venue: "The non-hierarchical, uncurated organization of YouTube provides a fitting venue for videos that are fleeting, provisional, rowdy, rude, epigrammatic, overtly political, or otherwise unruly in the terms that govern more disciplined precints of art."

The show got a positive review in the OC Weekly -- here's a quote:

...The show is as stylistically and thematically diverse as it is sprawling, exploring such varied topics as sexuality, politics, drama, feminism, pop culture, animation, multiculturalism and comic relief—the sheer size of the exhibition speaks to the diversity of the medium.

Read the full review here.

Living Photograph (Chris With Teacup)

Living Photographs! Photography vs. video, which is better? You decide!
Hope everyone had a good turkey filled break, this will probably get you pumped for finals!

Everything is Terrible is Terrible

The singing babies have been shuffled around...

SINGING BABIES! from Everything Is Terrible on Vimeo.

After taking a bit of a break from blogging over the summer, I thought I'd try to pick up the thread by starting with a summer disappointment. It came as a minor bummer that, early this August, Everything Is Terrible had their youtube channel shut down. The bummer is a minor one because, this being the internet, many of the banned videos are already available elsewhere -- but it still qualifies as a bummer because it's indicative of the anti-"fair use" climate that has grown at youtube since their purchase by Google.

Everything is Terrible (or EIT from here out) hosted videos that had been spliced together from the detritus of "ephemeral video" that still circulates in thrift stores and videostore cast-off bins -- exercise videos, children's programming, instructional videos, inept PSAs, crackpot religious propaganda, D-List science fiction and action movies, and so on. Sometimes the footage is remixed and distorted, sometimes it's simply whittled down to its absurd essence -- a "Body Flex" video, for instance, reduced to a series of convulsive breathing exercises and facial grimaces, turning the quest for aerobic beauty into a wheezy exorcism ritual. The "Singing Babies" video posted above layers some video effects on top of the original footage towards the end, but it's really impossible to top the horrific atmosphere of the untouched video itself. It seems to have been conceived as a scientific demonstration that the Clutch Cargo Effect is even worse when applied to living human beings. Cute always has a touch of the demonic, but yeesh.

The EIT channel reminded me of screenings at The Primal Plunge, a great bookstore and comic shop I frequented when I lived near Boston; occasionally, they'd set up a projector in the hallway just outside their door, and a film collector would screen old hygiene and driver's ed films, to the combined delight & horror of the audience, suddenly awash in the comically alien values of a bygone era. That sort of ephemera is always good for a swift kick of camp, but beyond that, I savored the slightly vertiginous undertow of cultural attrition, and the modest tragedy of misplaced earnestness.

In San Francisco, both Oddball Film + Video and the Prelinger Library are terrific archives of ephemeral films (Oddball sometimes has screenings from its collection, and the Prelinger hosts several of its films online, as well as providing a portal for "mashups" made from the hosted films).

EIT certainly weren't the first to start digging into the trash as connoisseurs of awful, stalking the VHS phantom zone rather than spools of celluloid, but they distinguish themselves with their excellent bad taste. I personally think most, and perhaps even all, of what they produce should be protected under "fair use" -- especially taken collectively, their videos amount to punchy and impolite cultural critique. That doesn't mean there's no legal risk involved, and they're certainly aware that their appropriation exists in a grey area. A compilation DVD they've made is for sale for a 1 cent donation (plus about 20 bucks for shipping) -- a pricing structure that seems to be arranged to ward off allegations of profiting from piracy. Some of the artists who contribute to EIT have given a few interviews, but they use fake names (noms de plume? noms de keyboard?) like Ghoul Skool and Future Shlock, giving themselves the same cloak of anonymity that vidders use.

The thing that, apparently, brought the EIT channel down was a video they titled "Hippie Weirdo Yoga Farmers," which featured clips from a children's yoga exercise tape, hosted by "Yogi Okey-Dokey" (and his pal, "Rasta Rooster"). The EIT edit of the tape came to the attention of the makers of "Yogi Okey Dokey," who requested to youtube that the video be removed, as they owned the rights the footage. Youtube, rather than pulling the single video, closed out the entire EIT channel. Fans of EIT began insulting the "Yogi Okey-Dokey" folks online, and then EIT tried to pour water on the flames with a conciliatory blog post. Clearly, they'd rather duck and weave than take their project to the "faire use" mat.

Here are a couple of my favorite examples of EIT videos (now hosted on Vimeo rather than youtube):

"Vitamix -- Catch the Vision" -- in which the mantralike repetition of the phrase "dust mite feces" helps induce us into a state where the Art of the Hustle crashes against the reefs of the cuecard slip and the the involuntary facial expression:

Vitamix - Catch the vision! from Everything Is Terrible on Vimeo.

"Two-minute Scanner Cop II" -- an exercise in "subtractive editing," which can probably be traced back to Joseph Cornell's "Rose Hobart," where Cornell excavated a mysterious and strange poem-film from the B-List action movie "East of Borneo." Here, they cut everything out of "Scanner Cop II" except the scanner cop "scanning" (which is to say, vibrating and willing his forehead veins into glistening prominence). EIT isn't chasing poetry here, but beyond the laughs that prolonged vibration is apt to provoke, actor Daniel Quinn's intense commitment leaves me both abashed and abject.

2-Minute Scanner Cop II from Everything Is Terrible on Vimeo.

Unfortunately, a video called "Worst Prop Comedian Ever," which might've been my favorite, seems to have disappeared down the "terms of use violation" sinkhole. Featuring a man with a bag over his head and two white paper hands affixed to his lapels, he attempts to guide his audience past their fear of public speaking through a "comedy" routine, but instead crosses the line where "motivational speaker" produces only the motivation to stick one's head in an oven. I have rarely had the urge to laugh uproariously and to die of depression in such quick, alternating succession.

The Onion AV Club, in their review of the EIT DVD (and the appropriation documentary "Rip!") said:

...both Everything Is Terrible! and Rip! have a lot to say in their separate ways about what kind of collage-art gets singled out and sued, and what kind doesn’t. Artists who use something popular, owned by a company with deep pockets, are likely to get in trouble, especially if the new work contains an element of sarcasm or critique. But if they stick with artifacts nobody cares about, like old “edutainment” programs, then they can fiddle away, largely undisturbed. Either way, the best way to avoid getting picked on is to keep a low profile.

EIT would like to dwell in the same dustbin of history (or maybe "dustbin of marginalia" -- where they reign as emperors of toenail clippings) that contains the off-the-radar junk they cannibalize. It remains to be seen if "off the radar" is really a place that can be found on the web. Or if the web is, in effect, all radar.

Rehearsals for Mirrors

Monday, I'm leaving for Puebla, Mexico, to participate in the PERFORMÁTICA festival. Kristin and I are staging a dance/multimedia piece called "The Mirror Has Six Billion Faces," which will be danced by Cari Cunningham and Rick Southerland. There's a brief article about the piece in the UNR Nevada News.


The piece was inspired by an article in the New York Review of Books, which discusses, among other things, the recent discovery of "mirror neurons":

The importance of body image and motor activity for perception, physical movement, and thought is suggested by the recent discovery of "mirror neurons" by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues. They observed that the neurons that fired when a monkey grasped an object also fired when the monkey watched a scientist grasp the same object. The monkey apparently understood the action of the experimenter because the activity within its brain was similar when the monkey was observing the experimenter and when the monkey was grasping the object. What was surprising was that the same neurons that produced "motor actions," i.e., actions involving muscular movement, were active when the monkey was perceiving those actions performed by others.

The "rigid divide," Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia write in their new book, Mirrors in the Brain,

between perceptive, motor, and cognitive processes is to a great extent artificial; not only does perception appear to be embedded in the dynamics of action, becoming much more composite than used to be thought in the past, but the acting brain is also and above all a brain that understands.

We can recognize and understand the actions of others because of the mirror neurons; as Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia write, this understanding "depends first of all on our motor neurons."[5] Our abilities to understand and react to the emotions of others may depend on the brain's ability to imitate the neuronal activity of the individual being observed.

These are some photos from an early rehearsal. Some of the work was developed through exercises where the dancers mirrored each others' movements. It was a strangely intense experience for them. Particularly in the beginning, they were sensitive to moments where one person seemed to be "leading" the mirroring activity, and their subjectivity seemed to be spilling over the mirror line. Hopefully some of those destabilizing qualities will be activated by the finished piece.




The rehearsals, at UNR, took place in an appropriately mirrored studio. Three walls (and even the plate for the light switch) are mirrored, providing melting glimpses of infinitude.

birds on wires

powerlinerflyers from wes johnson on Vimeo.

This is worth clicking thru for the HD version.

Mirror Scrap

It was interesting to see Mickey's disturbingly symmetrical portraits in the Junior Art Portfolio (see some of the pics in the blog post below) -- I've been playing around with some symmetrical concepts for a multimedia/dance performance piece I'll be staging in Puebla, Mexico in about a week, with Kristin as artistic collaborator and Cari Cunningham and Rick Southerland as the dancers. Above is a 5-sec clip of me playing with some live feed interlacing of video; the performance will include both live and pre-recorded clips that will fracture and combine the dancers' bodies.

A camera on a sushi conveyor

Hypnotic piece of video of a camera set on a sushi conveyor. I got a link to this from a friend, Trane DeVore, who wrote:

This is one of the most beautiful bits of video I've seen for some time. Spontaneous documentary with camera motion directed by machine. Watch the whole thing. It kind of reminds me of Sokurov's Russian Ark.

It reminded me of Standish Lawder's experimental short "Necrology" (the longest clip I could find of that is set to music by Radiohead)

It's amazing how much the whole thing seems choreographed.



More on "Necrology" here. Not to make too much of it, but it's funny how "Necrology" is vertical and didactic, whereas this sushi conveyor clip is horizontal and adventurous.

What I did on summer vacation

"My family lived in Frankfurt while it was being bombed..."



"He didn't want us to learn German."



"Back in Nagasaki where the fellas chew tobaccy."



The above are pictures and phrases that came out of a performance I was involved in, called "The Mapping Project," which had its premiere in June at the San Francisco International Arts Festival. The performance was a collaboration between Navarrete x Kajiyama Dance Theater, Element Dance Theater, the musicians Theresa Wong and Ayako Kataoka, visual artist Ilya Noe, and myself (working conceptually, and with animation, visual installation and video projection). With so many people involved, it could have easily been a disaster, but everyone got along, and peoples' roles were pleasantly fluid. Ayako was running sound, and she also danced; Theresa played live cello on stage; ideas for projected images evolved out of physical work that emerged from rehearsals; text and choreography was created by the dancers -- we even had a portion of the audience set up in chairs on stage, right in the middle of things.

The piece itself involved the crossing of borders, and memories of travel. Navarrete x Kajiyama developed work around the crossing of the US/Mexico border, and Element Dance Theater developed work about the dancers' histories, going back two generations, to the displacements of the Second World War. Segments overlapped and spilled into each other, the historical stories sometimes interrupted by the silent, urgent activities of dancers slipping in and out of the shadows, trying to evade apprehension, or frantically cleaning, mopping up other peoples' dirt. The two strains of displacement bounced off each other in interesting, suggestive ways. We had a piece of stage setting created by Ilya Noe, the bare frame of a house that was assembled, shuttled around, and finally disassembled over the course of the evening -- its malleability and transparency underlining how provisional the concept of "home" can be.

I set up a blog for the project, that has many more images, including images of several digital prints that were hung as part of the performance, paired with some of the dancers' family stories (they came from very different coordinates -- one had a grandfather who was in the Nazi army, one had grandparents sent to a Japanese Internment Camp in Arkansas, and so on).

A short review of the piece was posted on critical dance, as well.

Hopefully in the near future I'll have time to post a few video clips...