VIDEO VISIONS
Saturday 30 October 2004, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

PRESERVING CULTURAL TRADITIONS IN A PERIOD OF INSTABILITY
fordbrothers, Austria, 2004, video, colour, sound, 3 min
Preserving Cultural Traditions in a Period of Instability is a computer-generated video based on artefacts occurring during compression procedures. A short hypnotic and monotonous sound-loop underlines the structural character of the video footage, whilst a commentary by Stan Brakhage on the rise of digital technologies and new media forms the second sound layer. (Thomas Draschan)

AMONGST THE PERSUADED
Fred Worden, USA, 2004, video, colour, sound, 23 min
The human susceptibility to self-delusion has, at least, this defining characteristic: Easy to spot in others, hard to see in oneself. This film began as an effort to channel the stresses engendered by my daily New York Times fix. The news of the world read as a relentless collective descent into a 21st century Jonestown. More accurately, into a scattered offering of competing Jonestowns, each proffering its own distinctive brand of cool aid. In the free marketplace of mindsets, you’re free to choose your poison. Each of us sees things in our own way. What I was seeing was that the common denominator driver of so many of the man-made disasters charted in each day’s New York Times was the human penchant for delusional thinking. The war on terror, to cite only one simple example, seemed to me essentially reducible to their delusions versus our delusions, with the stakes being who will be the first to have its ass handed to it. My decision to make the mechanics and infrastructure of self-delusion the subject of a film was easy enough once I committed to two operating principles. The first was that the film had to be about my delusions and those of my milieu rather than about their delusions. The second, somewhat contradictory principle is that it really is impossible to see one’s own delusions. The essence of self-delusion as pathology is that it is at all times invisible to its host. For this reason, I could not cast this film with my actual delusions, but rather had to work with analogue surrogates. This suited my purposes just fine as my interest was never with the actual content of delusional thinking, but rather with its forms. How we get there, move in, make ourselves comfortable and then bend our talents to defending the fort. How the most gracious and nimble of mental eruptions can end up tripping down the slippery slope from inspired possibility through true belief to leaden and entrenched delusion. With a cast of available characters acting as themselves. Don’t believe a word. See the iron jaws of the mechanism at work as the filmmaker falls into the biggest and most obvious delusion of all: the belief that he can master his own delusions by making a film about them. (Fred Worden)

ICH BIN TRAURIG (I AM SAD)
Didi Bruckmayr & Michael Strohmann, Austria, 2004, video, colour, sound, 5 min
Ich Bin Traurig (I am sad) is part of a series of works on “digital translations of reality” (Didi Bruckmayr). Fuckhead – one of the band projects of cultural workers Bruckmayr/Strohmann – is one of these translation projects. The masculinity-charged raging of brachial heavy metal music runs – analogue to the technical processes of sound mixing – through the filter of another cultural form of expression: the opera and its melodramatic employment of voices, as well as the distant, cool, electronic creation of sound. The result is a bastard, a science-fiction being whose existence grows increasingly precarious. Fuckhead possibly tells – in image and sound and data – of human sensibilities at the edge, of that which the author J.G. Ballard calls “psychopathologies of the future” (in his epochal novel Crash). The expression quite aptly represents this video. Its “clinical picture” is that of the love sick, intense sorrow at the loss of love: “I am sad, because you do not understand me / melancholy steals my sleep at night.” Siemar Aigner’s pathetic bass drowns out the scratchy surface of electronic accompaniment. The antagonism between the Spartan electronics, which tend to refuse to lead the melody, and the presence of a human voice is mirrored in the visual translation of the number: the image of a human face (created in a computer by means of 3-D software) is horizontally deformed to the rhythm of the verse, disheveled along the lines of the acoustic information from the computer. When the song stops, black takes over the picture and narrows the narrative space down to music. The absence of the human element is heavier (textually, as well as visually) than its presence. (Michael Loebenstein)

ANOXI
Robin Dupuis, Canada, 2003, video, colour, sound, 4 min
The images are generated frame by frame as stills, usually generated from simple shape or forms (square, circle, line etc.), and processed in various commercial software (Photoshop, Vegas, DL Combustion) and/or open source software (Drone, Bidule), before and/or after being edited in sequence. I produce a lot of images and animated sequences to create what I call an image bank, from which I select parts for each project I work on. I do the same for sound. The image and sound in Anoxi is pure synthesis, there is no capture, scan or recording of external material of any sort. (Robin Dupuis)

KILVO
Michaela Grill, Austria, 2004, video, b/w, sound, 6 min
A remote, barren, almost unfriendly landscape: Kilvo in Lapland was the inspiration for Radian’s music, and even the accompanying visuals by Michaela Grill play with the bare countryside’s resistance to its depiction. A fourfold split screen shows views of this place in a kaleidoscope of animated digital postcards. The normal associations – visions of majestic, or at least marketable, beauty, of exotic or untouched wilderness – are consistently undermined in Kilvo. Instead of showing an idyll, the landscape is reduced to the greatest degree possible. Lines and contours are stripped from the background of black, white and grey tones. The viewer cannot be sure what is being shown, or implied. For brief moments fleeting images appear then change or are lost. Faithful reproductions are not the important thing here, but the digital transformation of a real landscape into an abstract pattern, translation into a completely different visual form, which at the same time conforms to this landscape. For all its reduction and structural austerity Kilvo also has a playful aspect. The movement in the screen sections is tied to the articulated rhythm of the music and its modulation. The sounds and images are combined in an entertaining and complex game with structures, and with musical and visual synchronisms. In the end everyone can invent Kilvo for themselves. In their reservation and simultaneous openness, the sounds and images offer a projection screen for the viewers’ mental images, for the search for their own imaginary landscape. (Barbara Pichler)

NUÉE
Myriam Bessette, Canada, 2003, video, colour, sound, 3 min
Though synthetically constructed, the fleeting works of Myriam Bessette bring rare tactile qualities to the digital medium. Her earlier videos Nutation and Azur bestowed an organic delicacy to the pure cathode ray signal. In Nuée, streaks of muted hues merge to form a constantly shifting colour field that is overlaid with abstract verdant flecks. The sensorial experience is heightened by a fizzing electronic soundtrack. (Mark Webber)

SET-4
Jan van Nuenen, Netherlands, 2003, video, colour, sound, 4 min
On the TV station Eurosport, the hours between the really exciting matches are filled up with sports pulp. You see endless games, sets and matches ‘live’, accompanied by lethargic commentary. Out of exasperation, Jan van Nuenen recorded three examples of this, which he mixed, overlapped and superimposed into loops. What starts as an ordinary game of ping-pong develops into a kaleidoscopic spiral of dancing high servers, flying springboard divers and rhythmically chopping table-tennis bats. Eventually it becomes a scene that appears to represent the culmination of a bizarre acid dance party. (Jaap Vinken & Martine van Kampen)

ALICE IN WONDERLAND OR WHO IS GUY DEBORD?
Robert Cauble, USA, 2003, video, colour, sound, 23 min
Alice in Wonderland, or Who Is Guy Debord? pairs footage from the Disney cartoon with an alternate sound track. Alice’s quest for the help of philosopher Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle) is punctuated by an assaultive TV montage that includes Bush’s aircraft carrier landing. (Chicago Reader)

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