NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR
Sunday 28 October 2007, from 12-7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio

NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR
Rachel Reupke, UK-China, 2007, video, colour, sound, 9 min
This video work reflects Rachel Reupke’s long-standing fascination with science fiction and the inherent problem of visualising the future.

Beijing is in the throws of a construction boom, break-neck in speed. Building sites are hemmed in by developers’ hoardings, each displaying an architect’s visualisation of what is to come in ambitious, blurry-soft style. Thousands of these billboards intrude on the streets: the future of the city rendered as illustrated inserts into the reality of its present – just as Beijing’s tourist maps pre-empt the completion of these projects, in order to keep up with the relentless pace of change. This visual overlay of proposed onto existent gives the impression that time is being compressed, and that tomorrow might actually be running concurrently with today.

Now Wait for Last Year takes the idea of these developers’ hoardings as its starting point. In a hybrid of architect’s projection and corporate video, Beijing’s buildings are presented in single-shot fixed frames, both monumental and unreal. Photographic in nature, but with visible post-production, the idea is that these images resist being located in a specific time or place. The collage aesthetic coupled with the incongruous design of some of these structures prompts the question as to whether these buildings actually exist in present day Beijing, are plans for future developments, or are sheer fantasy.

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OVER LAND AND SEA
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

THE IVALO RIVER DELTA
Patrick Beveridge, UK, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 17 min
The title of this film refers to the landscape where it was shot – an open marshland in northernmost Finland. This terrain, which is covered in thick snow during the winter months, provided a surface for filming changes in nocturnal light that are in response to the movement and position of the moon, and the sporadic displays of the polar lights. Such a project inadvertently raises the problem of landscape film as a genre in its own right. However, the film also has elements of astronomical and atmospheric photography. In particular, some experiments using film cameras placed on rotating celestial mounts lead to the unpredicted outcome of both the earth and the sky staying in focus with prolonged exposure for each frame. The film has a number of tracking shots, assembled in the chronological order they were taken, that document the events of particular nights. In filming above the horizon the camera moved with the stars across the northern sky. Against this backdrop displays of the polar lights occurred on clear nights, of which, during the unusually warm winter of 2005, there were few. (Patrick Beveridge).

AT SEA
Peter Hutton, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 60 min
Films by Peter Hutton appear more closely related to landscape painting and still photography than contemporary cinema. In their stately portrayal of urban and rural locations, they afford the viewer a rarefied and highly-focused mode of looking, a stillness seemingly at odds with everyday life. Over shots of extended duration, the world reveals itself before the camera, which often records only subtle changes of light and atmospheric conditions. Peter Hutton began making films in 1970 and has work in the collections of the Whitney Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou and the Austrian Film Museum. A former merchant seaman, he has been a professor of film at Bard College in the Hudson River Valley since 1985. (Mark Webber)

Put simply, the film tells the story (‘the birth, life and death’, in the director’s words) of a container ship – but there are no words to adequately describe the film’s awesome visual expedition. Hutton knows the sea. His experiences as a former merchant seaman have informed his filmmaking practice, known for its rigour and epic beauty. At Sea begins in South Korea with diminutive workers shipbuilding. The colossal vessel is revealed in de Chirico-worthy proportions, its magnitude surreal to the human eye. Off to sea, the splendour and intensity of the water – set against the vibrant colours of the containers – causes us to see the world anew. The film concludes in Bangladesh amidst shipbreakers as enthralled by Hutton’s camera as we are by his images. (Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival)

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SEVEN EASY PIECES BY MARINA ABRAMOVI?
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio

SEVEN EASY PIECES BY MARINA ABRAMOVI?
Babette Mangolte, USA, 2007, HD video, colour, sound, 93 min
Bruce Nauman, Body Pressure, 1974
Vito Acconci, Seedbed, 1972
Valie Export, Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969
Gina Pane, The Conditioning, the first action of Self-Portrait(s), 1973
Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965
Marina Abramovi?, Lips of Thomas, 1975
Marina Abramovi?, Entering the Other Side, 2005

In Seven Easy Pieces Abramovi? re-enacted seminal performance works from the 1960s and 70s by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys and herself, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The film is a reflection on performance art and body art outlining physical fragility, versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance as seen in the work of Marina Abramovi?. The film of Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovi? is about the performing body and how it affects viscerally the people who confront it, look at it and participate in the transcendental experience that is its primary effect. The ceremonial and meditative are the common responses to the week-long series of performances that took place in November 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. From an art event to a social phenomenon, the seven performances became the talk of the town because they created among the visitors a sense of sublimation, like prayer. The film attempts to reveal the mechanisms of this transcendental experience by simply showing the performer’s body living the events inscribed in each piece with details that outline the body’s fragility, versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance. The fascination comes from the revelation of the physical transformation of Marina Abramovi?’s exposed body due to the rigorous discipline of being there on display each day for seven hours without any restrictive boundaries. The relentless progress of time is revealed each day by the acoustics of the building with its waves of crowds that roll like an ocean and marvel at the performer’s steadfastness with respectful silence. That the performer’s required discipline had to be so different from one piece to the next is one of the mysteries. How the attentive audience fed into the art and Marina’s aesthetics is what is explored. It is as if a monastic urge attracted the mystical among us viewers who were there to participate. And the film, by focusing on Marina’s minute changes and strain during the long seven hours of each piece, explores in a systematic way a body without limit and increases the awareness of how participatory body art is. The film follows the linearity inscribed in the weeklong event, from body pressure, audience participation and confrontation in the first three pieces to the ceremonial in the last four pieces as mapped out by Marina Abramovi?. It is only after the fact that the film viewer will realize how much the project’s concept enlightens us on aesthetics that place physical experience over reason, process over iconography and testify to the power of audience participation over passive spectatorship. (Babette Mangolte)
www.babettemangolte.com

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THE ANAGOGIC CHAMBER
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

FILM FOR INVISIBLE INK, CASE NO: 71: BASE-PLUS-FOG
David Gatten, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
David Gatten’s placid, comically lyrical new Film for Invisible Ink, Case No. 71: Base-Plus-Fog calls to mind the self-referential highjinks and bone-dry textual wit of Owen Land. But Gatten’s approach is in some ways more classically minimalist than Land’s. Invisible Ink is largely composed of a series of sprocket-hole outlines that seem to materialize from the white screen, the ‘image’ consisting of clear leader and its dust granules until one of the rounded rectangles dips down and floats forward into the frame of reference. They each occupy pretty much the same position and, although they are mostly identical, the ongoing procession gives us time to notice their differences – a smudged lower boundary, say, or an unstable corner. In between, Gatten silently presents texts from a Kodak manual, detailing what I can only assume to be the film-developer hazard that we’re observing – problems in base-plus-fog density. (Don’t ask me. For all I know, this could refer to an ambiance management conundrum at a discotheque.) Gatten has been working for years now with the particular juncture at which text and image become indistinguishable, but Film for Invisible Ink displays an impressive recommitment to the less-is-more aesthetic that lent such subtlety and refinement to his earlier What the Water Said series. The new work is as delicate yet muscular as an Agnes Martin canvas or a Fred Sandback string sculpture. (Michael Sicinski, Green Cine Daily)
www.davidgattenfilm.com

SHADOW TRAP
Greg Pope, UK-Norway, 2007, 35mm, colour, sound, 8 min
Shadow Trap was conceived as a companion piece to the live film performance Light Trap. In Light Trap action is taken to remove all emulsion from completely developed black film loops; Shadow Trap operates in reverse – a film created by the application of film emulsion ‘dust’ to a clear base. In a way Shadow Trap is a documentary – a record of previously executed actions – an exhibition of the evidence. I also regard it as a found footage film, where material from one film is re-presented and re-examined in another. In this case the re-presented material has been subjected to extreme abrasion and reduced to dust. I was also excited by the notion of fragmenting the base unit of film language to a level below that of the classical single frame, where frames are ‘atomised’ and we start to examine the building blocks of film. The image-as-sound / sound-as-image crossover also mirrors the audio element in Light Trap (where a live scratch soundtrack is created). Using the inherent sound technology of 35mm projectors I can play back surround sound audio (sound which is created by the image), over which I have very limited control. (Greg Pope)

THE OBJECT WHICH THINKS US: OBJECT 1
Samantha Rebello, UK, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
The Object Which Thinks Us: OBJECT 1 is a film about human beings in the 21st Century, though paradoxically it is a film in which the human image plays no more than a fleeting part. Objects: utilitarian articles which play a major role in our everyday existence (though to which we pay little attention) are at the core of a film which uses them as a mirror in which we are able to view ourselves. People are nowhere to be seen though human presence is felt everywhere in the things which fill the screen. Humans are modified and directed by those objects they deem to be in control of. Our gestures and movements are constantly guided by things which do more than aid us in our day to day activities. The film seems intent on opening our eyes to the hidden qualities of manufactured goods and articles, exposing them to be enigmatic and imposing operators
in our existence, and human beings are shown at the periphery of an object world. ‘Through the objects, other human beings are haunting us.’ (Samantha Rebello)

FUGITIVE L(I)GHT
Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Canada, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
This film explores the morph-like quality of the Serpentine Dance and its intricate play on the visible and the invisible, which extends to the larger context and legacy its originator, the American born Loïe Fuller. fugitive l(i)ght is composed of elaborately reworked found footage, originally captured by Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers, of various renditions and imitations of Fuller’s Serpentine performances. These found films are woven into intricately reworked sequences using several computer programs and following poetic interpretations of several artists who experienced Fuller’s performances in person: texts of Mallarme, lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec, sketches of Whistler, and futuristic manifesto on dance by Marinetti. The music for this film was composed by Toronto based composer Colin Clark who reworked various LP recordings of Wagner’s Die Walküre, the music that often accompanied Fuller’s Serpentine performances. fugitive l(i)ght emphasizes rhythmic structures over and above representation, by drawing the viewer’s gaze into a maze of multiple folds of continuously unfolding colour patterns. fugitive l(i)ght aims to evoke a charge of energy that might have been experienced by the audience of the 1890s in the presence of Fuller’s light performances, and therefore permitting her to meet us again, one century later by making herself and her performance (in)visible to us through its palpitating playful rhythm expressed as a field of energy that resonates within the spectator. (Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof)

SICK SERENA AND DREGS AND WRECK AND WRECK
Emily Wardill, UK, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck revels in a subset of fiction – allegory, with its roots in Medieval poetry – that ricochets retrospectively into Emily Wardill’s other films, into us watching them, into a methodology or a thought process being made manifest in which we are complicit. Allegory is an illusion of the highest order, fiction crystallised into a specific or mysterious instructional purpose. It tells two entirely co-dependent stories absolutely simultaneously, one which we are actually reading, the other the lesson to be derived from it. Through coherent, albeit often surreal narrative, we are taught something about how to behave, told our own story. These (invariably moral) coda only make sense if the narrative we are reading or watching remains in tact. Allegories are told like fairytales or made into pictures that have a similar symbolic order. Religious images are not strictly allegorical, but they are instructional and in the close-ups of Sick Serena’s stained glass the figures crunched between thick lead with animals and angels, reframed here as decapitated, broken, they are reinterpreted as mysteriously, dramatically symbolic. What is more they come to life. To ‘life’. They come to whose life? (Ian White)

VICTORY OVER THE SUN
Michael Robinson, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 min
Dominant sites of past World’s Fairs breed an eruptive struggle between spirit and matter, ego and industry, futurism and failure. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory; nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain. (Michael Robinson)
www.poisonberries.net

TODAY!
Jessie Stead & David Gatten, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound-on-cd, 11 min
Touch what you see when you find it or pick it up.
Fall off tomorrow’s promise, not injured and again.
In the woods there is snow, in the water there is sugar,
bodies are made of salt and (yesterday is unaware).
(Jesse Stead & David Gatten)
www.jessiestead.com
www.davidgattenfilm.com

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SYSTEMS OF NATURE: RECENT INSTALLATIONS BY CHRIS WELSBY
6 November – 13 December 2007
London Central Saint Martins College Lethaby Gallery

LOST LAKE #2
Chris Welsby, UK-Canada, 2005, video installation, colour, sound, loop
The imagery comprises a series of eight, three-minute takes, all shot at the same oblique angle to the surface of a small alpine lake. The water surface fills the frame. A constantly changing pattern of ripples plays across the water surface, which reflects an inverted image of trees and rocks on the opposite shore. The eight three-minute takes, recorded over a period of several hours, depict the complex variations in the water surface as the breeze rises and falls. The image of the lake is projected, via a surface silvered mirror, onto a horizontal screen measuring approximately 10ft x 9ft and raised about 18 inches above the gallery floor. Seen from a distance, the surface of the water appears to be miraculously suspended in mid air. Close up, the raised screen gives the water the appearance of having depth. (Chris Welsby)

AT SEA
Chris Welsby, UK-Canada, 2003, 4 channel video installation, colour, sound, loop
A number of video shots of the coast of British Columbia are projected side by side to form a single, continuous moving image. This image contains elements such as ships, buoys, floating driftwood, tree covered islets, sea birds, open ocean, and drifting fog banks. The dominant colour is grey; grey infused with a multitude of ocean blues and greens. The overall feel is somber and mysterious; a study of winter light falling on the surface of water and cloud; an evocative portrait of the Pacific North West. (Chris Welsby)

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SYSTEMS OF NATURE
Wednesday 7 November 2007, at 8:40pm
London BFI Southbank NFT2

ANEMOMETER
Chris Welsby, UK, 1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 10 min
The location for this film is a small London park called Euston Square which is situated close to the busy centre of the city. The camera faces south east across the park, in the foreground there is an expanse of grass surrounded by walkways and luxurious plain trees. In the middle distance is a junction of the busy Euston road, trucks busses and commuter traffic surge past halting only for the traffic lights. The camera angle remained unchanged throughout but the filming speed changed according to the wind speed. The camera motor was driven by an anemometer, a device used to measure wind speed, the harder the wind blew, the faster the camera motor ran, and vice versa. If the wind stopped blowing altogether, no images were recorded, causing a jump cut in the film’s continuity. (Chris Welsby)

TREE
Chris Welsby, UK, 1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 5 min
The camera was placed on the flexible branch of a tree in a strong wind. The composition included both stationary and moving trees (a wooded landscape). The relationship of this landscape to the vertical and horizontal plane was maintained as much as possible. The camera ran continuously until all the film was exposed. The world is seen from the point of view of a tree as its branches sway to the rhythm of the wind. (Chris Welsby)

COLOUR SEPARATION
Chris Welsby, UK, 1975, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
This film is based on the colour separation process. High contrast film stock was run three times through a stationary camera; once for each of the light primaries. In the composite image, anything moving is represented in primary or secondary colour whilst anything still, having been filmed through all three filters, is represented in ‘correct’ colour. When projected the film resembles a moving impressionist painting in which time is seen to participate in the construction of the colour image. (Chris Welsby)

STREAM LINE
Chris Welsby, UK, 1976, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
This film was made on Mount Kinderscout in Derbyshire, England. It is a continuous, ‘real time’ tracking shot of a stream bed. The length of the track was ten yards. The camera was suspended in a motorized carriage running on steel cables three feet above the water surface. The camera pointed vertically downwards recording the contours of the stream bed and the flow of water along its course. The sound of the water was recorded synchronously from the moving carriage. The ‘drama’ in this film comes from the topography of the stream and not from the camera motion or from the editing. Throughout the unedited length of the film the camera tracks along a straight line at an absolutely regular speed. In contrast the stream runs fast and slow, cascading over boulders and swirling turbulently from left to right. (Chris Welsby)

SKY LIGHT
Chris Welsby, UK, 1988, 16mm, colour, sound, 26 min
An idyllic river flows through a forest, flashes of light and colour threaten to erase the image, bursts of short wave radio and static invade the tranquillity of the natural sound. The camera searches amongst the craggy rocks and ruined buildings of a bleak and windswept snowscape, a Geiger counter chatters ominously in the background. The sky is overcast at first but gradually clears to reveal a sky of unnatural cobalt blue … This film is made in three sections, each leading towards the final abstraction, and each resembling a search for meaning and order amidst a plethora of electronic, chemical and mechanistic information. Space in Sky Light is both highly compressed and volatile; the film challenges the notion of its own form, ending in a beautiful but violent abstraction in which only nature and technology remain. (Chris Welsby)

DRIFT
Chris Welsby, UK-Canada, 1994, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min
The overall feel of Drift is sombre and mysterious; a study of winter light falling on the surface of water, metal and cloud. The dominant colour is grey; grey infused with a multitude of ocean blues and greens. There is little land in this film and very few landmarks from which to navigate from one space to the next. The picture plane is in continuous motion like the ocean which, on the surface at least, is the subject of Drift. On one level, Drift is a film about the ocean, about winter light and about ships at anchor in a sheltered bay. However, it is also a metaphor, an essentially filmic metaphor about time and space, about being and perception, a metaphor for the act of looking, looking at film and looking at the World. (Chris Welsby)

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THE NATURE OF OUR LOOKING
Friday 9 November 2007, at 8:40pm
London BFI Southbank NFT2

LOOKING AT THE SEA
Peter Hutton, USA, 2001, 16mm, b/w, silent, 15 min
Most people go to films to get some kind of hit, come kind of overwhelming experience, whether it’s like an amusement park ride or an ideological, informational hit that gives you a critical insight into an issue or an idea. But for those few people who feel they need a reprieve occasionally, who want to cleanse the palate a bit, whether for spiritual or physiological regions, these films seem to be somewhat effective. (Peter Hutton, interviewed by Scott MacDonald in “A Critical Cinema 3”)

WHAT THE WATER SAID NOS 4-6
David Gatten, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min
What the water said is literally inscribed on the strips of unexposed celluloid that Gatten cast into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina. Encased in crab traps, the fragmented filmstrips harbour mystical messages from the underwater world, a source of seemingly never-ending fascination. The sea, its salt, sand and rocks, and its gnawing creatures have created the film’s inimitable textured patterns and sounds, while passages from Western literature’s greatest sea odysseys – from “The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” to “Moby Dick” – remind us of the sea’s singular place in our imagination. (Toronto International Film Festival)
www.davidgattenfilm.com

LAKE (NOCTURNE)
Lucy Reynolds, UK, 2007, 16mm, b/w, silent, 12 min
Lake (nocturne) is a study of the interplay of artificial light with the changing patterns and movements in nature, exploring the illuminations and obfuscations that occur in landscape after dark. The shadowy forms of landscaped lake and parkland also resonate with past narratives of the pleasure garden, recalling the original meaning of nocturne as a term for music composed to be performed at night-time, as accompaniment to the illuminated tableaux, spectacles and fétes of grand gardens, evoking a lost domain. (Lucy Reynolds)

REDSHIFT
Emily Richardson, UK, 2001, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 min
In astronomical terminology ‘redshift’ is a term used in calculating the distance of stars from the earth, hence determining their age. Redshift attempts to show the huge geometry of the night sky and give an altered perspective of the landscape, using long exposures, fixed camera positions, long shots and time-lapse animation techniques to reveal aspects of the night that are invisible to the naked eye. It takes these formal concerns into an emotional realm and uses the figurative to express philosophical ideas about our relationship to the world. The film has a gentle intensity to it, and is composed of changes of light across the sea, sky and mountains. It shows movement where there is apparent stillness, whether in the formation of weather patterns, movement of stars, the illumination of a building by passing car headlights or boats darting back and forth across the sea’s horizon. The sound has been composed for the film by Benedict Drew, taking field recordings of the aurora borealis as a starting point, and using purely computer generated sound to create a soundtrack that reflects the unheard elements present in the Earth’s atmosphere. (LUX)
www.emilyrichardson.org.uk

OBSERVANDO EL CIELO
Jeanne Liotta, USA, 2007, 16mm, b/w & colour, sound, 17 min
I refer to my films of the night sky as “16mm celestial field recordings” to reinforce their non-fiction status … This work is not metaphor but document. Even that light which travelled so far and so long to reach us makes its mark directly upon the emulsion … The subject of my work is perception itself, though it is variously manifested through attention to landscape, pure abstraction, the body in space, cinema itself, or, in Observando El Cielo, with systems such as Science. This extends into the found film and historical/educational footage, as testimonials to the limits of our understanding at any given time. The world itself is something we find, over and over again, and interpret it each time in a different way. (Jeanne Liotta)
www.jeanneliotta.net

YOU DON’T BRING ME FLOWERS
Michael Robinson, USA, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
Viewed at its seams, a collection of National Geographic landscapes from the 1960s and 1970s conjures an obsolete romanticism currently peddled to propagate entitlement and individualism from sea to shining sea; the slideshow deforms into a bright white distress signal. (Michael Robinson)
www.poisonberries.net

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THE NATURE OF SYSTEMS
Saturday 10 November 2007, at 8:40pm
London BFI Southbank NFT2

STREAM LINE (DOCUMENTATION)
Chris Meigh-Andrews, UK, 1991, video, colour, sound, 6 min
I was particularly interested in issues relating to the relationship between technology and nature, and with notions of the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ and to the idea of bringing aspects of landscape into a gallery space. I had conceived of the piece as one that would cross an entire gallery floor, encouraging visitors to cross the space, following the motion across the monitors. The bridge seemed an apt device, as it had both metaphorical and practical dimensions; it would serve as a viewing platform, provide a way of crossing the room and reinforce the landscape concept. (Chris Meigh-Andrews)
www.meigh-andrews.com

BIT-SCAPES 135.1_08
Davide Quagliola & Chiara Horn, UK, 2006, video, colour, sound, 3 min
Shot on location in Western Australia, Bit-Scapes explores digital reproduction and manipulation. Through the combination of natural landscape footage and computer-generated graphics, BitScapes investigates the ambiguity of photo-realism in the digital realm as location material processed with custom software creates a series of images that reinterpret the organic landscape structures. The result is a series of audiovisual compositions where natural elements seem to coexist harmoniously with the artificial in the creation of a new ‘digital biosphere’. (Davide Quagliola & Chiara Horn)
www.quayola.com

THE SOUND OF MICROCLIMATES
Semiconductor, UK, 2004, video, colour, sound, 8 min
The Sound of Microclimates reveals the sights and sounds of a series of unusual weather patterns in the Paris of today. Here, architecture has become interwoven with the natural processes of the geographical landscape. Set within the un-noticed moments in time, extreme microclimates are presented as the future in city accessories, revealing the unseen urban terrains of tomorrow. They exist as a series of weather observations that animate the evolution of the inanimate urban condition. (Semiconductor)
www.semiconductorfilms.com

SUBURBS OF THE VOID
Thomas Köner, Germany-Finland, 2004, video, colour, sound, 14 min
Köner used 2000 photographs for Suburbs of the Void. The visual material belongs to a traffic security camera. It transfers the pictures via the Internet, where Köner collected them and arranged them into a video. The town is situated in Northern Finland near the polar circle. Permafrost and darkness dominate the sight most time of the day. For Köner, the permanent cold is connected with a general slowing down leading to a sharpened attention. The soundtrack supports this aspect. Sometimes one can hear slight noises of playing children in the background. In front of the complete emptiness, these sounds must occur like memories, telescoping from the distance into the picture. (Holger Birkholz)
www.koener.de

TRAIN NO.8
Daniel Crooks, Australia, 2005, video, colour, sound, 6 min
In Train No. 8, Daniel Crooks uses his signature ‘timeslice’ technique to offer an unexpected ride through a London urban landscape. In his experiments, Crooks divides digital footage into segments of time; when reconstructed the segments offer a distorted version of reality where time, space and motion appear on the same plane. (FACT)
www.dlab.com.au

BIT-SCAPES 135.2_03
Davide Quagliola & Chiara Horn, UK, 2006, video, colour, sound, 3 min
See above

UNTITLED
Rachel Reupke, UK, 2006, video, colour, silent, 2 x 90 sec
Rachel Reupke bounces the background and foreground in her videos, propelling the viewer into different dimensions within the same space. The shots appear to have been recorded using a remote automated camera and are presented as brief clips, extracted from perhaps days of footage. Viewing these simple panoramas becomes an increasing complex experience as changes in atmospheric conditions affect the camera, the auto focus shifts and the weather closes in. (Danielle Arnaud Gallery)

VOILIERS ET COQUELICOTS
Rose Lowder, France, 2002, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
Little is necessary for everything to appear differently. The date, the hour, the weather, the space’s layout, one’s glance or presence of mind … can make everything change. The boats sail out of the Vieux port in Marseilles to be amongst the poppy fields. (Rose Lowder)

BIT-SCAPES 135.7_13
Davide Quagliola & Chiara Horn, UK, 2006, video, colour, sound, 3 min
See above

AS WE ALL KNOW
Alix Poscharsky, UK-Germany, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
This film is a six-hour time-lapse sun track, shot around sunset. With the sun locked in the middle, the earth appears to be moving from left to right across the frame (or around the sun). Referencing science fiction, this film is about the discrepancy between a scientific world-view and everyday life. As we all know, the earth is moving round the sun, but the sun appears to be moving round the earth. (Alix Poscharsky)
www.elusivetuesday.com

The following works are showing in the BFI Foyer

GLENLANDIA (excerpt)
Susan Collins, UK, 2005-07, online, colour, silent, 2 years
Glenlandia is intended to be viewed full screen and updated live to your computer in real time. Now offline, this version is compiled from the archive of images providing continuous documentation to give an impression of how the work appeared live. From September 2005 to September 2007 a webcam transmitted images of Loch Faskally, Perthshire, Scotland from the FRS Research laboratory, Faskally. The webcam harvested images pixel by pixel, second by second, day by day over the course of the two years. Each image was collected from top to bottom and left to right in horizontal bands continuously, marking visible fluctuations in light and movement throughout the day and being archived at two-hour intervals. Although this appears to be a quintessentially natural Scottish landscape, Loch Faskally is in fact man made. It was created behind the hydro dam at Pitlochry which was built in 1947-50 as part of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board’s Tummel/Garry Power Scheme. (Susan Collins)
www.susan-collins.net

TREE STUDIES
Chris Welsby, Canada, 2006, 3 channel video installation, colour, sound, continuous
Documentation of a three-screen, weather-driven installation made for the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, 2006. Combining the speed and versatility of modern technology with the strength and spiritual significance of the tree, this installation suggests an environmental model where technology can work collaboratively with natural forces. The installation uses modern high speed communication systems combined with customized software and computer technologies to harness the energy produced by the rotation and tilt of the planet and transformed that energy into an open, self regulating and interconnected system. The system monitors weather data from three different continents and uses this real-time information to edit three files of pre-recorded movie footage of a tree seen against the background of a stormy winter sky. The combinations of imagery and sound generated in real time is unique at any given moment and is part of a continuously evolving process fuelled by the operating system’s interaction with the planetary weather system. In the sciences, this generation of image and sound is often described as an “emergent” property, a term used to describe self-organization in all living systems and on a planetary scale this is recognized as the dynamic origin of biological life, cognition and evolution. Drawing on the ancient concept of the earth as a living system, combining the traditional Eastern concept of Yin and Yang and systems theory from contemporary science the work suggests a new post Romantic form of landscape art with relevance to the issues of our own times. (Chris Welsby)
www.sfu.ca/~welsby

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