Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was both a pioneer architect of the modern era and a global theorist. Fuller developed a system of geometry that he called “Energetic-Synergetic geometry,” the most famous example of which is the geodesic dome. His many designs for automobiles and living spaces were applications of a wider theory.
Since the Gulf War in 1991, warfare and reporting it have become hyper-technological affairs, in which real and computer-generated images cannot be distinguished any more. With the aid of new and also unique archive material, Farocki sketches a picture of the relationship between military strategy and industrial production and shows how war technology finds its way into everyday use.
-- International Film Festival catalogue, Rotterdam (2004)
"It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were, but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves."
Lost Sound documents fragments of discarded audio tape found by the artists within a small area of East London, combining the sound retrieved from each piece of tape with images of the place where it was found. The work explores the potential of chance, creating portraits of particular places by building formal, narrative, and musical connections between images and sounds, linked by the random discoveries of the tape samples.
A distinguished looking man (performance artist Richard Layzell) is apparently trapped in an ever changing void of colour, locked in a power play with a perversely operated camera. A mute, caged, charismatic TV presenter he is by turns charming, menacing, educational, confused. At times he appears to have great powers. A voiceover tells us extraordinary things — how this man is special — the first man to 'have a baby'. Hallucinogenic flash-frames punctuate the colour field to give us a view of his world's disturbing and alien futuristic logic.
By accident, the content of a computer encyclopedia is transferred into the brain of an animated parrot resulting in the emotional breakdown of a fine peach.
"I would never have known how to do anything on my computer if it wasn't for Computer Smarts."
—Mark Roth
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 3, Computer Smarts.
Ouroboros: Music of the Spheres is Chapter 3 of Mysterium Cosmographicum.
"Positing a linear continuum, with 'nothing' at one end of the spectrum and 'something' at the other, at what point does 'nothing' become 'something?'"
What Could Go Wrong depicts fire trucks, ambulances, fire alarms with sonic distress that document every current disaster….floods, fires, war, food scarcity and police torture are accompanied by Linda Mary Montano singing 7 ballads. The sappy positivity of the songs and the Vision of Mary bring a suggestion that hope is possible. This video is a study in contrasts and when the audience is invited to auditorially interact with it, the message is "action breeds healing" and if so "what could go right."
Prophecies of doom, disaster and political catastrophe envisioned by some of the world’s most famous psychics between the 1960’s and the year 2001 are conjured up through 3D-animation, industrial films, text and historical footage -- the sum of which combine to form a visually stunning meditation on the forces that are driving us into a dark, paranoid and uncertain future. Soothsayer reconsiders yesterday’s daunting and sometimes whimsical predictions for the future after they’ve been outpaced by time.
"code switching began as a contemporary reaction to Adrian Piper's Cornered (1988). It goes on to explore the fracturing of contemporary identity within modern culture, and the mechanisms by which individuals assign and create the cultural, racial, personal, and social identities around us. We all have codes by which we interact with and interpret others. Depending on what situation we are in, we adopt the appropriate persona to fit the occasion, constantly creating representations for others to read appropriately.
In this wistful tape, Segalove looks at how her childhood vision of the future holds up (or doesn't) in adulthood. Commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Madi plays an interactive on-line computer game in the privacy of her apartment. Wearing a computer corset that stores her programs in a "Garden Interface", she propels her go-go cowgirl construct WANDA through the game world, encountering an assortment of logged-on players and game identities who trick and confuse her. An aggressive male character WANG logs on, and inserts his cold architecture into her coordinates, draining the power in her corset. His expanding architecture threatens to overtake her Garden Reservoir.
Derived from Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity, Lossless #4 is the result of a digital file's debugging routine that reveals vectors describing apparent movement in the frame. Having removed the picture, thereby isolating these vectors, the formal qualities of Gehr's film are detectable. The hypnotic effects of the shifts in the lens’s focal length in the original are now substituted with a purely graphical representation, creating a perverse replacement of the optical effect of the original.
During 1998 and 1999, Pelon participated in various Internet newsgroups and lists where suicide is the main subject. Stories unfolded as the film was made; some reached the point of no return. The subject of suicide is very candid on the Internet, due to its anonymity and the freedom it allows from the usual taboos around the subject. The newsgroups and lists have become a relatively safe place for the many people that find themselves isolated because of their interest in the idea of suicide.
A video diary about Cuthand's efforts to undergo artificial insemination. Cuthand contemplates a desire to have children and its relation to preserving Indigenous culture.
Taking its title from the four consonants of the ancient Hebrew name for God, Tetragramaton contemplates the relationship between man, technology, and ecological systems. The sweeping camera movements, sudden changes of scale, and layers of natural and man-made sound, result in a visceral, turbulent and hypnotic dialogue between the artist's camera and the environment.
This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.
This video highlights several narratives concerning video surveillance—not to reiterate the conventional privacy argument but rather to engage the desire to watch surveillance materials and society’s insatiable voyeurism. A variety of subjects recount their interactions with surveillance—getting caught in the act of stealing or watching pornography, being discouraged from making an illegal ATM withdrawal—and question technological determinism, asking whether we choose to develop technology or technology shapes our choices.
A poetic allegory about technology's invasion of the body and the destruction of the immune system, witnessing the pollution of history that drowns us. Sponsored by the CICV, Belfort, France.
This title is only available on e-(d)entity.
A short Flicker Film adulterated by some extra images shot in Malawi, Africa. FF was in answer to an assignment given by artists Melissa Dubbin and Aaron Davidson who created the soundtrack to which I was asked to make a “Future Film”.
-- Deborah Stratman
This mock-virtual environment is a playground for the imagination. Equipped with helmet, goggles, and a basic understanding of early video game strategies, the artist morphs into an adventureland training camp where she meets with media icons on common ground. She fearlessly changes her intensity and velocity in unison with, and at times under the command of, rival action heroes and network sponsors. The title implies that there are bugs in the program, undetected viruses in the system.
“For quite some time the Hamburg artist Cornelia Sollfrank has been researching female hackers and found that hacking is a field completely under male domination. Nonetheless she was able to produce a series of several videos in which she interviewed female hackers. In December 1999 she came to know a U.S. hacker who attended the annual hackers’ convention held by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). She did the video interview have script, will destroy with her on condition that the woman, code-named Clara G.
Derived from Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity, Lossless #4 is the result of a digital file's debugging routine that reveals vectors describing apparent movement in the frame. Having removed the picture, thereby isolating these vectors, the formal qualities of Gehr's film are detectable. The hypnotic effects of the shifts in the lens’s focal length in the original are now substituted with a purely graphical representation, creating a perverse replacement of the optical effect of the original.
THE GREAT CURDLING is a Folk-Sci-Fi film. It’s a darkly comic musical exploring the feeling that collective reality is at tipping point. A middle-class family are adjusting to a new kind of happy, now they have consumed a transformative liquid technology that helps re-structure them from the inside.
People enjoy my company connects the privatisation of telecommunications with techno-optimism, euphoria and online communication in the lead-up to the millennium.
The film explores the privatisation of the Irish state-owned telecommunications company Telecom Éireann from the viewpoint of shareholders communicating on early online forums. The event is contextualised within ideologies of technological emancipation in the pre-millennium period.
The set of Bewitched is a spiritual battleground of overlapping zones — human, alien and cyborg — in Bobby Abate's latest ontological mystery film.
