Thursday, May 29, 2008

Video Lounge Schwerin

Video Art from Austria from the 1960s to the Millennium Fri 30th of May



The Kunstverein (art association) Schwerin invites to a special night, dedicated to Austrian video art from the early pioneers like Peter Weibel, Valie Export to recent works from the 21st century. The extensive compilation is based on the Video Edition Austria and Release 01, both published by the media workshop Vienna. The edition offers a representative view over 25 years of video art and artistic video documentation in Austria. In fact this compilation, even so it only features Austrian works, gives a condensed overview of the development of video art in general.

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The Lounge starts at 6 pm in the new, beautiful home of the Kunstverein Schwerin, former and first power plant in Schwerin. Beside this long night of Austrian video art there´s everyday (except for tuesdays) the chancce to drop by and ask for specific works between 3 - 6pm.


Recommended.

expand for location details



Kunstverein Schwerin
Spieltordamm 5 (power plant at the Pfaffenteich)
Fri 30th of May 6pm - 11pm

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Slow Space at no.w.here lab London



28th may 2008

Klaus W. Eisenlohr with Steven Ball

showing: slow space

Light Reading’s 2008 series continues with a conversation between artists Klaus W. Eisenlohr and Steven Ball. Eisenlohr’s film Slow Space (2004) will be screened during the event.
Klaus W. Eisenlohr is an artist, photographer and filmmaker living in Berlin. He is currently curator of “Urban Research”, an ongoing film and video project concerned with urban development and public space, at Director’s Lounge, Berlin. Eisenlohr’s recent work can be characterised as “camera-guided” rigorous research into exploring the body within the spaces it inhabits, and aiming to go beyond mere representation of public spaces through film, but to encourage a perception of space that goes beyond the camera’s frame.

Slow Space (2004) is a film journey through buildings of glass architecture in Chicago. Street scenes and interviews complement this essay on public and private spaces.







Slow Space takes the viewer on a visual trip through the city of Chicago without showing streets or plazas as they are seen in travel guides. Instead, the journey goes through places roofed and lit by glass architecture: Garfield Park Conservatory, Juvenile Court, Merchandise Mart, Cumberland Station, Nature Museum, Westside Future, César Chavez Elementary School, Tower Condominium, Jackson Academy, Lincoln Park Conservatory, a private living room, Gran Hyatt Regency and some other places. Scenes set in open urban space and interviews filmed in private homes complement this passage through public and private places. The project investigates the relationship between the body and the urban architectural environment over a period of three years. Searching the anomalies in “normal”, the filmmaker traces a ‘Desire for Modernity’ in the city’s architecture being shaped by pre- and post- modern forces. In addition, the film discusses the topic of public space in American cities through interviews with the Chicago artists and filmmakers Deborah Stratman, Chris Harris, Gretchen Till, Ken Fandell, Thomas Comerford and Eduardo Pradilla.

Eisenlohr’s work has been shown internationally, with recent solo and group exhibitions at the Alten Wiehre Banhof, Freiburg, Germany, 2007, Inner Spaces Gallery, Poznan, Poland, 2007 and at the Helsinki International Artist-in-residence project room, Helsinki, Finland, 2006.

Steven Ball is a time based media artist. His recent work has focused predominantly on working with digital video producing a series of works that are, among other things, particularly concerned with digital material processes and spatial representation. He is currently Research Fellow at the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London.

Light Reading is an ongoing series of critical dialogues that engage artists, writers and curators in conversation around a selected artist’s body of work.

slow space: film info
www.steven-ball.net
Direct Objective - Blog
no.w.here lab
More Milk Yvette - Blog


Friday, May 23, 2008

Homer: Best CSS ever

Román Cortés made a brilliant portrait of Homer solely in CSS



To get an idea of how this one was created, click pic and visit Ned Batchelder, who posted Homer in an animated way. Simply stunning.


"It is not an image in the normal sense, it was instead painstakingly created using CSS. CSS (cascade style sheets) is a language to define a website visual representation, but it is not intended to create images. Homer was created by placing hundreds of characters (numbers/letters/symbols) of different sizes and colors in specific positions on the page. Too easily see this, click somewhere in the middle of his face and slowly drag your mouse outward. You should see your mouse highlight some of the text!

Since this is an unusual and rather avant-garde method for displaying images, there are no tools and the process is hard, slow and complex to make it work well in different browsers.

So, why did I spent dozens of hours in such a pointless task?

…no comment."

Translated by Thomas Gilray.

btw: if this doesn't look right for you, it may be that you are on Linux and don't have the Verdana font. You can install it from the msttcorefonts package.



btw, btw: He also made George Bush (a fitting combo that is)

btw, btw, btw: I tried to post the original but somehow this blog is eating up the masterpiece.
You can see the funny result after the jump









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Floating



Charming video from the less is more deparment.
music: John Frusciante, who is probably best known as the guitarist for the Chili Peppers.

related: Flying in suburbs


via

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Residues After Sleep

by Steven Foxley




Steven Foxley, known to readers of this katz under his handle aE3, set up a new page, poison-gas, featuring his wide collection of video, audio and graphical art works. Residues After Sleep, his latest video displays traces of a dream of flight & becoming. Multiple X-Rays were scratched & then scanned & set as overlays to the video content. Expand to see this beautiful, dreamlike video of about 6 min.














more at poison-gas

Monday, May 19, 2008

A Director gone wild



Andreas Oehler resuscitating the legendary rooftop performance in Savile Row, January 30, 1969


Andreas Oehler, long time fellow of Directors Lounge, has been with us since the very first days. As a Director, together with Trude Trunk, he presented already five movies, he joined us as part of the press squad, as a cinematic connoisseur, and always as a friend. This time we´ll meet this Jack of all trades as a singing Director, a Master Of Ceremony. On the occasion of his Book release Oehler´s Straßenlieder (ballads by Andreas Oehler with drawings by Burkhard Mohr and a foreword by Wolf Biermann) do we proudly present Oehler´s Roadshow, together with Verlag Franz Schoen. Andreas Oehler will be live on stage, singing together with Max Emil Schoen & Eleni Wittbrodt. There will be klezmermusic by the Mel d´Oro-Quintett and, as a special guest, Michael Mertes reading from his book:"Du, meine Rose, bist das All für mich".






expand for location details and the (silent) trailer






moremehr


See you at the Scala, Friedrich Str. 112 A, 1st floor
Thursday, 22th of May
Doors open at 8pm, no admittance fee

Friday, May 16, 2008

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

"I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun."

Robert Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 - May 12, 2008)
photograph Dennis Hopper, 1966 »

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture with his his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. The Combines are both painting and sculpture.
Rauschenberg had a tendency to pick up the trash that interested him on the streets of New York City and bringing it back to his studio to use it in this works. He claimed he "wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing." “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons of postwar modernism.

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.
Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

He lived and worked in New York City and on Captiva Island, Florida until his death on May 12, 2008.
He will be missed.



sources wiki NYT

Friday, May 09, 2008

Composition In White And Green

by Diana Diriwaechter



By looking at the carefully composed landscapes, you wouldn´t suspect Diana to be a lighting and material technical director on 3D animated motion pictures such as, “Robots”, “Ice Age The Meltdown”, and soon-to-be-released “Horton Hears A Who” at Blur Studios. Don´t miss her ironic/iconic slave girl.





















Diana Diriwaechter

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

32.000 Barbies: An American Self-Portrait

Barbie Dolls, 2008, 60x80"
32,000 Barbies: photo-based statistical art

partial zoom

Seattle-based artist Chris Jordan has a provocative and thoughtful approach to using photo-based art to underline the excesses of human consumption and other atrocities. His series, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, uses cleverly designed huge images to convey the vastness of waste and other ridiculous human behavior. Barbie Dolls, 2008, 60”x80”, depicts 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006.
lens culture



Detail at actual print size
(click pIcs to enlarge)



Cell Phones
Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.
Cell Phones, 2007, 60x100"

Partial zoom

Detail at actual size


Chris says: “This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming. “My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so.”

Jet Trails
Depicts 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours
Jet Trails, 2007 60x96”

Partial zoom

Detail at actual size



Prison Uniforms
Depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005.
Prison Uniforms, 2007; 10x23 feet in six vertical panels

Partial zoom

Detail at actual size

Installed at the Von Lintel Gallery, NY, June 2007

via via