30 years of unconventional camera movements from the Vtape collection

For those of you in Toronto, this looks pretty great. Forwarded message below:

Dear Friends of Vtape

As many of you know, for over a decade, Vtape has developed an intensive and multi-faceted intern programme for students and members of the interested public. We are very happy to support all your future endeavors and provide as many opportunities as we can within our facilities.

Dragging my video camera down the front steps: 30 years of unconventional camera movements from the Vtape collection provides a showcase for the curatorial research of one of our recent - and longest serving – technical interns, John Shipman.

Shipman says this of his intriguing selection: “Eight short videos, from 1974 to 2004, playfully use unusual camera positions and movements to create a slightly different visual gravity, showing things improbable, but viscerally informative."

The opening screening will be on Saturday November 21 from 2pm-4pm. The screenings will be at 2:00pm and 3:30pm with a curator's talk at 3:00pm.

Dragging my video camera down the front steps: 30 years of unconventional camera movements from the Vtape collection.
Saturday November 21 2009
Screening at 2& 3:30pm, Curator talk at 3:00pm
Curator will be present!

This installation will run until December 19 2009.

Hal Foster @ OCAD

ALK | OCAD | Hal Foster | NOV 3
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Nomadic Resident Hal Foster presents
a free public talk at OCAD:
"How To Survive Civilization, Or What Dada Can Still Teach Us"
Tuesday, November 3, 7:30 p.m.

Ontario College of Art & Design
Auditorium, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto
416-977-6000 | www.ocad.ca

OCAD is pleased to welcome internationally acclaimed author
Hal Foster as the next resident of its Nomadic Residents
program, generously supported by the Jack Weinbaum Family
Foundation. Foster will be in residence at OCAD from
November 2 to 6, and will deliver a free public talk on Tuesday,
November 3 at 7:30 p.m.

Widely considered one of postmodernism’s founding theorists,
Foster has participated urgently in the critical and historical
investigation of avant-garde art for almost thirty years,
producing a body of writing that has informed the practices of
many contemporary artists. He draws from a wide range of
intellectual traditions to illuminate the continuities and ruptures
in the avant-garde’s critiques of art and society, exposing its
underlying historical and institutional frameworks while
assessing its continuing relevance.

Foster is the Townsend Martin 1917 Professor and Chair, Art &
Archaeology, at Princeton University, where he teaches
modernist and contemporary art and theory and the graduate
proseminar in methodology. In addition, he works with the
programs of Media and Modernity and European Cultural
Studies as well as with the School of Architecture. His
publications include The Anti-Aesthetic (1983), Pop Art (2005),
Art Since 1900 (2005), Prosthetic Gods (2004) and Design and
Crime (2002). A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Foster
is an editor for October, and continues to write regularly for
Artforum, London Review of Books, The Nation, and The New
Left Review.

All are welcome; admission is free. Limited seating available;
guests are advised to arrive early.
http://www.ocad.ca

Pleasure Dome Call

CALL | Pleasure Dome | New Toronto Works Show 2010 | DUE: JAN 15 2010
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Pleasure Dome is seeking short experimental film/video works,
expanded cinema performances and media art installations
produced within the last year by Toronto-based artists for the
annual New Toronto Works Show. Now in its sixteenth year, this
members-curated programme features the cutting edge of
experimental film and video produced in Toronto today.
Please send preview tape/DVD or film (Super 8 or 16mm) or
short outline of proposed performance or installation to:

Pleasure Dome
195 Rushton Rd.
Toronto, ON M6G 3J2

or drop off to
Vtape
401 Richmond St. West, #452
Toronto
* note: Vtape is closed for holidays Dec 19- Jan 4 so no drop off
between those dates

The New Toronto Works Show will be presented in March as
part of the Winter 2010 season.
http://www.pdome.org/wordpress/

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Call for Submitions

Trinity Square Video: Call for SubmissionsDeadline: November 15th, 2009
Trinity Square Video (TSV) has a long history of supporting and presenting video-based works that are mediated by images of protest and activism, providing a space to explore the range of meaning that can be generated from such imagery. Our upcoming programming will build from this history. In the fall of 2009, TSV will begin an extended investigation of the current state of political engagement in contemporary art by exhibiting works that question the motivations, objectivity and ethics found in and around political representations.TSV is eager to hear from artists and curators working with video and video installation who are rigorously invested in enriching and expanding the field of socially critical visual and media-based art. We are looking for dynamic video and video-based artworks that are engaged with varying forms of contemporary politics in unexpected or unconventional ways.We are seeking innovative artist's works that use video, its forms and its processes, to examine the modes of presentation found in activist gesture, social action or cultural critique. We intend to offer a wide range of video programs and installations: from those that feature direct activist gestures to those that call into question the relationship between aesthetic value and the promotion of social causes. TSV is an artist-run resource for the production, education and dissemination of video by artists and community organizations. Since 1971, TSV has made access to the means of communication its priority, providing a diverse community of video practitioners media-arts related development through workshops, seminars and classes, as well as offering a space for the creation and exhibition of video-based images. Through its public programming, TSV has advanced the understanding and appreciation of media works produced by various community-based groups and numerous internationally recognized artists, such as Michael Balser, John Greyson, Vera Frenkel, Richard Fung, Nancy Nicol, and Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak. In recent years, TSV has presented works by Sara Angelucci, Jeremy Blake, Deanna Bowen, Manon De Pauw, Isabelle Hayeur and Éric Raymond, Nelson Henricks, Gunilla Josephson, Jude Norris, 640 480 Collective, among many others. Submission Requirements:1. One DVD with a maximum of 10 minutes of previous and/or proposed work.* 2. Written proposal (1-page)3. Artist's Statement (1-page)4. Curriculum Vitae5. Self-addressed, stamped envelope for return of support material.***DVDs can be supplemented with up to 10 digital slides on CD-ROM (Mac compatible, .jpg images only, no folders, all images must be listed with slide number, artist's last name, title of work and year, eg. 01_smith_untitled_2009.jpg).**Support material will not be returned without a SASE.Submissions must be postmarked no later than November 15th. If this date falls on a weekend or statutory holiday, the deadline moves to the next business day.Submissions will not be accepted electronically. A floorplan of the TSV Gallery is available at www.trinitysquarevideo.com We encourage proposals from emerging to established artists and curators. We firmly support the equitable remuneration of artists. TSV pays all of it exhibiting artists in accordance with the CARFAC fees schedule. Our exhibitions are presented for 4 to 5 weeks. We will accept proposals by curators for single-night screenings. If you have any questions, please contact Jean-Paul Kelly, Programming Director at programming@trinitysquarevideo.com, or 416-593-1332. Please send submissions to: Jean-Paul KellyProgramming DirectorTrinity Square Video401 Richmond Street West, Suite 376Toronto, ON, CanadaM5V 3A8
TSV gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council

The New Charter

I'm back, fresh after completing and defending my thesis "The Work of Art in the Age of [Ctrl]-C: Digital Remixing and Contemporary Found Footage Film Practice." This 120 page tome was primarily devoted to drawing linkages between avant-garde found footage film aesthetics, the practices of the Soviet re-editors and the explosion of digital remixes on the Internet. During that period, this blog focused primarily on the American avant-garde and digital remixing on the net. That phase is now over and I will be continuing my research in some new directions.

First, I will be focusing more on contemporary video art, photography and other new media and practices of recycling, appropriation and adaptation. It will take some time to build the site to reflect these new directions, so I appreciate any advice, links, artists to watch and relevant news to post. I am moving into my Ph.D. at York University and am (at this juncture) looking at discourses and strategies of appropriation in contemporary art.

Second, I will focus less on simply posting videos and more on theories and philosophies of appropriation. I am also interested in manifestos, interviews, artists’ statements and reviews.

Third, I'm very interested in being a part of the larger network of individuals researching copyright issues, digital remixing and found footage film practice. I'm happy to link to other sites you either run or frequent and will take emails through my contact or in comments.

Because the blog is engineered to represent a chronological and continuous record of research as opposed to websites which are ordered by topic, I will also be updating recent gallery or museum openings around the US and Canada as I become aware of them. Anyone interested in publicizing events related to appropriation in art, film and video can email me.

Long Live the Recycled Cinema!

Eli

New Work

Sorry I've been gone for so long. I'm finishing my thesis. Some great new work to send your way:

Below is Enrique Piñuel's "The Dancer's Cut":


Also, check out these gorgeous videos by Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez here and some majorly ambitious work by DDLM, who describes his 4 hour (!) piece "SUCHILECTRO-C°°°°" as a journey through frivolomental irredemption. Wow. Just wow...

Nicolas Bourriaud

While I’ve been a fan of Lawrence Lessig’s passionate defense of remixing culture for years, I haven’t hailed him as its greatest spokesperson. As Lessig says in his book Free Culture after his failed defense of Eric Eldred which reached the Supreme Court: it will take more than legal arguments to defeat the repressive aspects of copyright law; judges must see the harm it can do to the spread of culture and ideas.

To understand just how valuable appropriation is to a progressive society, there is no better and more dynamic advocate than Nicolas Bourriaud. An art theorist who seemed to shape contemporary art discourse after his book Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud went on to write a small and now out-of-print text which has greatly benefited my understanding of approproiation as a progressive cultural phenomena.

I am including my own thoughts and a link to the book in PDF form.

In Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud explored several artists’ propensity towards dealing with “the interhuman sphere: relationships between people, communities, individuals, groups, social networks, interactivity, and so on.” (7) Postproduction follows this trajectory towards the participation of individuals in shaping new meanings from extant materials—appropriation for the purposes of transformation. Though Bourriaud acknowledges that “citation, recycling and détournement were not born yesterday; what is clear is that today certain elements and principles are reemerging as themes and are suddenly at the forefront, to the point of constituting the “engine” of new artistic practices.” (9) Though this is likely the result of the ease in which materials may be copied, altered and disseminated, Bourriaud’s focus on the moving image is telling. In my own research, I observe this as the result of shifts in media popularity (Georges Braque using newspaper, Koons using mass produced objects based on the zeitgeist of the time) and the supremacy of moving images as a means to disseminate information and entertainment.

First, the term postproduction is used to describe “the scrambling of boundaries between consumption and production.” (19) Though I admire the gist of Bourriaud’s term and it correctly implies the “second look” which occurs with transformed works, it does not posses the singularity of meaning terms like “found footage” or “digital remixing” have. It would be my guess that Bourriaud wanted to include a term that carried the weight of cinematic production with it but also could easily be applied to art works. Like digital remixing and remix culture in general, Bourriaud asserts that postproduction is not simply a tendency in contemporary art, but rather a new and semi-permanent culture of making art. He argues that “artists’ intuitive relationships with art history is now going beyond what we call “the art of appropriation,” which naturally infers an ideology of ownership, and moving towards a culture of the use of forms, a culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing.” (9) Bourriaud locates appropriation, not as a marginal art practice but as a central motif of contemporary art.

Though many of Bourriaud’s descriptions of appropriation are not groundbreaking in their originality, they constitute the first book entirely dedicated to the subject that I am aware of, and he masterfully explains the key concepts. I will briefly quote several of his descriptions of how appropriation functions in contemporary art:

“Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts. (13)

“Artists today program forms more than they compose them; rather than transfigure a raw element (blank canvas, clay, etc.), they remix available forms and make use of data. (17)

“In a universe of products for sale, preexisting forms, signals already emitted, buildings already constructed, paths marked out by their predecessors, artists no longer consider the artistic field (and here one could add television, cinema, or literature) a museum containing works that must be cited or “surpassed” as the modernist ideology of originality would have it, but so many storehouses filed with tools that should be used, stockpiles of data to manipulate and present.” (17)

“The material they manipulate is no longer primary. It is no longer a manor of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects.” (13)

“To use an object is necessarily to interpret it. By using television, books, or records, the user of culture deploys a rhetoric of practices and “reuses” that has nothing to do with enunciation and therefore with language whose figures and codes may be cataloged.” (24)

“A DJs set is not unlike an exhibition of objects that Duchamp would have described as “assisted readymades;” more or less modified products whose sequence produces a specific duration.” (38)

Bourriaud’s continuous invocation of both DJs and programmers seems highly applicable to the dual influences of hip-hop and computer technologies which inform digital remixing. The idea of the DJ as a curator or archivist and the programmer as a person that utilizes platforms, images and processes in an ensemble to form a new product mirrors the practice of assemblagist or collagist. Additionally, Bourriaud correctly places historical bodies of work as places to begin from by replicating those materials and altering them. One cannot help but remember Situationist artist Asger Jörn’s project to “update” paintings by simply painting over reproductions to make them “modern.” This kind of artmaking questions a teleological end to the process of creating an artwork as once supposed and constructs a new paradigm. Bourriaud says, that “The artwork is no longer an endpoint but a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions.” (20) This kind of art making in which works are constantly revised, revisited and altered mirrors the programming algorithms for the Wiki in which a page is constantly changed (for better or worse) under the auspices of improvement over time. Briefly, I will list some of Bourriaud’s comments on the idea of collective and continuous art making:

“To rewrite modernity is the historical task of this early Twenty-First Century; not to start at zero or find oneself encumbered by the storehouse of history, but to inventory and select, to use and download.” (93)

“What if artistic creation today could be compared to a collective sport, far from the classical mythology of the solitary effort? “It is the viewers who make the paintings,” Duchamp once said, an incomprehensible remark unless we connect it to his keen sense of an emerging culture of use, in which meaning is born of collaboration and negotiation between the artist and the one who comes to view the work.” (20)

“Appropriation is indeed the first stage of postproduction; the issue is no longer to fabricate an object, but to choose one among those that exist and to use or modify these according to a specific intention. Marcel Broodthaers said that “ Since Duchamp, the artist is the author of a definition” which is substituted for that of the objects he or she has chosen…If the process of appropriation has its roots in history, its narrative here will begin with the readymade, which represents its first conceptualized manifestation, considered in relation to the history of art. When Duchamp exhibits a manufactured object…as a work of the mind, he shifts the problematic of the “creative process” emphasizing the artist’s gaze brought to bare on an object instead of manual skill. He accesses that the act of choosing is enough to establish the artistic process, just as the act of fabricating, painting or sculpting does; to give a new idea to an object is already production. Duchamp thereby completes the definition of the term creation; to create is to insert an object into a new scenario, to consider it a character in a narrative. (25)

Here, Bourriaud hits upon one of the central themes of contemporary remixing; the curatorial and the selection process which informs many contemporary “postproduction” or found footage artworks. If we look at the major thrust of Christian Marclay’s found footage films, we observe that the emphasis is on the collection of materials rather than on their presentation. Additionally, the “artists gaze” here seems to mirror the idea of the “second look.” The artist’s “definition” of the artwork implies a kind of replacement of the original coding of the work or object which indicates the transformation made through the second look. Many contemporary modes of appropriation deal with constructing “archival interventions” in which features of the archive are reproduced to facilitate transformation in their groupings and combinations.