Choc Ly Tan: A Point in Space or Time that Is or Seems infinitely Distant

Stumbled upon this, this very morning. http://chooclytan.com/a-point.php

 

The artist places and displaces various objects in the room: she does random figures in the air with a frame and indicates verticality by jumping with an umbrella. she also sticks images on the wall, including a hand, with a pointing finger in an up/down direction which is eventually decided upon by the artist. Simultaneously, a flat screen plays back what is being recorded by an upside down video camera, allowing the audience to witness both the way up, and the way down, of the performance and emphasising the feeling of weight(lessness) and Gravity. While she hangs from a horizontal pole, the artist catches a leek. She also finds a book, 'The Master and Margarita', hidden behind a small secret door. Consecutively the artist asks two people in the audience to pick a quote from the book. Using the leek she then writes it in paint, upside-down on the wall, in an attempt to make it correctly appear upright in the inverted image shown on the monitor. Sometimes she is forced to walk back and contemplates the flat screen, to better realise the failure of such attempts.

Does anyone happen to know any other works by the artist? I'm quite taken with this film.

Nathan

Conflict

If you have 10 minutes this will give you some thoughts for the day







Geoff

How Film Restoration Begins

 With the Genius of Hitchcock season unveiling the results of our Rescue the Hitchcock 9 project to restore the director’s surviving silent features, curator Bryony Dixon explains how a restoration begins.
 

 Nathan

The Universal Texture

"At first, I thought they were glitches, or errors in the algorithm, but looking closer, I realized the situation was actually more interesting — these images are not glitches. They are the absolute logical result of the system. They are an edge condition—an anomaly within the system, a nonstandard, an outlier, even, but not an error. These jarring moments expose how Google Earth works, focusing our attention on the software. They are seams which reveal a new model of seeing and of representing our world - as dynamic, ever-changing data from a myriad of different sources – endlessly combined, constantly updated, creating a seamless illusion."

Quote taken from The Universal Texture by Clement Valla, courtesy of Rhizome.

And on a similar note, here's the greatest video game of all time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMnMOEB1zmE

John

Speaking of compiling list...

On a vaguely relateable subject to Nathan's post below, Taryn Simon has been collaborating with 'technologist' Aron Swartz to create the Image Atlas. It is an interactive online work which investigates cultural differences and similarities by indexing top image results for given search terms across local engines throughout the world. Visitors can refine or expand their comparisons from the 57 countries currently available, and sort by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or alphabetical order. This work was created during Rhizome's Seven on Seven Conference at the New Museum in New York. *

You can view the Image Atlas here

Website with contemporary art typed into the search engine


The New Yorker, Culture Desk, " Taryn Simon's Visual Babel"

"Image Atlas highlights cultural differences and similarities, and questions the possibility of a universal visual language. In some searches it presents a flattening and in others it highlights the inevitability of contrast. And then there are the scrambled moments-like, I typed in the word "jew." The results yielded a crude caricature that seems to have circulated in many countries. In Syria, it presented Obama in a yarmulke, and then in Germany it was all photos of Jude Law, because Jew in translation is "jude," and clearly "jude law" is getting more hits than "jew" within those borders right now. As people move farther away from verbal communication (Instagram, etc.), it's worth questioning if visual communication is subject to the same issues of translation and misinterpretation found in verbal communication."



You can read the rest of that article here

*http://www.gagosian.com/news/2012/08/03/479

Kit

LISTS!

We've all stumbled through top 10 lists/countdowns and many a time found something new and interesting along the way. With Sight & Sound compiling their Greatest Films list, one has to wonder what modern times remember most vividly and what precious space is taken by new films. In fact, take a look at IMDb revised list. Stunning that The Passion of Joan of Arc can be thrown aside to make room for Tim Burton's Big Fish! Though let's face it IMDb is a metacritic and any old Jimbo can log on there. Though do read this article here (the main point of this post) to grasp this obsession with listing and what background information each list may hold (note: the new poll includes links where to ever-so-easily watch each film...(but then again watching films on a laptop just isn't cinema is it?))

Compiling a body of work that exceeds a lifetime into a hierarchy should be an impossibility. Film reflects society, technology, trends, culture, fashion, etc, etc. Put simply, film is a sign of the times, moments recorded in short succession and arranged into a product. I would like to imagine like many good things, you truly had to be there to fully appreciate it. For instance sitting in Newcastle watching and reading about Dogme films last year meant nothing to actually being in Copenhagen upon the release of the first Dogme film, Festen in 1998. Consider now how their trademark shaky handheld formats seem to have since been handed over to being another cliche of the horror genre...

Nathan

The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends is the Highest Form of Art

By Tom Marioni, circa 1970