Mellart

Science Friction (1959)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:58:00 +0100

Stan VanDerBeek's ironic compositions were created very much in the spirit of the surreal and dadaist collages on Max Ernst, but with a wild, rough informality more akin to the expressionism of the Beat Generation.

Science Friction consists of animated paintings and collages of photo clippings from various newspapers( most of which is of then-President Eisenhower), combined in a form of organic development. This short is a non-verbal political satire, reflecting society, the mass media and scientific inquiry: “A social satire aimed at the rockets, scientists, and competitive mania of our time.

You can buy Visible Films, Stan Vanderbeek.

Spin Cicle

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:15:00 +0100

A short animation featuring a spinning slice of bread by Jeff Scher with music by Shay Lynch. This was made for a gallery show of films and paintings about bread.

As an underground filmmaker, Scher uses lights, abstractions and visual effects all paired with music to create experimental short films. His films have been described as animated still life as they are made from various drawings in which the images change to trigger responses within the human mind. He uses his paintings and collages by overlapping the colors and textures to seem as if they are in fact “moving” in a hypnotic fashion. Images of influential behaviorists, Hermann Rorschach and Ivan Pavlov, appear in some of his films. The films are highly irrational in their juxtapositions, but this is the intention of the filmmaker. Scher wants his viewers to create their own stories from the visuals he provides.

C'est toujours la même histoire (2007)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Tue, 9 Jun 2009 23:28:00 +0200

It’s Always the Same Story is a slight but charming teenaged anecdote, directed by Joris Clerté and Anne Morin, in which a Frenchman recalls sneaking off to see the steamy X-rated film Emmanuelle with a friend ... only to have his father take him to see the exact same film the very next day to teach him about “the facts of life.”
It made them both change one towards the other.

Oktapodi (2007)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Sat, 6 Jun 2009 18:08:00 +0200

Oktapodi is a computer-animated short film that originated as a Graduate Student Project from Gobelins L'Ecole de L'Image. It was directed by Julien Bocabeille, François-Xavier Chanioux, Olivier Delabarre, Thierry Marchand, Quentin Marmier, and Emud Mokhberi.

Two octopuses fight for their lives with a stubborn restaurant cook in a comical escape through the streets of a small Greek village.

Lavatory Lovestory (2007)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:37:00 +0200

Lavatory Lovestory is a delightful short film by Konstantin Eduardovich Bronzit. The film is a minimalist short about a lonely middle-aged public toilet attendant who sits in her little booth day after day, collecting coins from the lavatory users while she reads the newspaper and yearns for another man in her life, someone to love and hold her, fantasizing about the romantic lives that other people enjoy.

The story follows her angst and sadness, and her transformation into a happy and joyful human being. The unusual setting of a public toilet turns out to be surprisingly fitting, and make it slightly longer than conventional short films.

Panspermia (1990)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Fri, 15 May 2009 19:36:00 +0200

Panspermia is the name for the theory that life exists and is distributed throughout the universe in the form of germs or spores. This piece places the viewer in the middle of a virtual world of an aggressively reproducing inter-galactic life form, and depicts a single life cycle of this unusual self propagating system.

Karl Sims used an original software to create and animate forests of 3D plant structures. Artificial evolution techniques were used to interactively select from random mutations of plant shapes until a variety of interesting structures emerged. The subject matter of the piece suggests the underlying biological methods that were used to efficiently create an unusual level of complexity. Dynamic simulations and particle systems were also employed to achieve motions that are calculated automatically.

Dumbland (2002)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Sun, 10 May 2009 18:37:00 +0200

Dumbland details the daily routines of Ryan, a violent and foul-mouthed three-toothed man with a bulbous head, angry expression, and perpetually open mouth. The man lives in a house along with his hyperkinetic and high-stressed wife and squeaky voiced alien-like child, both of whom are nameless as is the man in the shows.
In this episode, Randy develops an interest in a neighbor's shed and proceeds to become verbally abusive towards the neighbor, which, meanwhile, reveals that he is a one-armed duck-fucker.

Dumbland is a series of eight crudely animated shorts written and directed by David Lynch.The style of the series is intentionally crude both in terms of presentation and content, with limited animation. The filmmaker describes it as "a crude, stupid, violent, absurd series."
You can download the first two episodes of Dumbland from Atom Films here.
More episodes are online at DavidLynch.com. To view them, you need to be a member of the site, or else you can buy Dumbland.

Arabesque (1975)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:45:00 +0200

James Whitney' shorts are visually based on modernist composition theory with carefully varied permutation of forms manipulated with cut-out masks. He pursue technological, theoretical, mathematical, architectonic and musical ideas which eventually led him to his masterful pioneer work in computer graphics. Meanwhile, Whitney became increasingly involved in contemplative, spiritual interests.

With Arabesque, Whitney demonstrated the principle of harmonic progression, experimenting with the eccentricities of Islamic architecture, which, though ultimately harmonic, contain many characteristic reverse curves in its embellishments.

Biogenesis (1995)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:33:00 +0200

William Latham is best known for his pioneering work in evolutionary art which he collaboratively produced with IBM UK between 1987 and 1993. Subsequently he worked in the computer games industry, exploring the use of artificial intelligence techniques. Now Latham has re-emerged into the public conscience with a return to his earlier evolutionary art
Biogenesis shows the evolution of artificial life forms in a synthetic universe where ‘survival of the fittest’ is replaced by ‘survival of the most aesthetic‘. We see cellular evolution and the replication of mutations forming chain-like structures resembling coral.

Survival of the most aesthetic in a synthetic digital universe of constantly evolving coral forms. From cell to psychedelic, this is DNA with attitude, and a reply to all those who did not think there could be life in the machine.
long synopsis
It can be viewed as a psychedelic experience or a more subtle parody of a man’s relationship with the natural world through modern technology.

Felix in Exile (1994)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:48:00 +0200

Felix in Exile is the fifth of eight films that complete the Drawings for Projection series, on which William Kentridge worked from 1989 to 1999. All the films consist of 30 to 40 charcoal drawings, and they transport poetic and political stories. As a South African, Kentridge is very conscious of his country’s history and its colonial past.
This short tells the stories of Felix, a man living in exile in Paris, and of Nandi, a woman working as a land surveyor. The woman is Felix’s alter ego. She stands for the longing for one’s homeland, and how for his sake someone bears witness to the incidents in the new, democratic South Africa.

Fundamental is the concepts of time and change. Kentridge conveys it through his erasure technique, which contrasts with conventional cel-shaded animation, whose seamlessness de-emphasizes the fact that it is actually a succession of hand-drawn images. This he implements by drawing a key frame, erasing certain areas of it, re-drawing them and thus creating the next frame. He is able in this way to create as many frames as he wants based on the original key frame simply by erasing small sections. Traces of what has been erased are still visible to the viewer: as the films unfold, a sense of fading memory or the passing of time and the traces it leaves behind are portrayed.
In the same way that there is a human act of dismembering the past there is a natural process in the terrain through erosion, growth, dilapidation that also seeks to blot out events. In South Africa this process has other dimensions. The term New South Africa has within it the idea of a painting over the old, the natural process of dismembering, the naturalization of things new.

Felix in Exile (1994)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:48:00 +0200

Felix in Exile is the fifth of eight films that complete the Drawings for Projection series, on which William Kentridge worked from 1989 to 1999. All the films consist of 30 to 40 charcoal drawings, and they transport poetic and political stories. As a South African, Kentridge is very conscious of his country’s history and its colonial past.
This short tells the stories of Felix, a man living in exile in Paris, and of Nandi, a woman working as a land surveyor. The woman is Felix’s alter ego. She stands for the longing for one’s homeland, and how for his sake someone bears witness to the incidents in the new, democratic South Africa.

Fundamental is the concepts of time and change. Kentridge conveys it through his erasure technique, which contrasts with conventional cel-shaded animation, whose seamlessness de-emphasizes the fact that it is actually a succession of hand-drawn images. This he implements by drawing a key frame, erasing certain areas of it, re-drawing them and thus creating the next frame. He is able in this way to create as many frames as he wants based on the original key frame simply by erasing small sections. Traces of what has been erased are still visible to the viewer: as the films unfold, a sense of fading memory or the passing of time and the traces it leaves behind are portrayed.
In the same way that there is a human act of dismembering the past there is a natural process in the terrain through erosion, growth, dilapidation that also seeks to blot out events. In South Africa this process has other dimensions. The very term 'new South Africa' has within it the idea of a painting over the old, the natural process of dismembering, the naturalization of things new.

Pixillation (1970)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:48:00 +0200

Lillian Schwartz is an artist, filmmaker, art historian, researcher and theorist. She was involved with the seminal Experiments in Art and Technology group in 1968, which led to her computer-based sculpture Proxima Centauri being selected for the Museum of Modern Art.

With computer-produced images and Moog-synthesized sound Pixillation is in a sense an introduction to the electronics lab. But its forms are always handsome, its colors bright and appealing, its rhythms complex and inventive.

I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Tue, 7 Apr 2009 16:19:00 +0200

In I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much, Pipilotti Rist dances before a camera in a black dress with uncovered breasts. The images are often monochromatic and fuzzy. Rists repeatedly sings I'm not the girl who misses much, a reference to the first line of the song Happiness Is a Warm Gun by the Beatles. As the video approaches its end, the image becomes increasingly blue and fuzzy and the sound stops.

Rist's classic video takes on rock music with its own tools, pushing pop's repetitive strategies and representations of women to absurd lengths. Rist's manipulation renders her voice into a parody of female hysteria and her body into a grotesquely dancing doll. Through obsessive mimesis Rist exhausts any possible legibility of the words, only to finally deliver John Lennon singing the real song.

Measures of Distance (1998)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Sun, 5 Apr 2009 13:31:00 +0200

Measures of Distances

In this video, letters from her mother in Beirut, written in Arabic, move across the screen. They are read aloud, in English, by the artist. Hatoum's mother is also heard, speaking openly about her feelings and sexuality, accompanied by images of her in the shower.

The video could be seen as a continuation of Mona Hatoum's earlier performance work: it represented a contrast between youth and age, between closeness and separation, homeland and exile.
Measuring a multitude of distances/oppositions or differences between home and exile, writing and reading, reading and translating, mother and daughter, autobiography and artistic invention, she creates a visual montage reflecting her feelings of separation and isolation from her Palestinian family. Emotional distance is measured by the separation of loved ones as surrounding space, emotional and physical, is overtaken by advancing war with its fissures, ruptures and violent breaks between family members.

The personal and political are inextricably bound in a narrative that explores personal and family identity against a backdrop of traumatic social rupture

Cornered (1988)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:47:00 +0200

Adrian Piper produces disturbingly intimate psychological theater aimed at the racial anxieties of an art-world audience more or less tacitly taken to be white and liberal.
Combining Minimalism, Conceptualism and Performance Art, she has worked since about 1970 to force viewers into an unbearable awareness of their personal complicity in what she views as a pervasively racist, xenophobic and unjust system.

In Cornered consists of a video located in the corner of a room. In front of the monitor is a long table resting on its side. With its legs pointing out from the corner, it functions as a barrier.
Piper herself sits demurely at a desk backed into a corner and explains with unflappable, schoolmarmish composure that most Americans are, like her, genetically black, even if their physical appearance seems to say otherwise. The artist’s monologue, delivered in an intimate, personal style presents the viewer with a master lesson in logic.

She also provocatively suggests that such attitudes and behavior actually create race as a perceptual category and that that category, however illusory, reinforces hierarchies of socioeconomic power and exclusion.

Non - Specific Treat (2004)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:26:00 +0100

Our desire to recognize and scrutinize the face of evil is framed by our experience of how different governments and the media have historically represented and continue to define the terrorist. Such attempts to locate and understand a threat or an enemy necessitate the creation of a character who is beyond reason, outside of civilized society and who becomes known to us as a fusion of real and fictional figures.
The figure is a young man with a shaved head wearing a black open-neck shirt, denim jacket, and silver chain around his neck. He is presented as a "non-specific threat," a gangster in a very lonely, someone who would seem or might be perceived to have no scruples about clearing the way for himself.

Willie Doherty moves the camera in a circular tracking shot around a tough looking baldheaded man with a gold chain around his neck and a denim jacket. As the camera tracks slowly around this threatening presence a male voiceover, disembodied from the central figure, makes a series of cryptic statements punctuated by pregnant pauses and he expresses explicit and veiled threats and attempts to describe the nature of his relationship to the viewer.
A group of large-scale photographs depict a young man in a variety of nondescript urban settings by day and by night. He emerges from dark alleyways and stands defiantly at street corners. The camera circles around the figure in a continuous pan so that we see every aspect of his head and shoulders front to back, back to front, and the background changes.

Jimmy the C (1977)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:51:00 +0100

A claymation President Jimmy Carter, backed by a chorus line of leggy Mr. Peanuts, is the visual of Ray Charles' voice singing Georgia on My Mind.
The song by itself is wonderful just as straight audio. But the fun with using Jimmy Carter as a foil doesn't take anything from that. It's the gut punch of juxtaposition that makes it work so well.

Jimmy Picker has uploaded more of his animation to his YouTube channel at jimmypicker.

It Wasn't Love (1992)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:45:00 +0100

This is a fractured tale of a love affair that is both heartfelt and tongue in cheek funny. Sadie Benning herself poses as various types of stereotypical masculinity and femininity: the rebel, the vamp, the biker, the bimbo. She also reveals the frustration of her position as a teenage lesbian growing up in Middle America.

This video ends on a far more positive note than many of her other films especially in terms of gaining access to an inner sense of power and autonomy rather than continuing to rely on media images and her imagination. Benning plays wonderfully with shadows and music.
Love is associated with danger and rebellion, opening up possibilities of adventure and self-discovery while reversing the ending of the traditional heterosexual romance that concludes with the submersion of the heroine's identity beneath the all-encompassing categories of wife and mother.

All the video centers on the narrator's construction of a series of imaginative roles and scenarios that enable her to act out her rebellion and defiance while reflecting her desire for autonomy, respect, and power. There is an imaginative envisioning of what it is like to have individual power and autonomy, a power that commands respect and awe in the onlooker.

Head (1993)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:47:00 +0100

Cheryl Donegan ushered in a new era of brash, low-tech performance video. Here she confronts sex, fantasy, and voyeurism in an autoerotic work out performed to pop music, and provides a perfectly choreographed simulation of desire.
The piece is incredibly direct. A woman approaches a green plastic bottle with a plugged spout sticking out from one side. She pulls the plug free, and a white milkish fluid begins to stream through the hole. So she starts to suck at the hole, lick around it. Lick the bottle up and down.

In this image of sexual pleasure and fantasy, Donegan is both subject and object, directing the action and performing for the camera without acknowledging its presence. The role she plays mimics that of a sex industry worker, whose choreographed purr and bounce fake you into believing that what she does feels good.
Donegan studies what pleasure looks like and with Head she delineates just how scripted sex may have become, and how far many of us have traveled from real taste and touch. Head is what pleasure looks like when it turns into illusion.
She also forces us to confront the essential ruse of pornographic imagery: all those women we saw live on celluloid exhibiting insatiable hunger and receptiveness. And they always loved it, always asked for more.

Inseln

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:44:00 +0100

By Goran Gnaudschun.

The Reflecting Pool (1977)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:09:00 +0100

All movement and change in an otherwise still scene is confined to the reflections on the surface of a pool in the woods. The camera angle of this film never moves. The camera is positioned in the same place for the entirety of the piece, starting from the woods and ending in the woods. Suspended in time, a man hovers in a frozen, midair leap over the water, as subtle techniques of still-framing and multiple keying join disparate layers of time into a single coherent image.

All Bill Viola's pieces concern the emergence of the individual into the natural world like a sort of of baptism. The water is a symbol of life and at the same time an important element in almost all his works. His unbroken reference water also stems from the fact that for decades now, he has drawn inspiration from Taoism, Buddhism and from Greek philosophers.
According to Viola, we cannot grasp our material world with our eyes, because no clear distinction can be made between reality and illusion. Our true identity, as Viola believes, is only visible when it is reflected.
Birth and death, our perception of time and its dissolution, consciousness, conscience and memory.

Fimage

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 22:39:00 +0100

Larry Vogel has been involved in photography since 1976 and in recent years has become a multi-talented artist using several mediums to pursue and express his creative explorations, including, photography, ceramics, painting and sculpture.

Private Hungary 1 (1988)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Sun, 8 Mar 2009 16:59:00 +0100

Private Hungary comprises more than 300 hours of home movies and an additional forty hours of interviews with the relatives of the amateur filmmakers who shot the footage.
Peter Forgacs places the original footage in context with images connoting great history and its universally recognizable political and public events. This montage interconnects great and small histories, often based on contrast or on parallel. He uses these devices in order to show both sides of a historical period, or at times simply only the down side, at the same time making the viewer more sensitive to the given period.
For most of the films, Forgacs collaborated with Hungarian minimalist composer Tibor Szemzõ.
His work with music, as well as the archive footage itself lends the footage a sense of urgency it lacked at the time it was filmed.

The first episode of the Private Hungary series tells the Bartos family Saga: a talented amateur filmmaker Zoltán Bartos, a chanson composer and lumber businessman made more than five hours of 9,5m amateur film from the late twenties until the mid sixties. In 1944 the Hungarian “Quisling government” plundered the half Jewish Bartos family. Following the Nazi period, surviving the war in a Forced Jewish Labor unite, Zoltán divorced and remarry. Later the Communists rage the Hungarian citizen's life; in 1949 his plant was nationalized and lost everything again, except his humor.

Awesome Storm Justice 41

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Fri, 6 Mar 2009 14:17:00 +0100

You can continue to read it.

Writing: Stephen Offenheim (Ugga Bugga)
Pencils: Todd Diamond (PencilPunx)
Inks: Norman Hardy (Popninja)
Colors: Jorge Rodrigo (KaRzA)
Letters: Amadarwin

Cover pencils and inks: OJH
Cover colors: Garry Henderson ( Mudcat)

Editors: Stephen Offenheim (Ugga Bugga), Dawnsknight and Amadarwin

Three Transitions (1973)

mellaart04@gmail.com (Mella) — Thu, 5 Mar 2009 17:54:00 +0100

Peter Campus' early work engaged his interest in the psychology and the physiology of perception, and was informed by the Minimalist aesthetic of the late sixties and early seventies. Especially, his video art is concerned with exploring the subtle balance between remote but penetrating and formal, but unsettling, elements.
One of his most important single-channel works is Three Transitions in which he uses chromakey processors and video mixers to create videos in the studio. This video engages this new method of perceiving oneself, Campus is watching himself live as he goes through the motions for the camera.

In three short exercises, Campus uses basic techniques of video technology and his own image to create succinct, almost philosophical metaphors for the psychology of the self. In these concise performances, he presents three introspective self-portraits that incorporate his dry humor. As Three Transitions moves between deadpan humor and seeming self–destruction, Campus explores the limits of visual perception as a measure of reality.
In each episode, Campus displaces an image of himself and eventually eradicates it. Three Transitions deals with duality in an ironic way, also with the video space made with this technological tool. The question of self is important, as the performer tries to expose the illusions the artist has set up.
Campus employs video's inherent properties as a metaphorical vehicle for articulating transformations of internal and external selves, illusion and reality. The tape's precise formalism and simplicity of execution advance the psychological wit and symbolic content.