[nettime-lat] Video Artists Escape Hollywood Sensibility

[Fernando Llanos <fllanos@fllanos.com>]

> Video Artists Escape Hollywood Sensibility
> July 23, 2003
>  By A. O. SCOTT
>
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> The New York Video Festival, presented every July by the
> Film Society of Lincoln Center, is an outpost of
> abstraction, eccentricity and avant-gardism planted in the
> middle of the blockbuster-dominated summer movie landscape.
> At the festival, which opens tonight and runs through
> Sunday at the Walter Reade Theater, artists use the medium
> as a tool of personal exploration, social critique and
> visual experimentation. But like the purveyors of big-money
> Hollywood action and sci-fi epics, they also occasionally
> use the rapidly evolving technologies of video animation to
> create strange and elaborate fantasy worlds.
>
> Some of these worlds will turn out to be curiously
> familiar. This year the festival, while as committed as
> ever to the difficult and the esoteric, devotes its opening
> program to one of the most popular (and profitable)
> applications of video technology, namely video games, which
> have recently superseded movies as the culture industry's
> biggest money machine.
>
> If you have ever played one of Nintendo's venerable "Super
> Mario" games, you may recognize the serene, fluffy clouds
> that greet you at the start of the opening night program, a
> lecture and "live video" presentation called "Game Engine."
> Organized by Graham Leggat and Katie Salen, "Game Engine"
> reveals that video games, the obsession of millions of
> teenagers and the guilty pleasure of at least as many
> adults, have also emerged as a vibrant collaborative art
> form.
>
> Those clouds are the work of Cory Arcangel, an artist who
> is also to give a PowerPoint presentation on how to hack
> into a Nintendo game cartridge.
>
> Other pieces show how players and designers adapt the
> environments and characters of various games to their own
> purposes, generating narrative and satire even as they show
> off their strategic mastery and manual dexterity. In "My
> Trip to Liberty City," for example, Jim Munroe turns "Grand
> Theft Auto III," a notoriously violent, seamy first-person
> game, into a comic travel diary, in which he chooses the
> "skin" of a Canadian tourist and blithely ignores the
> criminal inducements that are the whole point of the game.
>
> In "Warthog Jump" Randall Glass similarly takes the
> military game "Halo" on a wild tangent, turning what in
> ordinary play would be a terrible mistake (i.e., blowing up
> the guys on your own side) into a special effects
> extravaganza.
>
> Video art, like video gaming, is ruled by conventions:
> blurry images, affectless voice-over, electronic music,
> scrambled chronology and confessional self-consciousness
> pop up again and again. There are some influential artists
> - like George Kuchar, Donigan Cumming and Robert Frank, who
> are on the "Me and My Camera" bill this Saturday - who
> helped to set these rules and whose work therefore
> transcends them. But as usual, much of the work in the
> festival seems content to remain within established
> parameters, in a kind of safe, academic experimentalism.
>
> How many times can you watch images recorded from the
> window of a moving vehicle, however much they have been
> speeded up, slowed down, or otherwise enhanced? (Quite a
> few, apparently.)
>
> Happily, though, the ingenuity of the video gamer and
> developers is shared by some of the artists working in more
> traditional genres and with relatively low-tech tool.
> Shelly Silver, in her 65-minute <object.title class="Movie"
> idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="134545">"Suicide,"</object.title>
> subverts the norms of both travelogue and video diary,
> recording the bustle and tedium of airports and city
> streets as her narrator contemplates ending her life.
>
> The Brothers Quay, masters of the stop-motion uncanny,
> contribute a creepy wonder-cabinet excursion called "The
> Phantom Museum" to <object.title class="Movie"
> idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="139180">"Life Is a
> Dream,"</object.title> an otherwise uneven program that
> will be shown on Sunday.
>
> Anthony Goicolea, Shannon Plumb and Chris Larson, whose
> work is brought together in "Mirror Conspiracies" (tomorrow
> and Saturday), also bring a handmade surrealist aesthetic
> to the festival. Ms. Plumb, in a series of short, mostly
> black-and-white clips preceded by hand-lettered titles,
> stands in front of a stationary camera acting out banal
> scenarios made hilarious by her manner, which ranges from
> deadpan to demented.
>
> Mr. Larson constructs elaborate machines that combine the
> mechanical brio or Rube Goldberg with the sticky, gooey,
> costumed theatricality of Matthew Barney. And Mr.
> Goicolea's fairy-tale images recall the disordered,
> half-dreamed consciousness of childhood.
>
> The ways that children perceive - and confuse - fantasy,
> reality and causality are explored in Julie Talen's
> "Pretend," a harrowing, dazzling feature that will be shown
> on Saturday. A girl named Sophie decides that she can
> prevent her parents' separation by pretending that her
> younger sister, Ellie, has been kidnapped. The plan goes
> terribly awry, but it also succeeds, and Ms. Talen uses
> multiple screens to dramatize the sometimes contradictory
> implications and possible results of Sophie's act.
>
> The divided screen has occasionally been deployed by
> filmmakers to show events unfolding simultaneously. (Mike
> Figgis's <object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl"
> value="198542">"Timecode"</object.title> is arguably the
> most successful and at any rate the most compulsively
> sustained use of this technique.) Ms. Talen goes further;
> in "Pretend" the collage of images evokes the memories,
> fantasies and fears of the characters, bridging the
> distance between the objective reality of what the camera
> sees and the inner worlds that are ordinarily left to
> actors to convey.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/23/movies/ 
> 23VIDE.html?ex=1060013131&ei=1&en=c6fce445af328ce6



FLLANOS

          www.fllanos.com  >>>         seFelizconsumeVIDEO  >>>

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