No-Way Street 1:00, 2007 click on title for 6Mb QuickTime Cordoned areas and blocked streets have become an increasingly common occurrence in urban centres. The strategy of producing public spaces of exception disrupts the pedestrian’s everyday practice of writing the city. As regular pathways are rerouted along side streets and down unfamiliar alleys, the city starts to become a strange place, a more abstracted experience. No-way Street enacts the discombobulating effect of such orientation realignment through a series of multiple short video and audio loop sequences of blocked streets, diverted pedestrians and police cordons, constructed as a spatial and temporal matrix.
On Saturday 9th June Direct Language 3.2 screened in the Outside and Unknown: from the fringes of the vlogosphere programme in the Pixelodeon festival at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, USA. The programme was curated by Jennifer Proctor. Happily for those of us unable to make the trip to LA, Jennifer sent me the programme details with links to the online versions of the videos which, now the programme has screened, I am able to post so that you can also enjoy it from the comfort of your own computer. This screening is a celebration of international vloggers who push the limits of what the moving image can mean, especially in an online context. They treat video as poetry, painting, theater, soapbox, and laboratory. They fly under the radar, create for small audiences, and use the web as a venue for experimentation. You may not recognize all of their names, but they're producing some of the most groundbreaking work on the web, fusing videoblogging, filmmaking, and artistic practice. - Jennifer Proctor
Car Situations (Steven Ball/Philip Sanderson), 3:20, 1981 by Storm Bugs 7.7Mb QuickTime movie From the new compilation LP 'Supplementary Benefit' on Vinyl on Demand Records. View the entire record and get more information at www.stormbugs.co.uk
No-Way Street
