No-Way Street1:00, 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.
4 comments:
a true concrete urban voodle "celebrating the immediacy of the everyday".
it sort of conveys, in the hectic and abrupt cut-up(s), the tensed absurdity of nowadays urban "normality".
news, re-told in a different way; the particular image becoming a generic visual of an urgency, that unfortunately seem to become a part of the urban chores. Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" sort of had anticipated some of that.
that was quick Sam!
also taxonomy: I'm not sure that I'd call this a voodle as it's highly structured and layered, and in real terms it took me a long time to make as it's the most recent iteration of various processes of refinement and processing at both the aesthetic and conceptual levels. In many ways this is the antithesis of my understanding of the voodle form which is much less determined, more immediate and casually opportunistic.
the " much less determined, more immediate and casually opportunistic" approach might- often - be much more structured and lengthy in "editing" or manufacturing time. the actual capture of footage might indeed, have those primal qualities/characteristics inherent. it could eventually be a question of temperament and outlook or, taxonometric subtleties.
would "no-where street" thus qualify as "art-video", or "art video sketch"?
could voodling have the qualities of sketching ? trial and error endeavours, however casual in their outlook and appearances, yet being serious business, nevertheless.
the work of william kentridge seems to balance between casual sketching and continuous, ardeous compiling, frame for frame. yet he has many of those intermediate stages of footage, that then end up either producing or being part of a larger/longer work.
one of the qualities of a voodle, of the act of voodling in itself, might be its inconspicuous qualities of being a video sketch, not yet placeable in recognisable, appropriate categories. voodling might be an intermediate situation/condition in its essence. a latency, a sort of go-between, a "meddler", thus even possibly acting as "mediator".
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