Public Water at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival

Public Water is installed in the Peter Scott Factory for the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in Hawick, Scotland 2 - 6 May 2018

SUBCINEMA Melbourne screening 18 December 2017

SUBCINEMA

Steven Ball

8pm 18 December 2017

Artists Film Workshop

Arena Project Space

2 Kerr Street

Fitzroy 3065

Australia

Screening Notes

Steven Ball has been working in audio-visual media since the early 1980s. In the late 1980s he accidentally migrated to Melbourne, Australia, where he continued his practice making a number of film, video and sound and installation works, as well as engaging in various curatorial, administrative, teaching and writing activities, the most significant of which was several year’s deep involvement with the Melbourne Super 8 Film Group. He returned to the UK in 2000, and since 2003 has been Research Fellow in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, where he has been instrumental in establishing the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection.

Since returning to the UK his projects have included Deep Water Web, an audio-visual installation and online collaborative work with John Conomos at Furtherfield Gallery, London (2016); Film of the Same Name (video, 2015) with Philip Sanderson; Concrete Heart Land (video, 2014) with Rastko Novakovic; the screening exhibition Figuring Landscapes, which toured the UK and Australia (artist and co-curator 2008-2010). His publications include ‘Expanded Cinema: Art Performance Film’, Tate Publishing, (co-editor and author, 2011) and writing for journals such as Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ) and Senses of Cinema.

Most recently he has concentrated on music projects, as a member of Storm Bugs (post-punk DIY outfit since 1978) with Philip Sanderson recently releasing ‘Certified Original and Vintage Fakes’ (CD and download, Snatch Tapes, 2017), and his new solo album 'subsongs.' (CD and download, Linear Obsessional Recordings, 2017), which has been described by Radio Free Midwich as “The missing link between reductionist improv and the intimate breathy song cycles of a Robert Wyatt.”

This screening brings together a selection of film and video works made over a span of some twenty years. The work covers a range of territory and approaches, in particular concerning spatiality and landscape in Australia, the UK, and elsewhere, often through the filter of his relationship to what might be thought of as a post-colonial position. The works integrate structural and materialist techniques, they are variously essayistic, experimental, rhythmically abstracted, and occasionally immersive.

Programme

Periscope 180°
(super 8, 17 min, Australia, 1992)

The title indicates the scopic and conceptual topography of the film. The film starts in Fremantle, West Australia, with nautical references (seascapes, masts, lighthouses). The second part moves in East Gippsland, Victoria, alternating indistinct images of beach, sea and sky with black and white footage of fishermen on a beach. Taking up notions from Deleuze & Guattarian deterritorialisation, and including lines taken from Stanley Kramer's 1959 film On the Beach, the voice over narration resounds with ironical autobiographical suggestiveness, “...he’s English and he’s here on some scientific job, or was it geographic? What does he do exactly?”, becoming a poetic speculation on the uncertainty of migration towards a nomadic condition of continual departure and the paradox of return: the refrain. The third and final part in aerial transit, an arrival denied by the film's ending.

The Ground, the Sky, and the Island
(digital video, 8 min, UK, 2008)

This video reworks photographs, super 8 film, sound and anecdotal text from a series of bush and outback locations across Australia during the 1990s. It takes the form of extracts from an imagined first-person journal, layered over extruded experiments with composition and movement constructing a synthetic shifting landscape. Moving through discrete but related sections, the abstracted view shifts vertically through 90°, between the closeness of the local, the ground, and the claustrophobia of the distant colonizing horizon. As it travels east from the South Australian desert, through bush, tablelands and rocky range, the video becomes a subjective essayistic meditation, in absentia, on being in the landscape, the problem of attempting to reproduce these landscapes and the uncertainty of their representation. At its inconclusion we arrive on K'gari (Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland) where we reach the edge of the known world, a space being made in an open future.

However, the Autodidact
(super 8, 17 min, Australia, 1994)

frame enlargements by Arthur Cantril

From my small back room in Elwood in 1994, with super 8 camera taking revenge on the helicopters which I was convinced might have been spying on me; not paranoid, just healthy suspiciousness. The film was then reshot through several generations of just out-of-date super 8 film given to me by Marie Craven. The variations of grain and colour determined by the stock, which included Kodachrome, Agfa Moviechrome, and Ektachome. I devised an editing structure determined by the ideas that perception of the 'present moment' lasts for around three seconds as theorised in The Dimension of the Present Moment by Miroslav Holub. The soundtrack is constructed using a similar schema, made entirely of extracts from quarter-inch tapes found in a second-hand shop, included a teach-yourself-French tape, which inspired the title.

The Defenestrascope
(digital video, 6 min, UK, 2003)

Throwing the view through windows from monumental towers in contemporary medieval European city and town. This eccentric exploration of urbanised space revolves around a setting of the traditional 16th century Norfolk song Go from the Window. The melody reconstructed from an ensemble of samples from a variety of sources, determined the choice of a series of views from 'the window' and elsewhere. Framed by a fragmented clapping rhyme it echoes Music Hall and anthropological folk recordings in a neo-rococo vaudevillian romp for the surveillance age.

Aboriginal Myths of South London
(digital video, 10 min, UK, 2010)

Aboriginal Myths of South London adapts world views associated with indigenous people of Oceania to an interpretation of the space and social history of places in South London. As the first manifestation of the project, this video is presented as its prelude and explores New Kent Road, a major road close to the artist’s home. This application of attitudes to the status of the dead and human relationship to the ground, becomes a materialist alternative to the concept of the genius loci and the familiar. The approach is measured and austere, employing an arrangement of animated photographs and voice texts that becomes a poetic essay.

Harmonic Three Three
(super 8, 23 min, Australia, 1991)

frame enlargement by Arthur Cantrill

The originating super 8 film was shot on Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland. The relatively firm sand of the beach provides one of the main roads on the island as the interior tracks become unpassable due to the loose sand. As we drove north up the eastern side of the Island we came across the rusting hulk of a ship wreck; one of the more accessible of many such wrecks dotted around the Australian coastline. The former luxury New Zealand trans-Tasman liner Maheno was sold to Japan for scrap metal. On July 9th, 1935, while being towed north by the Oonah, it hit unseasonal cyclonic conditions off Fraser Island. The tow rope snapped and it was driven ashore on the 19th July. It remains there to this day, slowly disintegrating in the salty tropical sea water. I reshot subsequent generations of the film on super 8, off the screen, concentrating on the abstraction afforded by the increasing graininess and contrast of each generation, concerned with the grain, the light, or lack of it, and the degradation of visual information. Much of the film is dark, unreadable, ghostly, shadowy. Occasionally orange light bursts through the silhouetted contrasty skeletal image of the wreck. I used all of the film shot in the re-re-re-reshooting in the final version, which results in long dark sections throughout the film. The experience of watching the film is dense, intense, quite dramatic. This is in part due to the dark ambience of the soundtrack, which was composed entirely from a recording of waves on a beach, slowed to a fraction of its original speed, employing varispeed manipulation, delay and phase effects, which were all improvised ‘live' to tape while watching the film.

81 mins total

One Minute at Furtherfield trailer by Michael Szpakowski

 
for two weekends from Saturday 25/01/14

of spectres and vapours, past and future

 
The twentieth anniversary of the lecture and publication 'Specters of Marx' by Jacques Derrida, was marked in April this year by the Hauntology: 20 Years On symposium organised at the University of Bradford. Philip Sanderson and I give a presentation at the symposium about our current work in progress Film of the Same Name. This project revisits the films we made in the late eighties, in particular Green on the Horizon and Hangway Turning. The films were made before Derrida delivered his famous lecture, but they are prescient to recent interest around forms of hauntology which, beyond Derrida's extended essaying of the status of Marxist thought in the immediate aftermath of the dismantling of the Soviet Union, has rippled through art and music and is now popularly better know as embracing other questions and resonances of the past in the present.

Our films are in part concerned with hauntings in a quite literal sense, one of the characters is based on local legends of ghost sightings, but it also draws on such paranormal phenomena as psychometry, ley-lines, and various other notions of energy embedded in the land.  The films employ forms which have become tropes associated with hauntological concerns: voices over narrate mysterious poetic phrases and faux documentary reports, shot on super 8 film they already evoke a grainy ghostly nostalgia. By contemplating what it may be to revisit, remake, reenact these projects, we are immersed in the same kind of forms of hauntology that the word has become associated with, almost to the point of cliche. In the face of this it’s hard not let a certain sense of irony creep in and for the presentation we go into a deadpan performance mode while layers of past and present manifestations of the project slip variously in and out of relationship with each other; we read adaptions of the original text, play back video of recent visits to the films' original locations, reenact the revisitations right there in the auditorium, throw in extracts from the original films, alongside recent workshop re-stagings of the original sequences, deliver mini papers on related themes, all strung together with recorded extracts from a semi-fictional journal about the project.

As a way of approaching presenting the material amassed for the project and giving it a form which might lend it to public presentation, this seems to work quite well, in spite of suspicions that the audience are simply puzzled, there seems to be enough to do more than simply tantalise and the presentation is followed by a quite wide-ranging discussion. If nothing else it gives us a way in to thinking about how to begin assembling the beginnings of a finished film, a process that is now underway.

 

Questions around hauntology resurface a month later, albeit with closer regard to Derrida's original thoughts, when I write an essay about Chantal Akerman's film D'Est for a Melbourne Cinémathèque screening. The film was made in 1993, the same year Derrida published Spectres of Marx, and in it Akerman visits the (then recently former) Soviet Union 'before it was too late' [sic]. The coincidence of the anniversary of the film and the book, and their partly shared subject of the post Soviet Union, as well as the aforementioned reawakening of interest in the concept of hauntology, leads me to post-Marxist speculations about the resonances and relationships between the recent and current haunted reappearance of these formulations.

 
Future ghosts begin to appear through videos made for the vapor collecting Vimeo group project initiated by Michael Szpakowski, following a conversation we had had about the 'vaporware' music phenomenon. Vaporwave as a primarily musical practice, fascinates me with its engagement with the forms of late capitalism, often taking quite cheesy ‘80s and ‘90s, occasionally recognizable smooth funk and MoR, slowing, glitching, pitch-shifting it into hazy melancholia, immersed in the world of the shopping mall and commerce as both repellant and attractive, a kind of post-accelerationist form that speaks to a contemporary on- and off-line capitalist experience, while forging a more heightened affective aesthetic, it ranges not just across sonic forms but also appropriates video material. I may write more about this in the future but for more information and links to examples Adam Harper writes a couple of quite enlightening pieces for Dummy magazine last year and then a year later, while Aural Incognito also writes about vaporwave, particularly interesting is his framing of it as contemporary industrial music. 

The shopping mall escalator of vaporwave chimes with my interest in the private/public spaces of late capitalism, both the real and their virtual representations if such a distinction can still be made, and vapor collecting is an opportunity to try a few quick experiments with the reproduction of such spaces.  The works reuse and manipulate material mostly sourced on the web, as well as self-captured video (if such a distinction can still be made). They are immersions in capitalist spaces, the hazy logic of late capitalism melts into pixels, in part suggestive of an internet consciousness as imagined through the blandest of neo-liberal banality. They embrace the aesthetic and the ambiguous contradictions of a relationship to such places, the repulsion from and the attraction to their seduction. The imperative here is to distort and amplify affect through audio-visual effects, slow motion, pitch-shifting, repetition, and in so doing suggest hallucinations of spaces of the near future, imagining a time, perhaps post-consumerism, when the spaces of capitalism are theme parks, pure spectacle, within which a dream-like melancholic drift is the only activity available.

These works already have a life beyond the internet as a selection of the vapor collecting group videos screened at the Synthetic Zero event at BronxArtSpace in New York.

Capital Wharf Station and Systemic Risk Plaza from the vapor collecting series are also soon to be screened as part of the Tuned Cities screening programme at Baltic 39, Newcastle on 21 - 22 September. 

Western pixelated blur trail (accelerated obfuscation mix), one of the videos posted to the vapor collecting group is an ambient remix of an already ambient video From the West made for the latest edition of Kerry Baldry's One Minute project.   After being immersed in virtual representations of shopping malls, for this video I pay a visit to the most recent, and in some ways most notorious, example locally of such a place (being part of the Olympics-led regeneration and reportedly a crime hotspot - perhaps an appropriate reputation for a beacon of consumerism).

Not being a regular habitué of such places, this first trip to Westfield shopping mall in Stratford offers some revelations. I notice two things in particular: one is that it seems to have been designed as not just retail space, but also for leisure; there are a number of places where one can stop, relax, sit down, much like as in an airport lounge (which themselves increasingly resemble shopping malls). The other observation is that while the place is buzzing with people the shops are mostly empty and appear to be doing little or no business. Have people not come here to shop?

Where earlier ghosts of political/social totalitarianism reemerge in Chantel Akerman's films 'from the east' (D'Est), what future ghosts of political/social capitalist totalitarian consumerism emerge from the west?

I think back to Derrida's writing in 'Specters of Marx' and I try to imagine a paradox of western consumerism after the fall of capitalism: now the shopping mall is a kind of theme park, a purely social space for people to hang out in, it retains its aesthetics, architectural structure, etiquette, and customs but the crucial ingredient, mass consumption, is missing, reenacted only in the performance of the social habits of the act of shopping. It has become a ghost of itself.

From the West screens as part of One Minute Volume 7 at Cofi Roc, Caenarfon, Wales, 6 – 7 September; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, 28 September; Projection Rooms, The Museum of Club Culture, Hull, 26 -27 October; and Furtherfield Gallery, London, 25 -26 January and 1 – 2 February 2014.

Dodgy Provenance and the Fantastic Mundanity of Sound in Space

The final event in the Visual Thinking: Between Sound and Light workshop that I organised with Rob Mullender and Duncan White at Camden Arts Centre was presented on Saturday 16 February. For the workshops we had proposed that invited participants respond to the sounds of the Film in Space exhibition curated by Guy Sherwin.

We posed the question 

...taking the installed works' existence in the space and time of the exhibition as a given, what might become of sound as their residual and mutable extension?

The sound that we were inviting response to were those that Rob and I had recorded in the gallery space during the exhibition. Rob had concentrated on making close-up recordings of the machinery and sounds in the show, most often those of the 16mm projector parts, squeaky reels and so on, while my recordings were of the ambient sound of the rooms, ostensibly that of each piece, or at least in close proximity, using binaural microphones.  Of course the sound in the room at the point of viewing a specific piece didn't necessarily reflect the actual intended (or otherwise) sound of the work. Rather it was the sound of everything inside and outside the room relative to the position in which I was standing.

Our outline statement for the project suggested that

…faith to the provenance, authenticity, veracity and intention of the originating work is less crucial than the possibility of the extensible production of new material given birth through the process, giving free reign to transformative imaginative reconfigurations.

In the event the participants didn't necessarily take the brief quite so literally; Aura Satz and Steve Dorney presented a fascinating range of devices that demonstrated the mechanics of perceptual remapping of sound and image; Jan Thoben and Rob Mullender examined different methods for transforming light into sound, with Rob presenting his photosonic recordings of the show; Andy Birtwistle gave a lecture on experimental film and sound which became all but obfuscated by its own noise in the hands of Rob Mullender's layering manipulation; David Toop presented an intimate and personal essay about the silence of Annabel Nicholson (a version of which is published on his blog).

For my performance Dodgy Provenance and the Fantastic Mundanity of Sound in Space I took the recordings that I had made, looped them and imagined an alternative provenance for them, inventing a narrative which was quite fantastical while tracing a mysterious mundane situation, in effect it became something of a science fiction journey in which the continual presence of the sound of 16mm projectors became reinterpreted as the engines of some kind of implied inter-planetary craft. I performed it as a spoken word text accompanying the relevant sounds, the room in darkness, I was seated behind the audience.

The text was written very quickly and only finished the night before I performed it.  It does, I hope, strike the balance of being a slightly absurd mundanity, perhaps with more work it might have been more outlandish. It was very much an experiment that could become a process applied to any number of sounds, and perhaps I will make more of these in the future. 

Here is a recording of the performance:
  download mp3 

Later that day Duncan White performed A History of the Rectangle.

Travelling Practice - Directors Lounge special screening

Digital video works 2003—2010
curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

21:00, Thursday, 27 Oct. 2011
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

programme:

Metalogue (26:37, 2003),
Direct Language (10:00, 2005 ­ 2008),
The Ground, the Sky, and the Island (7:45, 2008),
Aboriginal Myths of South London (10:27, 2010),
Personal Electronics (26:00, 2010)

more details, with an essay by the curator

Seeing in the Dark - A Group Show

curated by Sam Watson, Adam Phillips (CIRCA Projects), Steven Ball

more information

Glitch vs Scratch

The MisALT Screening Series returns this Sunday, October 16th at a new location and with an exciting program of experimental film and video that explore and celebrate the distortion, destruction, and decomposition of their respective mediums.

MisALT Screening Series Presents: Glitch vs Scratch.
Sunday, October 16th, 2011. 8pm , $6.00
Artist Television Access
992 Valencia St. San Francisco, CA

This screening seeks to create a dialog between artists working in Scratch Cinema (film based practices that make interventions on the celluloid level) and Glitch based video and media practices (which manipulate images by exploiting vulnerabilities on the molecular and electron level of video tape and code), to bridge the gap between work that focuses on the material underpinnings of cinema and work that brings attention to the often invisible foundation that lies beneath the digital moving image.

The bubbling, flickering, abstractions of decaying, damaged, and melting celluloid meet the frantic and ghostly distortions of mangled signals and scripts.

Featuring:
Jodie Mack, “Unsubscribe #3: Glitch Envy”
Tsen-Chu Hsu (Taiwan), “Cotton Sugar”
Florian Cramper (Netherlands), “How to picturize two Kafka short
stories within one hour in a hotel room”
Charlotte Taylor, “Secrets”
Péter Lichter (Hungary), “Light Sleep”
Alberto Cabrera Bernal (Spain), “12 Erased Trailers”
Christine Lucy Latimer (Canada), “MOSAIC”
Anna Geyer, “Good Bye Pig”
Nick Briz, “Binary Quotes”
Adam R. Levine, “Koh”
Michael Betancourt w/ FsLux, “One”
Steven Ball(UK/Australia) “The War on Television”
Lili White, “Got ‘Cha”
Drone Dungeon “Phantom Wegman I-III”
Channel TWO “In a []”
Ted Davis “What make up a Surprising Image”
Lennon Batchelor “Focus on the Family”

Curated by Tessa Siddle

Urban(e) Environments

ACMI Gallery in Metalogue

This Wednesday 23 March Melbourne Cinémathèque will show a programme of my recent video as part of an evening of three programmes called Urban(e) Visions. My programme is sandwiched between John Smith’s War Diaries and Of Time and the City by Terence Davies, elevated company indeed and it's interesting  to me for my work to be in the context of, on one hand Smith’s situated reflections on the war on terror, and on the other Davies’s documentary revisiting of his Liverpudlian childhood. Interesting partly because this collection of my work is hardly as thematically, and perhaps formally, focussed as its neighbours'. However Cinémathèque has thoughtfully titled my programme FORMAL ENVIRONMENTALISM and describes it as work that “explores the geography and topography of physical landscapes and technological environments”.  In an attempt to flesh this out a little, I have provided some programme notes with an introduction suggesting that the programme  “…covers a range of territory, as digital materialist experimentation meets spatial exploration to become urban landscape study and hyperlocal excursion. Concretist formal processes explore and exhaust species of spaces and media, producing variously eccentric musically rhythmic structured works, and abstracted, essayistic studies."

Reflecting on these digital video works, I think that there is a sense in which many of them do strike a tricky balance between the specificity of place and formal process and techniques, but that specificity is often less to do with the qualities of the place -  an essence that might once have been called the genius loci - but more the way that my construction of place is an abstraction. In short I’m not so sure how ‘successfully’ these works do actively ‘explore’, ‘interrogate’, ‘construct’ (unsatisfactorily metaphorical words in themselves) the specificity of place.  Some, such as The Defenestrascope and Metalogue, are constructed from images captured in diverse places: in the former Lucca in Italy, Berlin, and London, while its ‘musical’ structure draws on English folk song and samples as diverse as Music Hall and Chinese traditional song, the neologism of its title suggests throwing views out of the window; while the latter ranges from London, Pisa, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne... the neologism of its title signals it as a travelogue in which metadata has risen to the surface.

One reason I am interested in screening Metalogue in this programme is because a section of it was captured somewhere several storeys below where the screening will take place, in what is now the gallery at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), the images taken from a private tour of the space I was given while the building was still under construction.

The final work in the show Aboriginal Myths of South London, might carry a slightly provocative title in an Australian context. It is in part an attempt to speculate what might happen if I articulate what I understand of certain Australian Aboriginal attitudes to the relationship between the history of a place and its specificity, in relation to the history of the now deceased people who once inhabited that place. It has occurred to me that the indigenous Australian attitude to the dead affords a level of respect entirely lacking from a European belief system, which plays itself out in terms of ethical protocols and legality.  The video is a first attempt to bring such a philosophy close to where I live, to New Kent Road in south London, as a way to pay closer attention to the specificity of that place and apply a pragmatic materialism in the face of what I think might mistakenly be considered to be the mystical notion of the genius loci.

Refenestration

The Defenestrascope screening at:

InCounter sound______video_____performance 

Friday 4th March

7pm- 3am @ the Bussey Building, opposite Peckham Rye Rail
Tickets: £7 on the door, £5 in advance from http://incounter.eventbrite.com
Doors open 6.30pm

with FREE MIDNIGHT SPAGHETTI

A programme of work exploring structure and process through sound, performance, and videos. With a special screening (World premiere) of James Benning’s new work YouTube Trilogy at 7pm

performances by: Anne Bean + Chris Gladwin + Richard Wilson, Stephen Cornford, Melanie Clifford, Howard Jacques, Kalendar + Clutter, Kaya King, J Milo Taylor, Rachel Moore, Ring Mod Orkestra + Marlon Random, Thomas Pigache + Yann Leguay (ARTKILLART)
with InCounter DJ Matt Brown
videos by: Holly Antrum, Steven Ball, Katy Connor, Riccardo Iacono, sue.k., Erica Scourti, Maria Theodoraki

live link with Resonance 104.4FM 8 - 9pm. Bring FM radio / mobile phone to take part.

Recalling the Shots

Actor - David Hall & Tony Sinden, 1972

On Wednesday 8 December I will be presenting Recalling the Shots at Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle upon Tyne.  The programme is part of the Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere series of exhibitions by CIRCA Contemporary Art Projects, which has so far presented shows by Stuart Pearson Wright, Henry Coombes and until Thursday 9 December Lu Chunsheng.

Recalling the Shots cuts across the received history of artists' moving image, featuring work from the past 40 years including experimental cinema classics, rarely screened artists’ films, rediscovered seminal video works, through to new and recent contemporary works.  The works in the programme move beyond appropriation and deconstruction techniques as they engage with cinema, television and digital media conventions and phenomena to consider, reconstruct and reinterpret them in new and unusual ways. Recalling the Shots includes work by Sarah Dobai, David Hall & Tony Sinden, Mark Lewis, Anne McGuire, Matthew Noel-Tod, Manuel Saiz, Erica Scourti, John Smith and Mark Wilcox.  Reproduced below is the catalogue essay and programme details.

Recalling the Shots 

A critical artists’ film and video practice inevitably exists in relation to mainstream media and there is a history of attempts to rouse or frustrate the viewer into an awareness of its supposedly pernicious forces of control, its deleterious effect upon the hapless spectator ignorant of its lack of agency and of the damage done.  In 1951 Lettrist Maurice Lemaitre provoked viewers and engineered civil chaos for a Paris screenings of his “general butchering of the cinema” (Lemaitre quoted by Christian Lebrat in the lecture Lettrism: History, Theory and Cinema, 1990) Le Film est Deja Commence? (Has the Film Already Started?); in the mid-sixties Nam June Paik famously asserted “television has been attacking us all our lives, now we can attack it back” (Gene Youngblood, ‘Nam June Paik: Cathode Karma’, Expanded Cinema, 1970); while in the seventies Peter Gidal’s polemical anti-narrative position dictated that illusionist narrative in 'dominant cinema' "places transparency and representation/illusionism at the centre of oppressive structuring in society" (Peter Gidal, ‘The Anti-Narrative’, Screen, 1978), leading him to make films intended to alienate the viewer into being keenly aware of the fact of their watching a film.

This brief chronology of discontent brings us to a point where, post Modernism, artists started using more sophisticated approaches to the conventions of television and cinema.  By the 1970s televisual pop had already begun to eat itself, with a self-reflexivity often manifested in the form of satire or comedy (look no further than Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC TV 1969-74) for evidence of this).  Artists were also beginning to appropriate and adapt media forms and language with a more nuanced critique of the idea of cinema and television, tactically reclaiming autonomy by rewriting the "simulacra the system distributes to each individual" (Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984).

Each work in this collection, in differing ways, shuffles and remixes the institutional codes, conventions and phenomena of cinema, TV and the media.  Each has been selected to engage with elements of those conventions, redefining their phenomenological roles.

The Actor:  Deconstruction in artists’ film and video finds an early exemplar in David Hall and Tony Sinden’s 1972 film Actor.  Inspired by Hall’s attendance at a BBC TV session for editors and directors, where examples of what not to do in shooting and cutting a scene were presented , the eponymous actor becomes locked in an aporia, a self-referential impasse.  As he unsuccessfully attempts to resolve his ostensible role in relation to and in conversation with an assumed audience, a monologue worthy of Beckett traces the actor’s absurd existential crisis, the fatal ontology of an on-screen persona.

The Director: The actor above is entirely scripted and the tactics employed to demonstrate the artificiality of the situation determined by the artists; John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) conversely, assumes directorial control after the fact: the authority of the voice-over preempting the everyday events of a North London street to achieve the illusion of absolute control over it.  As we become aware of the reality of the situation the film is transformed into a work of humorous deconstruction of notions of authority and the construction of the illusion of reality employed by cinema.  Smith was particularly inspired by Francois Truffaut’s film Day for Night (1973) during which a megalomaniacal film director issues instructions to actors and passers-by alike.

The Remake: Actor and The Girl Chewing Gum demonstrate classic deconstruction techniques as post-structuralism would have it in the sense that they are texts that have dismantled themselves.  Now considered as a classic text of Video Art deconstruction in its own right, Calling the Shots by Mark Wilcox (1984) is also an appropriationist deconstruction of a previously extant text: Douglas Sirk’s classic Hollywood melodrama Imitation of Life (1959), itself a remake of a 1934 film.  Wilcox’s fragmented ‘remake’ is complete with extracts from the original film, revealing the conditions of its own construction in the TV studio, the mutability of the actors, roles and script, as well as the then state of video art technology in the form of the repeat edit.

Post Postmodernism moving image across mainstream media arrives in many ways as already deconstructed and artists do not so much evince this as to create new formal relationships, resonances and formulations, through remaking and remodelling.

The Fading Star: In I Am Crazy And You're Not Wrong (1997), Anne McGuire plays the television singer past her prime with virtuoso just-reigned-in hysteria.  Like a suspended slow motion train wreck that never quite happens, the video echoes a voyeuristic cultural fascination with tragic fame.  But playing to whom?  Is there, was there ever, an audience?

The Extra: As the title suggests Mark Lewis’s The Pitch (1998), indeed takes the form of a pitch to camera, but who is his viewer, and to whom is he pitching?  The role of the extra, the apparent passer-by in the cinema that so intrigued John Smith, is revisited as Lewis calls for more attention to be paid to its role and existence in the feature film.  The camera pulls back revealing Lewis, a one-time extra himself, surrounded by his subject, as he uses industrial cinema techniques to reflect upon the conditions of industrial filmmaking.

Sound and Music: sync and non-sync.  Two pieces approach these phenomena from different directions and to quite different ends.  In Manuel Saiz’s Specialized Technicians Required: Being Luis Porcar (2005) the relationship of the voice-over artist to the star actor is neatly inverted.  How much of the persona of John Malkovich is the actor known by that name, and how much is actually the voice by which he is known to millions of his viewers?  Atomic by Matthew Noel-Tod is a simulacrum of the music video by Blondie that begs the question of what happens to the vehicle for a song when the sound to image relationship is reversed through replacement.  Apocalyptic imagery becomes dramatised, heightened and remobilised by association.

Landscape as location: Going back to ‘nature’.  One might occasionally hear it said of a spectacularly cinematographed mise en scène, particularly of the Western genre, that the landscape is considered as being central, as though a character.  In Sarah Dobai’s Nettlecombe (2007) the landscape is ‘performed’ as non-human elements such as the strength and direction of the wind, the movement of the trees and bushes are all choreographed.  Set as it is in a landscape garden, an artificial wilderness, the film critiques the artificiality of landscape representation, nature as essential and undetermined is a cinematic illusion.

Landscape as information: In the Information Age moving image media proliferates in many forms across every available device and platform as material and information as content and generic taxonomy become indistinguishable.  In Erica Scourti’s new work Woman Nature Alone (2010), rather than being a physical construction as in Nettlecombe, ‘nature’ is a generic keyword (and one that could stand in for ‘landscape’) for the setting or location of human activity.  It would seem that shots and gestures are now collected in databases, metadata has replaced creative invention and interpretation, in the world of stock images and footage content is described by keywords and organised with tags.  Scourti’s tactical cunning revivifies the database by reclaiming the anonymity of categorisation as a series of short self-portraits that writes the individual into the industrial.

Programme

Actor David Hall and Tony Sinden (UK, 1972, 11:00, original 16mm)

An (intentionally unmistakable) actor holds a conversation on a telephone, only his voice is heard throughout.  His scripted monologue attempts to draw the audience across the time barrier between the time when the film was shot and when it is seen, gradually revealing that the conversation is a hypothetical (impossible) one with the audience themselves.  Unconventional juxtapositions are applied in the editing to support this and ultimately to pose questions about the accepted notions of temporal and spatial continuity.

- Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film catalogue, Hayward Gallery, 1977

The Girl Chewing Gum John Smith (UK, 1976, 12:00, original 16mm)

In The Girl Chewing Gum an authoritative voice-over pre-empts the events occurring in the image, seeming to order not only the people, cars and moving objects within the screen but also the actual camera movements operated on the street in view. In relinquishing the more subtle use of voice-over in television documentary, the film draws attention to the control and directional function of that practice: imposing, judging, creating an imaginary scene from a visual trace.

- Michael Maziere, ‘John Smith's Films: Reading the Visible’, Undercut 10/11, 1983

The Pitch Mark Lewis (UK, 1998, 4:00, video)

Mark Lewis has made a series of films that isolate particular elements of mainstream and avant-garde cinema, which he identifies as cinema's real inventions.  In the work shown here he delivers a pitch about his desire to make a big-budget film devoted exclusively to film extras, usually seen only as the human backdrop against which the central stars perform.

Woman Nature Alone Erica Scourti (UK, 2010, 10:00, video)

Woman Nature Alone shows a series of micro-performances enacted in response to captions and taglines of imagery taken of stock video and photography sites that corresponded to the keywords ‘woman’, ‘nature’ and ‘alone’. Each of the videos was uploaded to YouTube on daily basis, only 2 seconds snippets of which appear in the final film.  This version fashions the range of activities into a loose narrative, covering various emotional states, times of day and weather conditions of a woman alone in nature.

Nettlecombe Sarah Dobai (UK, 2007, 7:00, original 16mm)

This fixed-frame work depicts a landscaped garden whose stillness is broken by the wind that plays across it. As the work itself reveals, the wind in Nettlecombe is achieved thorough an orchestrated performance of wind machines and ropes in which the trees and bushes in the garden are animated like puppets within a constructed set.

Specialized Technicians Required: Being Luis Porcar Manuel Saiz (Spain, 2005, 1:00, video)

Luis Porcar, a well known Spanish dubbing actor, speaks for one minute about his work when dubbing the voice of the American actor John Malkovich. The video is presented dubbed into English by John Malkovich himself, thus closing the conceptual loop of the work with his collaboration.

Atomic Matthew Noel-Tod (UK, 2003, 5:00, video)

Atomic is a shot-for-shot remake of the 1980 music promo video for the pop song by Blondie.  Recreated with a Debbie Harry look-a-like, the video replicates the imagined post-apocalyptic setting of the original video with the kitsch, vamp costumes and lo-fi, homemade stage set. The soundtrack of the original song, is replaced with a contemporary score for FW Murnau's silent vampire film Nosferatu (1922).

I Am Crazy And You're Not Wrong Anne McGuire (USA, 1997, 11:00, video)

A wonderful witty work about nostalgia and desperation.  Ann McGuire portrays a Kennedy-era singer performing in a space where theatre meets television. McGuire's Garlandesque gestures provide both a sense of tragedy and humour. I am Crazy and You're Not Wrong weaves narrative, performance, memory and history into a ironic and haunting work of unique proportions.

Calling the Shots Mark Wilcox (UK, 1984, 11:00, video)

Calling the Shots remakes a technicolor sequence from a 1950s Hollywood movie – not once but three times.  It progressively exposes the artifice and mechanics of production; behind the painted set plus poised actors, lie cameras, lights and technicians.  Reconstruction becomes deconstruction.  Simultaneously questions of the representation of women are raised and the power politics of gender are explored.

- Mark Wilcox, Subverting Television, Film and Video Umbrella, 1984.