Bren O'Callaghan » video art

More tea, vicar?

bren — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:50:47 +0000

Emma Rios

A mere glimpse of the super-fantastico illustration that Emma Rios has provided to adorn our doll's tea party at Inspace for Blood Tea And Red String. Finnish artist Sara Bjarland will also be contributing a piece to the projection screens: Blossom (2008) features brightly coloured carrier bags crumpled into balls which slowly unfurl to mimic flowers in time-lapse documentation, providing a complementary backdrop to our homemade soiree. Officially-cannot-wait.

moves10

bren — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 12:11:58 +0000

From Liverpool to Manchester and across the UK on screens, on site and online, moves celebrated its 6^th successful year by reaching out to more audiences than ever. With nearly 500 submissions from over 40 countries from around the globe, this boutique festival’s impact is greater than ever, encouraging even more talent from across the region, UK and around the world to discover and exchange new methods of telling stories centered around movement on screen through films, installations, forums and live events.

Hot Circuit: Christina Corfield

This year’s theme Framing Motion explored how practitioners choose to frame movement through their choice of setting and context to define the boundaries for screen-based works. These could be real worlds or imaginary, abstract, impossible or augmented environments defined by a specific visual intent. In looking at methods of capturing a sense of pulse and energy, the curatorial outlook also addressed definitions of stillness: the pause-and-relinquish through which motion occurs.

When We Meet Again: Clara Garcia Fraile & Sam Pearson

For the first time a series of installed works studded the halls, rooms and courtyards of Liverpool’s creative hub the Bluecoat, from Charlotte Gould and Paul Sermon's tasty AR buffet Urban Picnic, to the one-on-no-one intimacy of video goggle installation When We Meet Again (Clara Fraile & Sam Pearson). Christine Corfield’s Hot Circuit told the 10-screen tale of a 2D teenage pregnancy while viewers automatically flinched and stepped back from the violent crack of a rope pulled with gunshot force through an urban assault course, curling and lashing like an angry electric bolt (Space Drawing No.5, Sai Hua Kuan).

The Colour of Pomegrantes (Sayat Nova): Sergei Parajanov, 1968

Nowhere was the festival theme more apparent that within the rare, feature-length screening of Armenian auteur Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates. A useful and highly accessible introduction by Daniel Bird, co-lecturer in Russian and Eastern European Film at Sheffield University equipped us for what lay ahead by encapsulating the life and career of this persecuted visionary, warning us not to expect a story, sense or understanding. Instead we were asked to allow the images to wash over us, like listening to music or the view from a train.

The Colour of Pomegrantes (Sayat Nova): Sergei Parajanov, 1968

The colour-drenched stream of static tableaux that followed quite legitimately justified the movie’s claim in Cahiers du cinéma’s top 10 films of all time. A biography of Armenian poet Sayat Nova’s life told in visual and poetic form, rather than pursuing a literal course, Orthodox iconography and Persian miniatures blinked into life. Newly dyed wool is slopped from steaming cauldrons, animals pour through a hive of catacombs, quasi-religious figures glow with an unearthly light, books lie scattered across impossible surfaces, pages turning in the breeze.

The Colour of Pomegrantes (Sayat Nova): Sergei Parajanov, 1968

At the heart of all burns the arresting image of Parajadov’s androgynous muse, Georgian actress Sofiko Chiaureli, playing no fewer than six roles, both male and female. More of a cultural spa experience than a standard visit to the cinema, watching The Colour of Pomegranates is a visual feast that we can pick at or gorge upon, a precursor to Derek Jarman’s rich visual style or Matthew Barney’s super-stylised filmic orgies (see The Cremaster Cycle).

Like a butterfly cupped in the palm of a hand, this painterly dream is the very definition of movement suspended, an intake of breath before release.

Rinse and repeat

bren — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:46:23 +0000

Destination Earth (1956)

Although the central theme for this year’s AV Festival across Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Sunderland was Energy, it was the adhesive suture of Recycled Film that held the programme together and made a powerful case for shedding notions of ownership by allowing others to revisit and sculpt anew. Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Archives and Library delivered a keynote speech that fizzed and popped with genuine truisms on the current conflict between archives and potential users, including the following:

Archives are like children; they are largely conceived to fulfill the agenda of their parents.

It takes more energy to repress information and material than it does to release.

The opportunity to physically touch archive content, rather than access the ‘born digital’ alone, has the ability to engage the user in a profound manner and should not be underestimated.

Man On The Land (1951)

Prior to a day-long symposium was an evening screening curated by Rick of shorts from the Prelinger Archive: A is for Atom, a 90-minute journey through vintage animated shorts on the topic of energy, power and perceived progress, from nuclear fusion to capitalist ideologies. All are available online, from the confident cleft-chins and rooster chests of Man on the Land (UPA, 1951) to the infant capitalist propaganda of Destination Earth (American Petroleum Insitute, 1956). The naïve yard-sale of nature’s resources never looked so good: imagine if UKIP hired The Powerpuff Girls to battle blue Venusians with no visas and the political arena would be transformed.

: Trying Things Out (2007) by Vicki Bennett  People Like Us

What became referred to as The C-Word, in every sense, loomed large despite repeat attempts by panelists and filmmakers to avoid an issue with no simple answer. Vicki Bennett of People Like Us, a Boudicea amongst artists working within archive-footage, stood firm and resolute. “It would cost me £200,000 to clear copyright within the clip of the film you are about to see,” she explained, before a musical-that-shall-not-be-named burst upon the screen in a mash-up of high notes and helicopter gunships. Both Vicki and Rick were of the opinion that popular film is part of our collective palette, a memory shared by many, and as such belongs to no one person or agency but to all.

: Scorpio Rising (1964)  Kenneth Anger

Of the multitude of radio hits including Elvis Presley that feature with such apparently subversive intent within Kenneth Anger’s experimental opus Scorpio Rising (1964), all were – astonishingly - rights-cleared and paid-up. But of Ich Will! (2008), his latest collage film featuring sourced footage of The Hitler Youth, his response to permissions was unique to say the least. “Don't need 'em. War booty”, he chuckled.

: Crossroads (1976)  Bruce Conner

Elsewhere the exhibitions programme tapped into a similar vein of repurposed work: Bruce Conner’s Crossroads (1976) seemed a much more crafted, personalised exercise in adapting existing material to create something new (footage of the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946), in contrast to Anger’s Ich Will!, which feels shallow, pedestrian and empty of any additional authored intention when shown alongside his much earlier but more outrageous works.

: Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

Over at the Baltic, Jordan Baseman mixed and mounted spoken-word reminiscence with the skill of a Victorian butterfly collector. An elderly female Botanist recalls seeing a donkey being eaten alive by maggots, while a cocksure London gangster boasts of his sexual magnetism… the first lacking images but for a few final seconds, the second underscored by footage of women slowly undulating at a retro disco, sourced at the North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Even Jenny Holzer was busy adapting seemingly old-fashioned LED signage by using it to reveal censored text, piling tables with human bones and magnifying the obscured handprints of detainees, sifting traces of human ephemera to grant silenced voices a means of resurrection made all the more unnerving by her explicitly mechanical processes. Similar to the opening of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, what at first seems like streams of disassociated data begins to form grinning skulls and howling souls.

Homework: check out the wealth of the copyright-free Prelinger Archives. Because you really should.

The Rose

bren — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:26:22 +0000

Caroline Parker: The Rose

I first saw Caroline Parker performing as Caro Sparks at the DaDaAwards 09, telling filthy jokes from the perspective of a deaf woman (let's just say it touched upon noisy sex), delivering an unexpected treat with her comic signed performance of the Kate Bush classic, Wuthering Heights. It was in direct response to that performance that I approached Ruth Gould at DaDa to explore the potential for deaf and disabled video art in public space, although I couldn't have imagined that twelve months later we would be unveiling four new works as part of DaDaVisions.

Caroline Parker: The Rose

With additional support from Arts Council England, for her contribution Caroline chose to perform The Rose by Bette Midler, minus the infamous music bed. Famously satirised using perfunctory sign in the cult movie Napoleon Dynamite, Sparkle Media added augmented images paired with gesture and movement – marrying visual with non-verbal language to release a world otherwise hidden to hearing viewers.

All four films are now appearing on the BBC Big Screens in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Rotherham, Derby, Cardiff, Swansea, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Bristol, Swindon, Dover, Waltham Forest (London), Greenwich Arsenal (London), Norwich, Middlesbrough, Edinburgh.

Portrait of the Artist by Proxy

bren — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:07:29 +0000

Alison Jones: Portrait of the Artist by Proxy

If you could never see your own reflection again, would you trust others to describe your appearance? Alison Jones has done just that for DaDaVisions with Portrait of the Artist by Proxy. Originally commissioned as a sonic artwork by the Bluecoat in Liverpool, we recruited the talents of Sparkle Media to create a deliberately offbeat approach to standard subtitles. The end result maintains a key emphasis upon the audio emitted via the screen speaker system.

Alison Jones: Portrait of the Artist by Proxy

In this way the viewer/listener has to switch sensory emphasis just as Alison must as it is impossible to follow the descriptive portrait by reading the text alone. The point-of-view dips, spins and curls across a landscape of 3-D typography, lingering upon key words as multiple voices share consensus, or becoming impossible to scan as the soundscape dissolves into whispers.

Pixie Dust

bren — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:26:46 +0000

Gina Czarnecki: Pixie Dust

Gina Czarnecki's films and installations are informed by human relationships to image, disease, evolution, genetic research and by advanced technologies of image production. Pixie Dust blurs contemporary methods in scientific research – specifically, limb regrowth in salamanders and the harvesting of embryonic stem cells from pigs for use in human medicine.

Gina Czarnecki: Pixie Dust

Taking the form of a scientific televised report, observers will be drawn by the implicit ambiguity that appears to suggest the future has already arrived. What if those missing limbs through birth or accident were able to regrow, augment and fine-tune their bodies… becoming super-able? A DaDaVisions commission.

Who Do You Think You Are?

bren — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:37:19 +0000

So Many Excuses: Who Do You Think You Are?

...here comes DaDaVisions, a brace of opinionated new screen commissions developed right here in the North West and soon to appear upon TWENTY giant outdoor screens across the UK. Launching as a new strand of DaDaFest, four new artist film and video projects will face-slap shoppers with subversive and alternate interpretations of disability. I'll be posting further information upon each as the week progresses.

So Many Excuses: Who Do You Think You Are?

First up is influential agit-prop trio No Excuses, once fond of chaining themselves to buses to chant "Piss on Pity" and now reformed as So Many Excuses. Mandy Colleran, Mandy Redvers-Rowe and Ali Briggs (who some may recognise as Freda in Coronation Street) have revisited the classic Frost Report sketch from the 1960s featuring the Two Ronnies and John Cleese.

Then a comment upon the British class system but now playfully adapted to explore the stereotypes and labels that the disabled place upon each other, Who Do You Think You Are? is written and performed by SME, produced by Asta Films with vintage styling expertise by Maria Lloyd.

TV Interruptions

bren — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:18:04 +0000

David Hall: TV Interruptions 1971

Video artist David Hall confusing the living hell out of the Scottish public during the 1971 Edinburgh Festivals with his seminal TV Interruptions series. Broadcast unannounced as part of domestic television schedules, those at home on the couch were suddenly faced with the perplexing sight of the goggle box slowing filling with water from a tap, ablaze in the middle of a field or switched to fast-forward in a communal viewing room to the sound of background screams...

David Hall: TV Interruptions 1971

In celebration we are showing these again on the Big Screen Edinburgh by kind permission of REWIND, a research and preservation project for early video art at the University of Dundee. Thanks are also due to Edinburgh Art Festival and curator Lucy Keany, for baffling a new generation of unwitting observers. Appearing daily from 5th August to 5th September, at purposely unknowable timings...

Embassy Screen

bren — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:54:44 +0000

Beagles & Ramsay: When Humour Becomes Painful

The Edinburgh Annuale, now in its sixth year, is co-ordinated by the Embassy Gallery, currently housed within the Roxy Art House.  The Annuale creates a loose association between artist-run activities extant in the city all year round, initially conceived of as a challenge to the multitude of high budget, high profile international biennials which fill the art calendar.

However unlike these biennials—which pay lip service to site specificity and inclusiveness while promoting broadly the same band of well-travelled artist—the Annuale swaps the role of international host by creating an alliance between the city’s artists who temporarily form a pact to raise their visibility and champion grass-roots operations.

Embassy Screen is an inaugural programme on the Big Screen Edinburgh of local artist moving image video work including that of Beagles and Ramsay, Alex Hetherington, Alan Holligan, Shona Macnaughton, Francesca Nobilucci, Ewan Sinclair, Emma Tolmie.

20^th June – 5^th July (daily, random intervals). Full screenings on 20^th June / 1pm, 27^th June / 2pm and 5^th July / 7pm