A link today. To this brilliant Francis Bacon doc from 1985.
The South Bank Show, top notch 1980's Sunday night viewing for Irish teens such as myself.
31.5.07
South Bank Show
30.5.07
Dream - John Cage
Emily Mazo play's John Cage's 'Dream'. The video was performed live with the music at The Stone - complete with local police cars in the background. The images were shot when David & I were in Helsinki for an exhibition in 2004 in a place called Pasila-Böle - described by our Finnish friends as a 1970's utopian social housing experiment. The images were manipualted afterwards at the Experimental Television Center in upstate New York.
24.5.07
The Pledge
The pledge read at the opening ceremony of the Community Games National Finals
Sé aidhm na gCluichí Phóbail cairdeas fearúlacht agus cothrom na féinne a chothú agus a mhúnlú i measc an phobail uilig, Dearbhaimidne, páistí na hÉireann, go ndéanfaimid ár ndícheall a bheith dílis do ídealacha na gCluichí Phobail. Cé gur mhian linn go léir an chraobh a bhaint amach, mar sin féin tuigfimid gur tábhachtaí go mór spiorad coir, macánta ionraic a chothú tríd na gCluichí seo.
Measaimid-ne má éiríonn linn cuspóir na gCluichí seo a bhaint amach gur sásta agus gur aontaíthe an pobal a bheidh again uilig in ár gceanntair féin, in ár mbailte féin, in ár gcathair in ár gCondaethe féin. Ní neart go cur le chéile.
23.5.07
GCN interview
Brian Finnegan from the GCN (Gay Community News) in Dublin did an interview with me last week...and here it is.
22.5.07
A film map
A stack of post-it notes stuck to the wall...a structure used to edit sixty hours into less than two. Music from the film by Dennis.
21.5.07
Donnybrook
Dublin circa 1992. Listening to Laurie Anderson
Walking and falling.
I wanted you.
And I was looking for you.
But I couldn't find you.
I wanted you.
And I was looking for you all day.
But I couldn't find you.
I couldn't find you.
You're walking.
And you don't always realize it, but you're always falling.
With each step you fall forward slightly.
And then catch yourself from falling.
Over and over, you're falling.
And then catching yourself from falling.
And this is how you can be walking
and falling at the same time.
20.5.07
Early Kate
I spent a week at the Experimental TV Centre in New York in the winter of 2005. It's an amazing archive of analog video technology, Jones Colorizers, a wobulator made by Nam Jun Paik, a full room of delights. I filled about 40 hours of tape with the fruits of the residency. You can configure the system any way you like, feeding one machine into the next, multiple channels into a nest of processing devices, before the final video signal emerges at the other end transformed.
Here's a short excerpt of one of those tapes, a revisiting of Kate Bush's first appearance on Top of the Pops to perform 'Wuthering Heights'. I fed several versions through a Sandin Image processor, basically a very early video synthesiser which looks like a giant telephone exchange. You key and colour the images by connecting different parts of the board to each other, tweaking the signal as it passes through. And it became a bit of an obsession. I have about 90 minutes of this. Here's one pass of the song. The pop star transformed in the technology of her time.
For more info on Sandin click here.
http://www.audiovisualizers.com/toolshak/vidsynth/sandin/sandin.htm
19.5.07
18.5.07
GHOSTS
A music video of sorts from a few years back. Made for The Queen of Ireland, Veda Beaux Rêves, the video is an element of a performance...it plays on a giant screen behind her as she performs the song..in this case 'Ghosts' by Japan.
17.5.07
Letters with Tim
Tim Blue and I were chatting on the emails today. He in Berlin, me on my Brooklyn sofa. Here's what we said.
Hallo Pablicity,
The blog is very nice. I streamed the flicks and clicked the pics. Do you know how much your work informs my own? Well, it does. I just realised this recently when having a private Rowley Festival. I think it has to do with attempting to understand the power of Image.
Recently I have had a feeling of losing some nice things, and have made attempts to get them back. Mainly music and image, because for me these were communal things in the beginning, and they have become increasingly solitary, which caused me to feel as if the Source was lost.
It was mentioned to me by a Marc that my fixation on the Natural may be the result of making experimental films. This was meant as a playful jibe at a comment I had made in admiration of a tree. I thought it was funny, but it triggered a series of thoughts that stayed with me for the next day. I thought of the term, “Formal” in describing a certain type of experimental work, which in turn led me to think of the study of the variety of Forms in nature. Geometry of leaves, petals, the slopes of rolling hills. I had read in an interview with an Iranian film maker that he believed the history of Western film can be traced to it’s origins in painting, and Eastern could likewise be traced to a lineage of poetry. On my bicycle I thought how I always have envied painters. Though I really do not know for sure what is meant by Formal, I remembered what impressed me greatly when seeing Paul’s work in progress was the reduced scale of the working copy which not filling the entire screen, and surrounded by black, the natural looked artificial, like a painting. I liked the natural presented this way, as if it gave a certain truth in art; this is not Real. I have since put many things these reduced size boxes of moving images. Mostly Ghosts.
My love to you,
Tim
Timb!
Thank you for another beautiful email. I'm glad you are finding the communal again. I agree that we are both foamy mouthed image whores straining to put ghosts in boxes, and pointing to a tree as if to say, 'See, this is possible. We can do this too'. Brakage of course knew this, Jarman too, and most enthusiasts who found themselves on an optical printer, suddenly drunk with the knowledge of how to change time's constant rate. I remember my first hand processed super 8 experiments, where I crammed rolls of film into tiny tins and then tinted them in golds and violets. The image barely hanging on, dark shifting shapes on blasted bleached out light strips. Lots of these were pictures of nature, swinging plastic flowers, plastic and non plastic palms. And water. My early obsession with it and the way it conspires with light to deceive the eyes.
The other half of the footage was of people. But the portraits I found fell short. To show someone's face meant nothing. It added little to looking at their face without a camera at all, and served only as a record of a moment. Where the nature sequences made something that had the richness of an image, the frames of peoples faces were only stills of blankness in lines. It was up to us, looking back on the reels, to decide how to respond. Emotionally? With this blankness? How could that be possible?
Except for one shot, a group of strikers shot from a distance. Here, as a group, the flattening of purpose surpassed the inadequacies of my early silent filming. But yet this flattening of purpose was immediately apparent as the sticky fly trap of abstracting the individual and the group, the Leni Riefenstahl mode, flocks of hats and flags united in purpose. Foamy mouthed Fascism.
Maybe this was why our first feature shows the back of the main character's head for the first 15 minutes. In some ways it was an attempt to work through this image blankness, to place a person in an image. Holding back on the face, not having the face ever speak, then drowning the viewer with the loveliness of the image and the horror of history.
These experiments are ongoing. These days it is the residue of memories in broken down fairgrounds I am piecing together, while the faces speak directly to us. Somewhere between the recording of the record and the polishing of nature as it is whittled away.
XXX
Pablo
PACIFIC
A film from ten years ago, and one of my first super eight adventures. A record of a day at the beach in California with friends.
Sleep No More
Here's a short excerpt from our recent two channel video 'Sleep No More'. The installation here was at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny Castle last month. The piece takes the built in encoding of the standard DVD player and reprogrammes it in order to create a self generating work. The encoding causes the DVD player to select pairings of images and sounds according to rules based on patterns found in gene reproduction. The images, a collection of animated drawings, are then presented in infinite sequences, much like the DNA sequences at the centre of our own genetic coding.
Each time the two DVD players are set in motion, the programming generates a unique and infinite sequence of pairings. In a sense, creates a new work. The audio elements are composed of harmonic piano intervals, which are also selected by the DVD programming to create a new and unique soundtrack for each playing of the piece. In the background you hear the mechanical prepared piano of 'Gravity Loop', the cello from 'Commonwealth', and the sines of 'Some Americans'.
16.5.07
New studio minute
Here's two I made (working remotely with David)
http://www.condensate.net/condense.html
http://www.condensate.net/motion.html
So these two events, the one minute video friends reunion, and the new studio below, are here in this video. A video shot in a minute, from 11.52 to 11.53. The lovely music is borrowed from Hauschka
13.5.07
Double Bind
Asylum (1972)
Amazing doc by Peter Robinson (dir) Richard W. Adams (camera/edit).
From the Kino website:
"In 1971, filmmaker Peter Robinson and a small crew entered a world of anarchic madness and healing compassion unlike any other. The resulting film, Asylum, records their seven week stay in radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing’s controversial Archway Community -- a London row-house where the inmates literally run the asylum. Laing’s conviction that schizophrenics can only heal their shattered "self" where they’re free and yet are held responsible for their actions, challenged patients, doctors and, in Asylum’s incredible document, the filmmakers, to live communally and peacefully."
I recorded some excerpts and re-worked them, in a way mimicing the double-bind Laing talks of in the image treatment. It's interesting to think of this in terms of the filmmaking process, especially when the filmmakers set up this 'immersive invasion' style of gathering images and stories. You wonder what effect they had on the day to day goings-on in the house, and to what extent they caused the residents to see themselves reflected in the making of a film about them.
12.5.07
RF Chalet Line. Mosney
Nicky and I lived in Mosney, about an hour north of Dublin, for about 6 weeks last summer. A former Butlin's holiday camp, it is now a holding centre for asylum seekers. Here people wait anything from a year to 6 years (and counting) for a decision form the Department of Justice on their asylum claim. This place and the people who live here now is the subject of our documentary.
3.5.07
More from Mosney
A still from the documentary I'm editing right now. Nicky is here from Dublin and we've been cutting and trimming like maniacs. Yesterday we got to see our first rough assembly. 90 minutes. We'd be right on the nose, if we didn't have 3 more sections to add!
2.5.07
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