Real Cut-Ups and Virtual Realities
“Cut-Ups”, a technique that is based on the principle of contingency in order to withdraw the initial concept from the author, originated in Dadaism. The term “Virtual Realities” describes the immersion to the third dimension and fictional worlds. All artists in this program take an artistic approach to film production and therefore describe quite the opposite to the way the media portrays art and artists.
Empty Rooms
Beginning with what seems like a material analysis of an at first focussed wall, Larcher turns his gaze to empty, hangar-like spaces and their functional architecture. They appear like monuments to the memory of the lack of content of their most likely simple economically exploitable purpose.
However, the artist goes beyond the mere representation of the spooky, droning emptiness.
Reinforced by Constantin Popp's escalating, almost threatening soundtrack, an industrial hissing, she breathes life in to the rooms by isolating individual architectural elements and rearranging them. Reality and montage melt in to one, and an industrial, vividly magical spatial construction comes to life, a construction in which the viewer can only find her place with difficulty.
- Österreich
- 10:54 Min.
- Director: Claudia Larcher, Constantin Popp
- Year: 2011
Division
The simple tearing of a piece of paper develops a pulsing life of its own through being photographed and repeated “division” and multiplication. The workmanlike act disappears completely and in its place a paralyzing movement appears, one which finds an abrupt end in a return to the source material.
- Niederlande
- 01:15 Min.
- Director: Johan Rijpma
- Year: 2012
Günter and Mutti
A Groucho Marx like character analyzes 2 found objects - wooden trivets with the inscription Mutti and Günter on them. He makes up a story about Günter and Mutti . He also debates whether these trivets would work as art works exhibited in a gallery.
I have done several "performances" being the Critic - I have criticized Art Photography, press images of well known corporate and political persons, Icelandic power structures and now the ready made in fine art.
By wearing this mask I feel more powerful and free to talk about topics that I don't necessarily know that much about. I somehow feel more important.
- Deutschland
- 03:17 Min.
- Director: Nina Lassila
- Languages: englisch
- Subtitles: deutsche
- Year: 2011
Unusual Red Cardigan
18 months ago John Smith received the news that a video cassette of one of his films was up for auction on Ebay. The artist details how his initial curiosity turned in to an obsession, while the viewer looks at his laptop screen.
Smith presents the seller's profile here, along with the other items he has up for sale. Through successfully bidding on all of his articles the artist tries to connect with the seller. At the big “unboxing” the viewer becomes part of the search for clues to the identity of the seller and witness to the attempt to create a connection between virtual world and reality.
- Großbritannien
- 12:44 Min.
- Director: John Smith
- Languages: englisch
- Year: 2011
Mercury Watches The Road
In Roman mythology, Mercury, messenger of the Gods, plays the role of the connection between two points. As a virtual statuette, placed in apparently real surroundings, he becomes an emblem of the linking and exchange between reality and virtuality, between earliest science and today's technologies. In this work the artist gives viewers an intimate look at his working method and lets them comprehend its creation within the animation program.
At the same time the film describes an intermediary state in which virtual spaces and real objects work as one over and over and are only able to be distinguished from one another with difficulty.
- Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika
- 10:05 Min.
- Director: David Matorin
- Languages: englisch
- Year: 2012
The Eternal Lesson
The raw material for an unfinished film from 1939 shows art students at work in painting and sculpture classes and in museums. Many of the scenes were filmed multiple times – with only minimal variations. Two seemingly twin films are shown side by side, though they are in fact never identical. While the students compare their works to their models in the midst of their creative process, the viewer examines the differences between the films projected next to one another. The represented objects and people, perspectives and moments of emergence of the works go in and out of phase and cause the time-space structure of the scenery to become blurred.
- Deutschland
- 06:00 Min.
- Director: Christoph Girardet
- Year: 2012
How the Work is Done
Remembering the past is a central theme in the videos of the young Polish artist Agnieszka Polska (*1985). We see here, for example, how she reconstructs the performance of a Polish artist from the 1960s in the form of a re-enactment. In the course of her œuvre, she delves repeatedly into the treasure chest of modern (art) history and makes use of the historical material she discovers to produce new works of her own.
In this aesthetic, a key role is played by her very personal formal idiom, animation combined with photographs she has found and video films that resemble documentaries. As cameras track through reconstructed studio sets, they meet with animations in slow motion, clearly distinguished in turn from her videos shot in documentary style. In the animations, therefore, she frequently plays with sound. Hence the narrator’s voice in “How the work is done” gives way to an acoustic backdrop of clinking glass or the rhythmical beats of a triangle. This enables Polska to build fully on the power of the animated or constructed images and to highlight the contemplative level in her films.
The artist maintains an overarching interest in the archive as well as in the testimonies of art history and the preservation of artefacts. Here she is particularly concerned by questions such as: Why does the documentation of an art work often seem more interesting than the art object itself? How are attitudes to an artistic work influenced by the way it is archived? And what is the relationship between our yearning to reconstruct the past and the mechanisms of archiving?
- Polen
- 06:26 Min.
- Director: Agnieszka Polska
- Languages: englisch
- Subtitles: englische
- Year: 2011
Money and the Video Artist
In a very sober manner, the video artist Perborg lists his earnings and expenses. In the process he concentrates in particular on the role of video artists and their financial divergence from visual artists. This accounting of facts is visualized in the most concrete way and, in spite of the sober sequence of sums of money, tax rates and sales figures, the significance that the making of video art holds for the artist becomes tangible on an emotional level.
- Schweden, Deutschland
- 14:01 Min.
- Director: Björn Perborg
- Languages: englisch
- Year: 2012
Arts + Crafts Spectacular #2
Entangled (his)stories transform a museum into a sitcom.
Storytellers and voices amongst others: Yoko Ono, Tris Vonna-Michell & Bruce LaBruce as well as Maurizio Cattelan's horse coming to live and triggering further events.
This is the second of a series following "Arts + Crafts Spectacular #1", featuring Gilbert & George.
The animation is a fiction of fiction. It deals with artists myths and the relationship between telling a story and becoming a story. The animation reflects upon this by turning (his)tories into a sit-com, highlighting the act of the fabrication of the self-image.
- Deutschland
- 07:53 Min.
- Director: Ian Ritterskamp, Sébastien Wolf
- Languages: englisch
- Subtitles: deutsche
- Year: 2012