collaboration

Screen Tests - Westward

admin — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 14:38:58 +0000

Broadcast Times; the Birth of Westward
Screen Tests 2006

Screen Tests - archive

admin — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 14:34:27 +0000

film Archive
Broadcast Times; the Birth of Westward
Screen Tests 2006

Screen Tests - Dragline

admin — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 14:02:53 +0000

Dragline - title
Screen Tests 2006

Screen Tests - title

admin — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 13:44:43 +0000

Title
Screen Tests, 2006

Dragline crane

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Dragline
British Art Show 6, Nottingham

Social Cinema

admin — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 19:53:44 +0000

Sub-Title

A collaboration with architects Peter Thomas and Catherine du Toit of 51% studios

End Date

24 Jun 2006

Start Date

17 Jun 2006

Location

The London Architectural Biennale London

Body

We collaborated with architects Peter Thomas and Catherine du Toit of 51% studios architecture

The Social Cinema project consists of a series of temporary cinemas, each installed for one night only into the existing urban fabric of the Biennale designated route between Exmouth Market and the Millennium Bridge. Films about, set in, or commenting on London and its architecture were stunningly projected upon the city itself.

At each location, buildings became screens, steps seating, and residents generously gave power, or loaned their houses as projection booths. The architectural fabric of the temporary cinemas was improvisery, playful and subtle; pallets borrowed from an adjacent market made temporary bleachers, plastic crates from local pubs and restaurants became seating, neighbours joined the audience, and volunteers with torches transformed into ushers. Social Cinema turned un-built spaces into auditoria and spectacularly intervened in neglected places around landmark buildings.

The film programme of the Social Cinema traced an evolution in the moving-image representation of everyday life. From the observer and observed of classic documentaries, to contemporary participation in those representations through mobile technologies, by people living and playing in London.

Each program began by introducing ideas and observations on London and its buildings with excerpts from lectures in the Architectural Association Archives; including contributions from the architects Cedric Price, Denys Lasdun, Reyner Banham, and Ron Herron; we then looped back to the 1960’s showing some magnificent films from the Free Cinema movement, of everyday - meaning working class – experience. Free Cinema was followed by a selection of extrordinary amateur films from Straight 8 and these segued into short films previously uploaded onto internet sites where skateboarders, shoppers, and tourists record their interactions with the architecture of the city.

Social Cinema 1
17th June - 9.30 pm
Car Wash Wall opposite the Zetter, St Johns Square, EC1

Excerpts of lectures by

Reyner Banham House Of The Future 1976
Ron Herron Sets Fit For The Queen 1976

Followed by

Claude Goretta & Alain Tanner Nice Time 1957

And the Straight 8 selection of

Chris Vincze Evol 2005
Diego Arrendondo Tequila Chamuco 2005

Followed by

Short films found on-line

Social Cinema 2
23rd June - 9.30 pm
Finsbury Health Centre, Pine Street, EC1

Excerpts of lectures by

Cedric Price Aiming to Miss 1975

Followed by

Leslie Daiken One Potato Two Potato 1957
Daniel Mulloy Antonio’s Breakfast 2006

And the Straight 8 selection of

Dave Waters Harry 2005
Chris Durban & James Owen Class of 2005 2005

Followed by

Short films found on-line

Social Cinema 3
24th June - 9.30 pm
Pauls Walk under the Millennium Bridge EC4

Excerpts of lectures by

Reyner Banham This Is Tomorrow Exhibition 1976
Denys Lasdun National Theatre South Bank 1989
Jacques Herzog Tate Modern 1999

Followed by

John Smith Girl Chewing Gum 1974

And the Straight 8 selection of

Sandalz Deja Vu 2005
Benrt Lutzeler Rapid Eye Love 2005
Darren Walsh Rauhalglauarghuauagh! 2005

Followed by

Short films found on-line

Programme is subject to change, all screenings begin at dusk / 9.30pm

You could visit Architecture Week, or 51% studios architecture

Thanks to Clare Grafik at The Photographers Gallery , and all the volunteers

Generously funded by the Arts Council England and Awards for All

Some of the on-line archives are: YouTube, Vimeo, and Revver.

Club Room

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Film club room
installed at the Whitechapel, London

Enthusiasm

admin — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:52:08 +0000

Sub-Title

Films of Love Longing and Labour

End Date

15 Jan 2006

Start Date

1 Apr 2005

Location

Whitechapel Art Gallery London
Kunst Werke Berlin
Tapies Foundation Barcelona

Body

In collaboration with the architects 51% studios architecture we transformed the lower galleries of the Whitechapel Gallery into a film makers club-room, three beautiful curtained cinema spaces, and an archive lounge.

The exhibition Enthusiasm investigates how the amateur, the enthusiast or the hobbyist works invisibly within the relentless flow of ‘official’ culture, frequently adopting a counter-cultural tone of tactical resistance and criticism. In Poland under socialism even leisure was organised through factory-sponsored associations, and yet these film-makers activities became a space for dreams of love, criticism and freedom.

The first exhibitionary encounter for the visitor was a re-construction of a fictional film club. Many of the film clubs we visited during our research trips were marvelously evocative; they caught and held the traces of the social and creative history of the members and the films they made. The clubs were usually stuffed with framed photographs, printed film stills, caricatures, posters, certificates, medals, prizes and trophies from film festivals, cupboards stacked with of unwanted film reels and video cassettes, redundant projectors, old cameras and recording equipment, film editing desks and chemicals, homemade developing tanks and film dryers, tea and coffee making equipment, a fridge, a coat-stand, odd chairs, salvaged furniture, junk and even rubbish. Our installation of a ‘club-house’ – created from materials borrowed from club-members, scavenged, or bought at flea markets in Warsaw – was inspired by ethnographic museum room tableau. A monitor and VHS deck in the club-house replayed films by club-members documenting club ‘trips’ and holidays, special events, the process of filmmaking, meetings and festivals. Through inserting loops of self-representation within the fictional ‘club’, we tried to ensure the collaborative and social nature of the film making process remained to the fore. While at the same time enabling the ‘club’ to be an actual social space for the exhibition visitor; the club-house became the hub of the exhibition, mirroring its status in the culture of amateur film-making.

On our research trips we watched hundreds of films, in many extraordinary circumstances, often with former club members present. We became wary of imposing our own preferences and taste on the richness of the films themselves, and thus tried to become sensitive to their makers’ enthusiasms and hopes. What eventually evolved from screenings and discussions were three porous themes: themes of Love, Longing and Labour. This enabled us to select the films for exhibition into three film programmes, although in contrast to the conventions of artists’ use of ‘found-footage’ the compiled films were left complete, with their original music and fully credited. Our emergent themes seemed better able to curate the films into comprehension than the arbitrary violence performed by sorting the films into the genres usually deployed (feature, documentary, animation and so forth).

We had found a means of giving an exhibitionary context to the films and their production, but how should a cinema of enthusiasm be represented in a gallery?

Too often we have seen films and the culture of cinema lazily installed for exhibition. Films are routinely digitalized, and projected onto a wall in a black box installed inside the gallery with nowhere to sit, no programme, no running time, nothing. We were determined to complement the film-makers’ own cinematic aspirations, and thus we worked with architects Peter Thomas and Cathy de Toit of 51% studios to find a form of exhibition that could simultaneously express the gap between the humble club and the cinematic desires of the members. What evolved were three beautiful, lush, sensuously curved, vibrantly coloured, five-meter tall, velvet-curtained cinema spaces. Each cinema had appropriate chairs where visitors would feel comfortable, a screen, soft low-level lighting and a printed programme with film-notes and running times. Through the programme we wanted to hand control of the routes through the elements and spaces of the exhibition back to the visitors themselves. They could sit back and luxuriate in a particular cinema watching the whole programme, or wander from screen to screen mixing their own film selection. As with Capital, the space of the Enthusiasts exhibition became a space of creative production for visitors, mirroring the collaborative practices employed by the amateur film-makers themselves.

In the cinema entitled Longing we screened films of personal, political and sexual love, loss and longing; we explored themes of alienation, ecological anxieties, a fear of war and violence, and a terrible longing to be elsewhere. In Love, the films reflected on the joy, banality and celebration of an ‘everyday’ love of life; they dealt with themes of humor and camaraderie, of families, parties, passion and sex as a radical transgression of the expected. In Labour the films traced the beauty, routine, discipline and horror of work in all its forms; themes of celebration, futility, boredom and exhaustion are acutely depicted through films made by people caught within the processes of production.

The last major exhibitionary encounter within Enthusiasts was with the Archive Lounge. We were conscious that there were many films that could not be accommodated through our emergent taxonomies. An Archive Lounge would enabled visitors to watch, via searchable DVDs, all the films found, collected and digitalized but not screened as part of our cinema installations. Our intention was to make available as many films as possible, to enable visitors to curate their own programmes and recognize that our selection – Love, Longing and Labour – was part of an interpretive process and not final or in any way authorial.

From the seed of the idea of the Archive Lounge developed for exhibition, we are currently growing a huge and permanent archival extension of the project. Through watching visitors using the Archive Lounge, we realized the possibility for a new kind of exhibitionary space: a space partly opened by new technology, partly through our practice, and partly by a new suite of licenses.We are developing an on-line version of the Enthusiasts: archive it's featured as part of the i-commons summit 2006 in Rio Janeiro

Organised with the Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, the Whitechapel in London, Kunst-Werke in Berlin, and the Tapies Foundation in Barcelona.

Versions of the exhibition were also shown at The Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts Montreal Canada February-April 2007; curated by Renee Baert, and as part of Breaking Step a major collaboration between the British Council and Belgrade's Museum of Contemporary Art, from March- June 2007

Read a review of the project from metamute

Or read Leira Vergara's text on Enthusiasm and the Archive for Zehar Magazine

You can also read Carles Guerra's introduction to the enthusiasm_archive_workshop at Arteleku from the 22nd to the 24th of February 2006

From Enthusiasm to the creative Commons is an edited email exchange between Whitechapel curator Anthony Spira, Neil Cummings & Marysia Lewandowska, its taken from Enthusiasm 2005 a publication which accompanies the exhibition. The text was republished in 2006 as part of Documents of Contemporary Art: The Archive edited by Charles Mereweather.

Screen Tests

admin — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 14:07:21 +0000

Sub-Title

A collaboration with Eileen Simpson and Ben White

Date of Publication

October 2006

Body

There is conflict blossoming at the heart of culture, a conflict convened around the property rights that subsist in materials stored in public archives. Screen Tests explores this conflict, while enriching rather than depleting the public domain

Commissioned as part of the British Art Show Six, we collaborated with artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White to explore public moving image archives in each city of the exhibition's tour.

During the exhibition, we also negotiated with each of the archives to release our new films, along with the original source film and audio material, on a DVD entitled Screen Tests. The DVD's production was generously funded by the Arts Council England and therefore we made it available for Free under a Creative Commons: Attribution ShareAlike v2.5 License.

Features

Screen Tests 1/4 Screen Tests - 12.36''

The film unfolds as a series of Andy Warhol-like screen tests, slowly revealing the location and the occupation of those before the camera - students and models from the Manchester School of Art.

Screen Tests 2/4 Dragline - 06.57''

Dragline stumbles across an autonomous event, and echoing 1970â€™s structuralist film, returns the default setting of contemporary digital practice -sampling and looping - to its industrial roots.

Screen Tests 3/4 Broadcast Times: The Birth of Westward - 12.29''

As the exhibition train leaves the platform, we are taken on a documentary journey of â€œa happy hunting ground for tycoonsâ€ the birth of private television broadcasting.

Screen Test was launched at the Anticipating the Past: Artist: Archive: Film: conference on the 12th-13th May, at Tate Modern.

Mpeg4 samples coming soon.......

Duration

25 minutes

Format

DVD

Screen Tests_FandB

admin — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 17:22:10 +0000

front and back
Screen Tests, 2006

collaboration

Screen Tests - Westward

Screen Tests - archive

Screen Tests - Dragline

Screen Tests - title

Dragline crane

Social Cinema

Sub-Title

End Date

Start Date

Location

Body

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications

Club Room

Enthusiasm

Sub-Title

End Date

Start Date

Location

Body

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications

Screen Tests

Sub-Title

Date of Publication

Body

Duration

Format

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications

Screen Tests_FandB