collaboration

Club Room

admin — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 13:09:04 +0000

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

Screen Tests - DVD

admin — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 17:17:09 +0000

Front Cover
Screen Tests 2006

Lost Property

admin — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:31:16 +0000

Sub-Title

Date of Publication

October 1996

Location

Publisher

Chance Books & Public Art Development Trust; London

Designer

Stephen Coates

Body

A book resulting from a collaboration between us, the London Underground and Public Art Development Trust. It represents a selection of things from one days property recovered by the London Transport Lost Property Office.

We are easily seduced into acquiring, exchanging and displaying vast quantities of material things. Accumulation, in its broadest sense, is the literal writing-into-being of an individual or culture.

Things are found, polished, displayed and treasured; bought, bound or framed and collected; the object, plucked from the generic soup of a media culture, is momentarily arrested and woven into an intimate personal narrative, "I bought this when I was in Paris". It is this enveloping which marks the thing as a possession and simultaneously allows the narrator to refine and evaluate experience, to evolve a sense of difference or belonging. The thing itself, as commodity, inheritance, gift or souvenir, has become a privileged vehicle for establishing an emotional and intellectual identity. Things authenticate experience.

This much is well known.

The dark shadow within our seamless assembly of possessions and continuous narration of `self`, is loss. The word loss delineates a terrifying space, it is the void over which all exchange and collection precariously take place, but, from which no insurance or story can ever protect. Loss infuses accumulation with fear, everything, even our most precious belongings continuously circulate within its grasp.

Lost Property touches the wound opened between lost property, and the emotional investment implicit in personal possession. There will be no attempt to suture that gap. Comprised of photographs and texts, the book mimics the dispassionate style of a museum catalogue in an effort to re-inscribe the absence all the more emphatically. Inevitably, the book has more to do with the conventions of representation, than recovering a material presence. The things pictured, are still missing from these pages.

A temporary collection bound by this catalogue parodies the conventions established by museum acquisition. Although the collection is a well known paradigm of perfection, the objects here are always already incomplete, misplaced, fallen from narration, and never to return.

Lost Property is a selection from one days property recovered by the London Transport Lost Property Office; on average, some three hundred items. Designed as a desirable pocket size souvenir by Stephen Coates, Lost Property was released at the moment of spectacular accumulation, Christmas 1995

Description

148 pages, 140 B & W images

ISBN/ASIN

0-9513932-4-3

ArtWords Link

Screen Tests - DVD

admin — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 11:49:33 +0000

Sub-Title

In collaboration with Eileen Simpson and Ben White

End Date

Start Date

12 May 2006

Location

A project that evolved from British Art Show 6

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; The Northern Region Film and Television Archive in Newcastle, The North West Film Archive in Manchester, Moving Image Archive for Central England in Nottingham and the South West Film & Television Archive based in Plymouth.

All creative work is born into copyright; every image, text or sound is automatically designated as the property of its apparent author. Copyright is founded on the right of exclusion. And even material deposited in Public Archives is considered a property, access to which is subject to the generosity of archivists and keepers; effectively copyright restricts the creative re-use of public resources.

So, we sourced orphaned, or out-of-copyright material from which to edit four new films - one for each city - while simultaneously searched for copyright expired music in the British Library and Library of Congress sound archives to create appropriate soundtracks.

A film was added to the exhibition, at each of the host cities during the year long 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, under a Creative Commons license on a DVD entitled Screen Tests. Our intention is to establish a legally protected resource, as these licences act as an extension to copyright granting rights to others, enabling everybody to use and re-use Screen Tests for future screenings and creative exchange, enriching rather than depleting the public domain.

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.

Screen Test was launched at the Anticipating the Past: Artist: Archive: Film: conference on the 12th-13th May, at Tate Modern . It will be availible at all venues of the British Art Show 6 where Screen Tests will be shown. Or, you could try and mail us if you would like one........

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 ' a happy hunting ground for tycoons' the birth of private television broadcasting.

Screen Tests 4-4 00.00''
The Northern Region Film and Television Archive, based in Newcastle did not respond to several attempts at contact, eventually we spoke over the telephone and they declined any involvement.

Special Features

35 min. of original archival source films
36 min. of original source audio

Screen Tests

will be screened as part of Mimétisme curated by Anselm Franke, at Extra City in Antwerp, 25 Jan 2008 - 30 Mar 2008

Screen Test will be screened outdoors daily at 9:00, 12:00, 17:00, 22:35. Part of a BBC and Cornerhouse collaboration On The Screen: Artists in The Archive, the Bigger Picture in Manchester.

and at the annual Varsalongen [Spring Salon] exhibition, curated by Maria Lindt and Leira Vergara in Liljevalch's Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden 26 Jan 2007 - 18 Mar 2007

The Archives

Thanks to director James Patterson, and curator Richard Shenton

Moving Image Archive for Central England
The Institute of Film Studies
School of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
Nottingham NG7 2RD

Thanks to Director Elayne Hoskin and curator Mike Brewis

South West Film & Television Archive
Melville Building
Royal William Yard
Stonehouse
Plymouth
Devon PL1 3RP

The North West Film Archive
Manchester Metropolitan University
Minshull House
47-49 Chorlton Street
Manchester M1 3EU

The Northern Television Film Archive
declined any involvement in the project

The British Library Sound Archive
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London NW1 2DB

The Library of Congress
Recorded Sound Reference Centre

See the related and evolving Enthusiasts: archive

Generosity

admin — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 16:34:35 +0000

Sub-Title

part of Protections, curated by Adam Budak and Christine Peters

End Date

28 Oct 2006

Start Date

22 Sep 2006

Location

Kunsthaus Graz, Austria

Body

We used the opportunity offered by Protections to develop a project which explores the theme of public generosity. Generosity is the root of culture and yet in an age characterized by relentless self-interest and privatization, why would you give to strangers?

Generosity can be, but is not necessarily, kind. That generosity can obligate its recipients -through debts that can never be cancelled- is well known; like charity. And yet altruism can coexist in the very same gesture. People can give endlessly, and generously, without any interest in an interested return. Generosity is a powerful act of love, accompanied by a dark and threatening shadow.

The Generosity Broadcasting House intends to engage art, and cultural production in general with the politics of generosity.

Offered a typical prefabricated house as our exhibition space within the Kunsthaus (the house is the work of two other invited artists Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset) We in turn invited the local free radio station - a radio station driven by generosity-Radio Helsinki to use the house/musem. Radio Helsinki will move their entire studio into the show-house and broadcast live 24/7 to other homes in Steiermark for the duration of the exhibition.

Also, in close collaboration with Radio Helsinki we have developed a series of radio interviews - with philosophers, collectors, philanthropists, nurses, blood donors and others- which will explore both the deep philosophical background, and current personal instances of public generosity. The interviews will be interspersed within the regular radio programming

While researching for the project in the Image and Sound Archive of the Museum Joanneum, Graz, we came across a recording of Susan Sontag, one of Americas most influential intellectuals reading two of her own stories at the Steirischer Herbst, Literatursymposium in Graz on the 11th November 1982.

We negotiated to release the recording from the archive. Remastered by Radio Helsinki, designed by Grzegorz Laszuk, Gratis is a beautiful CD that will be available for free during the exhibition.

At a very late stage, and when faced with public generosity, lawyers acting on behalf of the estate of Susan Sontag refused us permission to produce the CD. Regretfully, we have had to return her voice to the silence of the archive.

During the exhibition, we have organised a series of workshops

Generosity Broadcasting House: Workshops

Inspired by Free Software development, software that challenges conventional practices of authorship, ownership and distribution, the Generosity Broadcasting House: Workshops explore the implications of those developments for art, visual culture and cultural production in general.

There is an astonishing growth in museums, and in archives and data-banks of objects, images, sounds and information. These new, emergent forms of archival capital have an increasingly powerful grip upon culture and its reproduction. And yet there is a conflict blossoming at the heart of culture, a conflict convened around the property rights that subsist in stored materials. The Generosity Broadcasting House: Workshops explores these conflicts, while enriching rather than depleting the public domain.

Contemporary creative practices have the potential to reconfigure the relationship between artist and audience, to replace exchanges facilitated by frustration and restriction with those of collaboration and generosity. Generosity Broadcasting House: Workshops will attempt to re-animate the public function of generosity in an age characterized by relentless privatization.

The Generosity Broadcasting House created for Protections will host a series of events including Open Content Film Culture , an Open Music Archive evening, and a Skills Sharing Workshop .

30th September 2006

Open Content Film Culture
An afternoon of discussion, screenings, ripping, copying and burning

Artists Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska will explore some of the implications for creative practice, moving image creation and distribution, introduced by Free and Open Source models of cultural production. Using their critical archive of amateur film Enthusiasts:archive as an example, and resources from archive.org artists and others will be able to watch, screen, download, use and re-use the material for future creative exchange, enriching rather than depleting the public domain.

The event will be in English, check the Kunsthaus programme.

7th October

Open Music Archive 5 - 7 pm burn session: 9pm live performance
an evening of free music

Open Music Archive hosts an afternoon of free music in the living room of the Broadcasting House. Browse. Listen, select and tag music from the archive and burn your own selection to take away. During the afternoon Eileen Simpson & Ben White will play a selection of blues, jazz, folk, and new electronic remixes from the archive and in the evening they will perform a live electronic remix of early jazz recordings.

Eileen Simpson & Ben White are London based artists who often collaborate together. In 2005 at Open Congress at Tate Britain, London they launched the Open Music Archive. Since then they have worked on a number of projects animating out-of-copyright material from the archive: including Night Fever at Beaconsfield Biennial of Moving Images Geneva, Circa 1972 Media and Architecture Biennial Graz, and Leverage at Futuresonic Manchester.

For more information visit Open Music Archive, or see the Kunsthaus programme.

14th October

Skill Sharing
Share the generosity of hacker culture

Skill Sharing is an informal hacker and g33k [geek] community, they meet - on Saturdays - in a net.culture club MaMa in Zagreb. As part of the Generosity Broadcasting House project they will exchange skills with you for one day only.

Skill Sharing found its inspiration in the free software movement and is focused on the exploration and generosity of hacker/g33k culture. Skill Sharing does not necessarily imply the sharing of computer related skills, although in two years of its existence Skill Sharing has gathered some of the best hackers in Croatia.

Join us for a day of sharing skills, knowledge, tricks and happy hacking!Check the Kunsthaus programme.

Skill Sharing will be lead by its initiator Nenad Romi [aka Marcell Mars] free software advocate, cultural explorer and social instigator. Nenad is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute - mi2 and net.culture club MaMa in Zagreb. He initiated GNU GPL publishing label EGOBOO.bits, the TamTam platform for on-line collaboration, and NGOdENgode software for NGOs financial management.

For more information visit razmjena vjestina

visit the Kunsthaus Graz

Chance: films

admin — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 20:49:54 +0000

Annual Film competition at at the KFKM Film and Video club, Mechelen Belgium

Social Cinema 1 pallets

admin — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 17:10:44 +0000

the auditoria
Social Cinema 1 2006

collaboration

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

Screen Tests - DVD

Lost Property

Sub-Title

Date of Publication

Location

Publisher

Designer

Body

Description

ISBN/ASIN

ArtWords Link

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications

Screen Tests - DVD

Sub-Title

End Date

Start Date

Location

Body

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications

Generosity

Sub-Title

End Date

Start Date

Location

Body

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications

Chance: films

Social Cinema 1 pallets