User:Eleanorg/1.2/Thematic/Lecture notes 17 Jan

Thematic project 17 Jan 2012

Artists projects with archives

Abraham Moritz Warbury & Aby Warburg, 1866-1929. 'The Atlas Project'.

Early example of creating narrative with archival images. Abraham was a librarian, shifted his books around according to different themes. Then did the same with images. Rearranging images changes their meaning - v early example of this practice.

Jeffrey Shaw a.o. 'T-Visionary' (2009).

Installation using archive footage from city archives. Interactive & in 3D. As images are rearranged, new narratives and contexts arise. Can be stocked with different images.

Stand Vanderbeek 'Movie Drome' (1963).

Huge tents/bubbles with films projected onto the walls, with live VJing. Immersive experience of movies all around you.

John Latham 'Encylopedia Britannica' (1971).

Animation style film of each page of encyclopedia in rapid motion See also Britishpathe.com/video/burnt-book-artist for a vid on his book compositions

Daniel Gustav Cramer & Haris Epaminonda 'The Infinite Library' (2007-)

Books made from other books; recompiling. Breaking categorisations, based on interesting combinations of images. In numbered volumes. http://www.theinfinitelibrary.com

Lisa Oppenheimer 'Killed Negatives after Walker Evans' (2007-2009)

Looking at US Congress library archive. Negatives from photos of farmers, which had holes in them. She tried to fill in the hole to complete the images.

Antoni Muntadas 'The File Room' (1994-)

Expandable database; installation and online database. Collection of things which have been censored. http://thefileroom.org/documents/dyn/search1.cfm See also: yougle (ask Andre), project on sexual violence in US prisons (ask Annet).

Deep Blue (belgian choreography collective), 'You Are Here' (2008)

Papers laid out on the floor through which a path is made. Collects data from several archives, deals with theatre space vs archive space. Determine your own route through the fragments.

Wikipedia Art - project within wikipedia about the process of moderation on wikipedia. Denied official access.

Artists not only work with the content of an archive, but can work with the structure of the archive itself.

Discussion of texts

Partiality of archives: paper archives, at least the governing scheme is transparent (categorisations etc). With Google, Amazon etc, the similarity alogrithms are not transparent.
What are the differences between archives, databases, collections? Different infastructures but also different purposes?
Is TPB an archive? It points to other files. Users create their own mini-archives hand-picked from the selection of torrents on TPB. It's a splintering archive maybe; or blooming?

Bodysong

Tells story of the body from birth to death through a succession of archive footage. Titles summarize the progress of the film: birth sex violence death dreams
Starts off with quite late 20th century euro-centric vision of 'average life' - kids play, then get to teens and do sports & dancing, then flirt & sex. In each section, 'generic' images of white people are followed by 'ethnic' variations from other countries/cultures.
Sex is followed by food (?), which leads into conflict over food, then war. Making a statement here about the roots of conflict in struggles over resources. Now becomes more historical sweep of 'human nature' in general, with wars, violence etc.
Mother's faces and birthing experiences are featured prominently at the start, but not in middle life, where most people (esp women) actually experience it. Menstruation is not shown - puberty is depicted mainly through people (mainly men) doing sports.
War leads into sickness and old age, then into religion. This is arguably more of a cultural phenomenon than a physical one - so why are other cultural phenomena left out? This is now a film about the essence of human life - reinforced by footage from around the world, as if to drive home the point that human nature is essentially the same everywhere.
At religion section, the film loses its chronological narrative and becomes a survey of cultural activity, from religious services to dance, performance art, painting, writing. (Why does footage of kids learning to write come after teenagehood, sex and war?? Can only assume some statement is being made about progress from our more base instincts to the higher achievements of humanity?)
First sound from the clips appears in section here on learning to speak & pronounce words. Move now towards communication and communication technology
Footage of an astronaut floating outside his spaceship is followed by a kettled protester begging police to let them out. Now more footage of protest. So protest is categorized as a speech act, rather than part of the war section... Footage of running protesters leads into more general pictures of 'humanity on the move'
Credits list archives used, they number somewhere around 70-80.

Simon on Bodysong

The film is a generic, overarching narrative made from lots of clips. The website takes the opposite approach, contextualising each clip and divorcing it from the metanarrative.
Rule that something has to happen in each shot; something or someone changes status. "Basic unit of drama" - to avoid having merely a series of "moving postcards".
Film started from a prose screenplay in detail of each 'scene'. Researchers sent to find the clips but asked to bring back other clips that they found on the way, too.
Was initially going to be a "pure" biological story, based on "how our biological limits define us" - but funders wouldn't go with a film that ended with death. So end section about culture and language was added on. Also, many births are shown but only one death - amount of 'dark' footage was carefully edited and is relatively short.
Simon admits that the film takes an essentialist view, where biological destiny comes before culture.

Decasia: The State of Decay - by Bill Morrison

Uses nitrate footage - very unstable medium, decays rapidly and compustible. Film theme thus links to the medium.
Opens with whirling dirvishes, then whirling reels of film going through developer. Then montage of decayed film overlaid onto footage of sea on rocks, camel trail through desert; then a series of clips with severe decay and/or overlaying negative and positive.
Draws attention to the fragility of the medium of film (and of memory?)
Back to spinning thread, spinning machinery, then reeling film again - inspected by hand; physicality of the medium; then spinning circus rides, ferris wheel, etc, back to whirling dirvish again. Draws attention to how the illusion of a 'moving' image is constructed with the circular rotation of film.

The Cineseizre - by Martin Arnold, 1998

1. Piece Touche 2. Passage a l'acte 3.Aone. Life wastes Andy Hardy.

Short films that use archive footage and deconstruct it by speeding it up, slowing it down and looping small sections.
Intensifies our attention to the minute gestures of actors and expands the tense dramatic pauses in the original

Trailer: Psycho / Viennale spot

See also: Douglas Gordon's '24 Hour Psycho'

Both Arnold & Morrison use optical printers for analogue editing.

Peter Tscherkassky - 'Motion Picture - (La Sortie des ourvriers de l'usine lumiere a lyon)'

Takes a single frame from 'workers leaving the factory' - famous clip - and re-works it in an optical printer.