The Chronicles of LAnn Oren
2009
Video, sound
04:00
The Chronicles of L follows the actor Luthaire Bluteau on eight different guest appearances on popular TV shows, where he’s typecast in various “bastard” roles, thus creating a single episode around him as a star.
Laure Prouvost
2014
2 screen HD video
04:00
courtesy the artist and MOT International London & Brussels
Attributing human characteristics to inanimate objects, this video work finds Laure Prouvost’s images forming a conversation amongst themselves. Discussing their existence and vulnerabilities, in relation to the viewer looking at them, the images want to be more than just pixels; they want to explore and exist outside of the machine upon which they are being played. Comments and moving images are juxtaposed; they come and go in a dazzling rhythm. As often in Prouvost’s films, the speed of images and text challenges the limits of perception, for it seems almost impossible for the human eye to catch every piece of visual information in the film. Eventually, the viewer becomes used to the rhythm and finally gives the images the attention they ‘deserve’.
Kevin B. Lee
Single channel video
08:25
Hints of narrative on hyper-consumerism and the Chinese Dream from LED displays in Suzhou.
Kevin B. Lee
Single channel video
04:47
Abstractions on hyper-consumerism and the Chinese Dream from LED displays in Suzhou.
Kevin B. Lee
Single channel video
06:01
Experimental observations on hyper-consumerism and the Chinese Dream from LED displays in Suzhou.
alsolikelife.com
vimeo.com/kevinblee
Samuel Fouracre
D.^^.$.® is an evolving project of video clips, which stitch together a kaleidoscopic, twilit world of desire. It’s an unreal world full of dualities, reflections in infinite regress and extreme shades of colour that illuminate individuals as if becoming their perfect self-images. It’s the colour and shade of narcissism, of the world as we want to see it, with ourselves at the centre.
In this utopia, romance and narcissism circle around each other, somewhere between the individual and the social world, where brands are strangely nowhere to be seen. Here, images are seduction, and seduction is the business of acting oneself perfectly as an image, until there’s no distance between what one is and what one appears to be.
Jodie Mack
2008
Yard Work is Hard Work is an experimental animation and mini-musical that moonlighting as a romantic comedy. Two lonely singles dream of eternal love, meet, wed, and learn the perils of homeownership and life in general. Disillusionment + hope in glorious color and song animated with thousands of recycled magazine cut-outs. Original music by Jodie Mack. Instrumentation by Seth Vanek. Made in Chicago.
Bryan Zanisnik
2012
HD Video
02:44
Bryan Zanisnik
2013
HD Video
03:03
Hannah Piper Burns
11:18
all music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
there is a murderous violence of banality that, precisely due to its indifference and its monotony, is the subtlest form of extermination. a veritable theatre of cruelty, of our cruelty to ourselves, completely played down and without a drop of blood. a perfect crime in that it abolishes all stakes and erases all traces- but above all in so far as in the murder, we are both the murderers and the victims.
-Jean Baudrillard, Telemorphosis
Dana Dal Bo
10:00
“…STILL in the RUNNING towards BECOMING…” is a ten-minute video of re-enacted scenes from two popular American reality television shows; America’s Next Top Model and Toddlers & Tiaras. Both are about displayed beauty judged by “experts”.
The toddler, mother, and teen model are merged creating a generalized anxiety about beauty and self.
America’s Next Top Model started in 2003 and has 23 cycles (seasons) as of 2015. In each episode, during the final moments of elimination, two girls stand before host, Tyra Banks. One of them will be “sent home”. Tyra reveals who will continue on in the competition with the sentence, “[Name], Congratulations! You are still in the running towards becoming America’s Next Top Model.”
The idea of being still, while in the running, and moving towards becoming recalls the Deleuzian conundrum around identity, difference and repetition, and for me encapsulates a current emotional zeitgeist of instability and uncertainty; an in between.
The aesthetic of the video/audio is raw and sketchy, referencing the D.I.Y. quality of contemporary social media when used autobiographically as an extension of the self and constructor of identity.
