FlashFlood : International Video Art Festival

The Museum for Polydimensional Research

Organized and Curated by

Brookhart Jonquil

The Festival will take place Saturday, August 4th, from 6 pm until 10 pm Held at Gallery Centella, located at 340 S. Convent Ave Tucson, AZ 85701 Free to the PublicIn the Sonoran desert, the scorching heat of the summer is interrupted by the monsoons, a torrential downpour of rain which fills the dry stream-beds as well as city streets. A flash flood, gone as fast as it came. At its most basic, the media of Video Art are light and time. A flash is a short burst of light. Flood is lighting that lasts longer, filling a space. The FlashFlood Video Art Festival, like the summer monsoon, fills the city and then disappears, leaving everything more alive. This Festival will bring the best work of international video artists together for one long evening of viewing. Along with the principal festival events will be a special showcase of “video-objects”, works which, through repetition or other means, may be appreciated by a viewer entering at any point and staying for any duration. These works will be projected in public spaces, bringing video art to pedestrians and drivers as they pass by.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

 

JiHyun Ahn: South Korea
Their Circumstances, 2007, 10’5”

This experimental animation tells a story about a day in which events happen to one innocent family. There are five storylines, from four different characters’ viewpoints. Stories are seemingly random yet vitally connected with the tale of a set of incidents in one day. The animation starts with the end of the story and then the viewer can find the clue to the story by watching each character’s viewpoint like fitting the pieces of a puzzle. It adds layers and events to the intriguing story until the final shot, where everything is finally made clear. This is an experimental online animation, which introduces a new way to watch animation. It combines videos and flash with action scripts. All movies are put together in flash and through the action scripts programming code, people can see more than two angle shots simultaneously, select the chapters and the video segments and create their own storylines. Also there are dynamic animations in flash itself so the animations in videos and those in flash interact with each other, crossing the frames. This frame means not only the literal frame object in my work but also the boundary between linear video work and nonlinear flash interactivity.

Sarah Anderson: USA
Untitled #1 (from the Tumid Architecture series), 2007, 2’16”

The figure crouches amongst a cluster of giant sequoias. The brick-cast tumorous growth on her shoulders slowly swells and shrinks with slow breath. As the fog-softened sounds of the forest slowly morph into the drone and sharp staccato of city traffic, the protuberance moves faster with quick, shallow breaths.

Ian Andrews: Australia
Bardo, 2007, 4’56”

Bardo is part of my Transiterations series which comprises a number of pieces shot in everyday banal situations, often in the same place over a number of days.
Bardo is a very simple piece—lateral tracking shot from an escalator handrail, up and down a number of times. The up and down takes are superimposed (feathered split screen) so that the passengers appear to fade in and out. The sound is a simple loop of the environmental sound which progressively becomes more and more detailed with increasing fidelity. What is first perceived as atmospheric noise gradually becomes more and more musicated. As in the other Transiterations pieces all sound was recorded at the time and place of the shoot.

Ian Andrews: Australia
5 cent Opera, 2006, 4’14”

5 cent Opera is part of my Transiterations series which comprises a number of pieces shot in everyday banal situations, often in the same place over a number of days.
5 cent Opera is based on a single locked off shot. The shot was edited according to visual elements (the actions of the children and adults who “play” on and with the steps—games, photo opportunities, differing trajectories), and sound which contains musical elements (rhythms, rattles, drum-like sounds, melodic voices, claps and the subtle strains of a distant opera rehearsal). In a sense, the opera house steps function as a large open (public) stage but the brief “performances” are directed solely to a number of small private audiences.

Sonia Armaniaco: Italy
High Velocity Oblivion, 2007, 5’16”

HVO (High Velocity Oblivion) is some kind of location for juxtaposing images, auto generating—it shapes and it is shaped by—it is a video where each superimposed frame is part of a whole and simultaneously is a unique cell that could have unexpected metamorphoses…Or it could be simply five minutes of watching/listening with a fast editing…Even dancing, in high velocity oblivion…

Uta Baldauf: Germany
Pasta Poem_2, 2007, 4’32”

This is from an ongoing series of written works that sometimes become poetry. I like to play with the concepts involved in the process of thought turning (or twisting) into language. The arbitrary association of words and meaning and, in this case, medium and message. The message appears straightforward but the portrayal of the sentiment becomes layered and its meaning less obvious. The process unravels the initial meaning leaving it open to interpretation by the viewer.

Uta Baldauf: Germany
typing by the sea, 2007, 4’20”

Instead of constructing text as an inviolate entity, static in its outcome, I want it to become an action—an expression beyond the logical meaning which coalesces in the type written words. The action of writing becomes a visual performance. I draw attention to the original act of concretion of ideas. I pose the question: What lies beyond text? Is it just words, or letters, or mere symbols? Is it a matter of cybernetics, systems, hieroglyphics, or iconography. I challenge the power and authority of the printed word. By relocating the action of writing to an unlikely place I emphasize the poetics of space, text, and action.

Bebe Beard and Lou Cohen: USA
con-flict, 2007, 5’

Physically manipulated objects depicting the artist’s impression of conflict—problems, difficulties, snarls, knots, and entanglements seemingly impossible to sort out, complex as hell, persistent, ever present, and not going anywhere soon. Audio created by electronic music composer Lou Cohen.

Liora Bedford and Ido Govrin: Israel
Tesseract, 2007, 15’30”

Tesseract tells the story of ‘Lea’ a 60 year old woman who experienced a true turning point in her life… a profound change which leads her into the Tesseract. Tesseract investigates and revolves around the abstract meanings of time and especially about the ‘classic’ human conditioning of time-space as it was suggested, in western culture, by physicist Albert Einstein. The conditioning the viewers use to hold keeps changing… during the film the viewers encounter new visual conditionings one after the other while each time a momentarily understanding of time-space is raising.

Howie Cherman: USA
flying 1, 2004, 8’34”

flying 1 is inspired by distant fantasies of light, power, and freedom. Utilizing video fragments of an action to build the illusion of flight refers to and examines the fragmentary nature of memory while displaying a convergence of real and mediated histories blurring into each other in compressed time. This phenomenon is coupled with the awareness of the impossibility of the real action itself, which is amplified by the static background. The action is distilled down into a singular gesture, a momentary suspension of movement vibrating in time and space… a timeless, perpetual motion.

Howie Cheman: USA
Soylent _______, 2006, 3’47”

Starting with the classic nihilistic science fiction film “Soylent Green” as a source, all the shots with people inhabiting them have been removed. The end-note of the original film is the discovery that the popular food substance ‘Soylent Green’ being distributed by the government to the hungry masses is actually made from people. This piece seeks to ask: what happens when the source of political, social, and cultural collapse is removed from the equation? Can this short circuit the cycle of destruction and reestablish the utopian aspiration of healing and rebuilding?

Howie Cherman: USA
Jumping Positions 2, 2003,10’ excerpts

The jump can be seen as a moment of freedom, distance, separation, power, avoidance, exultation, even personal expression. It started with the idea of the different sculptural possibilities of the body at the pinnacle moment of a jumping action. Each set of frames captures the fragment, at the moment the body reaches the ultimate position of the jump, that resonates the whole entire action. Two frame edits were used for each of the positions, the shortest duration that connotates movement in video, referencing the action, not just the position. The elements were assembled together to see how they might inform each other, how the eye would follow the series of actions, and to see if any inferred narratives might rise to the surface. The ‘vibrating’ freeze frames give the eye a chance to see each of the 36 sculptural positions, and use that as a reference point to help capture each distinct image while watching the rapid fire cycle of positions.

Edith G. Crichton and Susan Working: USA
Dis/course, 2007, 5’

Media artist E.G. Crichton collaborated with furniture artist Susan Working to create an ephemeral table, viewed from below a transparent surface. The video projection shows clusters of people eating a ritualized meal. The camera “eye” is located below the surface of the table, beneath the theatre of these social vignettes to suggest the life and memory of the object itself.

 

Theodore Chryssikos and Nikos Stavropoulos: Greece
Diapassion (Tuning Fork), 2004, 6’22”

In Diapassion, Theodore Chryssikos presents a video of sound act. The artist explores the urban environment by listening to the city’s natural soundscape with a tuning fork. With this echo-sounding function, which causes sound distortion and exacerbation, he attunes and composes the anarchic sounds of everyday movement, using a normative tool. Things cease to be part of the uniform and indissoluble space of visual perception. Through the acoustic experience the artist performs an internal journey from the center of concepts to their indeterminable limit.

Caterina Davinio: Italy
Poem in Red (Poesia in rosso), 2004, 5’44”

Dedicated to Ferrari Modena car and to red color, to perfect happiness, to imperfection of happiness. Poem in Red is a synthesis of hedonism, cynicism, non-sense, around a color: red. Maybe an imperfect happiness is enough for us, it must be enough.

Silvio De Gracia: Argentina
Via Crisis, 2007, 2’45”

From a simple pun with the Christian ViA CRUXIS, the video builds a reflection about the loss of faith and about an opposition between light and darkness within the religious field. A Christ who shifts ambiguously between life and lifelessness and who goes from semi-darkness to the abyss, ends up being buried, this referring to the definite closing down of a religion which is connected with intolerance and violence.

Susan Dobson: Canada
Requiem, 2007, 4’23”

Requiem is a short video produced from approximately 200 versions of a single photograph. The video begins as a black screen which gradually reveals a ghost image that is eerily reminiscent of the early photographic daguerreotype process. A portrait of a woman with her eyes closed eventually emerges fully, only to bleach out and fade back to darkness again. The emerging and subsequent fading of the portrait serves as an oblique reference to the photographic life/death paradigm, as was famously encapsulated by French philosopher Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida: “Like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages… Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away.” While the closed eyes and still countenance of the sitter reference death, the facial expression of the woman and the subtle pulsing of the image implies that she is actively thinking about something. The video then, uses new technology to create a requiem to photographic and personal histories that encapsulate both memory and desire.

Micheline Durocher: Canada
Syncope, 2004, 3’30”

This self-timed video shows a female reader moving to the rhythm of the turning pages of a book entitled Exercises de Francais (French language exercises). The movement of her body is illogical and nonsensical—it resides in the strange in-between space of wanting to read and being in language. This video is constructed upon a short loop extracted from a high-8 tape which was then expanded through repetition and experimental editing techniques.

Micheline Durocher: Canada
Lapse, 2006, 1’32”

Gearing up to perform, wearing a white retro bathing cap and silver eyelashes, the swimmer displays sparkle of performance. Nevertheless, as the music progresses, her set of precise choreographed movements, fluid at first, become erratic and break down as the video progresses.

Jan Hakon Erichsen: Norway
Letting Go, 2006, 0’53”

Several breakable objects are dropped from the ceiling and crush directly on the camera.

Jan Hakon Erichsen: Norway
Falling Down, 2006, 0’53”

An ordinary set of window blinds have been transformed into a homemade guillotine and every time a person walks by the window the shades are dropped, giving the visual impression of a random execution.

 

Kevin Evensen: USA
wind water stone, 2006, 2’5”

We are completely surrounded by the external harmonies of nature, which are illustrated here by moments in time… When we happen upon those moments that wash over us completely, giving us a sense of the eternal, we have no choice but to smile… happily.

Helen Grundy: England
Still Life , 2007, 0’50”

This piece was inspired by the 17th Century still life paintings of the Dutch Masters. I created a real still life referencing the style and arrangements of that period. I then allowed it to decay and rot over three months during which time I photographed it several times every day. The result was hundreds of digital images that I turned into a piece of video time lapse animation. The piece was then shown as an installation where the video was back projected into a traditional gilt frame. It subtly mimicked a real painting but was instead a piece of slow moving video. It is a digital memento moiré.

Sinasi Gunes: Turkey
The Middle of Bridge, 2005, 1’14”

This work is a bridge that connects the east and the west. The liveliness of west of bridge meets the serenity of the east. Suicides happen in the middle of this bridge and sometimes it is an arena chosen by those who wish to perform their show. A point where two cultures meet, it is a state between reality and fantasy. It may be a rehearsal for suicide or suicide itself.

Henry Gwiazda: USA
a doll’s house is…, 2007, 5’48”

This work explores the artistic connection between movement that occurs in an apartment building, other units in that building, and the exterior world. It shows that each motion, whether it is made by human, animal, object, light or sound, is connected and extended by other motions to compose a phrase, a sentence of great artistic interest. For example, a man is exercising in his apartment. As he makes one gesture, another gesture is made in an apartment next to his, which is connected to a light which gets turned on in another part of the building, which is connected to a sound which occurs somewhere else. Each movement by itself is meaningless, boring, cliched. But seen as one component of a larger artistic phenomenon, it becomes important, meaningful.

Sandra Hawkins: Canada
Golden Pond, 2007, 11’

The highly textured vegetated shoreline waters along the Mississippi River in Ontario are transformed through movement of the video camera and digital mirroring editing effects. The result is a shifting kaleidoscope of in and out mandala-like designs that crescendo and recede, their impact reinforced by A-tonal sounds of wind blowing through hydro wires. The sound is adapted from Australian artist Alan Lamb’s Journey on the Winds of Time. The video raises questions: the ecology of the environment, beauty in decay, cyclical rhythms of interconnections, and simultaneity of multiple realities.

Nicole Hewitt: Croatia
The Waltz, A Mock Ball, 2004, 10’23”

In February 2005, the Croatian National Theatre tried to emulate the Viennese Opera ball by launching its own annual Ball. The Viennese Opera Ball has long been seen in Croatia as the pinnacle of high society, and Vienna as the heart of the imaginary Croatian cultural and political heritage—the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The imaginary source shaping Croatian identity is Vienna. The venture is primarily a business venture, the commodity on sale is the fantasy of an Imperial past, a colonized subject’s longing for belonging to the mother state.

Ana Husman: Croatia
Merspajz, 2003, 2’1”

Video manual based on a cookbook written by Mira Vucetic. It is based on four recipes and for each of them while I was cooking, I made animation. Her cookbook is the one on which all-Croatian mothers and grannies based their kitchen. What is interesting is that there is no cooking or baking time written, and if you don’t have basic knowledge about cooking, it won’t help.

Ana Husman: Croatia
Plac (The Market), 2006, 9’32”

The Market is about buying groceries and preparing food for the winter. It deals with the tendency of the buyers to buy domestic products, considering them thus better than those foreign and imported, no matter the method of their cultivation. The Market explores people’s behavior during ordinary, everyday shopping in market places.

David Kasdorf and Joanna Goodman: Canada/USA
Tell Me What To Do, 2007, 19’07”

Tell Me What To Do draws its inspiration from the formal rhetoric of the instruction poem and the clinical, remote psychic space created by the television screen. We are interested, overall, in exploring the power dynamic and social exchange between author/artist and viewer. To this end, the intrinsically authorial nature of the speech mode and the passive mood associated with watching television enhance each other. We exaggerate the authorial or even tyrannical role of the artist by way of the monotonous, relentless scrolling text or voice. We call attention to anxiety instigated by opposing truths, the slippery boundary between advice and commands, and the institutional mood inherent in a circular rhetoric. Many of us turn to art to refresh our vision of ourselves and of our world. We long to resist convention. And yet, simultaneously, we in all of our dealings unconsciously search for rules to help us feel safe and in control. The fundamental grasping after cultural norms that we as a public are subservient o cannot be escaped. Tell Me What To Do attempts to call into question our human longing to be told how to be.

Luka Kito and Megan Boyd: USA
Stair, 2007, 1’45”

The film opens with a single dancer springing down a steep staircase in an outdoor park environment. Within moments another dancer darts forth and cascades down the steps. Repeatedly dancers begin to enter the camera frame and dance their way downward. It becomes quickly apparent that they are the same two dancers that opened the film, multiplied and overlaid. The duplicated image of the two dancers with various delays in time creates an unpredictable pattern of choreography that vanishes at 1’45”.

Steve and Melissa Kornicki: USA
Altered Orchestra (liquid video), 2007, 9’11”

A composition based on the mathematical principle of “self-similar” objects. A self-similar object is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself (e.g. the whole has the same shape as one or more of the parts). Many objects in the real world, such as coastlines, are statistically self-similar: parts of them show the same statistical properties at many scales. The visual and musical material of the piece consists of many instances of the same material overlapping in continually transforming ways creating new textural combinations, thus relating to the concept of self-similar objects.

Tomaz Lapajne: Slovenia
My Life, 2007, 0’35”

A short story of a life.

Paul Matosic: Britain
Test Tech, 2006, 2’

Test Tech is a film of an installation of deconstructed new technology, it serves to inform the development of a proposed installation that incorporates the notion of city surveillance. It responds to early Cubist notions of simultaneous viewpoints and it examines in close up components from technology. It plays around with rhythm and rapid editing.

Frank McCauley: USA
Friend/Enemy, 2007, 7’

Using his body as projection surface with the aid of a “projection suit”, Frank McCauley’s new work entitled Friend/Enemy is an investigation into the effect of mass media on culture and the resultant disconnection and loss of self associated with extreme fanaticism. In this instance focusing on a fictive infatuation with the character of Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek television series. This new work is part of an ongoing body of work entitled Casual Being that deals with various forms of mimicry and transformation.

Nenand Nedelijkov: Serbia
The Passing, 2007, 3’45”

The main idea of this work is presentation of human in permanent motion and relations between figures; conditions like running, walking, encounters and reactions between humans. Human forms are visualized as their inner energies. Since 2004 I’ve been working on a cycle called Study of Instability. Every work is made to be a single project but is also part of the cycle.

Richard O’Sullivan: England
Present Tense, 1999—2007, 8’40”

Present Tense juxtaposes 8mm tourist footage—taken from the top of the World Trade Center prior to its destruction—with later video images of that same footage playing in the 8mm video camera on which it was shot. The piece serves to demonstrate the illusory power of video’s immediacy, its feeling of ‘present tense.’ The deterioration of the analogue images from the towers, crackling with static, serves as a sad reminder of the fallibility of this electronic medium; as steel and concrete, video too fails and falls.

Jimmy Owenns: France
The Fortune Cookie, 2006, 8’32”

Video work about the cinematic narration (superposition of the American and French soundtracks).

Angelo Picozzi: England
00:06:03:08, 2006, 6’38”

00:06:03:08 is a digital degeneration of both sound and image. The natural element of water is progressively reduced to its digital essence—a series of pulsating patterns of light on the surface of a screen. 00:06:03:08 subverts and exposes the nature of digital imagery and sound, and the viewers relationship to and with the screen.

Domen Rupnik: Slovenia
Untitled, 2007, 2’5”

Project is a reflection of thinking about relation between man and nature. Communication between few video layers is a metaphor for “conversation” of human mind and sky.

Pallavi Sharma: India/USA
The Black Boat, 2007, 3’27”

The film is about the complex relationship which joins one person to another, building a home, living in a safer community, where never ending chain of love and trust persists, and is also challenged over and again. The “bathtub” is our sacred and profane place where we all interact, we converse, we dream, we wish! The film is a Creative interplay of floating boats in the bath tub made out of recycled paper which I use to make during my childhood days back in India during the rainy season. The multilayered paper boats are a positive signifier, longing-ness for safer world for our kids. The black boat is the central character, and is an outcome of my experience and depicts the wishes and challenges of a woman of Color.

Margarita Tsvaygenbaum: Israel
The Legend, 2006, 7’54”

Children’s stories and fairy tales always were interesting for me. In each fairy tale the certain culture is reflected. They act as a mirror, reflecting a society which they concern. The source of my inspiration were the films which have been done in style of “B-movies”. The films made by the amateur camera, the minimal budget, unprofessional actors. In this film I create my Mini-Hollywood, close to my heart… This film shows symbiosis of two cultures: Russian and Israeli. I have connected two cultures by means of the simplest educational way—fairy tales. It was based on a Russian fairy tale “Queen-a-frog.” Having divided actors’ suits in half, I have created visual synthesis of cultures. The top half is traditionally Russian clothes. Bottom part is universal, identical both to women and men: jeans and shoes. Consequence of the film is “mute”, movements of actors is finished to grotesque. They also help the spectator to apprehend and understand an essence. It is an adult sight at a children’s fairy tale.

Anders Weberg: Sweden
For Sore Eyes, 2006, 2’17”

For Sore Eyes is another exploration of the ambivalence of the male gaze and gendered (dis)order. It is a suggestive reflection of life in the pyrotechnic sanitarium of consumerism freedom. But what is really freedom?

Sylvia Winkler and Stephan Köperl: Austria/Germany
Aber den Kunden gefällts doch! (But the customers like it!), 2006, 2’

Musical intervention in the discounter supermarket.

Sylvia Winkler and Stephan Köperl: Austria/Germany
Stuck Truck, 2007, 5’

“My truck got stuck. If you help me to pull it out I’m gonna find you a bitch in town.”

Sylvia Winkler and Stephan Köperl: Austria/Germany
Medicare, 2007, 3’

Chinese medicaments and what they are good for…

Special Thanks

Gallery Centella
Timur Siqin
Bridger Berdel
Beth Jonquil
Jim Cook
And a generous grant from

http://flashflood.museumpdr.org/artists.html