video art

Experimental films, TikTok, and other art forms

intermechanismcontributor

by Vivian L
University of Chicago MADD 15300: The Loop as Form
Spring 2023

Although I have studied art history extensively, especially art throughout the twentieth century, I don’t usually encounter art that is intentionally taxing and unwatchable. Repetition and looping, on the other hand, are entirely different for me and quite enjoyable, so it was interesting to see a mix of these techniques. I didn’t know anything about experimental filmmaking before, so the experience was confusing, intriguing, then back to confusing. I had many questions and wrote down my observations during the screening. My initial observations included words like collage, layering, sampling, abstraction, and means of editing that felt oddly contemporary, much like the parody videos today. 

Like the class discussion said, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G was mentally taxing, inducing in different people a spectrum from boredom to anxiety. In my case, it was an uncomfortable mix of both. Destroy, destroy, destroy, destroy, destroy… Regarding the formal qualities of the film, I am drawn to the dynamic use of color and light, but I could not sit through more than 30 seconds of it before going on my phone and looking at something more calming. The rapid repetition of both images and sound created a sense of urgency that could not be escaped even when I closed my eyes, because I could still see the flickering light and hear the robotic voice.  Destroy, destroy, destroy, destroy, destroy… 

As the screening continued, I found myself becoming more and more immersed in the films. My Name is Oona was quite relaxing and poetic. Wonder Woman was funny and insightful; I was very engaged because I had never seen the show, and I completely understood the message of critiquing the depiction of females as objects of desire, even when they were superheroes. Something is to be said about all of these films: the use of unconventional techniques such as found footage, abstract visuals, and non-linear narratives challenged my preconceived notions of what constituted a film. I realized that experimental filmmaking was not just a means of creating art but also a way of subverting traditional modes of representation and challenging societal norms. The artists sought to break free from the shackles of commercial cinema and use their craft as a tool for social commentary and political activism, which was eye-opening to see.

Having been born in the era of the attention economy and a regular consumer of short-form video content, I have made “successful” Instagram posts and TikTok videos that made use of the algorithm, and it does feel good to have accomplished such goals when the standard is ever so elusive and fleeting — and I do realize this line of thinking is problematic. Hence, it would be interesting to imagine how to use formal qualities of contemporary media to critique themselves. T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G would totally work in the browser, in form of a pop-up window that cannot be exited without watching for a duration of time, almost like an uninvited virus; Vertical Roll could be transformed into a critique of mindless scrolling on TikTok; furthermore, there are already edits on different Internet platforms that use parody to make fun of celebrities, politicians, and such. Some people noted under the discussion thread that these critiques are always limited by physical constraints of the media, but so is every art form. Paint doesn’t work without a canvas; code doesn’t work without a computer; video art doesn’t work without a television. 

At the same time, 2023 is different from the late twentieth century. Although there are many restrictions imposed by online platforms, media has become less centralized (at least on the surface?) and distributed into the hands of creators, where diverse voices can be heard if they make smart use of the algorithms. Yes, there is the problem of algorithmic bias, but it is not unbeatable. With persistence and creativity, creators can find ways to work within the system and make their voices heard. Ultimately, the democratization of media offers both challenges and opportunities, and it will be interesting to see how this trend continues to evolve in the future.

Throughout the twentieth century, there was the desire to combine art and technology to make art more meaningful and technology more humanistic. Video art was one of the many examples where artists sought to control the means of influence and make it work for the people. Bauhaus came before it, and glitch/internet art came after it. There will always be resistance to new and emerging technology, and I see AI and machine learning art to be the next manifestation of the rebellious spirit of artists, especially the creative technologists. I am currently taking an AI art class, and one of the things we discussed was how prompt engineering can be put in conversation with Fluxus – it’s interesting to see themes in the past resurface and become relevant again.

White Cube / Black Box / Phone Screen

intermechanismcontributor

by Sage A
University of Chicago MADD 15300: The Loop as Form
Spring 2023

As I was posing questions for discussion, I was operating, perhaps problematically, under the assumption that gallery and theater spaces were standard and that digital spaces may perhaps undermine them or fail to adequately engage spectators. This is an especially salient question given the limited access to gallery/theater spaces during the pandemic, bolstering an already large-scale acceleration of the 21st century digital takeover. However, I was taken aback to hear that many people in class strongly preferred digital methods of engaging with art as opposed to the gallery space. Among other critiques, people noted that galleries were too formal or sterile, they impose strict criteria for which art is considered valid, and imply something is wrong with you if you don’t appreciate a certain piece of art on display. On the other hand, there was a general consensus that digital spaces are a valid addition rather than a source of degradation to traditional art spaces. In particular, there was discussion of curated art pages and tiktok videos as methods to democratize art and increase its reach. At least one person stated that they were familiar with Can’t Help Myself, a piece I presented in class, but would never have known about it if not for social media. 

In hindsight, I now recognize a parallel between the work that moving image artists were doing to problematize the gallery/theater dichotomy and the advent of digital art spaces. By blurring the lines between formal art contexts, moving image artists asserted not only their right as artists to properly contextualize their art, but also the right of spectators to engage with art in various non-traditional ways. Similarly, digital spaces offer us the opportunity to encounter art on our own terms; we gain more control over contextualization, method, depth, and duration. This democratization of art has been an important offshoot of the greater democratization of knowledge that the internet has contributed to. The ability to discover new pieces of art online with a wealth of information available at your fingertips is priceless. 

Though the breaking down of barriers and limitations in the art world expands its reach to ever more people, there is a tension: sometimes limitations serve important purposes. Encountering art is not the same as engaging with it, and leaving everything up to spectators can potentially undermine the work of the art and artist. For instance, the constraints of the gallery and theater spaces force a focus on the art which is on display. It’s considered bad form to check your phone during a movie or take a call at the museum. In digital spaces, or in the home, these social and artistic customs lose their force. It’s incredibly easy to be distracted by a notification, switch to a different app, or even to have your feed refresh only to lose the art you were looking at. Humans are easily distractible, and the oversaturation of online content only feeds into this tendency. If the post of a piece of art isn’t immediately interesting, we’ll just scroll past it. If it’s not entertaining, we won’t work to understand it. Alternatively, in museums, I frequently find myself looking at all the pieces of art displayed in a particular gallery or room. I don’t want to be gauche, disrespectful, or miss out on an important continuity by skipping unappealing art installations. I’m more likely to engage cognitively, to read the plaque on the wall, to attempt to determine why this piece of art was chosen for a curated exhibit. So, even as digital spaces afford greater opportunities for us to encounter art, what good is it if we don’t care? What do we gain from staring at a screen-sized photo of a ten foot painting for a mere 30 seconds before promptly forgetting and moving on to the next post? 

Even with the reading for our class, which I did my best to genuinely work to understand, which I had to pay attention to lest my presentation be terrible, there is still a limit to how much I can learn when I can’t see the central pieces of art in person. The best I could access were the pictures in the reading (with explanations), pictures and videos posted online, and gifs. Despite such a heavy emphasis on the physicality of art pieces from Breer, Duchamp, and Paik, I will always lack some of their intended effect because I was unable to interact with these pieces in real life. Not only was physical apparatus and situation in space integral to their works, so was the complicity, even necessity, of the spectator as an integral element of the art itself. It was disappointing to be unable to experience these works of art in their entirety. Something is missing.

But how often do people consider the missing element when they come across art online? We’ve been so inundated with pictures of the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers that we become completely blind to the fact that there’s more than the photo; the scale of the paintings, the brushstrokes, the texture and thickness of the paint, the true hues of the colors. We are so conditioned to the mere image, replicated digitally, that we forget the physical. Equally worrisome are the stories of visitors to the Louvre taking pictures of the Mona Lisa then moving on, more concerned with telling people that they saw it than actually seeing it. Even when the physical is right before us, we still fail to recognize its importance. 

I think, then, that we come right back to the problem moving image artists attempted to address: context of art is important, and when it’s wrong, the art is unable to come into its entirety. Different art works best in different spaces, and artists deserve some degree of say in which spaces those are. But this is not to discount the digital entirely. While paintings may be best in the gallery, while experimental video art may be best in the theater, and while pieces like the Mutoscope may bridge both spaces, there are countless forms of art which thrive in the digital. It’s up to us to recognize which forms these are. 

Interesting Games of 2018: A Belated Wrap-Up

Ian Bryce Jones

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I fell behind on 2018 games thanks to my “Let’s Study Horror Games” series. Things kind of worked out in the end, though, because 2018 ended up being not quite as supersaturated with games as 2017. To be sure, it was a year of big releases, both on the mainstream AAA front and on the indie front. But it didn’t have the sheer firehose volume of 2017.

Since my mid-year post handled January through June, I was originally intending this post to mostly cover games that came out from July 1st onward. It turned out there were plenty of stragglers I missed in the previous post, so that organizational scheme ended up going out the window. A jumble of things below the jump.

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Tuesday, March 6: Heaven Is a Place

Ian Bryce Jones

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So, this blog became something of a ghost town in February. The reason for that is that I’ve been hard at work on a number of projects, which means that the coming months will contain a slew of announcements.

To inaugurate these announcements: this Tuesday, The Nightingale Cinema is screening a program entitled “Heaven Is a Place,” curated by my friend Jesse Malmed. (It’s an offshoot of the exhibition of the same name he curated at Heaven Gallery.) Each of the filmmakers & video artists showing work in it have been commissioned to create work for another historical exhibition or screening—i.e., it’s a chance for them to finally be a part of Frank Stauffacher’s “Art in Cinema” film series, or Douglas Crimps’ “Pictures” show, or Die Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst,” or whatever catches their fancy.

I have a short video showing in this screening, entitled OREO NABISCO secret planet POISON january 2018 Concealed Information CONFIRMED!!!! The exhibition I’ve chosen to align myself with will remain a secret for now. If you’re in Chicago, and you are able, I invite you to show up—7:30 PM on Tuesday March 6, at The Nightingale. It promises to be a great show. (Indeed, I’m preemptively both honored and embarrassed to have something I put together more or less on a lark to be shown alongside the work of filmmakers I genuinely admire.)

I’ll eventually post the video on Vimeo, but not until after it’s premiered. [UPDATE: I’ve uploaded it onto my Vimeo page, here.]

Lesson Plan: Borders, Boundary Crossings, and Subaltern Images

Ian Bryce Jones

goss_stranger_comes_to_town_screenshot_01

Ian here—

Well, you can’t win ’em all. Over-ambition gets to the best of us, and sometimes a somewhat incoherent lesson is the result. Consider this post to be less of a how-to guide, and more of a postmortem on what is clearly still a work-in-progress.

Migration is a topic that, from the beginning, I knew I wanted to tackle in my Avant-Garde Film and Video Art course this term. US immigration reared its head quite explicitly in my week spent on Bill Brown’s The Other Side, but I also wanted to try out some more conceptually far-flung approaches to the topic. Key here were two texts: Hito Steyerl’s article “In Defense of the Poor Image,” which re-casts image quality as an image of global politics, turning a close eye on how media objects circulate around the world in the current neoliberal order, and Jacqueline Goss’ video Stranger Comes to Town (2007), which tells tales of entry into the US that have been metaphorized into World of Warcraft machinima.

I thought I could draw out some sort of grand theme from this material, about how the circulation of images maps on to the migration of people in our contemporary political regime. It turns out I wasn’t really up to this task. And it’s a shame, too, because I dearly love the videos I assembled for this week, and wish I could have done better by them.

[Update: I asked for feedback in the last day of class, and it turns out that several students actually really liked this class session. They thought its sketched-out argument left them room to think, and really appreciated having to fill in the blanks themselves. Apparently, for some students, it was perfect seminar material. Their only real complaint was that I could have expanded this material, and stretched it out over several weeks! So take the self-criticism in this post with a grain of salt, I guess.]

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What Went Wrong?

intermechanismcontributor
Screen Shot 2017-04-18 at 10.36.09 PM

by JB
SAIC ENG 1005-14: First-Year Seminar II
Avant-Garde Film and Video Art
Spring 2017

The avant-garde, experimental films of the late 1960s put their audience in the darkness of the theater with radical images and speculative subjects. The viewers were left to wonder “What am I watching,” “Why is this happening,” and ultimately “What went wrong?” Which is the same question that Blonde Cobra presents at the end of its duration. Naturally, we question the intentions of artists in this movement. Blonde Cobra flaunts its awareness of failure to unravel film and identity. It reminds us the world is not a spectacle easily observed but a reminder that we are cinema. We are no longer bought into the heteronormative conventions in the mainstream of Hollywood. Thus we begin to realize our position as spectator in relation to what is being viewed. In the “Introduction (to Flesh Cinema)” by Ara Osterweil, we are immersed into the ideas behind Ken Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra of embracing failure and queering the image in the corporeal turn of the avant-garde.

“Failing” is pivotal in the films of the American underground cinema. “Losing, forgetting, unmaking, un­doing, unbecoming, not knowing may offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” is what Judith Halberstam has manifested in the ‘queer art of failure.’ Osterweil introduces us to the platform in which Jack Smith performs for Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra. Described as “the worst film ever made” by critic David James, Blonde Cobra is the composite of Bob Fleischner’s parody films of Blonde Venus (1932) and Cobra Woman (1944) with the narration of a live radio. Jacobs deconstructs the fictional world that lives in cinema by taking away the image, playing the audio throughout the theater opposed to speakers behind the image. The blackout of the image, a persistent feature in the film, is the instance of what could’ve been a mistake. Rather its failures are key and used to queer cinema from heteronormative commerciality that is capitalism.

The social and cultural environment in which images like this emerged was in experimentation of music, visual arts, and performance. Artists continue to make radical film post the 1960s, and the spirit of social transgression that characterized early underground cinema lives on through works of more contemporary American filmmakers, such as Sadie Benning. She is an artist most well known for her Pixel Vision videos that give the viewer an inside look into her personal life and adolescent culture with a mix of music, extreme close up shots of her face and jumping narratives that highlight her suffering through, similar to a diary.

Living Inside explores the family dynamics and short moments of adolescent stream of consciousness. Benning faces rejection of her peers, feelings toward school and family and very irrelevant topics that break up the narrative such as “i got a pimple,” “my dog like dog food,” and “I know lots of people that like ham.” These fragments of personal thoughts are interrupted by cuts and the noise present from the analog medium of the Fischer-Price Pixel Vision she taped films on.

Questions for the class:

  • How do Sadie Benning’s videos relate to the images seen in the American Avant-Garde of the 1960s? Do they fail?
  • Can you think of any forms of failure seen in contemporary media and images?
  • Even though the intentions of these films were to fail, fuck up, be ugly- are they bad? Can we get past taste to appreciate films like this?

Joana Pimenta’s An Aviation Field

Ian Bryce Jones

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Ian here—

So I’ve done a couple dispatches now from the University of Chicago Film Studies Center’s “Troubling the Image” series. I’ve especially like the recent material that Julia Gibbs and Patrick Friel have pulled together from filmmakers and video artists around the world. As it turns out, 2016 was an especially good year for experimental cinema.

In fact, although there’s a truly embarrassing array of films I need to catch up on from 2016 (been playing too many games …), I think it’s likely the case that my favorite film from 2016 will be an experimental short: Portuguese-American filmmaker Joana Pimenta’s video An Aviation Field.

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Arash Nassiri’s Darwin Darwah

Ian Bryce Jones

darwin_darwah-frame_grab

Ian here—

Another quick reflection on something screened for the Film Studies Center’s so-far excellent “Troubling the Image” series. This time, Arash Nassiri’s video Darwin Darwah (2016), screened as part of their “Tales of Sound and Vision” night, last Friday. The screening was full of great stuff—including The Inner World of Aphasia (Edward R. Feil, 1958), which I would recommend to anyone who always wished Sam Fuller and Owen Land had made a film together—but Nassiri’s piece left me with the most coherent thoughts.

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Preview: Avant-Garde Cinema and Video Art

Ian Bryce Jones

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Ian here—

The School of the Art Institute spring 2017 semester begins tomorrow, and I wanted to take a moment this week to introduce this term’s classes, as you will likely be seeing posts related to these classes in the near future. First up: the section I’m teaching for SAIC’s First-Year Seminar II course, “Avant-Garde Film and Video Art.”

Now, I’ve taught this course before, and in fact this blog is littered with previous lesson plans I’ve used for it. But I decided to shuffle my syllabus up considerably this time around.

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Janie Geiser’s Flowers of the Sky

Ian Bryce Jones

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Ian here—

Any occasion to see a new film by Janie Geiser is a happy one, but I am especially lucky in that the context in which I saw Flowers of the Sky (2016) was during the inaugural screening of “Troubling the Image,” a series of recent (or recently-restored) avant-garde/experimental films being put on at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center. Programmed by Julia Gibbs and Patrick Friel, the series promises to be a stream of delights, and I’m hoping to post some more dispatches from it in the future.

There was plenty of great work on display in this first screening, entitled “Color My World.” (I was especially glad to see more videos from T. Marie, whose work I had fallen behind on in recent years. 2014’s Panchromes I-III certainly did not disappoint, together forming one of the greatest examples of “cinema as painting” that I can think of.) But I’ve decided to limit my thoughts here to Geiser, and Flowers of the Sky.

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