Lossless #2 is a mesmerizing assemblage of compressed digital images of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s 1943 masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon. Baron and Goodwin play heavily with Teiji Ito’s 1959 soundtrack, making the film’s lyrical ambience feel more astonishing than ever before. --Neil Karassik
This is a later reworking of original video documenting the goings-on of the village, Tlocalula, Mexico in 1973. Uses footage from Oaxaca 2004 in the background.
In this work, Alfred Hitchcock's 128-minute film Vertigo (1958) has been condensed at the rate of one frame every two seconds. The condensed film was then duplicated four times, shifting the horizontal or vertical orientation of the frame with each duplication. The four films were then reassembled frame by frame, generating a stuttering kaleidoscopic montage where Oedipal narratives of desire and obsession are shifted and displaced.
A Nazi battalion marches in red in front of the ominous floating hand from THE AX HAS FLOWERED. This meditative treatment on genocide can be taken as a palliative or as a poison pill.
Featuring overlaying monologues, Phil Morton brings up a wide range of philosophical and mundane topics: self-exploration, evolution, personal values, frustration, exhaustion, spirituality, video making, etc. He discusses the capability of video as a tool for expansion of perception.
“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”
-- Graham Harvey, Animism
Trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Filmed in a single take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist's everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps -- embodiment is our eternal everything.
In part a remake of Hollis Frampton’s Gloria! (1979), in part a repurposing of hacked, 16-bit video game technology, The Well of Representation asks us to reconsider our fear of the liminal. Following the convergent narratives of several voices, ranging from the linearly historical to the cybernetically personal, we come to understand the journey ahead: searching from interface to interface, knowing that whatever home we find will be a collaborative compromise. One where we might live beyond our representations and finally come to say what we mean.
Using highly-manipulated and over-processed images, Latham investigates the process of video as inherently fragmented. Weaving together various people’s impressions of the artist and her work, the work demonstrates important parallels between video, storytelling, and the formation of identity — all processes of active fabrication that blend “lies” and truth in the construction of a certain reality, history, or past. Labeling an image of herself talking as “her most recent explanation,” Latham addresses “the construction of her video personality” as an identity outside of herself.
Imagine that the camera is possessed with a psychosis similar to human schizophrenia; suppose that this disease subtly changes every single frame of film while leaving the narrative superficially intact. Then imagine that these symptoms came on as a result of the trauma of recording bizarre or horrific events, for instance those of the 1941 horror film Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde...
Adapted from the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.
This title is also available on Paul Bush Pixilated.
In a celebrity-obsessed culture, filmmakers often exploit the downfall of a star to amplify the emotional undertones of the fictional films in which they perform. POSTFACE takes a look back at the filmography of Montgomery Clift whose private life and career spiral downward after a 1956 car crash that left his face scarred and partially paralyzed.
Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.
This meditative silent video features gradual evolving swirls on top of vertically synced bars. Their ever-changing color, shapes, and sizes demonstrate the subtleties achieved through image processing. The slow-paced kaleidoscopic glow invites the viewer to contemplate a dance of visual genesis.
–Gordon Dic-Lun Fung
For more information, visit the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive page.
A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted) is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions. Animals, human bodies, children, ritual, and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire, and a visceral movement that is more felt than seen.
Lossless #2 is a mesmerizing assemblage of compressed digital images of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s 1943 masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon. Baron and Goodwin play heavily with Teiji Ito’s 1959 soundtrack, making the film’s lyrical ambience feel more astonishing than ever before. --Neil Karassik
This is a later reworking of original video documenting the goings-on of the village, Tlocalula, Mexico in 1973.
2 Spellbound is a frame-by-frame re-editing of Alfred Hitchcock’s 111-minute psychoanalytic thriller (1945) into a seven-and-a-half-minute dance video. Converting narrative suspense into visual velocity and exploiting the symmetry of Hitchcock’s camera by reversing every other frame, 2 Spellbound generates a hallucination of transference—an ecstatic dance where bodies and identities intermingle and shift.
“Normal forgetting takes place by way of condensation. In this way, it becomes the formation of concepts. What is isolated is perceived clearly.”
A grinding mortar and pestle vignette analogously describes the evolution of digital resolution; from a single color to a high definition image to an infinite splitting of that image back into the pixels themselves.
This title is only available on Suitable Video, Volume 1.
A Letter for Phil suggests an institutional critique in the form of a correspondence signed by “Matt/Rose/Tom/Isac.” The video juxtaposes two angles of the typewriter—one showing the typed text in realtime, another showing hands of the writer. The continuous sound of the typewriter creates an intimate space between the writer and the viewer.
–Gordon Dic-Lun Fung
For more information, visit the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive page.
Proposal for sidewalk projection in NYC using 7+7. Performed by Heidi Wiren Bartlett.
Backwards Birth of a Nation is a re-editing of D.W. Griffith's 187-minute film, Birth of a Nation (1915), into a pulsating 13-minute black and white phantasm. By means of structural strategies of condensation, the frame by frame inversion of black and white, and playing the resulting work from end to beginning, an apparition is brought forth where images of racism float to the surface and are contextualised as a part of the flow of United States history.
"A cup and saucer, pouring and drinking coffee, a duration ritual of contemplation and invigoration, doubled (tape copied), mixed, keyed + synthetic color, normal play and rewinding, sync events, the opening of a space to put the self in. 1/2 inch b+w Portapack, 2 reel to reel video tape decks, David Jones keyer and colorizer."
– Peer Bode
By subjecting fragments from the Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon to a mirror effect, Provost creates a hallucinatory scene of a woman’s reverse chrysalis into an imploding butterfly. This physical audiovisual experience produces skewed reflections upon Love, its lyrical monstrosities, and a wounded act of disappearance.
The video content—a live-feed image processing tape—shows intellectual discussion among SAIC Video Area students and faculty members. Instead of being a prescriptive monologue from school to students, Phil sits among the crowd and moderates the session. The decentralized and non-hierarchical academic setting—students and faculty sitting on the floor and cushions in a circle—is typical of the ’70s. At times, students burst into laughter, dancing, and lounging on the floor, hence creating a laid-back environment.
A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted) is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions. Animals, human bodies, children, ritual, and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire, and a visceral movement that is more felt than seen.
