By Pamela Biénzobas
The 19th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (March 3-12), in northern Greece, made a case for the rich and wonderfully diverse possibilities that archive footage has to offer, showcasing some true gems within its different programs, including a tribute to Italian artists Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian.
By Claudia Siefen
That concept of “phenomenon” exists inside the work of Susuki. Some things don’t appear as a phenomenon, but they get recognized as such once they unfold in a definite way. Of course Suzuki deals with his own self as a phenomenon. His interest in the “extremely private” originates from the idea that universality can be obtained, depending on the approach he takes in developing himself as that phenomenon.
By Karla Loncar
David Lynch has been particularly responsible for the lasting allure of the show. In other words, the series would be inconceivable without the content-based and formal characteristics typical of Lynch’s films: his love for the contrast between the eerie and the comical, light and dark, popular and exquisite; the preoccupation with the motif of evil (in a seemingly idyllic American small town); the fascination with the subconscious turmoil of characters; the richness of varying, often disturbing, sounds; and modern methods of filmmaking, particularly visible in the series’ pilot and the individual episodes directed by Lynch himself.
by Mónica Delgado
In Hermia & Helena, Matías Piñeiro deals with his fascination for the Shakespearian characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a different way than his two previous films: La Princesa de Francia or Rosalinda. Here the tale is divided by chapters, chapters that search for answers in flashbacks or by insinuating that what we see of the future (or present) is possibly part of a dream.
By Vica Smirnova
As with Antonio López Garcia, who follows nature, Victor Erice creates a palimpsest of times, or, rather, of traces of their presence, insisting on conventionality of end and beginning. In the end the camera, which for a long time shared a place with the artist, is left in solitude. Different mediums will create a semblance of finality; of something that doesn’t finish or, on the contrary, finishes in every moment of painting and filming.
by Bidhan Jacobs
Designed and published online on October 14th 2004, restored for The Wrong (Again) – New Digital Art Biennale on November 1st 2015, the website I Love You by French artist and net-art pioneer Jacques Perconte is not only a wonderful achievement of his research on image files visualization through the Internet, but also a fundamental piece in his artwork, and this for three reasons: first, it crystallizes a history of audiovisual technologies in the web age; next, it allows the analysis of his singular inventions on plasticity which are shaped by the offensive processes and techniques Perconte has developed until 2015; finally, it makes explicit the artist’s constant will to put the body to the test of digital technologies (in this case the partner’s body) and to literally inject life (each and every thought, interest, feeling, emotion, excitement, and desire aroused in him by the beloved body).
By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
This text doesn’t aspire to cover the history and the whole environment of current and historical practices on digital media and the avant-garde. It is mere a guide with annotations on some contemporary artists working in the medium and a reflection on their practices in the contemporary universe of experimental cinema.
By Tara Judah
Nick Briz, whose ‘how to glitch art’ hypermedia essay/tutorial/video I’ve taken as this article’s opening quotation, creates new media art, organises new media art events and works as a professor in a fine arts college in Chicago where he and his students discuss and produce experimental new media art. He also co-organises a conference interrogating the politics, progression, aesthetic and movement of glitch art called GLI.TC/H
Por Mónica Delgado
En RGB XYZ (2008), el irlandés David O’Reilly compone un universo salido del Paint, así de amateur en su trazo como dislocado en su estética, y observado desde un amago de drone endemoniado, que subvierte todo el mundo, rompiendo la gravedad y que permite el gobierno absoluto del pixel gigante y en completa ebullición. Como en sus trabajos posteriores, existe una fusión extraña, en la necesidad de romper con una convención de los límites de la animación propia de Hollywood, aliada a una sensibilidad punk para arrastrar a sus personajes a submundos decadentes y de crisis existenciales.
By Lauren Bliss*
In early 2015, the Indonesian experimental film co-operative Lab laba laba (Spider Lab) restored for exhibition a large number of propaganda films that had been produced in the abandoned film studios of the State Production Film Centre (PFN) in Jakarta. Having been left to the elements for nearly 12 years, the PFN was once the central film production house of New-Order era Indonesia.