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Marianna and Daniel O'Reilly (London, UK)

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Royal Male or Coppola’s Spyglass - 2009 - Video

 

‘Royal Male or Coppola’s Spyglass’ is an experimental narrative about a woman in search of her image, her body and her expression. As she encounters the male in the language that pins down her gender, her image begins to decay into archaic stereotypes of the feminine that are rooted in fear and horror, and the language she is subjected to becomes one of violence. In an attempt to experiment with the possibility of a feminine language the video emphasises the value of the interruption; in sex, in language and in image, and introduces ETA Hoffmann’s character of the Sandman as the deliverer of dreams to the sleeping, and of nightmares to the awakened.

 

Megan Jean Harlow (Vermont, USA)

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Dancing Goddess of YouTube - 2010 - Video

 

Anonymous is the dancing chaotic God of YouTube. Their playfulness, fractured ideologies, and rhetorical strategies embrace the irony of postmodernism. Identity becomes formless within the medium of the internet. As content is separated from form what emerges is a space of chora. Plato described chora as the space between being and becoming.

Contrary to critics fears of postmodernisms emptying of ethics I argue
that a new ethics emerges in the chaos of chora. This is an ethics of the moment . Anonymous seen in this light is not the end of ethics but rather a return to a primordial ethics that speaks of truths excess; addressing the paradox of contemporary micro-celebrity culture. Anon's communiqués poetically undermine narcissism. Following Butlers account of ethics I want to argue that ethical action requires a freedom from the subject. In the face of an unstable society the drive to self publish to give an account of oneself is the risk necessary to act.

What if Anon was a woman? If Anon is read as a woman we can begin to uncover the logic that has created identity and woman. Western metaphysical tradition has placed women in a binary focused on the male gaze - beauty/monster - Feminine subjectivity has been dictated by the privileging of the male gaze as Berger argues. Anon reflects the shattered image of celebrity back upon itself. Anon is not the death of the subject but the return of repression a ghost in the wires.

Melissa Potter (Chicago, USA)

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Boy Brides & Bachelors - 2009 - Video

 

Boy Brides & Bachelors< is an animated video shot on a cold January night in Southeastern Serbia during a ritual called Surovari in which men dress as women (large breasted peasants, grandmothers, and brides), and engage in pretend sexual acts with village bachelors.Little is known about the meaning of this pagan ritual, but its contemporary gender role-play implications are profound.

As I ran from house-to-house shooting footage that night, I didn’t know until more than halfway through the event that the “girl” with enormous breasts (who transfixed me with her beauty and outrageousness) was actually a boy, Milos. I also discovered that a little boy who was following the group, but rather uninvited, was in fact a girl. No girls are allowed to participate. That my ethnographer colleagues with whom I was traveling didn’t mention this seemingly key factor was baffling. The former Yugoslavia adheres by our Western standards to traditional gender roles and codes, and thus alternative variations of sexual expression are often met with fear, and even violence.

In Boy Brides & Bachelors, I use stop motion animations to engage my questions about the underlying meanings of the ritual, and make a connection between my inability to translate much of what was going on with the strange language of gender itself. Ultimately, I pose the question: What would our world look like if women had their opportunity to parody gender?How might we transform our society if this kind of role-play were allowed out from under the shadow of night and ritual? This piece is part of an ongoing dialog in my work about the organization of society through gender codes, rituals, and discrimination.  

 

 

Nia Burks (Maryland, USA)

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Reaction#1 - 2010 - Video 1:39

As a digitally knowledgeable populace, we possess the freedom and means to present the self as we choose—an ability that no other generation to date has known. Web 2.0 and Social Networking Sites have revolutionized personal communication and expression. They allow us to connect in novel and unprecedented ways, shattering old network paradigms. Ostensibly, geographical boundaries, unspoken class hierarchies, or social status no longer restricts us. By allowing instant and relatively anonymous methods of expression, we are provided with an opportunity to truly explore personas removed from geographically localized cultural frameworks that try to define who we are through the use of often arbitrary social constructs.

 

 

 

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BootyMeat -2010- Video 1:30

 

With the availability to perform for an audience to which we hold no accountability, we are truly afforded freedom of identity. So why— when faced with the intoxicating possibility of the infinite—do we choose to imitate each other? My interest does not lie in our differences, but rather, our similarities. My work investigates this idea in addition to others dealing specifically with interconnectivity. The progression of popular trends on the web combined with their meanings, effects and usefulness in our culture is a rapidly moving target. I examine the internet and its usefulness in popular culture by gathering and rearranging readily available data to make new statements about it, and gain many new understandings of our habits as gregarious, selfish, hopeful, happy, sad, lonely and most importantly, forthcoming, beings.

 

 



Susanne Schuda

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The bir(d)th - 2007/08 - video - 22:34

The bir(d)th is an interactive 3D narration where users can choose their perspective. 2 permanent mutating figures in a 3D living room are watching TV and having sex. In the TV there is a show about shabby charity events, a talk show about the essence of fear, and an advertisement for Worldview insurance. The figures in the living room are 2D collaged images from Internet material and animated in 3D.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ulf Kristiansen (Norway)

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The Art Reception - 2010 - video - 11 min

 

The Art Reception is a self-biographical black machinima comedy about artistic failure. A figurative painter holds an art reception. The critics and the audience are less than impressed by his art project (depicting male porn stars) and they tell him so. He does not take the criticism well. He loses his mind completely and starts hallucinating before passing out. In his dreams he gets his revenge. But dreams are short-lived.

 

 

 

 

Sheila Bishop (Florida, USA)

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sa.lacio.uslyLearningToSayNo - 2006 to 20010 video capture of video hosting website - 10 min

 

Here's the story. I post one of my early video pieces LearningToSayNo on Medicine Films. I want to reach a larger audience than I would if I uploaded it to one of my websites. I want the work to be part of a community conversation. I want the distribution power of a video-sharing site. Medicine Films allows users to label work "mature." It is one of the few video-hosting sites that allows mixed content. YouTube does not allow mature material- at least according to their rules, and I am a bit of a goody-goody. I want this piece to be labeled "mature" because it contains graphic descriptions of a bad sexual experience. It is meant for adults. Regardless of my various, sometimes contradictory, feelings about porn, I do not consider this video porn, so I do not look for a porn hosting site. I post the video. I send the link around. People watch it. Months pass. Over 1800 people watch the video. A year passes. I click on the small screenshot that should take me to the video and thus to the link I want, but I am taken away from Medicine Films and driven to sa.lacio.us: a website of social bookmarking for adults. My video about bad sex now lives surrounded by bad (or perhaps I should say uninteresting to me) porn on three sides. I wish someone had told me that all my "mature" work would be framed by bignaturals.com Glue Torture Three Girls in a Car!!!

I decided to make that whole experience into a brand new piece, to frame it as art instead of chance. In the video itself as well as its juxtaposition within the porn portal, I am trying to get at the ways in which sex, sexism and sexuality awkwardly dance together to create our experiences. Just like the man described in the story I narrate, porn is not all bad. It is not all his or its fault. But porn has an affect. We can never know precisely what that affect is, but we should look closely all the same. Some art is pornographic. Some porn is artful. But there are few, if any, communal places online for explicit video work about sex to exist without being framed by porn because video work that is explicit about sex, in our culture, can only be one thing, porn. I believe this is disservice to porn as well as to art.

 

 

Yuliya Lanina (New York)

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Mishka - 2008 - video - 5 min

 

"Mishka" is a playful depiction of human nature and of our culture. The main protagonist, Mishka, a little monkey with a human face, is tired of his corruptive life. He goes from one doll party to another without much joy or engagement. All of a sudden a three-eyed crawling creature appears and brings Mishka to a mysterious place of possible innocence. But Mishka's motivations are tainted and he is taken to hell by the mother bird. His death is imminent. Mishka is killed by an inwardly tortured death character while being observed by human monkeys and fornicating carrots. But his life goes on. He comes back as a mechanical doll whose only purpose is to entertain.

 

 

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Bible Reader - 2009 - stop motion animation - 2 min

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Owen Eric Wood

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Lost

The performative dimension plays a vital role in a great number of Wood's videos. The artist himself is present in his work in order to challenge concepts of identity whereby individuals must constantly reinvent or appropriate their own image. The artist dismantles the wheels of such processes while blurring the line between fiction and reality. Performance and self portraiture are at the heart of the Owen Eric Wood's art practice. As an interdisciplinary artist, he incorporates drawing, sculpture, photography and installation in his videos to reflect existential themes.









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Made Up

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ron Yeshoua (Tel Aviv, Israel)

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The search for love in urban landscapes is the focus of my work. The movement between loneliness and the search for communications has metamorphosed from the personal to the political. The humane has not become a vessel of representation, a metaphor, leading to the quest for security in a deconstructed world.  In the virtual age reality has become a separate independent question that is becoming rephrased and investigated a new, both the physical reality which we inhabit and the virtual reality. It is the dialog between those two types of realities that has made the metaphors into specters in the new world. These specters thus serves as representations of reality and mirages at the same time.

My work is heavily influenced by Jacques Derrida and his theory of deconstruction. In particular I place emphasis on the search for meaning in a world that has no security and no safe foothold. Even things that are tantalizingly real can no longer be relied on in such a world and henceforth we are lead to examine the meaning of love under such conditions.

I construe that those special settings the self evolves into an explorer whose foray into reality results in the construction of a new language. This is what I endeavor to achieve with my camera work. By introspecting the seemingly familiar actuality we find out how slight our familiarity has been. The works employs the contrast between beclouded and the clear, the reality as captured from the computer screen versus the physical reality presented in the same space.

My works are best presented when projected not at they size they have been composed in thus further enhancing their spectral nature. This serves to underlie the ghostly nature of the virtual world.

Samuel D. York

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nicebooty, 2009

 

This work explores the well documented phenomenon of "booty poppin" videos existing on the popular user generated content platform YouTube. The video loop displays a Firefox browser caught in an infinite feedback loop as it streams a readymade flv file of a woman shaking her "donk." I feel that the video peers into the infinity mirror generated by contemporary culture. YouTube users are in rapid exhibitonist competition for the most subscribers to their page, most views to their vlog. In this form of Cyber-Darwinism one of the best ways to gain many veiwers is with semi-explicit or highly sexualized content. YouTube is the ideal format for the work as the video draws veiwers entering related search terms, interupting their search for elusory sexual content. Nudity is censored from YouTube.



Ondrej Brody, Kristofer Paetau, Michal Pechoucek (The Czech Republic)

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Auticko - 2006 - Video

 

We can access the video of O. Brody & K. Paetau by stepping into an area of profound loss escalated by an unpleasant physical confrontation. The artists are operating at the border of ethical limits which most of us do not dispute but rather fear and ignore. Our natural fear of losing control and the integrity of our conceptions are challenged by the ‘evil forces’ operating within the structure of the video called “Auticko”. Auticko means‚ ‘small toy car’ in Czech. It might also evocate the term ‘autism’ and produce other associations in the viewers’ mind. “Auticko” was produced for a particular occasion - it was filmed and showed in the Jiri Svestka Gallery in Prague. The act of violence, aggression, manipulation and (remote-) control is omnipresent in the work and it is only up to the viewer to decide if this is happening rightfully. Auticko is on the first sight a cruel, cynical and sexually explicit work. Brody’s & Paetau’s raw, almost anti-artistic approach seems over-structured, overexposed and leaves us at its original anti-aesthetical stage with everything in our face that most of us are trying to hide.