TYPOLOGY

Category: film+video

  • WTF is a Wayzgoose? (and WNYBAC, for that matter?)

    This weekend, get thee to Grimbsy for their 34th annual Wayzgoose, a festive fair and celebration of all things book arts-related. While the origin of the word wayzgoose is still up for speculation, there is no doubt that this tradition of annual printers’ parties dates back to at least the late 1600s, when Joseph Moxon, author of Mechanick Exercises (1683-1684), wrote: “It is customary for the Journey-men every year to make new paper windows…because that day they make them the Master Printer gives them a Way-goose, that is, he makes them a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own house, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Nice.

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  • Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics: The Ferrofluid videos

    The name says it all. Watch and be mesmerized.
    (Click images to view in YouTube)

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  • Ashes to dust: Swept Away at the Museum of Arts and Design


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    While in New York, we stopped off at the Museum of Arts and Design to see Swept Away: Dust, Ashes and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design. Part of a series of exhibitions that “explore the intersection of traditional or unusual materials and techniques as viewed through the lens of contemporary art and design,” Swept Away features painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, performances, and installations which confront “the ephemeral nature of art and life, the quality and content of memory, issues of loss and disintegration, and the detritus of human existence” through the incorporation of fugitive and often discarded materials.

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  • The medium is the money: Hennessey on Hirst, Occupy George, Mark Wagner, and Gary Taxali


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    In the wake of Hennessey Youngman’s hilarious and pointed YouTube critique of Damien Hirst (linked below) in which Hirst gets skewered for: a) perpretrating “a perfect storm of banality”, b) oozing an unprecedented level of “Iroc-Z Axe Body Spray douchery” and  c) yes, using money as his medium, it seems an opportune moment to take a look at some other recent money-based projects as an interesting counterpoint to the art of excess.

    Just yesterday, Hyperallergic profiled Occupy George, an online initiative in which infographics visualizing aspects of the economic disparity in the US have been made available for anyone to download and print onto dollar bills. The stated intent? To circulate the stamped money as much as possible, passing knowledge to all who come across the bills.

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  • Art and Drinks and Bettina Hoffmann


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    Recently we enjoyed the art and drinks at Art and Drinks, the experimental venue on Dundas West featuring non-narrative video art in a lounge-like setting. Conceived as a hybrid pop-up space by artist John Oswald, Art and Drinks sets itself apart from the usual gallery/café scene by carefully foregrounding the exhibition and visual experience of the art over the comparatively unaesthetic business of eating and drinking. Presented salon style on all four walls (including the plate-glass window fronting on Dundas), video works by a changing roster of artists are displayed in a variety of projected and screen-based formats and sizes. Ambient music serves to modulate the sounds of conversation without detracting from the visual experience, while headphones hanging on the walls invite the viewer into further engagement with individual works. One might expect visual cacophany from such an arrangement, but the effect is surprisingly harmonious and coherent, a testament to the curatorial choices Oswald has made with regard to artworks and placement.

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  • “Tales From The Gimli Hospital” Comes Back to Haunt You


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    In New York this past weekend, Guy Maddin’s cult classic experienced a rebirth and transformation in its new incarnation, Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed. As part of the Performa 11 New Visual Art Performance Biennial, Maddin’s frankly bizarre first film was screened to the accompaniment of new narration and singing by Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir (formerly of múm, and also known as Kria Brekkan), and live orchestration and sound effects directed by the filmmaker himself.

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  • Surface Detail


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    Hypnotic and visceral. By Tom Beddard aka subblue.

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  • Murmuration


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    The embodiment of exhilaration.

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  • Susan Hiller at Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art


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    Presented as a wall-sized video projection, Susan Hiller’s The Last Silent Movie is a beautifully simple and deeply moving testimony to the ongoing obliteration of linguistic and cultural diversity in the wake of accelerating industrialization and globalization. Featuring simple white text on a black field accompanying words and phrases being uttered by the last speakers of twenty-five endangered or extinct languages, the video surprises and delights with the remarkable and unfamiliar sounds of languages such as Manx, Jerrais, Livonian, Potowatomi, Yao Kimmien, and Ubykh.

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  • Ursus Wehrli’s new world order


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    Ursus Wehrli’s photographs propose an orderly, perhaps obsessive, way of looking at the world. Ranging in scale from the tiny (an inventory of pine needles) to the colossal (galaxies and stars ordered by size), they provide a vicariously pleasing, if transitory, sense of control over our environment.

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