Stigmart VideoFocus Special Edition NZK

12th Edition STIGMART 1 0.PRESS

From experimental cinema to fashion videography, fourteen artists breaking the boundaries Since its foundation, Stigmart10 has encouraged a conception of art based on a dynamic dialogue between artists and audience, reflecting the interactive nature of the creative act itself.

A winning formula, according to the doubled number of submissions - more than 3000 applicants have submitted their video works and CV in 2014 - and the increasing popularity of our project.

We are glad to present this year's edition of Videofocus, our special Stigmart10 review focused on experimental cinema, original fashion videography and courageous documentary.

Stigmart10 Team

4

Vanja Sandell Billström

"Working with moving images for more than ten years has made me think a lot about the role of the filmmaker. Reflections about the presence of the person behind the camera has played an important role in my work for the recent years. "

14

Tuo Wang

"My recent project Vanitas (2013-‐2014) is founded on his “alienation effect,” combining with my knowledge and understanding of literature, unifying an interdisciplinary work with multiple layers of narration. "

24

Maïté Jeannolin & Charlotte Marchal

"When we started developing the project with Charlotte, I had to think about a previous "dance video" I made when I was younger with another filmmaker. Although we collaborated on the scenario, the video still bear some quite defined roles in terms of who makes the dance, who decides what is shot and who knows best how to edit. "

36

Lucas Roger

" With this connected world and all possibilities that we can have with new medias, we don't need to depend anymore of a pre-established cinematic language, so, in this short movie I am the director, the actor, the producer, and, above all, the artist. "

48

Kristen DeGree

"The idea came while I was driving down a highway towards Louisville, Kentucky on Halloween, 2013. My very best ideas come during transport of some kind. A random thought, did my Grandma celebrate Halloween? What was her favorite costume?"

60

Angelina Voskopoulos

“Exogenesis’’ is responsibly depicting energy, illuminated energy which moves freely inside the electrical field of the universe, interconnecting every Thing, holding and shaping the physical, the spiritual and the intellectual world, giving it life and movement.

Throughout the years I have felt like I am preparing for the end, yet this end is full of passages, and one such passage remains vivid in my mind.

Dawn Hollison

70

"For Ode I worked from the idea of a collector and her relationship to the items she collects. I wanted to explore this relationship when the process of acquisition serves to feed an underlying pathology. In this context the actions of the collector take on moral implications, although she is initially blind to this fact."

Amir Azar

80

"When I first watched Bruce Conner and Joseph Cornell’s found footage films, I was amazed by how the artists transform the used images into something else. It was almost like witnessing the process of incarnation, a transcendental moment of seeing the new soul bringing the old body to life."

Aleksander Johan Andreassen

88

"I had known Roy for a time and decided at some point that I wanted to make a work with him. He had an outlook that I somehow wanted to portray, but I did not know what form it would take.Roy is quite shy so it became evident that one viable method in making a work around his story would be to interview him as opposed to staging events or just following him with a camera. "

Shaun Vendryes

98

"I got into experimental cinema in high school . During that time I was taking a TV production class and was introduced to linear editing system.

It was there I started to work with video shooting and editing small 2 min pieces. "

Karina Griffith

110

"Inspired by the continuing struggle of African refugees in Berlin for the right to work and freedom of movement, UNKRAUT is a visual representation of the filmmakers experience with European xenophobia. "

David Theobald

120

"Today, location is not so much defined by geography, but by our position within the complex web of processes that make up contemporary society. My work attempts to capture such a situation, caught in a perpetual state of transit where increasing complexity is often presented as the illusion of ‘progress’. "

Bilsu Hacar

130

This video is not just about one thing.

As one side, about the environment we should grow up, the conditions we may give birth. On the other hand, the a baby is a hope, if you dare to give a birth.

Slava Pogorelsky In "Silent Misery" I wanted to bring the viewer an unusual audio visual experience with different way of story telling. The sound work started before the picture, and when I had enough musical ideas to play with. I started shooting. For me soundtrack plays a very big role in a storytelling, sometimes it comes in a perfect sync to reinforce the image and sometimes tells it's own story adding another meaning and depth.

142

An artist's statement

Working with moving images for more than ten years has made me think a lot about the role of the filmmaker. Reflections about the presence of the person behind the camera has played an important role in my work for the recent years.

Creating situations where the photographer, the

cast and the viewer are being addressed, I want to raise questions about our relations to film and how we structure our perception of reality and the image of ourselves. In my practice I often work with both fictional and documentary elements and methods. According to me these two are closely intertwined. Since fiction always carries traces of reality and documentary often has a great deal of fiction in it, it makes a lot

A still from What There Is

more sense for me to mix them up, rather than claiming something to be the one certain thing or the other.

Vanja Sandell Billstrรถm is educated at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden where she graduated from the Masters programme in Fine Arts in 2014. In 2012 her film "The Photographer" was nominated for Best Swedish

Short at Gรถteborg International Film Festival and later nominated for the annual swedish Guldbagge Award. "What There Is" was recently exhibited in the show "Let Me Tell You A Story" at Gรถteborgs Konsthall (January 2015).

Vanja Sandell Billstrรถm

An interview with

Vanja Sandell Billström Vanja Sandell Billström's work focuses on the tensions between perception, space and subjectivity in the contemporary age.

The hallmark of Vanja's talent resides in her absolute sincerity, her acute sensitivity. In What There Is she investigates the roots of her relation to moving images, displaying an extraordinary cinematography in this intensive, brutal and poetic film, marked by a radical indifference to decors. Vanja, we want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for What There Is? A couple of years ago there was a period of time where I filmed almost every day with my cell phone. First, I didn't see it as part of my artistic production but rather as an quite unreflective habit, something I did just because I had the tool accessible. But after a while I started to look for patterns. Why did I chose to film certain things? What was at play when I didn't aim my filming in any certain direction and what was I too uncomfortable to film?

Trying to answer these questions I started to work with the film that got the title ”What There Is” (”Det Som Finns” in Swedish). In this film I intended to blur the line between my private and professional practices and treat even the most boring everyday-videos as a part of the work. While watching hundreds of hours of sunsets, views from train windows and the following of friends walking down the street, I started to ”talk” to the clips by writing comments over the images. By a muted voiceover, a ”text-over”, the viewer is guided through the story about my relation to moving images and the people I try to film.

In your cinema fictional and documentary elements are intertwined: can you introduce our readers to this aspect of your art vision?

I'm usually a bit reluctant to decide if my films either belongs to the category of documentary or if it's fiction. For me they are films that carries both parts of reality and fiction and I often mix up different working methods like

scriptwriting, observing, interacting etc.

There’s nothing revolutionary in saying that documentaries carries parts of fiction in it and vice versa regarding fiction, but it helps me to to be more playful towards the aesthetics of reality that I think dominates a large part of today's filmmaking.

Could you take us through your creative process when starting a new project?

Different projects demands different approaches but what they all have in common is my focus on the image and my (literally) view on things. Almost every one of my projects start of with an image that has caught my eye. Something I have seen; a group of people interacting at the street, a painting or a educational video online... In the beginning I’m sometimes not sure of why I’m interested in something and then the work starts. I start researching, imagine and asking what different kinds of meanings and stories the image could bear.

Your use of cell phone as a film camera has been a fundamental starting point for your self-reflective investigation. Can you introduce our readers to this aspect of your art research?

As I mentioned earlier, I first didn't find my everyday cell phone filming interesting for my professional practice. I rather saw it as a typical gesture of our time and a wish to store experiences of a moment. But as the videos started to take more and more space on my hard drive but whithout me ever looking at them, I started to pay attention wondering what kind of purpose they filled. The use of the cell phone had made me creating different images than I usually would film.

I found it interesting with an image that in the beginning wasn’t created to visualize some idea or to tell anything, but came into the world because of an unreflected reaction of something happening in front of the photographer. I am normally quite suspicious against images where I feel that the

photographer haven’t reflected upon her own position. But this time I allowed myself to embrace these kinds of images. They are almost provoking in the way that most of the clips completely lack any sense of drama. The images could even been interpreted as indifferent towards the hardships of life since most of the images has been filmed during some kind of leisure or passive activity (like rinding the train or looking out through the window). It’s also goes a bit against the traditional notion about filmmaking; that you always should be able to argue why you are showing something and that every scene should lead the viewer further forward throughout the story.

Vanja Sandell Billström (photo by Annika Kupiainen)

In Lagrat Liv you explore the blurry boundary between collective memory and identity, investigating the psychological nature of the cinematic image. How did you come up with the idea for this work?

Everyday a massive amount of videos are being produced on cell phones. Many of them will never be played a second time and a lot of them will end up on a cell phone at a garbage dump or some forgotten cloud service.

Occupied by the thought of a disappearing archive of everyday images I wanted to get a glimpse of what was thought being valuable to film. During a residency in the city of Norrköping, I walked around asking people to share their cell phone videos with me.

A still from What There Is

A still from What There Is

Quite often I hear people say that our frequent filming with cell phones gets in the way of our experience of the real event. I was wondering if it possibly could be the opposite? One of my experience when filming with the cell phone is that my viewing is actually activated and enhanced, just because of the raised camera and the framing of the image. I wanted to upgrade the position of cell phones videos as something valuable worth saving and showing.

The project developed into a video installation where every video from the forty-four contributing photographers were included. As a walk from the kitchens through the living rooms out on the streets and later out in the nature, the films are slowly passing by as the sounds of stored lives tone in and out.

We have been impressed by your peculiar use of temps mort and static shots

reminding us of Antonioni's early films.

Could you comment this peculiar aspect of your filmmaking style?

It’s interesting that you mention Antonioni because I admire his cinematography but I have never drawn any connections between his work and mine. My relationship towards the media of film is a bit complicated, including both love and hate, so to say. Instead of focusing on the Aristotelian drama and

efficient dramaturgy I am more interested in the ”in betweens”, the gaps and the pauses in between the actions. Working with space and time; the rhythm, tempo and the viewers experience of time, is for me a very important aspect of filmmaking. And that was something Antonioni really mastered.

Your art is rich of references. We have previously mentioned the Italian director Antonioni, however your visual imagery

A still from What There Is

seems to be closer to Shinya Tsukamoto's hand-held camera filmmaking style. Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

films of Robert Frank and Jonas Mekas. Their use of everyday life as starting points for a film and how their characters are very present when they are behind the camera.

I’m trying to be both ruthless and precious about the image. I’m not so interested in working with elaborative camera movements on a track, but the composition of an image is still very important for me. When working with ”What There Is” I was a bit influenced by the

”The Present” (1996) starts off with Robert Frank filming in his bedroom with a VHScamera as he talks about how happy he is that he had found his camera, but that he doesn’t know what to film. For me these film notes creates interesting connections between the

technique, personal reflections and filmmaking as an action.

Thanks for sharing your time, Vanja, we wish you all the best with your filmmaker career. What's next for Vanja Sandell Billström? Have you a particular film in mind?

For the last three years I’ve been focusing a lot on the thematics of ethics and aesthetics of

filmmaking. With these thoughts still present in my mind I’m about to shift focus for my next film. I’m occupied with thoughts of how we interact with our work and what kind of relations it creates between ourselves and others. As one way of research, I film and interact with different settings and people, and at the same time I’m also writing scenes that I plan to film with actors. The project is still in an early phase so a lot of things can happen, which is something I’m excited about.

A still from Vanitas

Tuo Wang An artist's statement

In Brecht on Theatre, Bertolt Brecht believes that when taking an incident or a character from the situation of which makes it obvious, familiar or readily understandable, then the wonderment and curiosity of audiences are created. He calls this the “Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect).”

My recent project Vanitas (2013-‐2014) is founded on his “alienation effect,” combining with my knowledge and understanding of literature, unifying an interdisciplinary work with multiple layers of narration. I transformed two European fictions in the 19th century—Effi Briest (a realist novel by Theodore Fontane, 1894-‐95) and Thérèse Raquin (a naturalist novel by Émile Zola, 1867)—and placed them into a contemporary social context. By changing the time and space in which the original stories occur, I attempted to alienate the audiences from their existing knowledge and entrust the stories with new significance. Brecht’s dramatic theory preserves and establishes a distancing that estranges and separates the audience from the play, which provides audiences strong consciousness of that they are watching a play. While in Vanitas, viewers are forced to stay in a difficult position where they continually remain skeptical about the truth of the story.

The film starts with a man and a woman presenting their monologues seemingly in a stream of consciousness. Their narratives are unique, but share many similar plots: unhappy marriage, adultery and murder. Actually, what the man narrates is based on the story of Effi Briest, while the woman's tale is set on Thérèse Raquin. These two original novels have many tragic cliché in common. However, the progressive connection from realism to naturalism renders two vulgar stories end up differently. When the actor and actress narrated the plot of the novels, they were asked to fill out some details with their personal experiences. The narratives are interspersed with a literature professor discussing and criticizing realism versus naturalism in 19th century literature as well as the two aforementioned novels. This arrangement urges viewers to keep questioning whether the two actors are recalling their own experiences or retelling the fictions. A key character ‘Joseph’ connects two stories. In both of their narratives, it appears an artist friend of the husband for many years, who later becomes the lover of the wife. This figure is created from ‘Laurent’ in Thérèse Raquin—an artist and the lover of Thérèse. In the latter part of the film, viewers are led into a vision of the hero's imagination and time travel. The two versions of

Tuo Wang

Vanitas, 2013-2014, single channel HD video, 19'20", featuring William Corbett, Mike Hickey, Laura Marris and Tuo Wang

An interview with

Tuo Wang Tuo Wang's mythopoeic research investigates and deconstructs contemporary identity, merging together elements from cinema and video art. His refined language rich of references to the classical age as well as to the black and white photography of the 60s reveals a strong effort to destabilize visual clichès.

We have selected for this year's VideoBiennale his work Vanitas – A Study for Human Opera, featuring William Corbett, Laura Marris, Mike Hickey, Laura Sichler and Samuel Altekruse. Tuo, could you introduce our readers to this video?

This project is based on two European fictions from the 19th century that I read many years ago, the realist novel Effi Briest by Theodore Fontane and the naturalist novel Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola. I transformed the narratives by placing them in a contemporary context. These two novels left a very deep impression on me for many reasons, mainly because of the parallel structures that diverted into equally morbid but different endings. They share a similar plot: an unhappy marriage, an affair, and a subsequent murder. I believe that the stories part ways because they belong to two different movements in literature history – realism and naturalism. These distinct world views within the literary movements are reflected in the characters' motivations and different endings.

The project is mostly comprised of three short films, in which different groups of performers act out the same plot. Each video begins with a man and a woman presenting their monologues in a stream of consciousness about their unhappy union and adultery. Actually, what the man narrates is based on the story of Effi Briest, while the woman's tale is from Thérèse Raquin.

When the actor and actress narrated the plot of the respective novels, they were actually required to fill their accounts with details of their own emotional experiences, intimate relationships, as well as traumas. The narratives are interspersed with an interview

of William Corbett, an English professor, discussing realism and naturalism in 19th century fiction, using the two aforementioned novels as examples.

By opening up a channel where fiction and reality interweave, I want to set up a connection between the present human condition and the existing cultural archive, specifically classical literature, to make a new visual archive with contemporary occurrences – details of lived experience.

This project also attempts to reveal a relationship between literature and reality through their shared dramatic, often humorous and absurd moments. In this project, I created a fictional character – an artist named Joseph – and made several series of works on his behalf.

The whole project culminated in a retrospective exhibition of Joseph's works, which included a sequence of videos of his performances, as well as paintings, photographs, texts, and objects. The three short films add another layer to the myth of Joseph, the artist.

Could you tell us the way you use performers in this project? How did you develop your film style?

Performance is a very important feature of my practice. Even my painting is an expansion of my performance, and the images that are produced should be considered within that context. But when we look at the history of performance art, the majority of those artists use their body, or others', as a medium, utilizing an paranoiac methodology to explore the boundary of body.

It all seems so safe.

My interest in the body is when it represents a unique and private set of experiences instead of a physical existence. I'm not as interested in pushing the body to its limits, nor presenting a set of unadulterated experience as whole.

For me, performance should be more than a figurative portrait; a human body is a set of experiences, acting as material in the same way as colors on the palette are waiting to be resolve and reformed.

In Vanitas, I require performers to utilize their own experience as a resource in their acting, while also working within my framework.

After acquiring enough materials, I manipulate each performer's experience and put them in dialogue. The performers are making use of their real (and imaginative) emotional experience, intimate memories and trauma to

Tuo Wang

A still from Vanitas

A still from Vanitas

fill the plot structure of the two novels. When William Corbett, the professor, is talking about realism and naturalism, he does not know that his words would produce a critical connection with other performers; he is candidly answering my questions about the literary movements, Effi Briest and Therese Raquin.

As a result, all the participants are telling fictions filled with their realities, provocatively balancing between performance and documentary.

We would like to explore the performative nature of your video: in particular in Vanitas, we see the influence of

contemporary theatre, for example Romeo Castellucci' s latest works.

Romeo’s practice and theory do influence me quite a bit. He employs performers' unique expereinces in a physical way. For instance, in Romeo’s play, you can see types of performers that subvert expectations: very aged, disabled, and abnormal bodies. The unexpected actors anti-perform. They bring their physical uniqueness to the stage and let it be their only language. The visual truthfulness and cruelty force the audience to realize the absurdity of performance itself. When I am working with my actors, I want truthfulness and cruelty in their performance as well. Focusing on the

of narrative, and are surrounded by other media. For instance in Vanitas, based on Laurent from Therese Raquin, I created a fictional character – a conceptual artist named Joseph. As a friend of the husband and the lover of the wife, he functions as a thread between the two stories. However, Joseph never appears in the films. I believe the physical absence of Joseph deserves to be present in another way. I had a realization: I, too, as a conceptual artist behind this project, had been physically absent throughout the process. The fictional artist and his creator are in the same situation.

I've said before, it is important for the performers to use their experience, a truthfulness of being, within an established framework, to create a circumstance where reality and fiction simultaneously exist and interact. This methodology is fundamental to the project. Therefore, I have to place my own experience as a conceptual artist into the fictional identity of Joseph. I imagine and invent a philosophy of his artistic practice, and then examine Joseph’s perspective to make a response in art. The result is a series of multidisciplinary work including painting, photography, sculpture and text, on behalf of Joseph. So to get back to the topic of my own multidisciplinary practice, I use different media as a means to complete the performance.

Your standpoint as a Chinese transplant has a specific role in your artistic research focusing on alienation of cultures: how has your history influenced the way you produce art?

physical appearance of the performers, of course, is visually fascinating. Similarly, focusing on psychological states, using real memories to construct a play, also engages questions of performance.

The first time we have watched your works, we have been really impressed by the number of artistic techniques you use.

Could you introduce our readers to the multidisciplinary aspect of your art process?

I prefer to build layers to create different levels of reading. Visually, my work is restrained. My videos often function as a trace

Many people think that as an immigrant artist, the best resource is one’s native experience. In the United States, these novel experiences are part of a significant strategy. I have to admit that identity politics is something inevitable in the process of making art or viewing it. And identity politics are everywhere. A Chinese identity doesn’t offer me anything special, possibly because I do not place any importance on its novel qualities. It is still impossible to escape readings about your work that focus on identity. A friend of mine asked me why a person born and raised in China would pick up these two novels that couldn’t be more western, as material to make art. That’s when I realized that trying to avoid identity politics is also another way of engaging in it.

A still from Vanitas

We have previously quoted Castellucci's theatre: besides him, could you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

Brecht's philosophy influences my methodology. In his play ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’, he combined the drama of Chinese Yuan Dynasty ‘The Chalk Circle’ and the story of Soloman in the Old Testament. These two stories share a similar plot, and the Western and Eastern world are familiar with their respective stories. By combining these two into one narrative, Brecht alienated both of the original stories. In another play of his, ‘The Good Person of Szechwan’, he places a European story in China. The way he manipulates narrative is really innovative. He didn’t create a new story, but he created new meaning by shifting the circumstance.

Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts, Tuo. What's next for you? Are there any film projects on the horizon?

My next project will be a series of web-based videos. It will look very different from my previous work. It won’t be as complicated as Vanitas and the content will not be as heavy. I will host 12 episodes of a talk show called ‘Immortal’ where I speak candidly with established artists based in America. I will throw them embarrassing and antagonistic questions about their art, something irrelevant and inappropriate. I consider this surreal (hyperreal) talk show as an attempt to deconstruct the so-called identity of 'contemporary artist.'

Maïté Jeannolin &

A still from Paysage

Charlotte Marchal

An interview with

Maïté Jeannolin & Charlotte Marchal Maïté Jeannolin and Charlotte Marchal achieve a sublime lyrical quality in their video work Paysage. Yet they eschew the improvisatory style that is so common in the lyrical genre and works instead carefully carving out incisive images.

Paysage is a complex and astonishing video focusing on the tensions between perception, space and subjectivity. Their multidisciplinary approach includes not only video and dance: many of the classic sculptural concerns, such as mass and gravity, colour and form, are important to Maïté and Charlotte in their exploration of the concepts of space and time. We are glad to present their work for this Videofocus Edition. Maïté and Charlotte, how did you come up with the idea for Paysage?

Firstly, we should mention that "Paysage" is our first work together. We knew each other from private spheres but never got to work together beforehand. We simply started talking about our personal interests, practices and later on about a hypothetical collaboration which would merge our skills in a form we could develop side by side. And here we are!

Not really having time, or more exactly "making time" for ourselves in Bruxelles, we took the opportunity of a common trip we were supposed to do in Morocco. Inside that trip we booked for ourselves a full week to work on whatever we were about to do there.

So to be honest with the process of "Paysage", we have to admit that there was no clear "concept" nor "idea" when we left Belgium!

But as a first common production, what was truly important to us was not so much the actual outcome we would come to, but rather, thinking of it as an experiment to find entrances in both our working methods, interests in dance on camera and sensibilities.

Paysage is actually called "Paysage, Tableau premier" because it is the first landscape we

Maïté Jeannolin & Charlotte Marchal

imagined together, out of many other landscapes we would like to discover.

Your video reveals both the architectonic and gestural nature of the artistic act. We have been really impressed by the balance you have been capable of achieving in this work between classical sensibility and pure experimentation. Paysage is not conceived using metaphoric approach, but

adopting a performative research. How did you get started in contemporary dance and experimental filmmaking?

Well as a common response, it is easy to see that the work has strong links with performance since the direction is a collaboration in between a dancer/choreographer and a film maker. Each of us brought to the work its own research.

MaĂŻtĂŠ : When we started developing the project with Charlotte, I had to think about a previous "dance video" I made when I was younger with another filmmaker. Although we collaborated on the scenario, the video still bear some quite defined roles in terms of who makes the dance, who decides what is shot and who knows best how to edit. What I was definitely more interested in with Charlotte was to dig into experimental filming, of course using movement because that was what I was

bringing along, but not specifically dance. It ended up being a dance but it also could have been much different‌ Talking about both our approaches to movement was quite feeding. I was also very interested in learning how to do something I didn't know well to do; try to change my perspective on how to make a dance for a camera and therefore a virtual audience, how to think movement not only in relationship to the body but the camera and things around. The dance of objects, the dance of a look, the dance of a plastic bag ! Working with video is a great tool to rethink my own practice of movement and share with Charlotte a simple platform of interests, theory and practice together.

Charlotte : Compared to big cinema teams, which are mainly composed by multiple people, we were only two. It was quite new for me to have such an open area to try out things with only few elements : a person, space and a small SD camera. This constellation gave us more mobility in the creation and the research.

With these particular conditions, it was interesting to question the language of the image, to use the codes from cinema and develop our own in order to translate a sensation, a movement. In a very direct way, the question was : What does physically provoke a movement made by a camera?

Which sensation is created by filming movement -with a fix or moving camera ?Furthermore, I was inquisitive to try filming the body not like a character telling a story but approach it from the perspective of a "raw body". Trying to connect with the elements around, focusing mostly on the shape, the texture, the lines of the body's volume laying either on the ground or in the sky!

Could you describe your collaboration?

As it was our first experiment, we had to go through‌multiple tries. Basically, "Paysage, tableau premier" is as much of the first video from a "serial work to come" as the product of 10 different "tableaux" we produced in a week !

As we mentioned before, there were a lot of discussions involved before we got to shoot something, and then we would just come up with an idea, a tool to explore, or even just an exercise ("is it possible to do this ?"), shoot, watch, and discuss some more. It was very free in a sense that we didn't expect much of what was going to happen, we were just excited to

A still from Paysage

be able to try different kind of approaches, feeding by practice some of our imagined scenarios. It implied also a lot of struggle to have this much freedom. If "what can we do together?" remains the main question for too long, how can you make any choices at all ?

Somehow the decision for the form (a 5minutes short video) made things smoother in a sense that we knew we didn't have to synthesize all our desires in one shot.

The real work came, when back to Belgium, we had to start the editing process. There, we had to face what it really did look like with some distance, what we were going to keep and throw, you know, the usual stuff. But

somehow, the "choreography" of the work started just there, while we had to create a new "dramaturgy" for the piece.The final making of the video was also a strong collaboration with the composer, Gaël de Ville.

We first tried to work with some existing music on our images but it wasn’t working at all. It was ‘plaqué’, creating a distance between the image and the sound. So we asked Gaël to compose music on our images with different references we gave him. His own aesthetics and sensibility brought a lot to "Paysage" since it is after all the most narrative part of the video and became really central as it links everything together. It also brought to all

three the desire to keep on working together, which is what we are looking for now!

Overall, the advantage we could say we have, is that we have found a way to work without completely separating functions (direction, editing, music, camera, performance..etc) but nevertheless, we are able to recognize each other's skills or expertise when in need and trust it.

Your concept of time and space has a huge importance in your performative research as well as in your cinema, Maïté and Charlotte. Could you introduce our

A still from Paysage

readers to this peculiar aspect of your work?

Time and space are only components, translations of other important keys of our working process. We liked to think about it from the aspect of sensation. Particularly, how can we produce kinesthesia on camera. So to say, how can the movement travel like a fluid through a porous 4th wall?

What we tried to achieve was a desubjectification of the body, to suggest that although there is a body, although there is

action, it shall not compromise the making of a more complex picture.

Exploring the means of experimental film was a way in from the abstractness into the potentiality of a narrative to emerge, show himself, not impose it. A lone body in space creates many signs, meanings, characters or symbolics, that is why we chose an uncluttered space. The ground, the horizon defined by a line of trees and the sky, these simple elements have permitted us to include the body just like a part of this landscape, taking and making sense with the whole structure.

And the reason we used slow-motion in real time was a trick like another, so that it would

consumerism of experience were of course in the list. When you make products lasting 5 minutes, playable from internet and shared by a click, you have to think about what bothers you in every single other videos you've seen.

Why does dance still try to tell a story ? And why video makers have to "over edit" the videos to keep people interested, to create rhythm ? Dance as such and video making are both fields in which a strong thinking has been developed and shared but it seems that video dance, as an emergent form still didn't profit from this.

Your art is rich of references, indeed. Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

Haha, we don't know if what we are doing is truly full of references.

Of course we have both encountered artists, and artistic practices that have affected what we do at this moment in our work, but it will be difficult to point at particular ones that we wanted to quote in this work. If we had to choose for an artist whom brings together our enthusiasm, it should be Sergueï Paradjanov.

His symbolical images, simple and very "crafted" create strong imaginary landscapes.

It is the "freedom" compelled by those images that are mesmerizing. We like that power of suggestion.

state from the start that it is not about virtuosity but allowing the pace of things and the pace of the gaze to have a rhythm of their own.

We liked the form of a "capsule", a small object with the allowance to take things in the air and relieve them just like they were, you know, like a peeping tom. Only allowing ourselves for a quick look into someone's mind.

As to mention, it is also interesting to think about video dance as a new medium that has been coming up quite recently. It was important for us to put at stake things that matter in both our fields. Entertainment and

Maïté : In the dance field, there are many names that come up when I think about artists that have impacted me. One of them is Meg Stuart. What I like about her approach is, once again, the importance of kinesthesia and experience as a viewer. But in the making of "Paysage", I have to say that Marten Spangberg was also quite influential. He had been teaching in my school a workshop where we discussed a lot what he used to call "extended choreography", what choreography can be, looking for new ways to make a dance and particularly slow dances. Another influence concerning "Paysage" is this quote

by Susan Sontag, “There remains the inescapable truth about perception: the positivity of all experience at every moment of it. As John Cage insisted ‘there is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.’ (Cage has described how, even in a soundless chamber, he still heard at least two things: his heartbeat and the coursing of blood in his head). Similarly, there is no such thing as an empty space. As long as a human eye is

A still from Paysage

looking there is always something to see. To look at something that is ‘empty’ is still to be looking, still to be seeing something- if only the ghosts of one’s expectations. In order to perceive fullness, one must retain an acute sense of the emptiness that marks it off; conversely, in order to perceive emptiness, one must apprehend other zones of the world as full”. (Sontag, 1969, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’) Charlotte : Before shooting, I didn't have that many references but rather images in mind from movies of Jane Campion, Philippe Grandieux or Carlos Reygadas. And by making a dance video, I of course thought about the films of Thierry De Mey. It’s trough his videos that I discovered contemporary dance. I was always surprised by the importance given to space in his movies. It's almost like you can feel movements because you can feel the space around them. Furthermore, the sensation of the movements are not destroyed by an over editing or too many shoots. It's a quite refined work, which I enjoy.

Another reference would be Claire Deny for the way she chooses to film bodies. They are central to the staging of her movies; the movements from the bodies speak more than

the characters themselves. The importance given to every gesture defines each protagonist. The smallest movements make us enter more deeply, in a more intimate way with the image created.

You are masters at creating entire scenarious out of small, psycologically charged moments: could you comment this ephemeral quality of Paysage?

We were doing a lot of yoga at the time.

What aspect of your work do you enjoy the most? What gives you the biggest satisfaction?

Charlotte : I would say that the moment I prefer is when we are shooting. When we are searching, getting crazy with Maïté and then feeling that there is something good, beautiful arising, or we could say "when it feels right".

Or maybe just because it was enjoyable to spend a sunny winter in Morocco !

It was nice to see people receive our video in different and personal ways, which proves that everybody can rely onto their own feelings and imaginary to experience the work.

A still from Paysage

Maïté: Well, what can be more enjoyable than a work that you get pleasure from thinking and doing ? I mean, it's kind of a big playground. And that said, it was only our first work, so it might be less light sparkles and everything the next times, but I don't think so. There is no expectation, there is just a lot of curiosity, playing hide and seek with our minds, going somewhere and shooting.

When it will start to bother us both, we won't do it anymore since we just do it because we like to do things together. And what I like particularly about "Paysage" is that it came out of nowhere really and because it is so imperfect, it has to remind us, there is so much more to do..!

Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts, Maïté and Charlotte. What's next for you? Have you a particular collaboration in mind?

The next thing for us is as you imagine… the second tableau. We have already shot most of the material and are in the process of editing.

But what now comes as a surprise, is that the second tableau will consist of a series of few videos which are variations on the same thing.

We shot different couples executing the same tasks face to face. Now through their faces, what we see is another landscape/choreography with layers of emotional and physical tensions. The principle remains the same but the outcome is obviously very different. We shot people who are close to us and who all know each other with some different kinds of relationships… boyfriend/girlfriend, brothers, friends. Each video will consist of a couple, and maybe we'll manage to make a release of this new series, just like an album; with your favorite song and your favorite couple to look at before sleep!

The music will play a different role than in the previous work, it will be more independent from the images. Therefore we are thinking of developing some of the sound material with Gaël de Ville.

That is for a very very near future.

And for the rest, we'll keep on moving and we'll see...

Lucas Roger An artist's statement

BUT KARINA, WHAT IS ART? or GOVERNMENT, STOP HIDING THE TRASH! is an experimental short movie

structured in two perspectives: an affront to all misguided speeches that may arise from the question 'what is art?' and an affront to all dirty issues that politicians and the government itself does not talk to society, like hundreds of houses destroyed in Brazil

because of the 2014 World Cup. With this connected world and all possibilities that we can have with new medias, we don't need to depend anymore of a pre-established cinematic language, so, in this short movie I am the director, the actor, the producer,

and, above all, the artist. With a nonlinear narrative, this artistic experience also shows the fine lines that a performance, a video art and a movie can have.

Daniel CortĂŠs

An interview with

Lucas Roger Defining your artistic vision, we daresay that your personal experience is your main source for your works, even when they face political or sociological themes, like in BUT KARINA, WHAT IS ART? we have selected for this year's Videofocus Edition.

Where do you get the ideas for your work?

In fact, I would say that my personal experience has a huge influence in the construction of my artistic expression. I live in Brazil, here we have a lot of things happening and our culture is very diverse. As a developing country, we face problems in transportation, education, health and also at the structure of our political system.

It is different for an artist to live in a country where the fine arts are not valued as in other countries, but, at the same time, we now have a very powerful thing: the Internet. Combining this connected world with my personal experiences living in Brazil, I can say that I get the ideas for my works from the experiences that I have in my research group, in performative collective groups and also by the experiences that I have being an art student, black and homosexual artist in Brazil.

Your artistic research focuses on the complex relationships between narratives, utopias and fictions:how did you get started in filmmaking?

I started in filmmaking doing pixilation and stop-motion in my first semester of college.

After that, the professor and artist Ruth Sousa, creator of the fictional company Made Up Memories Corp., started to guide me in some art projects like the ‘Self-Portrait of A N Y O N E’ (http://lucrrrr.tumblr.com/).

Over time I started to do experimental video art and gif art more and more, creating narratives and fictions like in the ‘Self-Portrait of A N Y O N E’ or with the Drag Queen ‘M la Mère’ (http://mlamere.wix.com/lamere). At the same time, I started to do performance art with other Brazilian artists, in an experimental collective called Algodão Choque.

Lucas Roger

A still from BUT KARINA, WHAT IS ART_ OR GOVERNMENT, STOP HIDING THE TRASH!

After that, I did my first experience with the experimental movie ‘BUT KARINA, WHAT IS ART? or GOVERNMENT, STOP HIDING THE TRASH’ where I am the performer, the artist doing a piece of video-art, the director of a movie, the actor and everything else that I can be.

I just love filmmaking and the rich history of cinema, and, for the first time, I just realize that we can do whatever we want, I mean, we don’t need to wait for a director or sponsorship or anything anymore. If you have a camera and a computer, you can now do everything you want.

We have really appreciated your use of non linear narrative even to face political themes: an approach which is no doubt far from the militant art of the Sixties. Could you introduce our readers to this fundamental aspect of your art practice?

Nowadays with the Internet and new information coming all the time through a screen, I feel that every time we are building a non-linear narrative. We have always selected information to learn about history. Art history itself is a non linear narrative, a clipping.

I really appreciate the work of some Brazilian artists, like Trouxas Ensanguentadas (1969),

by Artur Barrio, created between the Sixties and the Seventies at the apex of the military dictatorship and oppression in Brazil. His work is very political and also represents a perspective of young artists and militants in general of that time.

We are now living different times, so, my art practice is also different: as you said, far from the militant art of the Sixties. With this nonlinear narrative, I am able to create artworks where we can face political themes and also having an individual space to project our own issues at the work. I don’t do art only for Brazilian people, I do it for people. Thus, I think that someone in Europe or Middle East, for instance, could design their own problems in my artwork.

How did you develop your run and gun shooting style?

I was just running with a camera in my hand, developing my artwork without concern about illumination, framing or what comes next. In a very simple way: it is a latent style.

A still from BUT KARINA, WHAT IS ART_ OR G

From the first time we watched your work we had the impression that your use of color is not merely aimed at achieving extremely refined composition: your cinematography seems to be deeply influenced by the emotional potential of color: could you better explain this aspect of your shooting style?

Color is one of the fundamentals of visual language and its use is determinant to create a refined composition, however, the culture is also an important factor to better understand the emotional potential of color. In my cinematography I use color in order to create different energies and reverberations of a specific scene. In the experimental movie ‘BUT

OVERNMENT, STOP HIDING THE TRASH!

KARINA WHAT IS ART?’ I play with scenes in black’n’white and sepia.

The sound design combined with the changes of color reinforces how a formal element of the composition has the power to create different sensations and textures at the movie. The interpretations and the emotional potential of color will depend of the audience and its hermeneutics.

In this specific movie I also dialogue with dualities: the subtitle gives two different information, the scenes have a political and a subjective space, we have different uses of color, and all this shows different prospects and the non-linear structure of the work.

We find that your art is rich of references.

Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

I have influences from music, fine art and TV series/movies. One of my biggest influences is the Brazilian singer and visual artist Karina Buhr, she is known as one of the singers of the new generation of MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) and her music has regional influences from all over the country.

Dana Wyse and her pills also has a huge influence on my artworks, she is a Canadian artist and writer, best known for the creation of the book ‘How to Turn Your Addictions to

A still from BUT KARINA, WHAT IS ART_ OR GOVERNMENT, STOP HIDING THE TRASH!

A still from BUT KARINA, WHAT IS ART_ OR GOVERNMENT, STOP HIDING THE TRASH! Prescription Drugs into a Successful art Career’ (2007). She works with fictional projects, combining texts, photography and fiction into her style. Thinking about superfictions, another source of inspiration for me is the Peter Hill’s thesis called Superfictions: the creation of fictional situations in international contemporary art practice (2000).

Thinking about the cinematographic world,

I can say that I am addicted to all kinds of TV series around the world, such as Doctor Who, Big Love, Utopia, Hit and Miss, Torka aldrig tarar utan handstar and many others.

Everything that I know about English language I have learned by watching TV series or movies.

Therefore, In all these artworks and artists I can see an interdisciplinary thought, reinforced by the fact that I am an Brazilian

artist with such different kinds of influences because of this connected world and it is this interdisciplinary and varied thinking that deeply influences my artworks.

Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts, Lucas. What's next for Lucas Roger? Are there any film projects on the horizon?

Thank you too. Right now I am creating a new web-site in order to organize all of my

productions, I am also developing a performance art series called ‘portrait-selfperformative’. People who do not speak Portuguese can see a little of my artwork in this blog: http://lucas-roger.tumblr.com/ and, for the future, I will just ask you to wait, because there is a new film project coming.

Thank you again!

K r i s te n D e G r e e

An interview with

Kristen DeGree Kristen DeGree's cinema strikes the perfect balance between autobiography and documentary research. His work Threads, a remarkable reflection of the purpose of costume, reveals an extraordinary maturity and consistency, reminding us of Guy Maddin's masterpiece My Winnipeg mixing autobiography, civic tragedy, and mystical hypothesizing.

Kristen, how did you come up with the idea for Threads? Could you tell us a particular episode who has helped the birth of this project?

The idea came while I was driving down a highway towards Louisville, Kentucky on Halloween, 2013. My very best ideas come during transport of some kind. A random thought, did my Grandma celebrate Halloween? What was her favorite costume?

At the time, my grandparents were in the process of moving out of their home in Litchville, ND and into a retirement home to get better care for my grandfather. The house would be vacant for the first time in 50 some years. I was surprised to learn that as a child, she didn’t actually celebrate Halloween, or many holidays of any kind. She grew up during the Depression, her family was comprised of recent immigrants from Norway and Denmark, and holiday celebrations were really only celebrated by the middle class or wealthier people during those times, though there were church events, dances, etc.

My mother has been a seamstress all her life and does alterations for wedding dresses for a living. It’s one of the few jobs where the older she gets, the more respect and authority she has, unlike so many industries that are ageist in this country. She always wanted to be a costume designer in Hollywood, but didn’t want to leave North Dakota or her family. She sewed our costumes when we were young, as well as her own clothing as a young person. Now her everyday experience is channeling all of that costume energy into creating wedding dresses.

For the film, I wanted to highlight their storytelling capabilities. Together, they become characters through which we explore this place. They are both women who were before their time, and both agreed, though my mom less so, that being a woman in a small town made it difficult to assert agency over one’s life. What I love about both of them is they express themselves with items that are historically

very feminine, dresses and rings, and elevate them to a level of individuality that transcends their roles as women.

Human experience is always the starting point of your filmmaking. What draws you to a particular subject?

I like to play with the ecology of stories, what lies adjacent of the story, what is left unsaid, what is underneath. When gathering material, every detail is significant and becomes a microcosm to view other aspects of history. Over time, this has led me to the fascinating places: public hearings on climate change, landfills, prairies, farms, and various special collections and museums. I truly believe that all things are connected, and it is often the most difficult thing in my process to whittle stories down so that others can comprehend them.

Lately, my drive to compile stories has been holistic, seeking some kind of healing purpose.

Threads feels very intimate and close now, but the first version was a long, sprawling storyline where the longer I worked on it, the more potential themes and stories emerged.

Here’s an example of a predicament of connectedness. While editing the video I had a vivid dream about the house I grew up in. The house is next to a cemetery which is also where the nighttime driving scenes were shot in the film. In the dream, my house and the cemetery were being dug up and a natural gas refinery was being planted there. Literally the industry of the new feeding off the bodies of the old.

That’s nothing new in North Dakota, it was the site of horrible genocide against Native Americans in the late 1800s and onward. The history of my state is so whitewashed. For years, we toured George Custer’s house in elementary school and never learned anything about his atrocities.

In the dream I was brought back to that feeling associated with my home state, of which has always given me a sense of paralysis. My dream was about struggling for the appropriate response. Because it was about my hometown, I felt the urge to include these crucial parts of my process that have affected the way I feel about the place I grew up in--a brutal history that’s still very present today, and the ongoing natural gas boom that creates huge questions for the future of North Dakota.

The original motivation of the work was an archive for the personal history of the women in my life that left me wondering when the

personal spills over into the political. In the end, I felt protective over the stories of my grandmother and mother, and of necessity, didn’t want to insert a larger crisis into what I thought was a very unique, touching film. My resulting decision was a personal choice to highlight my mother and grandmother and give them space to tell their stories.

Since the 50s Halloween has become more commercialized as a holiday for the kids: this is a starting point of your filmic investigation on memory and costume.

Could you introduce our readers to this aspect of Threads?

There’s a great book called Death Makes a Holiday by David J. Skal about the history of

Halloween in numerous traditions. Basically, Halloween is a pagan holiday that was coopted into Christian traditions. It also was a way to express humanity’s inherent dark side, as well as express class warfare. The tradition of trick or treating, for example, was about peasants going to rich peoples’ homes and demanding a treat of some kind, property, money, or food. It was accepted that this would happen.

Also, Halloween was considered a time where the barriers between life and death were dissolved, and spirits were allowed to roam.

The tradition of dressing children up as ghouls and goblins was so the spirits wouldn’t recognize the children and take them down to

the spirit world. The children were encouraged to get into mischief and mayhem for the same reasons, basically so the spirits wouldn’t recognize them as nice, well-behaved children they would want to take back with them. In the book, Skal talks about the film Meet Me in St. Louis, it shows a great example of an early Halloween. Young kids are torching peoples’ property, talking about assaulting their neighbors, and all the adults are playing along with it. It’s very funny.

We have previously quoted in our interview the Canadian experimental filmmaker Guy Maddin, though your filmmaking style is very far from what is generally considered documentaristic (or

mockumentaristic). Who among international artists and directors influenced your work?

My Winnepeg is such a lovely film. I relate to the way he handles themes of family, years, regret, and intimacy.

I’m interested in artists who work in an essayistic style-- storytelling that challenges our ways of knowing, makes us question how we know what we know, and posits the maker within the video.

I gather a variety of influences, partly because I have a background in visual arts. I was really lucky to work with mentors Sarah Kanouse and

Jesse McLean who considered themselves media artists as well as filmmakers while in grad school at University of Iowa. Texts that have had an influence on me are Hito Steryl's In Defense of the Poor Image, and Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp. There are numerous art and performance collectives that I admire that range from environmental art, radical politics, and wild performance. Critical Art Ensemble, YAWN, Implied Violence, and The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, to name a few. I admire the work of artists / critics like Coco Fusco, Andrea Frasier, and the video-essay style of Ursula Biemann.

Robert Altman's experimental filmmaking style has given me a lot of courage to push things

of the piece. The deeper I got into the process, the more I noticed how much I wanted to talk about the work, about the process itself. In grad school I had an opportunity to work with performance artists, and I loved the way the video became a moving document, long after the performance was completed. There was a lengthy project about making paper from recycled uniforms from an industrial cleaning facility in Iowa, I had written an essay about the history of papermaking, recycling the paper, and the larger predicament of waste.

The project kept getting bigger and bigger, until someone suggested I make it into a video essay. The resulting video has a lot of process: making paper, recycling, as well as the open essay format that changes as the video builds.

It lives in several versions a few years apart.

I’ve recycled the video several times. I was never satisfied with it, but it’s still a document of that liminal space I was in at the time.

Printmaking was the first form of mass communication, the process evolved out of the necessity to make many editions of the same text or image. Video also has a distributive quality, it can be shown to mass audiences, either in a theater or online. Though I work digitally, print is still very present in my work because the language of video references photography and duration. Printmaking is incredibly detailed, and the final result is usually the buildup of layers and tasks completed over time. In the same way, video is the distillation of a product that has all the tasks around it that inform the work.

Colors and layers are fundamental in your art process: could you explain this peculiar aspect of your style?

out that don’t make sense. He made Three Women about a dream he had, and has said that even he didn’t totally understand the ending.

You began your art making life as a printmaker: how did you get started in filmmaking? In what manner your work as printmaker has influenced your filmmaking style?

Video was always very magical to me, but was prohibitively expensive to play with when I was younger. I got started in art through relief printmaking and silkscreen. My projects always had some anecdote for the inspiration

When I was a printmaker, I found incredible joy from simply working and overworking prints by layering them with colors, patterns, imprints until the image became unrecognizable from its overtreatment. It’s a somewhat sabotaging process, one that I’ve been able to redeem through working with time rather than discrete objects and images.

It comes from the need to bring all of the disparate elements together to tell the story. I am interested in creating an emotional residue left from the deliberation process, the remnants of which become the compelling parts of the work for me. That’s been an interesting challenge in the documentation work I’ve done recently, because the emphasis is on the subject and less on the maker. It’s always a struggle.

Your video production is very miscellanous: how has your production processes changed over the years?

My style is miscellaneous because I really strive to learn a lot with every project. The process of figuring out the next video is

completely different every time. Part of this is my way of working, if it doesn’t present an emotional or artistic risk, I feel bored with it.

This creates a lot of crisis in my identity as an artist, as well as being professionally challenging. Sometimes people don’t take you as seriously if you are honest about the

process of becoming. I’m not interested a process that feels formulaic.

Thanks for sharing your time, Kristen, we wish you all the best with your filmmaker career. What's next for you? Have you a particular film in mind?

Thanks so much for interviewing me. I’m currently editing 2 food-related videos about how food production changed in America during World War II. It was a project I performed a few years ago and wasn’t satisfied with the result, and now I’ve finally reshot the footage into a kind of cooking show, with less emphasis on the performance part. I made a

An artist's statement

“Exogenesis’’ is responsibly depicting energy, illuminated energy which moves freely inside the electrical field of the universe, interconnecting every Thing, holding and shaping the physical,

the spiritual and the intellectual world, giving it life and movement.

“Exogenesis” is all about the flash like moment when light is about to define form and prevail over darkness, when the soul hidden inside every thing is ready to emerge and identify with an idea that will give it its form. It attempts a

Angelina Voskopoulos

visual presentation of that very moment at the very boundaries between the inner and the outer world, where all the contraries touch. It is an act of truce, an armistice and a resolution, in the sense that it represents, expresses and displays, in graceful movement and harmonic progression, “our life a permanent flow inside a steady time frame�. The alluring mystery of

darkness versus the illuminated mystery of light, chaos versus order, the innumerable possibilities of synthesis, are all there, available material for man to use...

Angelina Voskopoulos

An interview with

Angelina Voskopoulos Abstraction is defined by a desire to intensify subjectivity, which is at heart of every expressionist's desire to go beyond the limits of imagination. In Angelina Voskopoulou's cinema figures appear and disappear in a gentle flow, sometimes moving the story forward, sometimes backward. If we want to broaden our perceptual horizons, we must abandon our habits and certainties: the Greek experimental filmmakers Angelina Voskopoulou makes films that transform through into pure, tangible pieces of digital sculpture. Angelina, we want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film trilogy: how did you come up with the idea for Exogenesis?

To begin with, The whole idea came from the theory that the "seeds" of life exist already all over the Universe, that life on Earth may have originated through these "seeds", and that they may deliver or have delivered life to other habitable bodies. The idea of exogenesis (outside origin).

Moreover, Chaos is the science of surprises, of the nonlinear and the unpredictable. It teaches us to expect the unexpected. From chaos Eros is being born (love). Literally become one again (The question arose from Plato’s Symposium, which refers to the creation of mankind. Each of us is half of another person as if he were half of a whole cut in two and in this way each person seeks the part, which ones is missing. The reason for this is that people were not always cut into two parts. The desire and the pursuit of this reunion is called love…the other half…what is this person like?

The same as me? Does he complete me? Does my other half have everything I don’t?

“Exogenesis’ ‘for me, is responsibly depicting energy, illuminated energy which moves freely inside the electrical field of the universe, interconnecting every Thing, holding and shaping the physical, the spiritual and the intellectual world, giving it life and movement.

“Exogenesis” is all about the flash like moment when light is about to define form and prevail over darkness, when the soul hidden inside every thing is ready to emerge and identify with an idea that will give it its form. It attempts a visual presentation of that very moment at the very boundaries between the inner and the outer world, where all the contraries touch. It is an act of truce, an armistice and a resolution, in the sense that it represents, expresses and displays, in graceful movement and harmonic progression, “our life a permanent flow inside a steady time frame”.

The alluring mystery of darkness versus the illuminated mystery of light, chaos versus order, the innumerable possibilities of synthesis, are all there, available material for man to use...

The rhythmical element is extremely important in Exogenesis . By definition cinema is rhythm and movement, gesture and continuity, however rarely in mainstream or narrative cinema we assist to such a spectacular ode to movement like in your films. Can you introduce our readers to this fundamental aspect of you art research?

Some of my art work over the past years has been focused on ‘minimal movement’.

My view regarding the power of that which is minimal has been reinforced by research, the application of ideas and the results from previous research. The movement of a unit is considered to be that which drives all things. I don’t wish to lead anyone to wonder about the physical world and its laws or create religious questions regarding God and creation. The project is centered on Man and his inner world.

That, which I call minimal movement, is the internal movement, internal action or intensity and how everything doesn’t necessarily have to entail external action. Even total lack of movement indicates internal intensities, conflicts, disputes and concerns.

Angelina Voskopoulos

The last years I have been focused on the meaning of empty space, through my research I realized that there are many matters arising, regarding the research of an empty space. I have concluded, trough my study on empty space, that a void can be considered as an existing matter, much more different in its thickness from the full one.

For instance a bottle or a glass becomes useful from its ‘inside’ empty space.

It is like the ‘useful’ part coming from the missing one. Void and full are two elements, which are combined with a different kind of thickness and the one ‘moves’ inside the other. It is something like the invisible matter (but at the same time an existing One) that exists around the stars.

Moreover, my research led me to another question. The question is not how we observe something but the way we really see it... there are a lot of things to say about the definition of empty space, in accordance with the way one can present such an abstract concept. ..

Repetition and silence, as well as the continuos transformation of body substances into mental spaces, create a dynamic state of continuance in your films.

How did you develop your surreal imagery?

In my work, I transform an object into something else. When I edit and develop my videos most of the times I see what at first place could not see.

Our perception is something like our dreams.

They ‘enter’ in many colours and shapes.

In order to create an image I keep the way I see an object in its physical world and try to transform it into a conceptual idea.

A different world appears in front of me, beyond the visual or even the natural. I am looking for elements, which later I use in a different way than their origin. (For example, I transform an object that I film into something else. A jellyfish into a ‘visual’ painting- an analogue format into a digital one-in order to express my thoughts .

Everything that our eyes see is a condensation of the substance that exists in universe.

We perceive all things through our senses, trying to understand the world around us.

‘Things’ don’t end where our eyes see, but on the contrary they moving toward to infinity and

mixed together into something, which, metaphorically, seems to be like a giant, “Without limit mush”.

Every form of art is a self –sufficient world, which functions by the use of its means. It could be addressed to different senses or other times it provokes a diversity of emotions or thoughts. Art heightens the sense of existence.

It tries to give life into a meaning beyond the obvious or common. A basic form for this condensation and intensification of existence is the poetic image. Poetic image exists in the ‘periphery’ of its and every artistic form. It is a substantive part of art’s connective tissue and it is rooted to the core of an art form. Beyond its technical importance, poetic image reveals

the existential question and becomes the reason of one can find in something that may is pointless. If someone can apprehend it trough his/hers senses and mind, it does not need any further explanation because for the first moment of its creation it gives the impression that exists on its own.

Poetic image exists when gives hypostasis to something that first was flat. The poetic image is art, a connection to memory, and viewed through materiality. The poetic image allows a relationship with reality, while giving a new awareness of the world at hand and is different for every person. Art is defined as something that sets up a world for someone to enter.

It relies on the person having a connection and allowing it to be part of their memory. They allow the poetic image to be their world. The poetic image can be thought as of a better understanding of the world we dwell in, by using art, memory and material.

You often work using chroma keys and other effects: could you describe your creative process? What technical aspects do you mainly focus on in your work?

Chroma keys and digital effects are always necessary for helping me describe a surreal and imaginary world. All I need is a small studio with good lighting and green screen in order to film a dancing figure in action.

Your filmmaking reminds us of Gregory J. Markopoulos's early works, as well as the post-structuralist films by Jayne Parker, in particular The Whirpool (1997). Can you tell us your biggest influences in cinema and how they have affected your work?

Well, yes, thank you for the above examples…But honestly, my biggest influences… , To start with…Peter Brook , of course, I remember something I had read once in a newspaper:”don’t believe anything from what you are told or from what I tell you, go back ,empty your space and live your own experiences.

Then I will say , Andrei Tarkovsky , who well explained regarding the poetic image in cinema: ‘P_o_e_t_r_y_ _i_s_ _a_n_ _a_w_a_r_e_n_e_s_s_ _o_f_ _t_h_e_ _w_o_r_l_d_,_ _a_ _p_a_r_t_i_c_u_l_a_r_ _w_a_y_ _o_f_ _r_e_l_a_t_i_n_g_ _t_o_ _r_e_a_l_i_t_y’’ …

Peter Greenaway , Stanley Kubrick (space Odyssey), David Lynch, Man Ray, Stan Brakhage : ‘My eye, again, outwards (without words) dealing with these "indescribable," "imaginary" vibrations. . . ‘’ … Last but not least Georges-Jean Méliès , an illusionist and filmmaker famous for leading many technical developments in the earliest days of cinema.

One of his most famous quotes come in my mind right now is the following : ‘’If you've

space around. Leading me into different times, into an imagined future.

Thanks for sharing your time, Angelina, we wish you all the best with your artist career. What's next for Angelina Voskopoulou'? Have you a particular film in mind?

Thank you for sharing my thoughts to all.

Actually, my last short is called ‘‘Behind this page but not disappearing’. Its main idea is the following:’ ‘’A common thread that runs through identical or disparate elements and ends up being a state of things retired unto itself which cannot be seen through one's eyes but can rather be felt. The lights pulsing timorously in the firmament are perhaps a rhythm of recoiling into themselves. Perhaps if we are at harmony with them we will find the meaning...the way...The earth is living, tossing in her sleep, dreaming, stirring, breathing, panting. Her humours course through her body. Her waters convey information. We grow, we mature with her, or so we believe’’.

ever wondered where your dreams come from, you look around... this is where they're made.’’

Many of the classic sculptural concerns, such as mass and gravity, colour and form, are important in your exploration of the sensuality of body and gestures: could you comment this aspect of your art?

Some statues have a 'vibration' that surprises me. It allows me to have a minimal movement in my films which is the main characteristic of its creation.

Hmmm, Mass and color they are openings to other places. The visual language echoes the worlds of science fiction –like occupying the

My recent film is focusing on human relationships. It is based on theme ‘LOVE’. I call it ‘Skin deep’ .. love...this word that dominates the senses...which has never been deciphered. I believe that's where its magic lies. I wouldn't like to lose this magic, wouldn't like to shed too much light on it, because that is when it'll become irretrievable. I'll play with it, Like I did when I was a little girl playing with dreams...not fearing they don't exist. I liberate myself of the anxiety of the status of love and hold on to its meaning...when I touch lyrics and make images...you can only feel the true happiness of being human if you bleed, if you shed tears, if you taste new things, if you let yourself change through your relationships.

Some words overwhelm you like an alien spirit and you surrender....

It's the words. Commonplace words making up uncommon sentences, strange words carrying an unutterable weight, words set one after the other so as to create images, feelings, little lights illuminating wide streets. And then there's also the magic. That inexplicable magic of some people's words that you know to be right upon hearing them, you know them to be yet another key to one of many doors…

Dawn Hollison An artist's statement

For Ode I worked from the idea of a collector and her relationship to the items she collects. I wanted to explore this relationship when the process of acquisition serves to feed an underlying pathology. In this context the actions of the collector take on moral implications, although she is initially blind to this fact. The

woman starts out with certitude, willful and unyielding, and the film traces her transformation from this oblivious state to a condition of awareness – as if she is waking from a dream. The dream gives way to the weight of her memories. In Ode, I tried to express the irreversible connectedness of the present to the past, and how remembrance of the past influences the future.

Elegy focuses on two figures trapped in an inward-turning circle, locked in a repetitive orbit of attraction and repulsion. The man and woman exist in spaces that are distinct but complementary, totally different yet simultaneous and absolutely inseparable – like shadow and light. As the film begins, each character is determined to resolve some painful conflict involving the other. But each action they perform undoes the progress of their

counterpart. The characters cannot escape an endless existential loop of cause and effect. They are only partially aware of their tragic state, though, captured by both memory and forgetfulness. In Elegy I tried to create a sense of the enigmatic tension between fate and choice. The protagonists exercise their will, to no avail.

Dawn Hollison

An interview with

Dawn Hollison The logic of Ode is the logic of a dream: its relentless vision is as revolutionary as Sergej Parajanov's cinema. Dawn Hollison creates through her unique visual imagination an intricate web of symbols, an intense mix of visual languages embracing different cultures and sensibilities: numerous voices and fragmentary echoes from different cultures and languages participated in the semantic organization of the film. We are pleased to present Dawn Hollison for this year's Videofocus Biennale. Dawn, how did you get started in experimental cinema?

I had a long, searching path before arriving at moving image as the medium I wanted to work with. I explored a lot of different areas: music, theatre, writing - and after exploring these different forms of expression, I found myself in a film production program. When I started film school I was really open to the many possibilities in front of me. I wasn't sure if I wanted to work in indie narrative, or documentary, or experimental film, or something else. I had a whole range of interests. So I started making films, made many mistakes, and did all the usual stuff a film student does. Then about a year into it, I had to make a project for a digital filmmaking course and I decided to make a “fine art� film.

At the time I had no idea about the traditions of experimental filmmaking. I just knew that I couldn't describe what I wanted to make in terms of the standard genres. I made this little 3 minute project and it was one of the hardest things I'd ever done in my life. I was exhausted by the end of the shoot and I was very unsure of how the piece would turn out. When the edit came together, the project turned out much better than I had anticipated, in terms of aesthetics. All the creative areas I'd explored before kind of gelled and started to make sense and I discovered what I wanted to do as an artist. So I guess you could say that I discovered my style somewhat early on in my film training.

We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up

Dawn Hollison

with the idea for Ode? My ideas usually start with an image that appears spontaneously in my head. I'll see an image that is so striking, so moving, or so intriguing to me, that I then spend a lot of time trying to find a way of reproducing it. Sometimes I know instinctively what the image means, and sometimes I have to do a fair amount of work to uncover its meaning. For Ode, it started with an image in my mind of a woman looking at a

photograph of something in the past, and then seeing the photo come to life, activating all the memories that go with it. It took a long time for me to understand how the different elements and images played off of one another in that part of the film. And it was actually only as the idea started to take shape that I realized I was starting, in fact, at the end of the story; that there were other things that came before this idea of the photograph in the room coming to life. It was a long process of discovering what the whole story was and how it wanted to be told. But it all started from that original idea of the photograph and memories returning to life.

In Ode the viewer is not asked to meditate on the action in progress decrypting a series of hidden symbols, but to follow the logic of sensation. Can you introduce our readers to this fundamental aspect of your video?

I am primarily driven by emotion in the construction of my work. And while there is a certain amount of cerebral work that is asked of the audience, emotion always has primacy over representation. I've found that there's a certain type of image construct that we respond to more or less instinctively: they are haunting images that somehow provoke an

intuitive response from the audience, regardless of whether a human figure is present or not. And that is very intriguing to me because it suggests that even when there is no personal identification with a character there is something else, something mysterious that is driving our feelings. There's something larger operating and it provokes a gut reaction without us consciously knowing why. It creates a sort of reverse feedback loop where the experience of emotion is no longer through sympathizing but is rather through instinct – there's something happening below the surface that's being communicated through a visual language. I'm really fascinated by that process. I try to mimic that in my work so that the emotional response is the mechanism that leads to reflection, rather than conscious thought or character identification driving the emotional response.

We have been impressed by the balance between absence and presence in Ode, which is not conceived as a classical balance, as the relationships between solids and voids in architecture for example, but like a sort of coexistence between past and present in imagination and perception. A stratification of past into future, future into present. How do you achieve this balance?

I think part of it has to do with the process that I go through when working from the images.

There is an associative quality to that process, and when I conceive of the juxtaposition of elements I'm frequently making the assumption that they are natural counterparts.

Whether their relationship is of contrast, similarity of form/meaning, or balance, the images and objects are associated in my mind and I think that means that I'm not perceiving them as separate, but instead as having an organic connection between them.

Their connection isn't necessarily one of opposites, it could also be one of analogy, or where two elements exist on opposite sides of the same coin, even though on the surface they may seem unrelated. Strangely, I've never considered trying to translate those connections for the viewer, it's an assumption I make as an artist: that two things are connected or are the same, like a metaphor. I guess I never thought of trying to explain the logic behind it, I just show the connection as it appears to me, since it's clear in my mind.

Objects and elements that are normally thought of as distinct from one another can also be related across space or across time.

And while I don't specifically think about the absence of elements, I probably do think about objects differently than many filmmakers would.

In narrative cinema, objects are usually part of a setting that informs us of the character's story, but the objects in my films don't work that way. For me, objects take up just as much screen time and are just as meaningful as the people.

Which means that the objects are elevated to the status of characters and the human figures are reduced to the same status as objects. This means they're all on the same level playing field; one doesn't have priority over the other.

This naturally means that objects take on greater significance and therefore only those that truly are significant are shown. All others are implicitly eliminated. I think it's by that process of omission that the viewer knows what is shown is important.

In terms of working with time - past to future, future to present: when it comes to memory or thought, we frequently don't make those distinctions in our heads. We do in an abstract sense – I know the difference between yesterday, tomorrow, and now when I think about it. But usually we're split in our thinking – while we physically occupy the present, we're held in place by experiences from our past,

and we're constantly looking toward events in the future or vice versa. So all three aspects of time are encapsulated in the present, at least in thought. And this means that even though we perceive time as linear, our mental experience of it is fragmented. So in Ode all of those facets of time inform and determine one another simultaneously – they're all interlinked. I think this stratification in the work is just a natural by-product of my own notions of how the elements are associated with one another.

Your conception of time reminds us of the novels of Alain Robbe Grillet, yet your

visual language is closer to Sergej Parajanov's atmospheres. Who among international artists influenced your work?

I've not read Robbe Grillet's novels, but have heard that his writing style frequently works to disrupt chronology in such a way that it reveals the subjective psychology of his characters. The use of disrupted chronology in my films is less in service of exploring an individual's psychology, and more to contextualize the figure within the complex web of their existence. For me the technique works to extrapolate the general from the

specific. Some of the visuals in the middle section of Ode were directly influenced by Sergej Parajanov's use of unusual tableaux vivants in The Color of Pomegranates. His powerful images were based on Armenian illuminated manuscripts and the idea of extrapolating the symbolic space of a painting into a three-dimensional analogue was quite intriguing to me.

Generally, when we look at those older types of paintings, we're aware that the artist isn't intending for the imagery to be translated into physical space.

But the conflation of symbolic and real space is central in my work, and so I thought this visual

approach might fit in with the rest of the film.

At the same time, I wasn't sure whether it was going to be a good stylistic match. Also, long duration shots was terrain I'd not explored and so I was taking a few risks with my visuals that I had not before.

Other than that, I'm mostly influenced by mythology and fairytales. They are filled with archetypes that I think create an instinctive understanding in us, even if we don't immediately or consciously understand what we are seeing.

Like many artists, my work is autobiographical on some level—either with personal

experiences or the experiences of people I know—and I attempt to use a myth-like interface to express and explore those experiences. However, I'm keenly aware of the fact that autobiographical work is frequently too personal and that I can't expect the audience to be interested in it if it's only specific to me.

So I try to make the work more substantial and extract themes that are relevant to everyone, so that I can contemplate questions that are larger than just my own life. I think using a myth-like language or structure is the perfect vehicle for universalizing the content in my films.

change in response to their actions, or perhaps as a reflection of their actions, making it into a kind of ecosystem of habit. The question of unthinking habit is central here. Both characters make choices about how to proceed, but have no awareness of the larger cycle that they themselves are both creating and feeding through these very choices. It's exactly this lack of awareness that imposes their fate upon them. They have free will but don't realize that true choice is denied them by their ignorance of the consequences of their actions.

Elegy is a simpler work than Ode, in that the story is self-contained with no reference to events outside of the cycle. However, the involved nature of the tie between the man and woman makes the work more complex. I think Elegy has a more subtle treatment of the overarching narrative, and its soundtrack provides fewer dramatic cues for the audience.

This makes the structure of the film more invisible, and perhaps more challenging to absorb.

Could you take us through your creative process when starting a new project?

In Elegy you explore the tension between fate and choice: can you introduce our readers to this work?

In Elegy, I placed the two figures in separate physical spaces in order to represent their alienation from one another. They each are alone despite their deep emotional intertwinement. The man and woman are trapped in a sorrowful cycle of their own creation – and it's their lack of awareness of their roles as creators that traps them. I tried to capture this simultaneous agency and complicity by making the environment itself

I tend to think of my creative process as an excavation. There are many images that have spontaneously occurred to me —sometimes I encounter them in real life, but usually not.

Usually they come from a dream, a conversation, or out of nowhere, and I will carry them around inside of me for a long time.

So my excavation is a process of contemplating that image to understand what it's trying to tell me; getting it to reveal its context. It's a lot of reflecting on possible images, feelings, and associations. It's a very exploratory process that's almost like I'm trying to tap into a lost memory. I frequently have different visuals that I know are related somehow but I'll have no clue how they go together, and it takes a long time trying to discover the bridge that connects them; waiting for my brain to deliver an answer that feels like the right one. I won't force an image into a box where it doesn't belong. I would sooner let it sit in my mind and wait for the context to reveal itself. I have waited a very long time for some of them, and I never know what I'm going to end up with. I try to let each story reveal itself; I don't like forcing my will on them or trying to turn them into something that they're not. I'm guessing that some of the images I've got in my head will lead nowhere; they won't be part of a larger construct.

How has your history influenced the way you produce art?

Because I work autobiographically, my history is central to my art making process. But aside from contemplating personal experiences, my work serves as a way for me to grapple with questions about life, suffering, and what it means to be human. I didn't always intend for

these to be the central themes in my art, but as I've gotten further down the track of filmmaking, I've realized more and more just what a cumbersome task the whole process is.

For me that process is so soul-crushing that I can't bring myself to put in so much labor for ideas that are just diversions or amusements.

The demands of the moving-image medium have focused me more and made me really

think about prioritizing my ideas and efforts.

So now I'm mostly concerned with larger, philosophical questions in my projects.

Thanks for sharing your time, Dawn, we wish you all the best with your artist career. What's next for Dawn Hollison?

Have you a particular film in mind?

Well, I have a very long gestation period and I

try to let ideas grow as organically as possible.

Because of that I try to work on multiple ideas at the same time, staggering them so that I don't have too many dead periods. Right now I've got several new projects in the air, but the one that is closest to the surface is a film partially inspired by the tale of Bluebeard.

A still from The End

Amir Azar

An interview with

Amir Azar Amir Azar's films are pervaded by a unique atmosphere. For this Videofocus Edition we have selected his short film The End, a surreal short film presenting a refined black and white cinematography. Amir, how did you get started in filmmaking?

I have been always waiting for an opportunity to start film making, in the past few years I have been doing graphics, sculpture and photography which was a very helpful experience to realize my films.

My first experience of video art was in 2011.In 2012 i participated in Kiarostami`s course which was a good point. Finally I started to show my thoughts. in different medium to my audience in my works I didn`t want the extreme releases of some video arts which look like a pale(tash)of a sence neither limits of films based on classical learns.

Could you introduce our readers to The End? "The end" is a simple and at the same time a complex image of challenge between destiny and authority.

There are persons or things which are with us from the very first moment of our lives that might not be noticed for years or forever or presence of someone or an enent in few seconds involves us for the rest of our lives or sometimes they are like chiaroscuros (light and dark)in our lives.at the same time they are present and not but in any case they have their influence. Life is a combination of these all.

We have found really stimulating the balance between absence and presence

in your film: a masterly use of temps mort and the precise composition of the static shots create in the viewer a sense of lack like in Antonioni's early works, just think of his masterpiece L'Eclisse. How did you develop your visual style?

Yes, these light and darks and uncertainty are seen in L'Eclisse of Antonioni that fine at creates an atmosphere of vanity in front of audience and leaves the protagonist in state of confusion.

We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for The End? Could you tell us a particular episode who has helped the birth of this project?

About the visual style as I mentioned above years of experience in photography and graphics helped me a lot to cognition my desired image better. Before I started registration I created that in my mind very detailed so when start making I feel like making a film I already have seen.

We have previously mentioned the films by Michelangelo Antonioni, even though your filmmaking style is very far from what is generally considered 'academic' or narrative. Who among international artists and experimental filmmakers influenced your work?

Usually ideas come in my mind in an instant like a discovery maybe something is waking up in the back of my mind and appears. Of course music helps me a lot in picturing these ideas but the main event takes place in seconds.

I like many of film makers but if I have to name I should say I really likes Tarkovsky and Von trier`s works wathing them give me a particular energy. Also Abbas Kiarostami & Michael Haneke are my favorites so.

What draws you to a particular subject?

Amir Azar

A still from The End

A still from The End

Whatever makes man to know himself and his around and makes him to revelation€ is interesting to me.

Thanks for sharing your time, Amir, we wish you all the best with your filmmaker career. What's next for you?

Have you a particular film in mind?

another video art which is in editing and there will be another that I think will be

I have a lots of ideas i recently made

beginning of a new season of my career.

Aleksander Johan

A still from Roy

Andreassen

An interview with

Daniel CortĂŠs Aleksander Johan Andreassen's documentary work is suspended between the humanity of traditional portraiture and the effective exploration of themes like mental disorders, memory and perception, reminding us of the neurologists Oliver Sacks's essays, especially Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. His intimate filmic portraits are the jumping-off point for a spellbinding meditation on the boundaries between between illness and behaviour, between normal and abnormal. We are pleased to present Aleksander Johan Andreassen for this Videofocus Edition. Aleksander, we want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for Roy? I had known Roy for a time and decided at some point that I wanted to make a work with him. He had an outlook that I somehow wanted to portray, but I did not know what form it would take.

Roy is quite shy so it became evident that one viable method in making a work around his story would be to interview him as opposed to staging events or just following him with a camera. In the few weeks I that interviewed him about his life, one story that I become interested in was his thoughts on his large production of both digital and paper drawings.

Knowing in the back of my mind that this story was what I wanted to focus on I decided to film a lot of the drawings and borrowed some of the digital ones.

At the time I had stopped filming Roy, I did not know how and if I would use the material. Some months went by and I started to review and edit the interview and footage. Eventually I found a structure in the material that became the final ten-

Aleksander Johan Andreassen

minute duration of the film. The film focuses primarily on his relationship with the mental care system and through his feeling of lack of freedom he got into drawing. When working with the interview I became intrigued by the cumbersome process of editing the human voice. I found in it a very strong signifier in creating structure and meaning. In this process I understood that this was something I

wanted to take further in terms of working with it as a series.

We have been impressed with the way you cross the boundary between cinepoetry and documentary genre.

What is the role of words in your cinema?

Having worked with some sort of interview

as a source material in almost all of my later projects the role of words is hard to escape, but my main focus is often on the meaning of voice, where intonation and vocal phrasing become strong signifiers.

I hold a fascination with the plain act of talking and listening to talk. It is so performative in itself.

If necessary, I edit the source material quite heavily, straight down to single words

A still from Roy

and letters. I try to take it wherever necessary, often deflecting notions of fictional and factual. For me the interview is an art form in itself.

How did you get started in filmmaking?

I have a background in horticulture and was working as a landscaper in my early twenties.

Ultimately I got tired of it, and after having had different odd jobs that I quickly got bored of, I got the idea to pursue filmmaking.

I didn't know anything about it so I applied and eventually got accepted to a preliminary film school I Denmark.

I gradually got introduced to artist cinema and video art which I found, and still find to be much more inspiring than most commercial film. After going through art school and trying out different mediums, I eventually found an artistic path in filmmaking that made sense to me.

It developed slowly, and still is developing.

A certain doubtful certainty is necessary.

Along the way, I have been doing video design for theatre and worked as a stop motion cinematographer, amongst other things.

I have to say though, that I am really happy to have my background in horticulture. It has been a lifesaver at times, and I really like it.

Let's explore now your earlier film 'stille dag' (silent day) 2012, where you use the sustained shot to show us the actual dayto-day existance of your mother, giving the viewer a strong sense of emptiness, rather than the manipulative approach of mainstream Hollywood productions. Can you introduce our readers to this video?

This work is the most personal I have made and on some level a starting point for the series of portrait films that I am working on now. In the film I use time-lapse photography from a fixed position to follow my mother for 24-hours. The audio track consists of two conversations between my mother and me about her passive lifestyle and the effect it has on our relationship. It is shown as a continuous loop.

The idea for the film came naturally. This passive life was, and still is where she is at. I have tried to do something about it, but

A still from stille dag (silent day) 2012

nothing worked. The making of the film was fueled by my despair for her situation.

I had to do it, even though I knew it probably wouldn't help her.

Going through the process I was very doubtful of many aspects of it. It makes sense to me now. I have come to terms with it.

Your art is rich of references. We have previously mentioned Oliver Sacks, yet your visual imagery is close to Jean Rouch's and Chantal Akerman cinema.

A still from stille dag (silent day) 2012

Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

Generally I find a lot of the documentary

cinema and artist cinema of the sixties and seventies inspiring. Chantal Ackerman, Stan Brakhage, Frederick Wiseman, the Mayles brothers, Jonas Mekas and Marie Menken are just a few of the artists and

There is an overwhelming intensity and presence in this film. Hara displays a very strong, but also conflicting relationship to his subjects in all of his films. I find this conflicting relationship intriguing, and his DIY attitude inspiring. Thinking of the films of Hara, they all seem to literally scream in my face.

Thanks for sharing your time, Aleksander, we wish you all the best with your filmmaker career. What's next for Aleksander Johan Andreassen?

Have you a particular film in mind?

I am working on two projects right now.

One of them is a film from the portrait series that I am doing the finishing touches on. The second is a new project that will be a video installation consisting of several animated abstract videos and found audio interview footage. It is not part of the portrait series but it has clear links to it.

With it, I will try out several ideas that I have in terms of mixing abstract visual work with a narrative sound. I am also working with three-dimensional projection objects rather than square flat screening surfaces.

filmmakers that have influenced me. One work that has been especially influential is Sayonara CP by the Japanese filmmaker Kazuo Hara. In the film we meet a group of Japanese people with cerebral palsy.

Shaun Vendryes

An interview with

Shaun Vendryes From the first time we watched Shaun Vendryes's vj mixes we were impressed by his surreal imagery. His experimental works reveal a strong effort to destabilize the language of cinema. We are plesed to present for this Videofocus Edition his work JESSE SLAYTER X STRATUS COMBO, an original vj mix demonstrating a viral way of conceiving art. Shaun, how did you get started in experimental cinema?

I got into experimental cinema in high school .

During that time I was taking a TV production class and was introduced to linear editing system.

It was there I started to work with video shooting and editing small 2 min pieces.

However it wasn't till my first year of college that I took those tools and started to apply them in a live context such as vjing and live video performance. It was then that I learned about scratch video and learned about the audience for experimental film.

We have been really impressed by the balance the have been capable of achieving in this work between classical sensibility and pure experimentation. How did you come up with the idea for JESSE SLAYTER X STRATUS - COMBO? Well the title refers to a remix of a track done by a close musical collaborator called Big Makk ( the full title of the piece is JESSE SLAYTER X. STRATUS - Combo Big Makk remix ). The idea for this piece was born out of the general collaborations I tend to have with recording artist. Normally music producers will make new music and to test the waters release it on YouTube for people to listen to. When I work with producers they normally approach me requesting me to develop some form of visual to accompany their music on YouTube to keep the listener entertained. These collaborations don't normally have too many restrictions as far as what the visual should be so it give me a lot of room to create.

Shaun Vendryes

As for the balance you see in the piece . I think it comes from my blending of different video art concepts and ideas. I feel if I didn't integrate other concepts into my scratch video style it wouldn't move the medium forward .

Alone scratch video is a sharp and rough form of video art. It has relentless cuts and fast movements which can be harsh on the eyes and is clearly experimental . While the other ideas and concepts I use aren't as harsh and are more easy on the eye and adds more is a polished softer edge that gives it the balance you see.

Could you introduce our readers to your scratch video style?

Scratch video refers to a type of video art that uses beat centered film cuts and transitions to build visual rhythm and phrasing similar to musical phrasing. Similar to the style of editing currently used in popular music videos and montages in films. This all came about in the late 70's and 80s with the advent of lower cost VHS equipment and the birth of the video art scene in places like New York. Now instead of VHS edits done in a studio these types of pieces can be made live and in real time with the use of modern vjing software .

The way my style differs at scratch video than other artist in the past is the choice of imagery I use. In the past scratch video has mostly centered on using referential images a way to connect the visual to the auditory . For example in the classic Scratch Video called Timber by Coldcut. The VJs use images of people logging trees and milling wood to match the theme of the song. This allows the viewer to make connections between the too and make the piece more enjoyable.

My style tends to use randomly sampled nonreferential images that have no clear connection to the sound, outside of the cuts and translations. So by using the language of

scratch video, in combinations with random non- referential images , I create montages where the viewer is forced to make the connections between the content and the music. Since the images don't have any inherent reference to the music, theme, or each other the connections and assumptions made about the piece are unique to the viewer.

This leads multiple people to come away from each piece wit their own views and perspective of the piece. I like to think of it as I am deconstructing precomposed narratives and reassembling them in a random order so the view can derive a Unique and new narrative.

These ideas come from the work of john cage and his work around randomness, chances , and indeterminacy. All of which I studied while working on my masters in music.

In your works you use visual tricks to create phrasing for visuals, a concept derived from music. Can you describe this peculiar aspect of your art process?

The visual tricks I use for phrasing really come from film techniques and concepts of visual rhythm . That and a understanding of how modern dance music is constructed . At the

root of it , the concepts of visual rhythm and film editing techniques are things video editors learn when perfecting their craft. Learning where to cut from, what would look good in the next shot and how you move between them are all things video editors learn as they develop their own style. On the other hand understanding how the music is constructed and interpreting that structor dictates how you will use these video editing techniques in a live and real time context.

I approach the phrasing by blending the language of scratch video, beat centered editing, with the concepts of visual music.

Visual music is an idea born out of absolute music. Absolute music is the structuring of time with non-referential sounds and loops.

Visual music is the same but using visuals and images instead of sounds. Moreover, visual music shares a lot with tonal music. In the sense that the interest not comes from the note your playing but the transitions between the notes, the tension and release . The movement between visuals, the transition between images is what pulled the viewer in.

So by using the ideas of visual music I can structor time with the visuals. Then with the scratch video techniques I can take these time

structuring visuals and rearrange them to create visual tension and release. It is these moments of tension and release that mimic the phrasing you find in most tonal musical pieces.

It isn't the visual your playing but the relationship between the visuals, the movement between them, and the context of their sequence that really creates the phrasing.

Your art reveals a synesthetic approach to moving images. How did you develop your style?

I think that has to do with my use of montage and non referential imagery . It is by the use of montage, which traditionally is meant to tell a narrative, with non referential imagery , imagery that inherently doesn't tell a complete narrative, that the synesthetic effect is achieved. It is similar to the effect one gets watching a audio visualization generated by a computer program. The mind works to make connections between the visualization being drawn by the computer and the music playing .

However unlike a computer visualization that may still be running after the connections are made by the user, by presenting the visuals in a montage like formate the mind never has a chance to fully make the connections. It is the

lack of the ability to makes these connection in time while presenting it in a formate that is designed for you to make connections makes the viewer feel like that synesthetic effect is happening. It is because the viewer feels like they have to make a connection, that they associate it with what ever they are feeling or thinking.

In your work we can recognize a simple at the same time masterly work of editing: what kind of technology have you used in producing it? Could you take us through your creative process when starting a new project?

The process for this piece is the same process I use for nearly all of my pieces. First it is important to note that this piece was not edited except for the title placed at the start of the video . It was recorded in one take using VJ software and prerecorded video clips stored on my laptop. VJ software is basically software that emulates a TV studio, it lets you cut , fade and apply special video effects to live video feeds and prerecorded video clips.

The clips I used are all sampled from popular video streaming services. I feel that this gives the viewer more of a chance too see something

they have seen before, but in a different context. This helps in pulling them into the piece even more with them trying to make more connections.

They way I put it together is the same way you would see me performs it live. The music will start playing and I will choose my first visual clip and start mixing . I don't normally choose all the visuals as that would give a sense of forced narrative so I also allow the computer to choose clips at random which allows me to focus on how to sequence the images. This also ties back into john cage and his ideas of Indeterminacy since if I where to preform this piece live it wouldn't look the same even if I limited the clip selection to the one used in the recorded piece.

So the process in the end is simple. Sample video and edit them into manageable chunks , roughly 30 seconds each . Load them into my VJ software. Hit play on on a new piece of music I have never heard before and the record on my capture device then mix!

We find that your art is rich of references.

Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

First off I have to say any references the viewer makes are their own. Most of the images I use are sampled at random. It is not uncommon for me to download a 5 min video with out watching the entire video and cut it up into chunks to use as samples.

It is because of this I always say John cage is a big one, randomness and chance are a big part of how I work. Also many of the other Fluxus artist who worked with him. I got to meet a lot of his contemporaries while working on my masters when I got to work with the Merce

dance company, before Mr Merce passed away. They influenced me greatly in how I approach making art. To me life is random and life is also a performance, so it makes sense to make randomness a part of my performance.

I basically see my self as a Fluxus artist who works as a VJ and in the video medium . With Fluxus life can be seen as a performance and with video we can capture life and make it what we want . It is a realty that we can shape , edit and process into what we want . My video mixes are a representation of how I

experience life in this fragmented non linear world. Some may look at my life and see one thing and others may see something else to me that is Fluxus.

Oh yeah, I am also a big fan of Nam June Pak! Thanks for sharing your time, Shaun, we wish you all the best with your filmmaker career. What's next for you? Have you a particular film in mind?

I don't know really, I don't see myself as a film maker but more as a live video artist. But I plan on retiring from vjing at events and focusing on more video art pieces for galleries and installations. I can't do film since I don't have the attention span to edit and don't like dealing with construction long form narrative.

So I just see myself living life and expressing my experiences from it in some form of visual medium.

Karina Griffith

An artist's statement

Why are some plants desired in our gardens, and others, uprooted and discouraged to flourish? How can we expect seeds and people to respect borders if opportunities for growth are disparate on either side? Inspired by the continuing struggle of African refugees in Berlin for the right to work and freedom of movement, UNKRAUT is a visual representation of the filmmakers experience with European xenophobia.

Karina Griffith

An interview with

Karina Griffith Karina Griffith eschews traditional storytelling and opts instead for an associative, surrealist methodology. For her the embrace of the imagination has specific political implications: in UNKRAUT she explores the theme of xenophobia through a cinematographic language that is specific and original, reminding is of the Dogme 95 movement from Danish directors. Karina, how did you get started in experimental cinema?

I got my start at the SAW Video Media Arts cooperative in Ottawa, Canada I had just finished a Bachelor of Journalism at Carleton University, where I co-directed a documentary under the supervision of Peter Biesterfeld.

SAW had this amazing Youth in Residence program, where you spend 6 months immersed in video production.

That year, the theme was "Urban/Rural Youth Connections", and the 12 of us had to make public service announcements for some of the non-governmental partners, but other than that, we had free reign and use of the equipment and editing suites. It was a golden time.

We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for UNKRAUT? I have an allotment garden here in Berlin, and I was spending a lot of time with my hands in the dirt. I was also researching natural medicine for a larger project about my great aunt who was a bush healer in Guyana.

At the same time,the refugee camp in Berlin at Oranienplatz which housed 100 people and served as a peaceful protest and meeting place for the movement, was cleared in April of 2014.

The one remaining info tent was burned down later that year. The refugees (mostly from the African continent) are demanding the right to work, freedom of movement (at the moment, "Residenzpflicht" dictates a limited radius of movement enforced with a hefty fine).

Karina Griffith

Instead of having their applications for asylum processed, the government is threatening deportation, and constantly evacuating people from "safe houses" in the middle of the night, even in the dead of winter.

This is how the idea of borders between countries and the conventions of gardens came together for me, because both are man-made and inorganic. It is an "othering" process that we need to question.

Can you introduce our readers to the multidisciplinary nature of your art research?

Coming from a journalistic background, there is an element of documentary in there. I've moved away from traditional interviews, or let's say, they don't usually make it into the final product in any way you would recognize.

Talking to people is a big part of the conceptual process.

Then I read a lot. Each piece has a thesis in a way: "people doing something for a reason". I always have my super 8 camera with me when I am travelling, and I often put myself in the mindset of a "flaneur" here in Berlin and walk around with my camera, capturing visual metaphors. I remember walking from Wedding to Neukรถlln (over 2 hours from north to south through the city of Berlin) to find that shot of a worker repairing the cobblestones for UNKRAUT.

A still from UNKRAUT

A still from UNKRAUT

I knew this was how I would visually represent the repressive "integration" process for immigrants in Europe; these stones that are fondled, flipped and hammered into place for us to step on.

From a visual point, we have been impressed with your hand-held camera style. How did you develop your shooting style?

I want to expose the bias of the point of view, to remind the viewer that there is a human

behind the camera with bias. I don't want them to get lost in the images and forget themselves, or the Black female telling the story. That's why I like to work with old camera that create an imperfect picture and also why I include out-of-focus shots. Even 20:20 vision is not perfect.

We would like to explore now your video installation Gitarrenunterricht (Ottawa, Toronto, Banff) commissioned by the RRR

Festival in Berlin. Can you introduce our readers to this work?

I wanted to play with the stereotype that Black people are born with musical talent. I have seen very few images of Blacks learning music, and I feel it is our responsibility as artists to create a diversity of representations. I was learning to lay guitar at the time, so when the curating duo, Late Nights in Squat Bars, approached me, it made sense.

The moving image work was of me practicing a song over time on a cross-Ontario trip (to Ottawa, Toronto and Banff). The audience can see my learning progress in each of the three films and figure out the chronology of my travels.

How did you collaborate with Ian DouglasMoore?

Douglas-Moore is my guitar teacher! He is a wonderful musician and composer in his own

A still from UNKRAUT right, and together we worked on turning our weekly lesson into an interactive performance.

We invited the public to join in on our lesson, and performed three songs in progress. This performance accompanied the three-channel video installation. Some brought their own guitars,and we had some extra available for spontaneous joiners! The notes were on an overhead projector, so people were singing

and playing along. The atmosphere was wonderful.

A recurrent characteristic of many of your artworks is experience as starting point of artistic production: in your opinion, is experience an absolutely necessary part of creative process?

It always starts that way for me. I like to say that my work exists in the space between the question and the answer. There is something I am personally grappling with, and the film essays are part of how I tease it out and find peace.

Thanks for sharing your time, Karina, we wish you all the best with your filmmaker

and artist career. What's next for Karina Griffith? Have you a particular film in mind?

UNKRAUT is part of a film essay series called "Becoming Afro German". I am working on more moving image works for the series for an exhibition at the end of 2015.

David Theobald 'Digital Purgatory' - computer animated continuous loop of call centre recordings and rendered objects.

Today, location is not so much defined by geography, but by our position within the complex web of processes that make up contemporary society. My work attempts to capture such a situation, caught in a perpetual state of transit where increasing complexity is often presented as the illusion of ‘progress’. As

the global economy lurches towards an uncertain future, these complex connections that form the basis of day-to-day existence seem ever more evident and ever more precarious.

Technology and its impact on subjectivity lies at the heart of my practice. Consisting of digital animation, my work and subject matter mirrors the structure of the underlying technology used in its creation and the repetitive processes that seem central to the infrastructure of contemporary society. The intensive labour that goes into my animations is perversely used to

A still from The Cloud

produce images of objects and experiences that we often go out of our way to avoid experiencing. They often ‘take place’ in parts of that world that resemble what Marc Augé has called ‘non-places,’ the locations of supermodernity characterised by their prefabricated blandness whose cloned anonymity is simultaneously alien and familiar.

Working with video inevitably raises questions about mediation in modern society and the seemingly endless pursuit of much digital animation and game technology towards ever

more spectacular optical effects, the spectator held in thrall of the screen. In contrast, the use a restricted viewpoint, repetition, mundane subject matter and flat narrative in my work seem more likely to generate feelings of futility, frustration and perhaps humour which, in some cases, might give way to a deeper contemplation of the systems in which we live.

David Theobald

An interview with

David Theobald David Theobald's work investigates the infrastructure of contemporary society, focusing on the tensions between space and subjectivity. In order to represent the shifting relationship between these two elements, his digital animations feature architectural reconstructions marked by labyrinthine paths and restricted viewpoints, conveying an unheimlich, Kafkaesque feeling like in Jacques Tati's masterpiece Playtime. We are pleased to present David Theobald for this Videofocus edition. David, how did you get started in animation?

When I first went to art college I thought that I wanted to be a painter. However, I became increasingly frustrated with using paint as a means to express or explore a particular idea or concept. I found that moving images offered me much more flexibility. I could add whatever sound, colour or movement that I wanted and if I stopped the film it became a photograph. To me it seemed like a ‘super-medium’ as it was multisensory, each element and could be directly manipulated to generate affect. Further, with animation I could represent anything I wanted as I was not reliant on needing to have the physical subject standing in front of the camera. Digital editing and animation took this one step further, allowing the direct manipulation of the pixels to generate photo-realistic imagery. Also, given how prevalent such techniques were in the media it seemed a rich subject of research for my art practice.

The theme of post-geography is central to your imagery, and Marc Augé's concept of ‘non-places' is no doubt a starting point of your art research. Could you introduce our readers to these fundamental ideas behind your work?

Today, location is not so much defined by geography, but by our position within the complex web of processes that make up contemporary society. My work attempts to capture such a situation, caught in a perpetual state of transit where increasing complexity is often presented as the illusion of ‘progress’. Our

A still from The Cloud conventional idea of ‘places’ is associated with some kind of definition of identity and the generation of historical and contextual relations – often they evoke some sense of individual or collective memory. In contrast, Marc Augé’s concept of ‘non-places’ describes spaces which do not really fulfil these criteria.

Such spaces could be places of transit, such as an airport departure lounge, or a hotel lobby or an office mezzanine, and are often associated with leisure or commerce where there is a need for an efficient circulation of people. They are characterised by their lack of character, by their prefabricated blandness whose cloned anonymity is simultaneously alien and familiar.

When we enter such spaces we take on a purely experiential role of a customer of passenger devoid of individual identity,

severed from historical context. Further, Augé saw such spaces as endemic of contemporary society which he outlines in his ideas around ‘supermodernity’. To this idea of non-places, I think we could add a whole class of ‘virtual’ spaces that fulfil these same criteria.

The idea of using computer animation to create a digital simulation of such spaces seemed an interesting idea that offered a lot of scope for exploration.

Do you think that nowadays there still exists a dichotomy between art and technology?

No, I believe that technology is both a key subject and crucial material for artists. The contemporary art that most interests me

encapsulates some criticality about today’s society and technology is a key part of that.

For example, so many daily processes in the workplace and in our leisure time are structured by the technology that we use. If we think about globalization and the myriad of supply chains and systems that we use to manage that, none of these would be possible without technology. Further, the use of technology allows artists to use the language of contemporary culture. For example, CGI and digital animation underpin almost every advert and movie that we see so it seems obvious to utilise the same medium to make art, albeit with a different objective – to me it just seems more relevant to use ‘digital materials’ to make work about contemporary subjects.

Indeed, I’d say that technology and its impact

A still from The Cloud

on subjectivity lies at the heart of my practice.

We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your video: how did you come up with the idea for The Cloud?

This work was conceived to evoke ideas around the physical nature of ‘the cloud’.

The concept of cloud computing underpins the infrastructure behind much of contemporary visual culture. The ‘cloud’ is becoming the archive for our memories where remote distributed computers store our photographs and videos through a combination of private online drives and public websites such as Instagram, Flickr, YouTube and facebook. In one sense, this latest step in technology completes the move from the physical storage of family photographs in dusty albums to the remote hosting of our images, films and videos where the borders dissolve and everything becomes indexed ‘digital content’. Through the widespread marketing of a name which evokes the idea of an ethereal space, our conception of ‘the cloud’ has become massively abstracted from the physical reality of huge data centres consisting of thousands of computer servers in air conditioned hangers. In addition, as well as providing data storage, such spaces have also become central to image production, providing the ‘render farms’ used for much commercial image processing, computer animation and CGI. What interests me about these spaces is their massive hidden complexity coupled with the collapse of all media specificity into purely numerical data. Such complexity is hidden at several levels. The physical location of such places will always be completely unknown to us – we have no idea where our digital artefacts are stored - they will always remain sites that we have to imagine. The technology itself conceals the ‘work’ going on – computers tend to look the same whether they are actively processing or merely on standby.

Further, the synthetic manner of the representation seemed apposite given the ‘virtual’ nature of its subject and the difficulty that we encounter in its visualisation. In a sense, this work is both a product and a representation of ‘the cloud’ being overwhelmingly ‘digital’ (a few pixels fluctuating on and off being the only ‘action’) and depicts another layer of fiction that does little to really advance our understanding of cloud’s true nature.

At the same time I had been also been thinking about call centres. I have a particular bugbear when it comes to call centres when one has to hold online for minutes on end, stuck in some kind of digital purgatory. During this time you do not interact with real people, but with automated voices who attempt to apologise and reassure. In a sense, such interactions are also a product of the cloud as, for this period, our calls and our interactions are held on a compute server somewhere waiting to be routed to some back to the ‘real’ world, albeit again in some unspecified location.

From the first time we watched your work, we were impressed with your refined animation style. How did you develop your visual imagery?

Working with digital animation inevitably raises questions about mediation in modern society. Advances in imaging technology have the potential to stretch the limits of our senses and what we are capable of perceiving.

However, much CGI and game technology instead appears directed towards anthropomorphism and a pre-canned form of wish fulfilment, the spectacular effects holding the spectator in thrall of the screen. In contrast, I’ve developed a body of work which often combines elements such as a static camera, restricted viewpoint and repetition to create something that has sometimes been described as ‘anti-animation’. The durational experience of viewing such a work, with ample to time to explore the unchanging areas of the image, is more akin to viewing a photograph than a conventional film or animation - the image ‘posing’ rather than ‘passing’ in front of our eyes. When installing work in gallery spaces, I will often structure works as continuous loops rather than conventional films, so there is no real beginning or end – one can start watching at any point. Indeed you could say that a defining characteristic of digitally generated film is the ability to create a seamless loop where the start and end conditions are identical. I also think that this ‘flat’ narrative structure leads to work that seems well suited to what Walter Benjamin referred to as ‘reception in distraction’ where multiple fragmented viewings allow casual passers-by to build a view of the whole loop over time.

Let’s speak about influences. We have previously mentioned the French anthropologist Marc Augé, whose theories

A still from The Cloud

have deeply influenced your art. Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

Some of my biggest influences have been writers and philosophers. I’m really interested in the ideas around the nature of human subjectivity and the generation of affect and have found the writings of Giles Deleuze, Brian Massumi and Bruno Latour of great interest.

As my work tends to be pretty static, I think that photographers more than film makers have had an influence on my visual style. I really admire the work of Joel Sternfeld, Andreas Gursky, Rodney Graham and Martin Parr. I also enjoy the artifice in the work of Thomas Demand. Within film makers, I’ve long been interested in the work of Chris Marker and the Brothers Quay. I also spend a lot of time looking at mainstream contemporary movies and commercials.

Animation is a long and hard process. How long does it usually take to finish a piece?

From initial gestation to completion a new work usually takes about three months, but a lot of that will be playing around with different visual ideas and structures. This will include

lot of visual research and experimentation as well as the ‘how can I do that?’ aspect where I play around to see how I might technically achieve certain visual effects. The actual making part, where I am modelling, rendering and editing, usually takes around 4-6 weeks.

This is usually a pretty creative period and the final product is often a bit different from what I might have been thinking about at the beginning. I’m not very efficient and during this period I’ll continually be refining and making changes which often leads to a lot of extra work. Also, digital animation is very computer intensive so the process tends to be ‘batch driven’, a bit like cooking, where you set up a series of scenes that render overnight before you can see if the output is quite what you want. Sometimes I’ll experiment with several different versions of a work, maybe with different sounds or structures, before deciding on the final piece. Further, if a work was initially envisaged as a continuous loop, I might also choose to make a credited film version for use at screening events which presents a different set of challenges.

We would like to explore now your video titled The Highway Code. Can you

A still from The Cloud introduce our readers to this work?

In one sense, this work is about ‘free will’. In the UK, ‘The Highway Code’ is the rule book for road users containing hundreds of regulations and traffic signs. I’ve long been interested in road signs – partly because my father used to be a highway engineer. By their very nature, they are intended to inform, direct, warn or regulate our behaviour and represent authority and order. They are written in a highly abbreviated ‘code’ which we have to be taught to understand by passing through various trials – road safety training at school, cycling proficiency and driving test etc.

However, in recent years the number of signs seems to have continually increased to the

point that in many built up areas there will be some kind of official sign every other lamp post.

These signs have a very abbreviated and authoritarian nature that tend to distil options down to a few, or only one, choice, so I had the idea of trying to tell a story, in this case a fictional biography, purely using traffic signs where one was encouraged to read them in a different way. This narrative could be read as reflecting a society in which choice and freewill sometimes feel illusionistic – it can only really be read in one way – the viewer is not given much space for different interpretations.

In life, it feels like we may have a huge consumer choice, if we have the money, but we

David Theobald David Theobald is a video artist born in Worthing in 1965. Although originally trained as a chemical engineer, he pursued a career in finance for fifteen years, living both in New York and London.

Twelve years ago he decided to change profession and dedicate himself to becoming a full-time artist, attaining an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths in 2008. Most recently, his main works have been animations structured from photographs, scanned images and rendered objects, blending these together to create a familiar yet alien environment. These may be structured as conventional films or as continuous loops with no discernible beginning or end

Website: www.davidtheobald.com Video Channel: www.vimeo.com/davidtheobald Still Images: www.flickr.com/photos/david_theobald/collections/

continually bump up against processes and systems which can only be passed through in a single way. Sometimes this is the result of technology replacing people where ‘precanned’ choices and behaviours are hard coded, sometimes this is the result of focus groups and media saturation that leads to risk aversion and risk avoidance in our behaviour.

I liked the idea that somewhere, perhaps, purely by serendipitous chance, one might pass random road signs in a certain order that they might be read as a narrative that worked alongside their normalised instructional nature. Obviously, that’s pretty unlikely, so I’m deliberately ordering them in a way that encourages this additional reading. It’s almost

like an ‘over code’ that exists on top of their simpler underlying meaning – Guattari has written about overcoding in relation to the ‘meta-models’ that characterise contemporary capitalist society.

Thanks for sharing your time, David, we wish you all the best with your artist career. What's next for David Theobald?

Have you a particular film in mind?

Like many artists, I divide my time between making new work, trying to get existing work seen as well as some teaching. I’ve just started working on a piece that explores some ideas around anthropomorphism and the generation of affect in cinema. Watch this space.

Bilsu Hacar An artist's statement My video “The Funeral” is mixture of the ultrasound video of a fetus and the sounds of Berkin Elvan’s funeral. During the Gezi

protests, Berkin Elvan(15) was killed by a police with a tear gas can. Berkin was not a protester, he was going to the bakery to buy a bread for breakfast. He stayed in coma for 269 days. The day he was dead, he was 15 years old

and weighted 16 kg only. At his funeral, there were thousands of people. They were crying, yelling, feeling the pain deep in their hearts.

And the next thing happened was the police attack to civilians again. The sounds are from

these attacks. This video is not just about one thing. As one side, about the environment we should grow up, the conditions we may give birth. On the other hand, the a baby is a hope, if you dare to give a birth.

An interview with

Bilsu Hacar What have impressed us most of The Funeral (Turkey, 3'53") is the way Bilsu Hacar succeeds in recollecting the tragic†† death of Berkin Elvan. We have found astonishing the way political and personal dimension are mixed in this work: the tragic event happened during the Gezi protest is only the starting point of The Funeral, revealing a deep reflection on the environment we should grow up.

Bilsu, How did you come to the idea of The Funeral?

“Gezi Protest” was an unexpected movement for my generation.

Government’s politically annoying attitude was protested by a generation “so called” distant from politics, with a way never seen before. The police violence against a small group of environment activist led hundreds of thousands people on streets in a few hours. And the real trauma has begun right after. The most important thing we’ve learnt during protests that we don’t have a social state anymore. People who are not member of the majority, but still with a huge number, understood that they have no importance for their own state. Berkin Elvan was the youngest person deceased during protests, he was just a kid. In a kid’s funeral, protesters expected their opponents woud think more sane, regretful and take a step for peaceful solution. But what happened was too far from that. Protests and resistance movements make individuals feel more hopeful and courageous for their future even against brutal violence from state.

But the state’s consideration of threat from an innocent funeral ceremony has created the exact opposite effect on me.

The reflection of the fear and the concerns for the future evolved and became a starting point for “The Funeral”.

In your work we can recognize a deep

Bilsu Hacar

introspection: do you think that art could play an important role in facing†social questions? Could art steer or even†change†people's behavior?

I think, there should always be a social questioning. I believe the art create different connections between people and scene, widens the perceptions and shows alternate point of views. The individual and social perception of art should be considered separately on this point. A work of art may find its place in common memory of a society but it makes it’s marks with infinite different ways for each individuals. Especially in a country like Turkey, it’s hard to ignore social flaws in artistic inspiration period. And when your work is about society, eventually you find yourself waiting for a social response about it. In any case, I believe art may encourage people but frankly it sounds too much daring to claim a piece of art can change a human behavior totally. I wish I had that piece…

Audio has a huge importance in your works. the use of soundtrack has not a diegethical aims, but tend to sabotage the common perception mechanims.

Using the ultrasound video of a fetus, you have recollected the tragic story of Berkin Elvan. Could you introduce our

readers to this aspect of your filmmaking?

In a large perspective, I like my works being a little disturbing, creating awareness and having a matter. I use the opposition between sound and visual to manipulate the perception out of what it is prepared for. In this work of mine, I used brutal and panical sounds because I wanted to get ourselves out of our safety chambers we created in our minds which is represented with the propitious of a mother, the safest place for a baby.

Could you introduce our readers to your recent work "Keep My Pic Sister"?

“Keep My Pic Sister” is my first work which I questioned being women in an Islamic country. The fast evolving of my country to a quite conservative enviroment is a serious cause for this questioning. Arguments about abortion, increasing woman homicides, public limitations, puts women in an increasingly difficult social status. Woman gets away

from being individual with her own posture and becomes a generic figure. I tried to solidify this figure by using a cut-out burqa and behind the burqa they had no differences or personalities.

Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

People, social movements, news, current life, evolving conditions and politics are the subjects that I prefer to work about. I don’t go for over-abstract or too personal points. But I admire lots of contemporary works which are created with this way.

Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts with us, Bilsu. What are your next projects on the horizon?

In my next project, instead of using just video, I’ll try to create an installation. Sure it’ll be combined with a video projection.

And I want to discover new ways of interaction between the work of art and the audience.

Slava Pogorelsky An artist's statement

Slava Pogorelsky, 27, is originally from Russia, but moved to Israel with his family at the age of

12. His father was a painter and records collector, so art and music was around Slava from an early age.

Yet it was only after coming to Israel that he really discovered his passion for making music,

A still from Silent Misery

in particularly electronic music. After studing electronic music production at BPM college, Slava had a couple of successful years with a techno project "Kulten Yeuk". But for Slava something was missing, a picture, a picture that

can move and evolve with his music and together create something unique.

Slava Pogorelsky

An interview with

Slava Pogorelsky Since the first time we watched Slava Pogorelsky's work, we have been strucked by his imagery so close to Guy Maddin's surreal films: Slava, how did you get started in filmmaking?

Silent Misery" was actually the final project I got for one of my classes at Sapir Academic College, where I did my B.F.A at Soundtrack, Cinema and TV course. My main passion is sound design and music in visual media, but things got very interesting for me when I had to create my own visual work.

Audio has a huge importance in your works. The use of soundtrack has not a diegethical aims, but tend to sabotage the common perception mechanims like in the films of the French director Jacques Tati. Could you introduce our

readers to this fundamental aspect of your filmmaking?

Feelings is not an easy task to achieve in a short film, it's even harder when film itself is about feelings. In "Silent Misery" I wanted to bring the viewer an unusual audio visual experience with different way of story telling.

The sound work started before the picture, and when I had enough musical ideas to play with I started shooting. For me soundtrack playing a very big role in a storytelling, sometimes it comes in a perfect sync to reinforce the image and sometimes tells it's own story adding another meaning and depth.

We have used the term "soundtrack", however, it would be more appropiate in your case to say that the starting point is not music itself, but musical thinking: you have studied electronic music production

A still from Silent Misery

at BPM college, an experience which has no doubt marked your artistic practice.

When did you come across electronic music?

We have selected your short film Silent Misery for this year's edition: could you introduce our readers to this abstract visual poem?

One day me and my friend Kirill Diamandy realized that we didn't just want to listen to music, we want to make it. So we started to make some noises with some old programs and gear for a couple of years.

For me "Silent Misery" is an abstract audiovisual poem about the "dark side" of emotions. The poem shows us an individual that dealing with those emotion as the soundtrack reflecting his inner thoughts and memories.

Back then I had no specific direction... everyday it was a new style and experience. At some point I wanted more knowledge and skills to improve my sound, so I found BPM College in Tel Aviv. It was a great experience for me, I started a techno project called "Kulten Yeuk" and released a couple of CD's under this name. It was an interesting journey, but at some point it wasn't enough, something was missing. I've always loved cinema, especialy the power of music and sound in it that brings another level of interpretation and meaning . After graduating from BPM, I started studying Soundtrack, Cinema and TV at Sapir Academic College.

We really appreciate you refined black and white cinematography in Silent Misery, your grainy footage shows no doubt a painterly-analog feel. How did you achieve this effect?

My father, Boris Pogorelsky is a painter, so I always was around him working. Back then he worked at a newspaper, he was writing short stories and ink drawing pictures for each of them. I was fascinated by the ability of one black and white picture reflecting the story so well. I think that black and white photography allows the viewer to focus on the forms and

A still from Silent Misery

A still from Silent Misery

relations of image elements. "Silent Misery" was shoot black and white, with massive use of out of focus, close ups, masks and little post production effects.

We have previously quoted the Canadian director Guy Maddin, however, your filmmaking is rich of references: Silent Misery remind us of Artavazd Pelechian' cinema too. Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

I think my biggest influences are directors like Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch and Jan Svankmajer, I can really appreciate their creative work with image and sound. There is always something mesmerizing, innovative and Intriguing in their filmmaking. Salvador Dali left a big scar on me as well, sitting hours as a kid, trying to crack his fascinating paintings.

What aspect of your work do you enjoy the most? What gives you the biggest satisfaction?

A still from Silent Misery

I can really enjoy the "idea searching" process, I find it very mystique. For me it can start with music, or a certain sound that evoke something interesting and brings those little pieces of images. But of course a post production stage is the most enjoyable, where you put all the ideas together in a certain order and magic is happening.

Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts, Slava. What's next for you? Have you a particular project in mind ?

Recently I've been working with Rob Whitworth, urban filmmaker and a timelapse genius on a short

film called "Barcelona GO", also with David Reinlib, Israeli young and very talented director on a short film "Labyrinth", which soundtrack won at Cinema South Festival this year. Now I am working with Indiefferent - a game development team from Croatia, on black and white, point´n´click adventure game called Bear With Me. It's dark and fun