Shooting Wide Open

“34 x 25 x 36,” short by Jesse Epstein.

Someone’s edited Pulp Fiction so that the events are in chronological order. Hmmmm.

A new video interview series from Pier 24.

I combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale, using macro lenses and time lapse techniques. Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism.

The structure of the second video reminds me of the massive concrete structure researchers created by excavating an anthill into which they’d poured cement.

(via Petapixel)

She’s a powerful woman. She’s amazing. Her Powerpoint has 20 slides. I love her. Her value proposition was really good.
- Ryan Trecartin

Does it take more or less imagination to make art out of the mundane action of a man in a suit running around with a magazine or, say, to make video collage-narrative out of bizarre costumes and settings? (Looks like blondes really do have more fun?) One thing’s for sure: they both sure know how to turn an ominous culturally-resonant phrase.

K-CoreaINC.K (section a) from Ryan Trecartin.

Am I the only one who thinks Ryan Trecartin is really an audio artist masquerading as a video artist? For me, the unhealthily addictive onslaught of the audio track is only matched by the gaggle of bleached blondes having a “meeting,” but not much else. I’m tempted to play his entire Vimeo catalogue on late-night radio. Thank you Creative Commons.

David Byrne in early days at The Kitchen, in an ensemble piece called Two Moon July. This was still in the lead-up to the golden big suit era.

Don’t you wish you had his natural tart, flat yet bouncy inflection and his way of making simple phrases ring out like paintballs exploding in your ear canal? (“Insignificance – there’s a reason for it.”)

Remember Thomas Wildred? Apparently, Lumia footage ends the film Tree of Life. Good to see that Wilfred’s getting some love.

On a whim I watched Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moments, a foreign period film about the well-worn, if also well-acted, story of a woman who finds an artistic outlet (as it happens, photography) to ease the brow-furrowing aspects of her marriage.

It was a quiet movie and there were two endearing moments. One where the man at the photo lab projects the flight of a moth onto Maria’s hand with a small lens (not very doable in real life), and another in which we see a glimpse of one of Maria’s fledgling photos. I wish we got an unobstructed look at the whole thing. It’s a tantalizing photo of a girl laid out in wake fashion as kids look at her through frosted panes of glass.

Even if photography wasn’t the central subject of the movie, it’s nice to see films portraying photography as something that adds that bit of something to a person’s life without the usual flim flam of high speed flashes, Blow-Up style acrobatics and gooey profundity.

Empire City, Wonder City from Jin Zhu on Vimeo.

Another video I’ve stitched together. This one is pretty self explanatory. Too bad I couldn’t get more of a businessman as civic leader angle into it, but I may tweak it soon, if only to add a line about America being the envy of the world. I’m not sure I like this one as much as I liked the last one. This seems a bit done before, but I’m intent on continuing with it if only for the unevolved logos because I love how Nyman’s music interacts with the ‘vintage’ footage. I can’t believe some of the educational films that were made in the ’50s. My new obsession is watching declamatory government sponsored educational footage on Archive.org.

I’m just starting to discover the video world and I’ve got that inertial early feeling of not knowing where to look. I’m just starting to check out the Vimeo community (reminds me of when I joined Flickr!), videoart.net and Aspect, but I have no idea what the landscape is like. Kinda exciting. First sightings, “land ho!” and all that. It’s a good medium for working with sound too. I was doing a bit of college radio last year and it occurred to me that the best films and movies are always the ones that you can also just simply listen to.

On a more personal note, I am officially done with all the coursework for my degree, and am just waiting on conferral, which will happen in spring due to some technical paperwork issues. So now I suppose I pass into the odd jobs and applying to everything phase of life. A little daunting, but also exciting since I can actually plan a spring trip to the SW without much constraint. I’m free!

For my last video assignment I looked at a lot of footage of educational and semi-propagandistic films from the ’50s and while I didn’t get to include very much from this one, I am fascinated by the framework – three hypothetical boys in upper, middle and lower classes grow up to lead different lives, but gee whiz, there’s upward mobility in the middle class!

I’m becoming increasingly wary of the supposed social mobility in this country (after all, there’s downward mobility too – “trickle up” economics, anyone?), especially since I’m eyeing Winner Take-all Politics, but some of the videos are great just for the visuals. Maybe not this one. Are we still making these sort of videos today? Not collected in one place, though, I assume.