Art Jones' provocative music videos, documentaries on hip hop history, and vj collaborations with Soundlab, DJ Spooky, Alec Empire, Phillip Virus and Anti-Pop Consortium, all question the powers and politics invested in pop culture. From his work as a member of Not Channel Zero in the early 90's to digital cross-pollinations with the new media collective ITEL, Art Jones challenges stale academic critiques of American commodity culture. Screening tonight are his digital music video trilogy Love Song #1 and Making the Video/Mama Said Knock You Out One More Time, an exploration of the making of media-ted race and gender identities featuring LL Cool J; and the World Premiere of 711, an experimental documentary made during a residency in Hong Kong. Culminated by a live VJ performance by Art Jones.
From bursts of perspective trickery to homoerotic celebrations of the male body and philosophical musings on public versus private, the award-winning videos of Pierre Yves Clouin never cease to delight. His witty examinations of the quotidian elements of life bring transcendental revelations combined with laughter. He shows us that as viewers we have become lazy with the way we understand perspective in our spectatorship. Whether he is playing with the framing and eroticisation of the male body or showing us a succession of seemingly random images of the public with intimate voiceovers, Pierre Yves manipulates our viewing expectations so that we look askew. "Alone in front of the camera, and without a word, I spy on myself in the monitor during the action. I am double: seer and seen. As if freedom from surveillance meant inventing, within surveillance itself, an illusion that subverts the watching eye." - P.Y.C.
Belgium qué? The heart of Europe, its capital Brussels is the capital of the European Community. NATO has a 'thing' going on here: never-mind the nukes tucked away in secret basements...From a country known for it's chocolates and beer, the Flemish versus the French (opposites attract), we find work that incorporates elements of experimental electronic music, fashion and stylized performances. As an ode to the sound collaborations in many of these works, this selection is structured as a DJ-set, with dance parts, more melancholic moments, pure noise eruptions and silent resting points to mark the measures. Featured artists: Anouk De Clercq, Kiila, Ryoji Ikeda, Thomas Köner, Antonin de Bemels, Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Patar, Daniel Daniel, Lucy Grauman, Manon De Boer, Julie Morel, Nicolas Dufranne, Karen Vanderborght, Alexandra Dementieve & Mark Mancha, Yves Bernard, Claude Cattelain, Frank Theys, Pascal Baes and Dora Garcia.
Phillip Hoffman Program #1: What these ashes wanted
Opening Series: Before the screening begins, 12 boxes of film, each pasted with an image (not representational of the contents), are placed in order by the audience. Hoffman will then splice them together in the 'decided on' order to form a unique film. With this communal and interactive ordering, that places the "starting experiences of the present - light, rhythm, and color", the audience and film come together in the moment. "What these ashes wanted (2001) places flesh on the poet Ann Carson's words, '...death lines every moment of ordinary time.' With this work Hoffman resides in an acutely intimate time, a daily practice of loss lived precariously between the terror of psychic disintegration and the provisional solace taken through public rituals of mourning. The film is not a story of surviving death, but rather of living death through a heightening of the quotidian moments of every day experience." - Karyn Sandlos, Catalogue for Images Festival, Toronto, 2001.
Phillip Hoffman Program #2: Somewhere Between
Through the years, Hoffman's films have built upon a dialogue of personal history and memory. His films bring together formal strategies that encompass both the conceptual and the accidental. Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion (1984), passing through/torn formations (1988), ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (1986), and river (1979-89) negotiate this developing sense of the daily process of living loss and integrating a multiplicity of meanings of death into everyday life.