Impakt presented the program Impakt Highlights: Dimension play at the LOOP festival 2010 in Barcelona.

Impakt Highlights: Dimension Play

This program focuses on artists and filmmakers that play with perspective scale and dimension in their work. Not only visual artists but also animation filmmakers and performance artists use these techniques to create imaginary worlds, alienating visions or surreal sceneries.

The program includes:

Black Hole – Johanna Reich (GERMANY 2009, video, 06:00 min)

A person dressed in black clothing digs a hole into snow until the black of the clothes and the black of the ground fuse. The person disappears in front of the camera. The video ‘Black hole’ shows a strategy to escape in front of a camera, to escape from the cinema’s audience into another space.

Beautiful – Camille Verbunt (The Netherlands 2008, 5:00 min)

People singing Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful. Camille Verbunt’s mosaic-films unite many individual and private internet-experiences into a single frame, a collective experience. The films reveal a synchronisity in seemingly unique webcam-video’s posted on the internet. These so called ‘memes’ (units of cultural transmission or imitation) make up the evolutionary DNA of the internet. The films come forth from Verbunt’s other visual art (paintings, photography and embroideries) in which he explores the digital self-presentation on the web. These webcam-self-portraits are explored on a micro and a macro-level. How many (or little) pixels does it take to convey an visual emotion? How many individuals does it take to make up a collective experience or meme?

Sand Saga – Shana Moulton (USA 2008, video, 10:32 min)

In Sand Saga, Moulton’s alter ego Cynthia again gains access to a parallel universe via the transformative powers of New Age body treatments and domestic objects. After applying a facial beauty mask, she moves through an environment energized with South-western motifs and rituals, from sculpted heads and Georgia O’Keefe-like forms to sand painting and hot stone massage. Ultimately Cynthia is transported to a fantastical world and emerges transformed.

Civilization (Megaplex) – Marco Brambilla (USA 2008,video , 02:40 min)

Civilization depicts a journey from hell to heaven interpreted through the modern language of film using computer-enhanced found footage. This epic video mural contains over 300 individual channels of looped video blended into a multi-layered seamless tableau of interconnecting images that illustrates a contemporary, satirical take on the concepts of Heaven and Hell.

Scary Maze – Camille Verbunt (The Netherlands 2008, 3:00 min)

Parents make their children play a game with a very scary surprise.

Naufrage – Clorinde Durand (FRANCE 2008, video, 07:00 min)

Naufrage lists fears: the narration stops at the frozen instant. But Naufrage relates something. What is it talking about ? We don’t know… perhaps an accident, a depression, an explosion? This scene might be the summit of a catastrophic scenario: the moment of physical emotion. However, nothing in the sequence of events tries to explain this state of things.

Mount Shasta – Oliver Husain (CANADA 2008, 16mm, 08:05 min)

“It’s always a pleasure to get blindsided by a great new film. I’ve been vaguely aware of Oliver Husain, mostly as a video artist, over the past few years, but this 16mm production represents my first encounter with his work, and I must say I am duly impressed. Judging from his website, Husain frequently employs puppetry, props, and other sculptural and musical elements in his work, but the bizarre confluence of text, performance, gesture and ambiance that goes to concoct Mount Shasta is really rather thrilling. This is a film that doesn’t look like anything else out there, but points of comparison can be drawn if you stretch the pencil far enough. My initial thought was “Spike Jonze doing Owen Land, sort of,” and there is a hint of truth to this. Like Land’s films, Mount Shasta plays with conventions of text / image relations, the fallibility of narrative drive, the mismatch between the written word and its performative visualization. And, like Land’s best work, Mount Shasta evokes a time and place — an earnest 1970s, before the social and educational theories of the 60s had been rejected as failures. Pastel-coloured institutional walls contain fabric-and-pipe-cleaner inventions of a whimsy that almost seems forced, were it not for the total belief evinced by those participating in it. In the background, a bearded man at a cheap keyboard (again, of the sort familiar from middle-school music rooms of a certain era) warbles a story-song as half-formed handkerchief puppets fly around each other on visible wires, the puppeteers made “invisible” by their white canvas beekeeper suits. Husain’s story is about a mountain trip waylaid by a fog which turns out to be the smoke from a destructive fire. In a sense, this could be a way of understanding Mount Shasta as a film. The elements that envelop this gorgeous film in mystery (is this avant-garde? a narrative short? a children’s film?) are also the ones that threaten to unmake it at every turn, since “the spell” is always already about our ability to turn away from its blatant disenchantment.” (Michael Sicinsk)

LOOP

The LOOP Fair is the 1st Fair exclusively dedicated to videoart, and an unmissable meeting point for professionals and videoart lovers.

LOOP is the annual meeting point for video art professionals based on the triple format of Festival, Fair and discussion Panels. The LOOP project is directed by Emilio Álvarez, Carlos Durán and Llucià Homs.

LOOP Festival presents the work of over 800 artists at many different venues in Barcelona’s city centre. LOOP Fair is the first fair specialising in video art, and features more than 40 participating galleries and distributors showing the latest works by international artists.
LOOP Panels brings together distinguished artists, collectors, curators and museum and festival directors to discuss different aspects of conservation, collecting, distribution and new trends in video art.

LOOP was first held in 2003 in response to the need to defne the current status of videoart, but also in order to explore possible future steps that would help establish this new discipline.
LOOP aims to brings together all kinds of agents involved in the sector, in a space with international repercussion. A reference point that favours debate among videoart lovers and allows visitors to experience new works and to devise future strategies for all aspects affecting the field.
LOOP intends to become an international benchmark event, an active platform for the diffusion, creation and management of video art for fans and professionals.
LOOP takes place in Barcelona in the Spring.

For more information please visit: www.loop-barcelona.com