I Thought I Was Hallucinating
Panorama 1
Sometimes the living room gradually fills up with snow, people walk the water and a little girl lisps the words “your mother sucks cocks in hell.” These are moments somewhere between sleeping and waking with the devil seemingly lurking in the background. This programme records supernatural phenomena in all their insanity and serenity.
On the Lake – Jeroen Kooijmans
The Netherlands, 2008, video, 01:35 min
Opinions on other people’s religions and superstitions and rumours of threats, fed by the mass media, co-determine our perception of the world. With a number of works that are part of a larger project, entitled The Fish Pond Song, Kooijmans tries to provide contrast to this perception by different images. On the Lake is part of this. His strategy of choice is totally different from those of trivial politics or the media. These are images that are not bent on convincing you of one thing or another, but rather, force you into a meditative state. Beyond conflict and dualism, Kooijmans creates an image that does not take a stand, but rather, stimulates reflection that helps you to think yes and no, this and that, and to say nothing at all for a while.
Metamorphosis – Clare Langan
Ireland, 2007, video, 12:00 min
Clare Langan powerfully cultivates introspection, where poetic atmospheres and elegiac landscapes, capture the very nature of our fragile existence against the perpetual forces of nature. Langan uses the camera as an instrument to capture the reverberation of something that has disappeared. It depicts a world in an unrelenting state of transformation and motion, as it shifts between scenes of stormy landscapes to snow filled interiors, from frozen glacial surroundings to violent seas, and ultimately chaos. Metamorphosis deals with issues of cinematic off time, but here time becomes specific, as we see a suspended time of social history. Langan’s work investigates an empty cityscape whose streets are eerily absent of its inhabitations. The storm leads us into snow filled interiors, with only flashes of it’s former inhabitants to suggest a human presence, but not leading to any definitive conclusions as to their fate. Metamorphosis is shot in a mixture of created environments, architectural models (built by the artist), along with actual landscape. There is no clear line between reality and created environments. This, along with Langan’s familiar use of exquisite hand –painted filters, creates a physically powerful visual dynamic in the film, a world that is both familiar yet beautifully unreal.
The Shape of Things – Oliver Pietsch
Germany, 2008, video, 17:30 min
Found Footage-Film about the representation of sleep, fear and human desires in movies. The thematic sequences of The Shape of Things project a variety of motifs, interspersing humorous and erotic fantasies, as well as peaceful slumber with multiple phobias, private anxieties and psychological torments. This accumulation of images is open to interpretation as the viewers take their own journey, making their own connections between scenes to form an individual narrative.
Scary Maze – Camille Verbunt
The Netherlands, 2008, video, 02:30 min
This film is part of a series of mosaic-films that unite many individual and private, yet published experiences into a single frame, a collective experience. It reveals a synchronicity in seemingly unique webcam- and home videos posted on the Internet. The mimicking of other Internet videos is more than the desire to share a personal thrill. Through publishing one becomes part of a larger movement. The mechanical repetition of action and design within this group in turn propels new contributions with small alterations. These so called ‘memes’ (units of cultural transmission or imitation) make up the evolutionary DNA of the Internet. Slow memetic changes in degrees of openness and social behaviour are already detectable. Collective anxiety has never looked this funny.
Murphy – Bjørn Melhus
Germany, 2008, video, 03:01 min
Murphy is a pure synchronized sound and light projection from which the artist consciously redraws his own figure. Unlike more traditional Melhus’ pieces, in which the artist embodies different roles – including that of a woman sometimes -, Murphy envelops a dramatic reduction to abstract fields of colour and concentrates exclusively on its sound footage, which results in a collage of some of the most significant moments from mainstream war movies. The video light sequence is based on sound snippets from the movie Blue Thunder (USA, 1982), which was one of the early 80s media rehabilitations of Vietnam war veterans in civilian society. In Murphy, the visible stream of colour light and the absence of the image itself creates an imaginary movie that possibly connects to the first draft of the screenplay for Blue Thunder which featured Captain Frank Murphy as more of a crazy main character with deeper psychological issues, who went on a rampage and destroyed a lot more of the city. Murphy is a true abstract Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
A lecture on Schizophonia – Erik Bünger
Germany, 2009, video, 37:19 min
A video essay on the phenomenon of ‘schizophonia’. Erik Bünger defines this as “that which makes dogs bark at speakers, that which makes children look for the man behind the box (the television) and the entity that makes savages demand their captured souls returned.” Bünger employs a diversity of film historical footage to grasp this fascinating phenomenon.