Urbanautica is pleased to announce the collaboration with the platform of video art Filmessay to strengthen the debate on representation of the image in a ‘cinematic’ perspective, when picture becomes motion. Filmessay is glad to present the New Zealand online Festival ‘Goodnight Kiwi or: Tonights broadcast has now ended, regular transmission will resumer at 6:00am’. A project curated by Mark Williams and CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand
WHEN AND WHERE
From 20.12.2014 to 04.01.2015
Free streaming, sign up from HERE
Page of the festival HERE
© Festival manifesto featuring New Zealand photographer Harvey Benge from the series ‘Against Forgetting’. («For the first thirteen years of my life I lived with my parents in the Auckland suburb of Mt Roskill. Our family home was a modest, two bedroom, flat roofed, weather-board house, which my father had built around 1940».)
THE PROGRAMME
Before the advent of 24 hour broadcasting in 1994 the evening closedown of New Zealand state television was signaled first by a two-minute animation called the Goodnight Kiwi, then followed by several hours of either static or a television test pattern.
These 12 videos are offered as a collection of alternative sign-offs, transitions into the post-broadcast hour and/or potential place holders to fill the twilight hours between regular broadcasts.
Alternately humorous, abstract and challenging, Goodnight Kiwi presents a series of direct addresses to the viewer. Recognising the ubiquity of the internet across the globe, this programme is designed to be broadcast somewhere between the hours of 2-4am.
Reflecting the often solitary and ritual nature of technological occupation, Goodnight Kiwi variously offers aesthetic transformation, mass media critique or moments of personal reflection arising from the effects of exhausted wakefulness.
The selection proposed by the curator Mark Williams starts with ‘Coloured Bars’ a production by Daniel von Sturmer (time: 7’ 09”, 2008). Coloured Bars of dripping paint ooze silently down the screen, slowly forming the image of a SMPTE-like television text pattern.
© Daniel von Sturmer, ‘Colour Bars’
With 'Untitled (Hair Transposal Video)' Bryce Galloway undertakes an obscure grooming exercise for dealing with male pattern baldness using the camera as a mirror. Galloway exploits his own baldness to poke fun at social vanities and the cult of appearances/cult of youth.
Bryce Galloway is a transdisciplinary artist who works across fanzines, drawing, writing, music, performance, installation and video. Galloway’s work is always comedic and usually autobiographical and self-effacing.
© Bryce Galloway, ’Untitled (Hair Transposal Video)’, time: 11’ 12”, 2011
POD by Bronwyn Holloway-Smith (time: 3’ 55”, 2008) is filmed in a single take, and depicts a mysterious circular shape tracing the images of occult symbols across a white surface plane. The “occult symbols” in question have been sourced from, and defined by, a conservative Christian New Zealand publication. Originally created for the ADA symposium event “Séance for Nam June Paik” (Christchurch, Feb 2008), the work not only responds to Paik’s contribution to the development of Video Art and the locale of Christchurch, but also touches on ideas of religious and social tensions, invisibility and the intangible, spirituality, and memory.
Working in the expanded field of contemporary painting, Miranda Parkes explores the languages of abstraction while making dynamic work that is not bound to its conventions. Parkes makes objects that walk a line between painting and sculpture, are contingent on their environment, inclusive and engaged with the real world. The video works are “like photographs thick with time”; one-take meditations on found incidents in the everyday environment that play on formal elements. In contrast to her unruly paintings, Parkes videos are light, yet compelling and lend a poetic element to her practice as a whole. ‘Boob Reflection’ by Miranda Parkes (time: 2’ 05’, 2011) moves in this direction.
'Fleeced' by Brit Bunkley (time: 4’ 22”, 2005) is a video composite of short video vignettes that obliquely refer to psychological, environmental, and social-political dislocations set within rural settings of the Southern North Island of New Zealand. «I grew up on an Island in New England in the USA near a military air base during the cold war. I moved to a house in the middle of a sheep paddock in New Zealand in 1995. In the valley, dead animals regularly float down the Whanganui River. A famous postcard of a “Maori maiden” was photographed on this river at the beginning of the last century. A sacred volcano, Mt. Taranaki looms on the horizon».
'Ghost Town' by Mike Heynes (time: 7' 33”, 2011) is a dystopian travel diary. A point of view tour through a recently deserted city.The ghost town is an artificial ruin, an anti place constructed using other modeler’s rejects. Titled in lower case, it is not a specific town. This work represents a new direction, a move away from the grotesque, towards the uncanny, a conscious shift from an interest in character, to an exploration of place. These mass produced model buildings are empty, suggesting that this is a post consumer world and that capitalism has failed.In 1906 German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch first described the uncanny “as something one does not know one’s way about in”. Installed as a single channel video projection, the intended effect is disorienting, an endless looping journey where all the streets start to look the same.
© Mike Heynesm, ’Ghost Town’
'TV Hooks' by Ben Holmes (time: 5' 44”, 2005) is part of a series of instructional videos made between 2005-2010 that were sent out with different accessories as part of a mail-based participation game. Their premise was to show participants how to perform different tasks and how to take part in a covert communication system through the use of various collusive actions, markings and signals. Initially they also incorporated a points and prizes system.
Goodnight Kiwi presents the work ‘This is Driving me Quackers’ by Gemma Syme. «Gemma Syme holds a cheeky attitude towards ideas of gender and sexuality. She addresses issues of gender without holding onto lingering binarisms, and begins to blur lines of conventional sex differences. Her works plays along the fine line between objectification and empowerment, but doesn’t present any sort of closure on these issues». [Abby Cunnane]. Gemma Syme works in video, performance and music. She has been involved in a number of performance works and exhibitions at venues including Enjoy Gallery (Wellington) and The New Zealand Film Archive.
'Light' by Clinton Watkins (time: 6' 01”, 2009) perpetuates fragments of time by stretching, repeating and therefore suspending a minute moment. High-speed video technology encapsulates in slow motion and detail unknown to the human eye. Visual subtleties, nuances and movement are amplified at 300 frames per second.
© Clinton Watkins, ’Light’
Lydia Chai’s ‘Moon Rising’ (time: 4’ 36”, 2008), so conceptually similar to Clinton Watkins, films the progression of the moon across the sky in real time.
'Binary State' (time: 12' 51”, 2010) as the overall practicve by NA Royal focuses on the difficulty of communication. «Presently I am investigating how the body operates as a gestural system and I am asking what happens to communication when this system is deconstructed and its elements are re-configured and subverted by time-based media. Within this I am interested in the psychological effects of fear, tension and anxiety that we experience when confronted by an increasingly sophisticated system of manufactured ritualised beliefs. The aim is to draw attention to the ways in which our conscious realities are constructed and manipulated by Mass Media.»
'The Twilight Drone' (time: 48', 2010) is an experimental video that aims to resurrect the concept of the “ambient film” stipulated by Brian Eno. Set to a minimalist soundtrack of steady, undulating organ drones and rhythms, this static-POV video tracks a group of three silhouetted figures moving in a loosely triangular pattern in the snow. One of the figures is an unwitting participant in the others’ choreography, which means the cyclical flow of movement is constantly being renegotiated. The editing of the video, which includes stark contrasts, ghosting, inversions, speed changes, overlays and colour blocks, evokes the bluntly unnaturalistic techniques of 1970s/80s video art.The Twilight Drone is the conclusion of Johannes Contag’s Sleepy time trilogy, the first two being instrumental music albums (‘You Are Feeling Sleepy’, ‘Schlafwandler’). As the name infers, the Sleepytime cycle aims to shift the audience’s perceptive faculties into a somnolent state somewhere between meditation and daydream, free from the trappings of the causal intellect.
THE CURATOR
Mark Williams is the founding director/curator of CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand. Established in 2012 CIRCUIT supports New Zealand artists working inthe moving image through distribution of works, professional practice initiatives, commissioning of works and critical review. CIRCUIT issupported by Creative New Zealand, the arts council of New Zealand. In 2012 Mark Williams took part in the Asia New Zealand curators tourof Japan, China and Korea. Subsequently he co-curated (with CityGallery curator Aaron Lister ) Moving On Asia: Towards a New ArtNetwork 2004-13 (CityGallery Wellington 2013). As an independent Williams has curated and presented a number ofinternational touring programmes including The Artists Cinema (BangkokExperimental Film Festival 2012); Peoples Television (co-curated withLaura Preston, Paris Les Rencontres, Pompidou Centre 2011); ObjectLessons – A Musical Fiction (co-curated with Laura Preston, Adam ArtGallery, Wellington 2010; Malcolm Le Grice – The Image of Time(various venues NZ/Aust 2010). From 1999-2010, Williams worked at the New Zealand Film Archive in theposition of Exhibitions Manager/Project Developer. During this periodhe presented a number of international screenings at institutionsincluding LUX (London), Pacific Film Archive (San Francisco),Anthology Film Archives (New York), Other Film (Brisbane), WORM(Rotterdam), Kunstmuseum (Liechtenstein), Hamburg Film Festival(Hamburg), Arsenal (Berlin).
© Circuit | Filmessay | Urbanautica