The catchily-titled 2004 Cimatics International Festival for live audiovisual arts and vj'ing is underway, in Brussels. It features a host of VJ and live cinema performances, between 25-31 October.
Highlights include Austrians Crossing, on the Vidok collective's travelling movies; a live cinema performance using VJ tools to create a narrative work by Exparts; international artist performances from Jeffers Egan, Milycon/EN, and Skoltz_Kolgen; and demos including Resolume video performance software, and the Pioneer DJV-X1 VJ deck.
Archive for October, 2004
Cimatics 04 AV festival
Video virtually overwhelms Turner prize
The Tate's annual Turner Prize for contemporary art is both firmly screen-based, and politically charged this year. Tagged as a shortlist of buildings and battles by The Guardian, they seem to miss the point that it marks the clear renaissance and reinvigoration of video art, while also in the case of Langlands & Bell–whose work includes a virtually crafted interactive tour of The House of Osama bin Laden (2003)–finally incorporating computer game design.
While Langlands & Bell are already Bafta Interactive Awards Winner 2004 for their recreation of Osama bin Laden's dwelling, how long before machinima and digital imagery take over from the current, and predominantly linear, screen-based trend at Britain's most prestigious arts prize?
The Turner Prize exhibition 2004 can be seen between 20 October 2004 – 23 December 2004 at Tate Britain.
Joy Division reanimation
C505 | "Shadowplay" by Joy Division, ReanimatedInspired by Peter Saville's iconic design of the Unknown Pleasures album by Joy Division, C505 have recreated a music video taking this signature style and applying it to vintage footage of the band playing on Granada Reports (which was a local Manchester TV programme). It takes a certain amount of design machismo to mess with seminal works such as this but the piece represents a bravura performance by the digital art/design group. Yoshi Sodeoka has been making varying types of sound toys for a while now, with previous incarnation C404, but currently motion is being foregrounded.
Jaguar X-ing over
Peter Cheung, famed for the slick and hip MTV animated series Aeon Flux (which is itself soon to be released as a live action feature), involved in Jaguar's new webisode project developed by Global Beach.
x-ingover.com (Tedious Flash interface warning!)
Although the first webisode attempts to set up the suspense, it's too slow moving and undramatic a start.
Killing digital viewing
Just as we are on the verge of space-shifting viewing (to go with the 'time-shifting' all but necessary now in a post-VCR era where we have multi-channel time-starved modern worklives), the Hollywood studios want to stop it. The flurry of proposals in the U.S.
U.S. Election video mashups
"Ever year, by law and by custom we meet here to threaten the world...
Kaze: Ghost Warrior
Albee quit as an animator at Walt Disney Feature Animation to go live in a cabin in the wilderness of Alaska. Here he created the animation he'd been wanting to make for years, and he did it alone, on two PC workstations.
He wanted to prove he could make an animated feature for $10 million in 18 months (apparently turning down offers from studios to make it at triple this figure out of prinicipal).
Cutting Nokia Shorts 2004 down to size
Why is Nokia Shorts 2004 actually a 'short film competition' rather than one dealing with mobile film or chaku motion? Even more confounding, these shorts, apparently made specifically to be played via mobile phone, aren't even going to be available for download onto them (according to The Guardian). Instead they are to be screened at October's Raindance film festival, and via the official Nokia Shorts site. Whatever the ins and outs of another short film competition – one in which the sponsoring product, the Nokia 7610, is arguably more interesting than this 'me-too' marketing exercise (thankfully Nokia have some more interesting marketing on the horizon) – at least a couple of the 2004 finalists for the latest Nokia Shorts go beyond traditional film festival fodder.
Make Warp visuals
The audiovisual projects are coming thick and fast from Warp. News emerges on the follow-up to Warp Vs Creative Review, the successful music video 'competition' run by the label and magazine: Warp/CR Animate was so successful in turbocharging their promo video output they are doing it again.
Ten young filmmakers are wanted for a motion graphics piece to accompany an unreleased Warp track from Plaid, Gravenhurst, Mira Calix, Jimmy Edgar and Home Video.
Strangerhood: the Sims simulated
EA have teamed with ace machinima team Rooster Teeth Productions to showcase the virtual filmmaking capabilities of its newSims 2 release. Machinima takes another step to mainstreaming..
