Latest video reviews
Thesaurus of Reconstructive Microscopy by Ian Gibbins
Ian Gibbins‘ work has been featured here so often I’m apt to say he needs no introduction, but this video in fact serves as an introduction to an earlier chapter of his life, when he was better known as a scientist than a video artist, poet and electronic composer. I grew up in a natural history-obsessed family, so scientific instruments were major objects of lust in my prepubescent years, just as my poetic muscles were beginning to develop, and this takes me back to that fertile imaginary landscape. It’s super high-concept, though, so I’m gonna do the lazy thing and drop in the whole description from Vimeo:
“The Microscope Project” was a major installation / exhibition at the Flinders University Art Museum & City Gallery, 26th July – 21st September, 2014, in Adelaide, South Australia, featuring work by Ian Gibbins, Catherine Truman, Deb Jones, Angela Valamanesh and Nicholas Folland, curated by Fiona Salmon and Madeline Reece.
For much of his time at Flinders University, Ian managed the main microscopy research facility, contained divers kinds of sophisticated microscopes. In 2012, several old scanning electron microscopes, some fluorescence microscopes, and other ancillary equipment were decommissioned. Once state-of-the-art, they were now largely dysfunctional and no longer practically operational. However, they had long histories of contributing to internationally-recognised research into the nervous and cardiovascular systems, the gut, and much more.
… and then there was all their supporting documentation: schematic diagrams and plans, manuals, advertising brochures, catalogues, certifications of performance, packing lists.
Although much of the equipment had been disassembled down to their component parts, it was all to valuable to be dumped for scrap. There were many more stories to be told about these instruments. Perhaps we could re-imagine their pasts, their futures, the people who had made them, maintained them, used them…
So, over more than 12 months, the artists collaborated with these elements in the unique shared environment of The Distillery to create “The Microscope Project”. As part of the project, Ian wrote a series of texts that became the basis of the book, “How Things Work”, a unique collaboration between him, Catherine and Deb. Accompanying the book is a CD of “Microscope Music” composed using samples from the microscopes themselves and the various documents accompanying them.
In celebration of 10 years since The Microscope Project, this video is built around a set of images from the “How Things Work” book, their accompanied text, and a remix of some Microscope Music that did not make it onto the CD.
Listen to the full “Microscope Music” album at iangibbins.bandcamp.com/album/microscope-music
For more see: iangibbins.com.au/projects/the-microscope-project/
Unto Ourselves by Forrest Gander
“To see what’s there and not / already patterned by familiarity” begins this videopoem by Forrest Gander, using a text from his latest collection, Twice Alive: an Ecology of Intimacies. (The full title of the poem in the book is “Unto Ourselves III: To See What’s There”—p. 52.) The imagery of South Asian temple sculpture is used to great effect in this interrogation of familiarity/unfamiliarity, until “unconditional foreignness grows conditional, stops being foreign at all.”
Any non-titillating examination of the erotic is necessarily foreign to our sex-obsessed culture. And Gander goes further than that, choosing language from science rather than religion without disrespecting, much less heedlessly appropriating, a culture other than his own. Consider, for example, how a man with a wheelbarrow emerging from a dark passageway prepares us to see a giant boulder, a stone pestle grinding in a mortar, and the closing encounter with a lingam: the connections feel visceral rather than spiritual, to the point where stone and bodies become nearly interchangeable. This may be my favorite Forrest Gander videopoem to date.
We’d Love to be Masters of Our Time by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
Dedicated to Wim Wenders, this square-format videopoem by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas with music and mixing by Ben Turner is an electronic ode to transience and mutability. As Vitkausas notes on her Vimeo page,
Words on paper or screen are arranged and captured for a moment. Poems exist, but the unique act of word arrangement for that moment in time is fleeting.
My poems are like photographs, capturing a string of images or moments so that they may exist in newly created forms for one moment.
Do visit her website as well. She’s launched a fascinating new generative poetry project called Hallucinations, and is looking for collaborators.
The Weekender by Joanna Fuhrman
A whimsical re-imagining of the New York City subway system by videopoet Joanna Fuhrman.
泡 Soaked In by 唐诗雨 Shiyu Tang
This animated poem by CalArts student filmmaker Shiyu Tang has done very well on the festival circuit for good reason: it doesn’t give away all its secrets on a first watch or even a third. Dedicated “To the sisters we never had a chance to meet,” it takes a deeply personal look at female infanticide and abortions in China, with a kind of Notes section at the end to help orient an international audience. My only criticism is that some of the subtitles didn’t linger on-screen long enough for me to read them all on the first viewing, but aside from that, it was a pitch-perfect film, I thought.
Shiyu Tang is clearly a poetry filmmaker to watch. In addition to her Vimeo page, she’s got a channel on YouTube, an active Instagram account, and a website where she describes herself as an “Independent animator, whose works are mostly based on social phenomena and female perspectives.”
