DAY ONE (TWENTY DAYS OF VIDEOS)
By now you probably all know about the Cauldron International Film and Video Festival.
Over a month ago, I stated that I was going to start using footage from my old film and video projects to promote the festival. I'm going to do this every day until the 24th of this month. This is a way of (getting started at) making this Substack a sort of archive of my work while also plugging the fest on a daily basis.
If you, or anyone you know makes films/videos/animations/motion-picture based art, etc, then PLEASE consider submitting to Cauldron. This is the first year of the festival, And we need submissions from all over!
Today's selection is an easy start for me since this series of videos is already online, but I've pulled out the old hard drives, and I'll be uploading a lot of “new” old videos too starting (maybe) tomorrow.
First off, here is the (very simple) festival blurb I made using footage from the series of videos I'm sharing today.
This clip was from a prototype installation I set up in the Diego Rivera Gallery in the now closed San Francisco Art Institute (don't get me started on why SFAI closed, but if you wish, you can read about it here. I received my MFA at the school and the closing was like having a family member die)
Anyway…
Below are three versions of a concept I was working through from 2009 to 2011. Each one is accompanied by a brief artist statement.
I'll start with the one I like most.
CATHODE COMANCHES
A looping system in which one new LCD flat-screen television shoots out the screens of several CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) monitors. The piece explores varied elements of consumer culture, entertainment, waste and obsolescence. The footage on the LCD monitor is from battle scenes between John Wayne and Comanche natives featured in THE SEARCHERS. The spectacle is brought into the third dimension by replacing scenes of the Comanches with CRT monitors. This work is evolved from an earlier installation called CRYSTAL BULLET AND CATHODE RAY
CRYSTAL BULLET AND CATHODE RAY
A looping system in which one new flat-screen (Liquid Crystal Display) television shoots out the screens of several CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) monitors. The piece explores varied elements of consumer culture, entertainment, waste and obsolescence.
…lastly, this third one was included in an earlier post on this Substack. If you happen to have read about it there, you'll know that I think it has some problems and deserves re-working. Despite my misgivings, here it is …
TETRAD
A video sculpture based on Marshall Mcluhan's "Tetrad of Media Effects" (see diagram in video), this work pits re-edited
sequences from the Michael Crichton film WESTWORLD against each other in a shoot-out sequence that serves as a
dramatization of Marshall Mcluhan's pedagogical tool. Like this video work, Mcluhan's Tetrad seeks to chart
simultaneous give-and-take relationships between a media artifact and cultural assumptions about that artifact.
The tetrad asks:
1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?
In this sculpture, each video clip has oblique signifiers (film melt, analog video interference, digital compression or
pixelization, etc) edited into it to infer a battle between mediums or formats (film vs. video, analog vs. digital, etc). As
living and mechanized cowboys shoot each other, one media format continually emerges to obsolesce, or assassinate
the previous format.
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Okay, that's all I've got for today! Join me again tomorrow for another weird video!