For the 10th International Istanbul Biennial, five curators from Turkey have been invited to select over 150 short video works from an open-call to the public. During the nights, the program, under the title of “Nightcomers,” will be projected in public spaces in different parts of the city, from the centre to the periphery. The Dutch artists couple Bik Van der Pol have researched and selected about 25 spots and have designed the mobile projection device.
For the first time in the history of İstanbul Biennial, a real open participation of the public has been made possible so that thousands of people living in areas without access to “high culture” can have direct contact with contemporary art. Or, contemporary art is brought to the frontier of a true public gaze.
Remaining Screening Dates and Locations:
Oct 18: Tugay Yolu Caddesi, Maltepe
Oct 21: Mecidiyeköy, Şişli (Otobüs duraklarının arkası)
Oct 23: E5 Tem Okmeydanı Bağlantı Yolu ile Kağıthane Caddesi’nin Kesişimi, Köprü Ayağı, Kağıthane
Oct 25: İtfaiye Caddesi, Zeyrek, Fatih
Oct 27: Kısıklı Caddesi, Altunizade, Üsküdar
Oct 30: Kanlıca Hisarı Caddesi, Kanlıca, Beykoz
Nov 02: Karamük Çayevi, Asmalımescit, İstiklal Caddesi, Beyoğlu
Here is the schedule for tomorrow, which includes our film at 8:45pm. Incidentally, tonight they’re showing The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, an excellent film that a couple of our new Greek friends introduced us to last weekend. Brilliant, funny and philosophical, the PGTC will make you think of Hitchcock in a whole new light. One snippet: the most frightening thing in cinema is not death, but the inanimate undead object, or that which cannot die, yet does not live.
You can buy tickets to the festival here, but if you’re not able to make it to the screening, the ever-innovative DVF is simultaneously hosting the film festival on Second Life for one week in conjunction with the live events. Here’s what you need to know and here’s where you need to go.
This weekend we opened two of our videos (The Stepping Up and Going Under Method and Bruc Fugue) as part of the TRUCK exhibition in Kansas City (wow, what an art town — more on that soon). We made a box to contain each monitor, which also contained items that have a relationship with each video. Here our some construction images of making the boxes. We’ll post final images tomorrow.
This is a drawing of the box we’re gonna place our monitors inside for the Truck show (see post below). These boxes will serve as both exhibition crate and display strategy. The inspiration easily comes from three teachers I studied under, Mel Ziegler (the container as art), Dan Sutherland (the art’s crate as art) and Bill Lundberg (video as sculpture).
Now that I think about it, there is a long history of containers and art crates, including Marcel Duchamp, perhaps the most well known. Wouldn’t it be great/scary if someone assembled a concept diagram that kept track of where art ideas came from?
The Stepping Up and Going Under Method, 2006, set detail
Our next exhibition opens this Friday (April 20, 2007) as part of the Truck show at the Urban Culture Project in Kansas City. Truck is actually two exhibitions — one in KC and one in St Louis — curated by Matthew Strauss (White Flag Projects, St Louis) and Barry Anderson (UCP, KC). Each city “trucks” in artworks by artists living in the opposite city.
We’ve been asked to show two video installations: Bruc Fugue (2006) and The Stepping Up and Going Under Method (2006). Currently we’re busy working on the installations for the finished videos. More details to come.
Here are images from the set of The Stepping Up and Going Under Method we finished filming Sunday. The images show the key points, from the camera viewpoint traveling down the conveyor. Each box was hand-placed to not look hand-placed.
One of the hardest things is to realize when something is not working, and to take the necessary time and energy to find a better solution. Oh, how painful it is to interrupt the momentum of a work flow and take a time-out. But ultimately, how much better to solve the problem for good instead of limping by with half-measures and then suffering the consequences later.
We had a video shoot yesterday. It involved Murray sitting on a cart while holding the video camera and rolling down the conveyer belt. Since he was holding the camera, he couldn’t manually brake the cart with his hands, and without brakes, the cart would shoot down the track at an uncontrollable speed. After a ridiculous amount of brainstorming, we came up with a plan: we would build a crank, attach aircraft wire to the cart via a pulley, and a production assistant would lower Murray and the camera down the track, spelunker-style.
In the days leading up to the shoot, we spent significant time on the problem, between ideas, sketches, trial runs, and the construction of the crank. Come shoot time, the cast and crew was in place. Everything was working successfully, except the crank system. The PA managing the crank was viewing a video monitor that beamed the image wirelessly from Murray’s video cart. In theory, it should have worked. In reality, without being able to directly see Murray or the track — which had too many variables to accurately predict through the video monitor system — we’d given the PA an impossible job. So Murray would lurch forward, then jerk to a complete stop, then crawl along at the perfect speed, only to lurch forward again.
It was a three-hour shoot, and one hour into our allotted time, it was clear that the crank system just wasn’t working. We gave performers a break while we tried to come up with a better solution that we could implement in record time. What a relief when we hit on a idea that hadn’t occurred to us before.
Here’s what we did: we disconnected the crank and built a new cart, then attached Murray’s cart to the second cart with a cord, and reassigned our PA as the new “caboose.” We had him travel behind Murray and brake both carts, now that he was able to see exactly what needed to happen and when. With the right tools, our PA was able to sensitively pilot the camera cart with the right timing and speed, which resulted in a fluid long shot (thanks, Camillo!). When we reconvened again, the cast and crew was transformed into a well-oiled machine, and we got 32 usable takes in the can.
Speaking of starting over: the video we’re working on? It’s a re-shoot of The Stepping Up and Going Under Method. We’ve got this great new camera, and the set was still up in our studio, so we decided to get a higher image quality on the video while we still could. In the process of preparing to shoot the new version, we solved several of the problems that had plagued us in the first shoot and re-worked the set. A painful process, but worth the effort.
