Open Phoenix Video Art Festival

Full programme below

Saturday 13th October 1pm-5pm

Sunday14th October 1pm- 5pm (repeated)

Victoria Melody will be performing on Saturday 13th at 5:30pm

 

Open Phoenix Video Art Festival Programme

 

2 days of screenings curated by Victoria Melody with screenings from protoPlay and videoclub. The Open Phoenix 2007 Video Art Festival is a showcase for artists working within the medium of moving image.

Victoria Melody has curated 3 screening programmes that respond to the themes of Humour in Art, Performance for Camera, and Brighton Bred. The following seventeen films have been mixed up and placed into half hour digestible programmes.

 

Programme 1

Saturday 13th 1pm

Sunday 14th 1pm

 

Icarus by Tom Flanagan

8:11 minutes

'Icarus......a view to inspiration in video art' explores the notions of production and process in video, the ongoing dialogue between subject and camera, and the activity of inspiration, following an afternoon's video shoot where two artists are attempting to achieve the 'perfect shot'

Road to Knowhere by Ian Thorley

6 minutes

Road to Knowhere: performance duration 8 hours. On a mountain in the Lake District, I carried 14 road-crossing patrol sticks to the summit. One aim is to achieve a kind of poetry through the rigor and struggle of the body. The task-based project is tied into the existential themes of Albert Camus who wrote; "The struggle towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart". The [re] presentation of this work is a 6 minute looped film (with a dubbed-over sound track that might be perceived as being "authentic"), which begins to blur the boundaries between documentary and the mythological.

Signs by Neil Bryant

1 minute

The video attempts to playfully explore the mediated representation of the child/childhood, and questions its impact on cultural symbolism/meaning.

Hollow Bones by David Blandy

8 minutes

David Blandy's work deals with his problematic relationship with popular culture, highlighting the slippage and tension between fantasy and reality in everyday life. As a white man mouthing the words to "Is it because I'm black”, Syl Johnson's 1968 epic, in "hollow bones" (2001), Blandy asks how is it possible for him to love a song which features such an obviously inappropriate refrain. When is something a celebration rather than an exploitation, how can anyone reconcile heartfelt admiration with an awareness of the difficulties posed by appropriation in the post-colonial world?

Stone by Roz Cran

2 minutes

Stone is part of a body of work titled: animal, vegetable, mineral. Who am I? What am I? How do I relate to other beings in this world? Can I be other? These are some of the questions I asked. I attempted to be tree, stone, to speak to the pig. I failed. But I changed a little.

Flat Me by Rosie Holmes

4:50 minutes

'Flat Me' is a humorous and fairly low-fi stop-frame animation using 2-D cutout prints of myself as the main character. It explores the face as our means of expressing identity. Can we choose who we want to be on any giver day through the face that we show the world? The various 'identities' that we create for ourselves just through the face through facial expressions can be very 2-dimensional and lack the 'real' essence of who we are.

I Love You by Pablo Perezzarate

3:33 minutes

“I love you” explores the Orwellian concept of “doublethink” and contextualizes it within the never ending War on Terror. It particularly relates to the humiliating and inhumane treatment of prisoners after the invasion of Iraq at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. It triggers opposing emotions enhanced by the caricature style of an animation created with photographs of a performance for camera. The photographs were digitally manipulated to show the same subject multiplied, submissive and dehumanized.

 

Programme 2

Saturday 13th 1:35pm

Sunday 14th 1:35pm

 

Bodies of Text by Chris Lewis-Smith

14 minutes

Bodies of Text is set amid the Victorian architecture of Bristol Central Library reading room. A public library is a place where one's awareness is intended to inhabit the space between you and printed words. But of course we are also aware of the presence of others and ourselves in relation to them. Where do we choose to sit? If you pass someone in the narrow isle between shelves, where do you cast your eyes? Which way do you turn your shoulders?

Breakfast by Graeme Walker

2:43 minutes

Graeme Walker decides one day to make a round of toast using power tools.

Test Phantom by Robin Kiteley

5:52 minutes

This piece explores themes of intimacy, memory and desire via a recounted monologue about an anonymous sexual encounter. A fractured voice-over is counter pointed with images drawn from archive films illustrating the x-raying of the shoulder and the formation of clouds and weather systems.

Forest Fire by Nathan Birchenough

3:37 minutes

A chaotic tragi-comic series of bad jokes that could be called performance art.

Dutch Work -1 minute

Parking Lot Opportunity - 1:29 minutes

by Nick Tobier

Nick Tobier has guarded the Imperial palace in Kyoto (on his own volition), ceremonially sailed rats along the Arno River in Florence, and lectured (outside) the Natural History Museum in New York. As founder of everyday Places, Nick Tobier has perpetrated site0-specific performances in public since 1995. Finding that everyday places are far from ordinary, Nick Tobier's work turns workaday into celebratory.

Blood and Blossom by Rachael Field

7 minutes

A trailer for a spoof Japanese film all done in the best possible taste.

COMING SOON..........

 

Programme 3

Saturday 13th 2:15pm

Sunday 14th 4:10pm

 

Feng Shui (Wind and Water) by Mei Fong Tam

4:20 minutes

Feng Shui (Wind and Water) is a video explicitly related to our living environment and is my personal comment on Chinese traditional but ever- so- popular culture. In my work I translated Feng Shui literally into wind and water and showed how they influenced my behaviour and sensitivity, not in the traditional sense, but a playful and philosophical manner. It is a reflection of my attitude towards Chinese culture, but also a satire on man's growing dependence on the artificiality, while trying so 'hard' to 'code' with nature.

Blinking Ballet by Anton Hecht

4:30 minutes

The film was made with the collaboration of older people. Talking with them while trying to come up with an idea, they said they often feel invisible. Filming them doing a ballet routine in the middle of central Newcastle was my strategy for making them visible. Breaking the dance down onto small unit's means anyone can get involved independent of their physical prowess, the morphing edits, adding to the fluidity of the moves. The conjunction of the music and the dancing in the specific local hope to imbue the participants with a sense of the epic...the epic of everyday.

Deep Fried Vitamin by GrosePoolman

10 minutes

Filmed in the 'Hi Tide' kebab shop, King's heath, Birmingham, the artists GrosePoolman persuade the owner to produce and sell a novelty snack - deep fried vitamin. Featuring the process of battering the vitamin, and discussion around its complicated pricing structure - the vitamin can be sold cheaply as 'food' or at the higher price as 'art', customers are then invited to participate in a 'Pepsi challenge' - offering their views on the battered vitamins both as a snack and as artwork.

Only To Feel Weightless by Tord Paulsen

5:44 minutes

In a darken room a man and a woman enter into a game of exchanging boxes. This exchange teeters out unresolved.

Then in a bright room the man and the woman meet again and continue their exchange where it left off. The exchange escalates as the man's faster delivery builds a wall in front of the woman; she is in turn forced to throw her boxes over the wall. In this frenzy, one of the flying boxes knocks the man out and the woman flees.

The couple meet again at a train station.

The Persistence of Vision by Nicky Cary

4:06 minutes

My work is a collection of footage/clips that aims to investigate the continuous process of fluctuation between the static and the moving object, between degrees of permanence and impermanence. It is an obsessive and humorous look at the way in which the stillness of photography seems somewhat unhealthy in a world where everything else is constantly moving.

"Fight Scene" by Jonathan Acker

1:53 minutes

"Fight Scene" is a fight that is doomed to failure from the start. The video starts with a fight scene from a popular action film projected on the artist's inert body. Gradually the artist starts reacting to the scene that is projected onto him, eventually becoming a full blown low-tech fight scene between the artist and the projection, mirroring, in a dismal way, the high-tech fight scene taking place on the screen.

Spit or Swallow by Katy Richardson

6:30 minutes

It has been said that the biggest success of chauvinism in recent years is to persuade women to subjugate themselves in their quest for acceptance by their male peers. From this cultural shift come magazines like Nuts and Zoo, and the bizarre trend that makes little girls dream of glamour modelling. This performance to camera explores this modern phenomenon and seeks to highlight the effect of publications such as these on the female community.

 

 

protoPLAY   presents The YouTube Thing

Saturday 13th 3:00

Sunday 14th 2:00

protoPLAY   presents The YouTube Thing. Videos from YouTube will be screened in the format of a video art presentation. YouTube has been approached as a gigantic reservoir for images and information, and the selection process as a linguistic act. Each video will form a sentence fragment, which has a meaning on its own, but also interestingly that belongs to a chain of signifier and signified, to eventually create a new entity. These sentences or emergent forms are something that might be thought of as latent, waiting to be connected and activated by the viewer and yet rather than being something created by any one individual- are something which mutually arises in concert with the contemporary trends of cultural transformations.   A manifestation of our global community's unconscious thoughts? www.protoPLAY.net

 

videoclub : society

Saturday 13th 4:00

Sunday 14th 3:00

videoclub : society is a selection of artists' films exploring society and societal constructs. Each artist explores aspects of humanity and how humans have created structures, models of power and dependencies upon one another to conform. These constructs relate to and build upon our natures as human beings, and have been developed alongside language and society over millennia. The films in this selection raise questions about the desire to belong, social violence, corporate male power and peer pressure. Artists include: Raymond Taudin Chabot, Derek Lodge, Miranda Pennell, Jaan Toomik and Hard Shoulder. Curated by Jamie Wyld. www.videoclub.org.uk

 

For more information contact
info@victoriamelody.co.uk, www.victoriamelody.co.uk, www.phoenix.org

Phoenix Arts Association is a charitable (not-for-profit) arts organisation based in central Brighton.It provides 100+ studio spaces, short-term project space for community groups and supports a gallery and education programme which brings together professional artists and the general public in a friendly and creative environment.

Phoenix Arts Association

10-14 Waterloo Place

Brighton   BN2 9NB

01273 603700 ext.20