Loud and Clear, 2006
1:30 min excerpt – Full Running Time 61:30 minutes
Dietmar Krumrey – Mt. Pleasant Michigan

Loud and Clear is an hour long performance piece where, dressed in a shirt, tie and expensive shoes, I spin in circles while shouting “Attention!” into a large black megaphone and a clock ticks off the seconds in the background. It is a repetitive action that at once appears totally absurd, but if seen as a metaphor of communication in all its dizzying ceaselessness. The work exemplifies something much more ordinary, realistic and is down-to-earth.

www.dietmarkrumrey.com

Clean Slate, 2006
4 mins
Michael Sherwin – Ellensburg Washington

After my first year of full-time teaching as a Professor of Photography at Central Washington University I was exhausted. I walked around the empty classroom sifting through all the ups and downs of the past year. I had thought four courses a term, including six sections of Beginning Photography alone. So many students, so many faces, and so many questions crisscrossed my muddled mind. I was burnout, beaten, and numb. The repetition of courses and endless stream of students only seemed to gain intensity with each subsequent term. How does a teacher handle the constant process of renewal?

As I reflected on the challenges of my new chosen profession, I looked around the classroom hoping to find some symbol of my effort. My eyes fell on the old slate chalkboard sitting in the corner of the classroom. A reservoir and device for the transmission of information, my chalkboard had not been cleaned in an entire year. Like a cumulus cloud drifting slowly overhead I stood and stared at this abstract representation of time passed. Embedded in the thick dust lied the signs and hazy reminders of my mechanical reiteration.

In an act of determination and restoration, I decided to document myself cleaning the chalk-dust off the board with a big wet sponge. Condensing 30 minutes of repeated attempts to cleanse the board just into 5, each of the infinite patterns formed in the drying dust trace the residue of my rapid actions, resembling a temporal abstract expressionist painting. The piece serves as a process of mental cleansing and as a simple symbol for repetition, ritual and renewal.

www.michaelsherwin.com

Fireflies, 2003
5 min excerpt – Full Running Time 11:55 mins
Joe Nanashe – Brooklyn New York

To record is to see, to quantify. Moments pass before the lens to be forever repeated. Memory no longer exists outside of the context of records. This is the trap we have established. To preserve we must kill. Video is the most purgatorial method of documentation. The recorded figure is unable to respond yet continually being. The revolution of the assembly line paved the way for this condition. Industry broke down the body at speed unprecedented in human history and the advent of moving imagery captured and normalized the systematic violence against the figure.

Created just after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Fireflies is a meditation on the generative powers of fire, the fragility of existence, the beauty of destruction, and the mediation of war and violence. As the blue tipped matches are shot across the floor, the fleeting burn of fire illuminates the shot, giving brief glimpses of the overall decimated landscape. The rectangular shot of the camera becomes the ritual space for the repetitive gesture.

www.joenanashe.com

L’entre deux
1:31 excerpt
Sylvie Bélanger – Toronto Ontario Canada

My work stems from a nomadic aesthetic, immersing images, sounds and the visitor in a sort of collage. It’s a collage, which constantly redefines ambling spaces, through aimless video loops combined with sounds and silences that interrupt the flow of images. It’s a collage that deploys a resistance to fix defined positions, both in space and in time. The fluidity of the visual and sound spaces sets the stage for a view of the subject, which is in a state of constantly becoming. It is a vagrancy, where my motive force, is a visual and auditory movement, one that affectively rests in the viewer and never on the screen. It orients, disorients, links and ruptures sound and image in fluid variations, one that loops in the end, as discontinuously as any contemporary attempt at fixing in time or space our personal subjectivity.

The work originates in an investment of the subject as agent, meaning a multiplicity and multidimensionality of its positions in relation to art’s discourse, its investment and of its political powers to resist, to criticize and to contradict. It is a space evoked by but also remote from structures, language and articulated experience. It’s a dialectic space between presence and absence, which I like to call “ailleurs” (the elsewhere) – a space situated at the intersection between the real and its metaphor. In this context, I will say that Art is largely social for me because it resuscitates again and again, our fears or desires, our hopes and anxieties, recording through itself our struggles as people who are acting at once in relationships to each other and living in a world that has its own relationships.

www.sylviebelanger.com

Collusion, 2003
with sound design by George Cicci
3 min except – Full Running Time 20 mins
Christopher Coleman – Eugene Oregon

Collusion consists of a full wall projection of industrial expulsions that have been time-manipulated so that the vents seem to be sucking in the smoke in rhythmic breaths. Large amounts of smoke are drawn from the sky followed by a pause and small release before another inhalation begins. The sounds of machinery quickly take on a natural cadence that compels the viewer to breath with the factory. Just when all the smoke seems to have been withdrawn, more materializes from the blue sky in a never-ending deluge. As an enveloping installation, a connection is quickly made between the breathing of the viewer and the piece. It speaks not only of hope and hopelessness but control and our own complicity in what is happening to the world around us.

www.digitalcoleman.com

Composition for Two Lengths of PVC Pipe, 2005
19 seconds
Neal W. Cox – San Antonio Texas

The work entitled Composition for Two Lengths of PVC Pipe is a work of percussive “music” (I use this term losely, as I am not a musician) related to the specific geometry of a particular geodesic dome. It is the audio/video component of a larger work using a dome built as a system designed to make 130 photographic marks. The dome itself is constructed using two lengths of PVC pipe repeated throughout (one used 30 times, the other 35 times). Likewise, the musical composition is dictated by the placement and occurence of the pipes, in irder from the base to the top. The video within this context is an endless loop.

The Reluctant Narrator (Gus, Murder, Subway), 2006
6 min – 3 excerpts
Written by K. Mockler – Filmed & Edited by K. Mockler / D. Poolman
David Poolman / Kathryn Mockler – Toronto Ontario Canada

When Donald Rumsfeld briefed his press secretary on how to deal with the media he said, “begin with an illogical and proceed perfectly logically to an illogical conclusion.” Then he said, “They [the media] do it all the time.”

In constructing the narratives in these videos, we are juxtaposing the rational against the irrational through quotidian imagery of contemporary North American life. In this collection, we introduce scenarios that are simultaneously familiar and opaque, and create a narrator who is anonymous and whose gender, ethnicity, age, and economic status is deliberately vague yet is defined by the characteristics with which it is associated. The world we are creating is a world in which the viewer is forced to suspend his or his disbelief, and at the same time asked to critique the ambiguity of the narrative that has been presented. The reader is then left to come to his or her own conclusions about not only what is true or believable but also what he or she understands to be the underlying message of the narrator.

This way of reading is similar to the way we decode media and information which is presented to us under the guise of a “narrator” that is unbiased and neutral but that is systematically partisan.

Gus, Murder and Subway are three excerpts from this body of work.

www.davidpoolman.com

I’m in the Wrong Film, 2006
2:38 min excerpt – Full Running Time 10 mins
Hans Gindlesberger – Buffalo New York

I’m in the Wrong Film is a body of work composed of a series of staged tableaus that interrogate the small town. Presented as a non-linear narrative, these photographic stills and moving images explore identity, memory, place, and the loss of belonging by probing the psychology of a transient character as he is inserted within a variety of constructed environments with which he must interact. This process references the theatre as well as silent film and places the otherwise realistic images at the threshold of a dreamlike space. The techniques employed in synthesizing the images are intentionally left ambiguous. While presenting themselves on the surface as truthful documents, each construction finds a way to falter and show its seams. This disruption of reality is an acknowledgement of the simulated space of the small town. Therefore, the actions of the character within this environment serve as a catalyst for the viewer to think about their engagement with the space around them.

As a result of its neglect or inability to modernize the American small town has fallen victim to economic decline. This decline leaves vacancies that can be seen physically in boarded up windows on Main Street as well as felt psychologically as the town is forced to consider its declining relevance in contemporary society. The community’s sense that it no longer belongs is, in turn, instilled in the people that live there. Consumed by uncertainty about their future, small towns often rush to embrace a nostalgic image of an idealized past with the intent of using it to return to economic viability. However, in imagining themselves as a mythical image that cannot be realized, these towns become simulated spaces. It is within this simulated space that this work explores the impact of home on individual identity. By probing the psychology of a wandering character as he engages a staged photographic environment the interconnectedness of identities of people and place is made apparent. The body of work is composed of self-contained narrative images that imply a cohesiveness that is never realized. Many of these images document a moment of epiphany for the character in which he is presented with an opportunity to make a decision. This repeated emphasis on the will of the character and the absence of decisive action in the midst of an indifferent, ambiguous universe renders these situations absurd.

In his aimlessness the character is a product of the changing relationship of the small town to mass society. Through the observance of his actions we can interrogate contemporary concerns about identity, authenticity, and the loss of belonging in our own homes. Repeatedly viewing these images places the viewer in the same ambiguous, uncertain position as the wandering protagonist. These photographic simulations seduce the viewer into accepting their artifice as natural. Therefore, as the actions of the character disrupt his environment the images serve as a catalyst for the viewer to consider their own sense of place.

www.gindlesberger.com

Crow’s Tale, 2004
3:50 mins
Colette Copeland – Media Pennsylvania

The work explores the issue of memory on both a personal and collective level, as it relates to race, identity, and cultural heritage. Drawing from childhood memories, the video contemplates the legacy of prejudice, questioning the family and cultural inferitance and its impact on the individual. The manipulation of time, motion and space calls into question the veracity of memory and the construction of narrative.

www.colettecopeland.com

Nothingness, 2005
2:55 mins
Arzu Ozkal Telhan – Cambridge Massachusetts

Culture inscribes its mark in bold letters affirming “human” on the surface of the body at the first moment of “being.” After being entitled as “human,” one would notice the vocabulary to define “human” is limited only to dichotomies: male/female, good/bad, pretty/ugly, us/them …

I don’t think that I ever sought for a definition of my human being until I left my native country – Turkey – four years ago. I had never thought that language, which holds the connection between mind and object, introduces the individual to the collective voice and vocabulary, fastens the codified norms of the society, and imposes them on the individual. I believe the major advantage of being away from my native country is to provide emancipation, or a distance, from my previous life and indoctrinated values. This emancipation is helping me to become conscious of the borders and limits that I was setting into my life, in addition to the ones that were being set for me by my social environment. I have realized that this freeing was also a temporary one and ended as soon as I had to attend a western identity, which I have been introduced by my present milieu.

My practice can be grouped under the interpretation of body and its relationship to its environment. I make attempts to emancipate the body from social and cultural norms and try to suggest ways to distance one from the limits imposed on the society by totalitarian establishments. I believe that even temporary emancipations can help us be aware of the limits forced on us by the regimes of society. I appear in unfamiliar places where supposedly “I do not belong” according to the tradition, laws or patriarchal value systems. It is very important for me and for my work to be informed by other people: friends and artists, as well as strangers I meet on the street. My work emerges from temporary encounters and used what is already available in the everyday.

www.contrary.info