Screening at Atelier Nord in the Project Room

Par Hasard, 2009, by Bull.Miletic, trt: 6’33”

Whir, 2002, by Bull.Miletic, trt: 12’00”

Spatial Traces, 2008, by Jeremy Welsh & Robert Worby, trt: 4’00”

The Go, No Go Detector, 1997, by Jeremy Welsh & Robert Worby, trt: 6’00”

Opacity, 2005, by Farhad Kalantary, trt: 6’00”

Shiva, 2003, by HC Gilje, trt: 8’00”

 

mekanisk <-> organisk, 2009, by Ivar Smestad, trt: 5’06”

Uten Tittel (Untitled), 2003, by Amanda Steggell, trt: 5’00”

Merkur & Psyche go to the cinema, 2009, by Amanda Steggell, trt: 2’55”

 

Mais 68?, 2009, by Camilla Haukedal, trt: 1’45”

 

To all the important people, 2006, by Camilla Haukedal, trt: 5’03”

 

Motholic Mobble Part 3, 2009, by Kaia Hugin, trt: 6’33”

About the works:

 

Par Hasard (By Chance) by Bull.Miletic explores the Eiffel Tower’s symbolic relationship to its ethereal physicality. Sequences in the video are shifting between the wide shots of the stroboscopic lit tower at night and the tracking shots from within the tower’s structure during the daytime. The video opens with the two sentences; “No, the past is fantastic”, “No, the future is fantastic!”. Negotiation between contradictory meanings, emotions and times continues throughout the video in a similarly ambiguous manner, primarily via cutaway shots. The video embraces formal qualities of the 60’s American pop art and French avant-garde cinema. The soundtrack, reinforced by long periods of silence, enhances the hallucinatory atmosphere of the video.

Whir by Bull.Miletic proposes a counter-scape of San Francisco in which dissimilar elements of the city are poignantly singled out. Sharp tempos and striking images rally around an extraordinary space bustling with mystery. The city is no longer a clearly localizable spatial unit, but has transformed itself into an “urban field,” a collection of activities instead of a material structure.

Spatial Traces by Jeremy Welsh & Robert Worby

One of a series of works by Welsh & Worby exploring urban environments and architectural spaces through sound and image. The material used in this short video originally formed part of the six-screen installation “Moving Toward / Drawing Back /

Passing Through: Each Moment In Time A Point In Space” created for the exhibition

“Tracing Space” at Bergen Kunsthall in 2004. Images recorded in city streets (New York,

London, Tokyo and others) are digitally manipulated, layered and composited and combined with a dense soundtrack of sampled sound that mirrors, but does not literally illustrate the visual landscape of the video.

The Go, No Go Detector by Jeremy Welsh & Robert Worby

The title, The Go, No Go Detector, is a phrase borrowed from J.G. Ballard’s influential book “The Atrocity Exhibition”, published in 1969. Although the video is not directly connected to the book, it explores a similar territory in which nature, technology and electronic media collide and absorb one another. The video is constructed from a small selection of images that are digitally manipulated and recombined in various ways. Abstracted, almost graphic images of details of the natural landscape are mixed together with the reflected image of a sleeping passenger reflected in a train window. A rotating plastic fan in the window of a building, with a pale winter sun shining through it, suggests a cryptic kind of machinery. Animated still images, derived from scanned photographs, are mixed into the rapidly moving montage of video and sound. The audio was created by Robert Worby, using recordings of ambient environmental sounds (wind, water etc) that were digitally processed and combined in a richly textured soundscape. The video and sound were produced separately, in parallel, using similar methods of mixing and layering, with conscious reference to the twin histories of experimental film and avant-garde music.

Opacity by Farhad Kalantary is a short film concerned with the architecture and the sense of interiority. It uses subjective camera movements to contemplate fears that are imbedded in the design of interiors. Opacity borrows its sound from several suspense movies and it traces the emotional graph of the action-thriller films.

 

Shiva by HC Gilje is based on material recorded during live performances of the collaboration HC Gilje(video) and Kelly Davis(audio), and consists of fragments from various urban environments, transformed into a dystopic vision. Shiva is one of four videos to be found on GIlje´s dvd Cityscapes,

released on lowave in 2005.

 

mekanisk <-> organisk, 2009, is a decomposition that transmutes a mechanical structure into organic matter through one single amorphous passage.

The enormous ship lift Schiffshebewerk Niederfinow, a monument of the mechanical age, is dissected and regenerated into the spectra of culled trees in a desolate forest. The point at which the change occurs is hard to discern. It happens slowly, on the edge of perception as the screen becomes a fluid architecture of spatial tension, creating a misty hinterland that is as if beyond conventional time.

“Nothing has ever changed since I have been here, but I dare not infer from this that it never has.” (Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable 1953)

Untitled Video Sound Painting by Amanda Steggell

“…this is a sound painting that is indicative of the neurotic feeling of our time. The artist is very young, shows great promise, and I’m glad that the work is exhibited here.”
Ken Nordine (The Sound Museum, 1957)

Merkur & Psyche go to the cinema by Amanda Steggell

How times change! Merkur and Psyche are frozen in time just inside the entrace of Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin waiting for repair, while statues on the tops of buildings with their related security cameras and antennas, look out over the changes taking place in the city. This is a movie I made to entertain myself while in Berlin this summer. It combines extracts of a bootleg of Berlin Babylon (2001, directed by Hubertus Siegert with industrial music performed by Einstürzende Neubauten) that I recorded in the cinema upon its release, with photographs I took in 2009. The video image and sound is basically as captured by my camera; I have only adjusted the speed of the clips.

 

Mais 68 by Camilla Lingås Haukedal The starting point for the video work is the riot in Paris in 1968. The video deals with questions regarding history and especially the writing of history. Who and how do we tell or retell history?

 

Motholic Mobble Part 3 by Kaia Hugin. By using cinematic elements, patience, time and labour, a “real film trick” is carried out. The piece balances between a Sisyphean desperation and a humorous element. It might be seen as an intervention or interference of nature, or maybe as a longing for connection to the vast landscape. The video is a part of the Motholic Mobble series, which thematically are orbiting various questions related to human condition, and where movement and space, humour and horror are key instruments.

About the artists:

 

Bull.Miletic is Synne Bull (Oslo, Norway, 1973) and Dragan Miletic (Novi Sad, Serbia, 1970). Central to their artistic practice is the question of how reality is perceived in moving images. Central to their artistic practice is the question of how reality is perceived through different media. In their work, they examine their surroundings (architecture, objects, landscape, urbanity) as containers of emotions, memories, and political decisions. Bull.Miletic exhibited internationally at venues including the 2006 California Biennial OCMA, Newport Beach, Henie Onstad kunstsenter, Høvikodden and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Their work was presented at media festivals such as Transmediale, Berlin and World Wide Video Festival, Amsterdam. They were artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, 2003, Künstlerhause Bethanien Berlin, 2004, and Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, 2007 among others.

 

Jeremy Welsh (artist) & Robert Worby (musician) have worked together periodically since the 1970ʼs. For a period in the mid-seventies they were members of British experimental theatre group Aerschot Performance Division and then in the late seventies both were members of post- punk band The Distributors. They have also worked as a duo for many years, creating installations, performances, video and sound pieces. They are currently working on a series of HD video/sound pieces based on urban and post-industrial landscapes.

 

Farhad Kalantary, (Tabriz, Iran, 1962) is a visual artist working primarily with non-narrative films and video installations. He has studied at San Francisco State University (BA, 1992) and San Francisco Art Institute (MFA, 1996) and he is now based in Oslo, Norway. His works have been shown in various international film festivals as well as in galleries and museums in the US and Europe, and they are part of the collections of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Arts Council Norway. He is the co-founder and leader of the artist run space Atopia (2003-) in Oslo.

HC Gilje, (Kongsberg, Norway 1969) works with realtime environments, installations, live performance, set design and single-channel video. He is educated at the intermedia department of Kunstakademiet in Trondheim 95-99. In October 2006 Gilje started a 3-year position as a research fellow at Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway, exploring how audiovisual technology can be used to transform, create, expand, amplify and interpret physical spaces. Gilje has presented his work through different channels throughout the world: in concert-venues, theatre and cinema venues, galleries, festivals and through several international DVD releases, including 242.pilots live in Bruxelles on New York label Carpark and Cityscapes on Paris-label Lowave. He was a member of the video-impro trio 242.pilots, and was also the visual motor of Kreutzerkompani.

 

Ivar Smedstad, (Oslo, Norway, 1961) Norwegian artist, former chair of the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art and formerly teacher at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. He has recently been appointed director of Atelier Nord, artists’ media centre in Oslo. For many years Smedstad has created works that combine a high degree of visual synthesis with images collected in the urban landscape, creating a kind of contemporary electronic constructivism.

 

Amanda Steggell was born in Yokohama, raised in England and has been living in Norway since 1985. Amanda has a background in dance and choreography and has worked with digital and communications technologies since 1995. She founded the Motherboard Project (1996-2008) with Per Platou to explore the potentials of the net as a creative, mediating and modulating instance in performance, installation, social, participatory, site specific work and live art happenings. She currently works as Associate Proffesor at Bergen National Academy of the Arts and video artist of the theatre group Verk Productions. In both her solo and collaborative work she investigates space as narrative place while musing over how perceptions of time, space and the body are affected by technologicial interventions in everyday life - the outcomes of which take on many forms.

Kaia Hugin is master student at Bergen National Academy of the Arts and works mainly with video. Exploration and a mixing of cinematic elements with choreography, performance and sound work is essential in her productions. Fundamental to her practice is the breaking up of narrative strategies in relation to communication and psychological reactions. Her films often have a self-reflective dimension related to moving images such as mixing the genres, playing with references and producing “real film tricks”.

Camilla Lingås Haukedal is studying at the National Academy of Art in Bergen, where she will finish her Master degree in May 2010. Through her studies she has produced several video works where she investigates different ways of telling a story. Her works often uses know persons or events where she, through retelling and rewriting of the material, creates new stories.