HIGHLIGHTS
Jianghu Mobile Video£º
During the week of March 21-27, the third event in the series of 12 Jianghu events took place in Kunming, organized and curated by Jay Brown and Andrea Stelzner. Jianghu 3 was timed to overlap precisely with Yunfest (www.yunfest.org), a documentary film festival which is one of the most important events in Kunming¡¯s visual culture.
Because Yunfest created an intense viewing schedule for audiences - 96 scheduled films playing simultaneously in three indoor theaters -Jianghu 3 decided to deal with films, but work interstitially to the Yunfest schedule. Instead of competing in the same time slots for the same audience as Yunfest, Jianghu 3 took the opportunity to question the context in which we see moving pictures. We did this in two main ways: first, in a local bar, we made installations and interventions which concerned moving images; second, we constructed the Jianghu 3 Mobile Video Machine from which we projected short video pieces on the streets and buildings of Kunming. We also experimented with façade projections and student workshops using live-projected video and flash animations to further explore how we interact with moving images.
Mobile Video is the core of Jianghu 3. The idea is aimed at the problem of fixed viewing spaces such as theaters and museums, where audiences must know about an event, make time, and choose to attend the event in order to interact with the work. The self-selection at play in fixed presentations of film and video means that such work only reaches a portion of people pre-disposed to these events. Mobile Video projected on the street simply forces people to choose on the sopt whether or not to enage in the projection situation. They can judge their interest after they are already confronted with the content and visual spectacle.
With notions of attention in mind ?C the splitsecond decision to look or walk past ?C Lijiang Studio made a call for videos which addressed attention and visuality in public spaces. Out of responses to an international call for work, we selected approximately 50 pieces and transferred the digital files from the submitted DVDs onto our computers, and burned compilations of work onto custom designed DVD templates separated by chapter markers. This allowed us to put up to 30 works on one DVD, and, holding the remote control to the mobile DVD player, present the video pieces in any order. Sometimes we very actively selected the order of the pieces we showed, sometimes we simply let a compilation play without interruption, according to the situations we encountered on the street.
So during the week of Yunfest, artists from Lijiang Studio took turns controlling the Mobile Video Machine. We usually started our evening journeys at the Yunnan Provincial Library, where the Yunfest films were screening and where we stored the mobile video machine during the day. The first night, we played with the movement of the machine ?C lingering at a spot to show a piece, sweeping the projection over a façade, or beaming into trees. With Alfred Banze driving, we stopped at a restaurant which had a translucent screen to block onlookers from the street ?C a perfect projection surface. The restaurant staff came out to watch Jean-Gabriel Periot¡¯s (www.jgperiot.free.fr) Dies Irae, while dinners watched from their tables and complained about not getting their food. We continued to play with the projection that first night, and happily discovered that our machine¡¯s batteries can power the projector for a full four hours.
The next thing we discovered is the incredible variation in visual quality when projecting images on a city¡¯s infinite surfaces. Projecting an image static within its frame onto a changing surface makes an interesting overlay of light on texture, but when the image in that frame is moving, telling stories, and linked to sound, the possibilites are endlessly fascinating. The second night out, with Jay Brown and Daniela Butsch driving, we spent the first hour in a small park, projecting into pine trees, onto water and stone. Daniela Butsch projected her piece Flow, a moving digital painting based on footage shot at Niagara Falls onto tree bark, which yielded a mezmerizing visual dialogue of tangible and intangible, digital and organic surface. During the day we burned new compilations of video work, and each subsequent night drivers volunteered to experiment with the Mobile Video Machine.
Video in Context: Dick Fontaine¡¯s Hiphop History in Kunming
Invited to Kunming by Yunfest and the Yunnan Academy of Fine Arts, filmmaker Dick Fontaine, head of the documentary department of the British National Film School, brought several of his films to screen in Kunming. When he found out that Kunming has a hip-hop, breakdancing, and graffiti scene very similar to the scene in New York in the early 1980¡¯s, he suggested showing his landmark documentary film Hiphop History as part of Jianghu 3 events at the Speakeasy. Hiphop History documents the origins of hiphop culture with exclusive footage of the creators of hiphop's DJing, rapping, bboying, and graffitti including interviews with Africa Bambatta, DJ Cool Herc, The Dynamic Rockers, Cold Crush Brothers, and Brim. Originally released in 1984, Hiphop History marked the expansion of hiphop from its beginnings in the Bronx to the rest of the world. The event was organized by Lijiang Studio with the help of DJ DSK (www.djdsk.com), an English hiphop DJ now residing in Kunming. It attracted members of the local hiphop scene. After the screening, DJ DSK set up his turntables, prompting a Chinese freestyle rap session by Latino, an MC from the local hiphop crew Gumbo, and bboy circles with members of the local bboy crew KGS. An astounded Dick Fontaine admitted his surprise at the similarity between the emerging hiphop scene in New York twenty years ago and what took place before his eyes in 2005. Fontaine is bringing photos and a report of the event to Africa Bambatta and the Zulu Nation headquaters in New York.
Video in Context: Music Improvised to Video
On Friday March 25 at the Speakeasy, DJ DSK, Alfred Banze, Michel Biscuit, Sam Delilah, and DJ Shonny brought computers with various loops, a digeridoo, and bongos to the Speakeasy for an improvised musical session. Lijiang Studio brought two compilations of video work with interesting sound for the two main projection screens in the Speakeasy. Using audio signal from the video works being projected, the musicians created an extended jam alternatively emphasizing the sound from the video work and the sound they were creating.
Video in Context: Alfred Banze¡¯s Banyan Project Workshops on the Moving Image
Simultaneous with Jianghu 3 Mobile Video and installations at the Speakeasy, Lijiang Studio visiting artist Alfred Banze spent ten days running workshops ?C up to four times a day ?C at the Yunnan Academy of Fine Arts as part of his Banyan Project (www.banyan-project.de). With a suitcase and basic equipment, Banze carries physical and digital works of art accrued from students and artists all over the world, providing motivation and tools for students to engage with the existing Banyan works and create new ones. Banze showed the participating students many tools for ¡®remixing¡¯ the art he carries with him, but for Jianghu 3, Banze put particular emphasis on moving images. Many of his students used live-projected video and simple Flash animations in their projects. Banze and his students presented the final products of his workshop in a Kunming caf¨¦, using a projector, various physical objects, and a Final Cut timeline they had prepared for the event.
Video in context: Daniela Butsch¡¯s Façade Projections
In addition to installations and mobile video, Jianghu 3 also explored another form of interacting with video: façade projections, from a fixed location. Berlin artist Daniela Butsch traveled to Kunming to participate in Jianghu Mobile Video and to project her video work on buildings in Kunming. Butsch projected her 12 minute, looping, piece Flow onto the ceiling of the main entrance to the Yunnan Provincial Library each evening after sunset during the Yunfest documentary film fetival. Flow, a moving electronic painting finished in 2004, is based on a stationary shot of water cascading over Niagara Falls. Colors slowly pulse through the image, running through the spectrum of oranges, reds, pinks, greens, violets, blues. Halfway through the piece, the flow of water reverses, torrents flow back up the waterfall, throwing the viewr for a loop. While Flow was flowing vertiginously upside down and sometimes backwards, Butsch and Lijiang Studio used the Mobile Video Machine to project flow and other electronic paintings, such as Butsch¡¯s Landscape Fast and Homage to Mark Rothko, or works by other artists, to create dialogues between the pieces, spaces, and the vantage points they required.
Moving Image Installations£º
Video in Context: Jianghu 3 Video Installations at the Speakeasy
In addition to its mobile video experiment, Lijiang Studio also experimented with video context by making some small interventions in a popular Kunming bar, the Speakeasy. A large underground space with regular DJ events, a dance floor, pool tables, and lounge space, Lijiang Stuidio invited artists Liu BB, Noraset Vaisanyakul, and Xiang Weixin to intervene in the space on the theme of moving images and their context. Liu BB took a lounge-bed in a side room of the bar, and using ultraviolet lights, live and fake birds, and a television, created a dark and frightening environment in which to watch his most recent work, a three-minute video concerning the unexpected death of one of his close friends.
Xiang Weixin created a piece which opposed two large televisions, also in a lounge space. In one of the televisions he removed the CRT and installed a sculpture of the Buddha¡¯s head, with pink lights. The facing television showed, against a pink background, a stationary image of a Buddha head which mouthed words to CCTV sports and news broadcasts, commenting on the displacement of religion for home tv.
Noraset Vaisanyakul hung two televisions from the ceiling in the center of the bar, just above head height. Facing each other, one of the televisions showed a video work the artist made in Amsterdam called Borderlines in which the artist explores an artificial landscape, while the other television showed stills from the artist¡¯s bedroom in Bangkok. This piece played with the convention of the bar-tv, which usually plays sports or news, but in this case created a floating space which explores the relationship between constructed qualities in the artist¡¯s domestic and professional landscapes.
In another lounge space in the bar, we placed a large projection screen with DVD¡¯s out for the audience to play as they wished. This space, with padded sound-proof doors, became a quiet and intimate space where one could concentrate on a compilation of short works or a longer piece.
On the dance floor, we made two large projection screens, and installed one television. These screens, visible from anywhere in the bar, were controlled from the DJ table. The dance floor, normally a place where people put themselves ?C particularly their bodies - on display, we made two compilations of video dealing with the body, one color and one black and white. These two screens, adjacent to each other at right angles, showed looping compilations of different lengths.
Jianghu 3 and Yunfest
The physical and visual qualities aside, Jianghu 3 had some unexpected intersections with the documentary film culture at Yunfest. Planned in cooperation with and in support of Yunfest, Jianghu 3 was given some time in the Yunfest opening ceremony to show a sample of the work we would show that week. We chose to show a two-minute edit of Shanghai artist Liu BB¡¯s 7 minute video piece The Game, which is an intense conceptual piece manipulating black and white footage from 1920¡¯s Shanghai, set to very disturbing music. That two-minute insertion was followed by a documentary film on Chinese involvement in World War II which also used black and white archival footage. As the audience exited the opening ceremony, Lijiang Studio projected the full version of The Game at the entrance to the main auditorium. The heated and sometimes upsetting conversations that followed were debates on intellectual property rights and found material, on the influence of commercial television and mainstream documentary culture in Chinese film culture, on the value of truth and reality in documentary and experimental film, and ultimately on appropriation and the value of ¡®originality¡¯ in making art.
