Artists' Moving Image

Golden (Notes) (2007) is an artist’s book that documents and extends the works developed under the rubric, Golden. Approaching the artist’s book as a curated space, documented works and events are interwoven with commissioned texts, intimating a relation to wider contexts of practice and research concerned with a critical aesthetics and poetics of memory, history, place, and translation. Golden (Notes) is envisaged as an experimental, reflexive, discursive space that reflects the project’s overarching concerns: to explore the movements and co-temporalities of languages, cultures, histories, and subjects in flux; subjects for whom aspirations to ‘settle’ and ‘return’ may not be contradictory, and ‘nostalgia’ may be understood in more complex terms than a ‘backward’ gaze. Contributors: Sonia Boyce, Mimi Lok, Joanne Morra, Irit Rogoff, Naomi Siderfin, Rob Stone, and Gilane Tawadros.

A comprehensive theoretical book, “Minor Cinema: Experimental Film in Switzerland” traces the evolution of Swiss experimental film addressing the relationships between contemporary art and underground film, formal and amateur films, video, expanded cinema, and performance, national scene and international influences, with a special focus on how art schools and festivals were decisive for its development. As the editors state in the introduction, the aim of this pioneering publication is to look “back at the history of experimental film in Switzerland, the cinematic practices that are still considered the core of the avant-garde show, in the brief period from the mid-1960s to early 1970s, the initial signs of a 'minor' cinema, which produced exponents of experimental works which, though they have always remained on the margins of writing on the history of film, have never been forgotten entirely and were directly present in various places and times as central figures of a different kind of historical writing.”
By deciphering the fragility and ramifications of historical genealogies and challenging them by modern and scientific approaches, the book proposes an active archeology of Swiss experimental cinema, making visible the main characteristics of its specific history—a history which developed in parallel to the international evolution of marginal cinema, albeit fragmentary, often delayed, and with powerful personal, institutional, and geographic idiosyncrasies. Taking those as methodological starting points for their reflection, the editors describe Swiss experimental film as “minor cinema,” quoting American scholar Branden W. Joseph.
An attempt to offer an overview of the development of Swiss experimental film practices, it includes essays, among other key protagonists and spaces of diffusion, on Robert Beavers and Gregory Markopoulos, Peter Liechti, Hans Helmut Klaus Schoenherr, Clemens Klopfenstein, the role of cinema at the Kunstalle Bern during Harald Szeemann's curatorship, Annette Michelson, Tony Morgan, and Kurt Blum.

The Thickness of Cinema E-book; 100 pages of interviews and discussions from the 2017 CIRCUIT Symposium / Artist Week 22-27 August in Otautahi / Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Thickness of Cinema was CIRCUIT’s 5th annual symposium exploring artists moving image practice in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. It was preceded by an Artist Week of installations, screenings and events. This symposium presented responses to the following;

What might be the role of the body and sensorial experience in cinematic intelligibility and meaning? How does film affective experience contribute to our knowledge of the world? In what ways might we be able to analyse and get beyond sensation and emotion to explore cultural, gender or ideological implications? How have cinema, and phenomenological approaches to film been influenced by and respond to recent technological developments in our digital age? What might the cinematic experience be destined to offer us in lieu of the new sensorial experiences brought by these technological advances?

The Thickness of Cinema was convened by CIRCUIT 2017 curator-at-large Dr. Mercedes Vicente, an independent curator and writer who has recently completed her PhD at the Royal College of Art, London, on the work of New Zealand pioneer video artist Darcy Lange. The Symposium was based on the curatorial project Thick Cinema, also curated by Mercedes Vicente.

The Thickness of Cinema E-book was designed by Callum Devlin.

How have recent developments in building and imaging technologies been addressed in contemporary art, and what differentiates such artistic responses from the reflections of mainstream and ‘arthouse’ cinema? To what extent is the moving image complicit in modern and contemporary architecture’s privileging of image over design? What conditions and limits the filmic representation of distinct building types such as civic institutions, social housing and informal squatter settlements? How have contemporary artists used film to ‘read’ the built world? What worlds have they built, demolished, parodied and investigated with moving images? Through a close engagement with the works which make up the exhibition 'The Surface of the World,' this book sets out to explore these questions by focusing on the question of how built space and moving image space collide, inform and reconfigure one another. This inquiry is approached from a range of perspectives encompassing those of an artist/filmmaker, Cocoy Lumbao, an architectural critic, Rob Wilson, and the curator of the exhibition, Clare Carolin.

CIRCUIT is proud to present The Time of the Now e-book. 118 pages of interviews, presentations and discussion from the 2018 CIRCUIT Symposium at AUT. Free to download.

Featuring contributions from; Dr. Fiona Amundsen, Dr. Erika Balsom, Stephanie Beth, Stephen Cleland, Cushla Donaldson, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Dr. David Hall, Becky Hemus, Dieneke Jansen, Moya Lawson, Nova Paul, Dr. Janine Randerson, Natalie Robertson, Dr. Alan Wright, James Wylie.

The Time of the Now was conceived and presented by CIRCUIT in partnership with the Document Research Group at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), and invited responses to the following questions around ‘truth’, representation and artist practice;

What strategies do contemporary artists employ to test media representation of reality and the means through which we channel and consume it? How do artists expand the documentary form through various material processes and formal strategies? How do artists deconstruct the surfeit of images we already have and the means by which we receive them? Can 'truth' and fiction exist in the same space? What historical artworks could be part of a revised genealogy of current documentary practices in Aotearoa New Zealand? How could an ethic of care, as understood through sustained relationships with Indigenous and diverse communities be played out through documentary practices?

Designed by Callum Devlin, The Time of the Now e-book is CIRCUIT’s second e-publication. Featuring dialogue with some of Aotearoa’s leading academics and artists we hope that it serves to circulate the conversations beyond the room.

“…what has been happening today across some of the presentations is the articulation of a vision of what documentary could or should be, or how it could relate to an audience. That doesn’t always happen. In fact, it often doesn’t happen.”
- Dr. Erika Balsom

Many thanks to our partners at AUT, Govett Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, The Audio Foundation and City Gallery Wellington. Special thanks to Erika Balsom.

Exploring the use of live performance and the moving image in contemporary art practice, The Sensible Stage brings together essays that examine how elements from theatre, performance art and cinema are integrated in contemporary art, often in order to question the boundaries and mediations between the body and the image. Opening with a discussion between prominent philosopher Alain Badiou and Elie During, this book offers a unique mixture of theoretical, creative and discursive reflections on the meeting of stage and screen.

This revised and expanded edition includes two new chapters that offer an updated look at how these ideas continue to develop in contemporary art practice.

Bridget Crone is a curator and writer based in London. She is currently lecturer in visual cultures at Goldsmiths, The University of London. She has a particular interest in contemporary moving image and performance practices

CONTRIBUTORS:
Alain Badiou
Bridget Crone
Vanessa Desclaux
Anne-Sophie Dinant
Elie During
Beatrice Gibson
Dan Kidner
Pil and Galia Kollectiv
Mason Leaver-Yap
Lisa Panting
Dominic Andrew Paterson
Lucy Reynolds
Ian White

Artists whose work is addressed in the volume include: Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Yael Davids, Marcelline Delbecq, Marguerite Duras, Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin, Clare Gasson, Beatrice Gibson, Anja Kirschner and David Panos, Charlotte Moth, Public Movement, Annabel Nicolson, Heather Phillipson, Gail Pickering, Jimmy Robert, Carolee Schneemann, Cara Tolmie