It seems that more intimate, monitor-based screenings are the popular choice for Snöplog.
After making an appearance in the Private Cinema Installation at DFFUK in London this summer, Snöplog will be screened at FIVC, Festival Internacional de Videodanza de Chile, in Santiago de Chile, this November.
The film will be part of the FIVC OFF selection, shown as an installation in the Centro Cultural de España for the four days of the festival, 24-27 November 2015.
The International Journal of Screendance Volume 4 is now online, including my essay
“Cutting across the century: an investigation of the close up and the long-shot in “cine-choreography” since the invention of the camera.”
Really looking forward to some fascinating reading material!
Do have a look and let me know your thoughts.
Title quote from Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, Writings, p.253
Bill Viola’s words have crystallised something for me. They connect many of the strands that seem to crop up in my work… the experience of the body, of time, of the landscape as a physical thing. The body as conduit of the experience (simultaneously) of time and landscape, the body as a landscape in the frame.
Or rather, I don’t know if these things are apparent in my work, however, they are things which inform the choices I make.
As well as the sight of landscape, the sound of landscape enters the works. The sound of the rain and the wind in Snöplog. And Figure(s) became a sound piece – a “sculpting of time” (Viola again) through sound, object and body – falling beans alluding to waves, pebbles and the time of landscape, of the body, not of the mind.
“If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights.” Bill Viola
Cited here: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/bill_viola.html#DzmPS0ioD0Puf5Fw.99
“Sculpting time”: is how Bill Viola defines his art. “Time is the basic material of film and video. The mechanics of it may be cameras, film stock, and tape, but what you are working with is time. You are creating events that are going to unfold, on some kind of rigid channel that is embodied in a strip of tape or celluloid, and that thing is coiled up as a potential experience to be unrolled. In a certain way it is like a scroll, which is one of the most ancient forms of visual communication.” ¹
This time is something Bill Viola likes to extend, repeat and decelerate — as if to show us all its contours, all its forms.
It is an aesthetic not unrelated to the practice of meditation, which focuses on the present moment, zeroing in on hte subject on order to perceive it more precisely. What can I see? For the artist, the camera is that second eye that “re-teaches us how to see” and addresses the world beyond, or beneath, appearances.
(my italics)
Jérôme Neutres in Bill Viola – Album Bilangue de L’Exposition au Grand Palais, Paris 2014
¹ “The Universe continues to be in the present tense,” in Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, writings 1973–1994, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1995, p. 253.
… the only thing that I tolerate, that I like, that is familiar to me, when I am photographed, is the sound of the camera. For me, the Photographer’s organ is not his eye (which terrifies me) but his finger: what is linked to the trigger of the lens, to the metallic shifting of the plates (when the camera still has such things). … For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches—and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
Barthes on the stills camera
The camera as a means to mark, or measure the course of time. Or duration?
And what of the symbolic association with a living thing, a tree? Duration again?
My favourite images of Kate created by Jennie.
“Photographing gravity” ?
My favourite images of Claudia created by Ryan.
“Making the invisible visible.”
Group session at the University of Brighton 15.10.13
I brought various framing devices to the session – two cameras, two empty photo frames, several chairs. I asked the artists within the group to adopt my processes – to arrange the body within a framing device, paying attention to how gravity affects the body. I then asked them to frame a landscape of the body.
Ryan working with Claudia.
Creative and reflective session at the University of Brighton.
Ryan commented that he found it interesting how the different weight of the beans and the stones caused a certain kind of organisation when the box moved.
Claudia commented that no matter how you move the box, it is always perfect however it lies. And that the things in the installation, including the box, become themselves. I would like to try to translate these notions to the live work that I am creating.
“Beauty untouched by humans”. Is this what we feel is landscape?
Framing the body and composing with it,
Framing devices,
The human subject as dancer (everybody is a dancer),
and the humanity of the ‘dancer’.
The juxtaposition of the everyday with the choreographed,
Improvisation in performance.
– How adept I am with technology (even in performance mode).
– How much technology I use in the performance.
– The delay in the projected image causes the viewer to question whether it really is a representation of me. This reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s assertion that through the camera lens, “The sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the hands of technology”, and of Rene Magritte’s La Condition Humaine (1933)
As Magritte wrote:
In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape. This simultaneous existence in two different spaces is like living simultaneously in the past and in the present, as in cases of deja vu. (My italics)
Quoted in Torczyner, Harry, Magritte: Ideas and Images. New York, 1977.
This simultaneity of past and present interests me… and leads me to Bergson and Deleuze’s notions of simultaneous, but differing durations.
KATY PENDLEBURY 
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