The Enso-Darklight Open Air Experimental Cinema {Full Programme}
Following the success of Enso’s open air free events as part of Project 06 last year, the Galway Arts Festival is promoting this year’s Enso Art projects intervention.The Enso-Darklight Open Air Experimental Cinema is a third year running collaboration with the Darklight digital film festival based in Dublin and Enso Live art projects based in Galway.
This year’s event is curated by Tom Flanagan and will host a range of cutting edge Video Art by Irish and international artists also premiering new work by I.A.T, David Beattie, Peter O Kennedy, alongside a selection of experimental animation and new media curated by Maeve Connolly from the ‘Darklight Digital Film Festival 2006'.
Enso Video Art
Curated by Tom Flanagan
While the seven towers of Ballymun, immortalised by Bono in the Joshua Tree album, are dynamited to the ground, Ballymunners live on, and are very much alive and well. This is the extensive subject matter of Ballymun Sequence, an 11-minute musical video by the Paris based artists Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly, the result of a year long participative new media art project commissioned by the Ballymun Primary Health Care Facility.Using an interactive video installation as an interface, the artists collaborated with AXIS Art Centre to lead a series of informal workshops on the theme of movement, working with local people varying from senior line dancers to teenage jugglers.The resulting film mingles choreography, juggling, dance, music and colour against the background of a deconstructed city with its omnipresent sky.Inspired by early 20th century sociopolitical mural painting, but using contemporary techniques, Ballymun Sequence juxtaposes images of people with images of the times, in this case the pervasive images of a modern city. The vigorous energy of the dancers, set against this changing urban landscape gives Ballymun Sequence a euphoric quality… they are dancing to the pulse of the city.
'Audience' (05:52) by Bea McMahon
The scenarios played out in my works, are intended to appear as if they are snatched from some sort of imaginary plane. Certain works, being realised through the medium of video, with very simple props, or simple spatial translations (of people or objects), have a decidedly clunky construction allowing the viewer to reconsider the various ways in which the world is underpinned. Other works on paper combine elements from perspectival drawing with the background field lines that are derived from a scientific understanding of reality. .
'Images Ireland' (14:00) by Vivienne Dick
1988, 14 mins, video
A kaleidoscopic film depicting Ireland in the early 80s. These fragments of rural and urban life blend document with fiction showing a teenager in love, a riot on the way to the British Embassy in Dublin, a picket at Mountjoy prison, dinnertime in Cork with Nell McCafferty on the radio. Soundtrack by Steve Nieve.
Vivienne Dick began making films in the late seventies in New York where she was part of a group of musicians and filmmakers known as No Wave. She later made a number films while living in London and continues to work from her base in the West of Ireland.
'Rotocolour' (02:09) by David Beattie
Central to much of Beattie’s recent work is the notion of experimentation and elementary physics. These series of experiments investigate the physicality of space, substance and time. The work primarily takes the form of sculptural installation, and utilises video, sound, photography and sculpture.
'Blood and Xerox' (03:45) and 'Europe After the Rain' (02:22)
by Pil and Galia Kollectiv (UK)
Blood and Xerox reanimates the fossilised vision of Modernist architecture and advertising by putting their visual language in the mouths of horny transformers, rewriting the urban skyline into a sleazy non-narrative of pornographic lust. The black and white Super-8 film unleashes the violent yet playful potential of the sky-scraped cityscape. Situationist slogans and consumerist propaganda, both interchangeably evocative of revolution and its demise, echo the collapse of the bold architectural vision of the early twentieth century, at the same time interrogating the relationship between its aesthetics and politics.
Europe After the Rain
“Inspired by the two war paintings of the surrealist painter Max Ernst, especially his Europe After the Rain II, a series of short video loops of shapes cut from World War II documentaries turn into organic matter. A series of abstract digital landscapes fuses the textures of rotting vegetation and the angular shapes of forgotten archaeological sites, bombed Japanese factories, B52s and the scorched ground of Hiroshima, tiny atom bombs and ravaged cities that turn into jellyfish or parachuting soldiers dancing in the sky. The isolated motion of the camera becomes an organic, pulsating movement on the screen. As new life emerges from the ruins, destruction gives birth to a post human scene of regeneration”.
“Pil and Galia Kollectiv are London based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. Their work is primarily film and video based, but extends to sculpture, installation and collage. Reading dada and the Bauhaus backwards through popular culture, they try to rescue the humour and critical vitality that have been subsumed by the canonisation and commodification of modernism, while finding new uses for the failed utopias of the past.
'Recreation' (03:40) by Peter O Kennedy
This film is one of a series in the same vein; all trying different things emerging from a glowing fire. This particular one is a bit dumb, but it does have sex, death and religion running through it, so it covers a lot of bases relatively economically. To my mind it’s crass and stupid, but also beautiful and sad; so not quite so dumb in the end.
Peter O’Kennedy is a Dublin-based artist working with lens-based media and kinetic installations.
'Janela' (02:31) by Debora Prado (NewYork)
If a person was to disappear we could still tell a lot about her from objects she left behind. These artifacts become a physical representation of memories and identity, both person and social. We may not directly share the same memories but we can share the same
artifacts. Thse artifacts are not only such personal belongings as photographs and letters, but also te commecial objects we accumulate and become attached to. Shared artifacts connet us. Made entirely of still pictures from a DSLR camera, with no video used.
Deb Prado is a Brazilian visual artist based in New Jersey. She works with a variety of medium from traditional black and white photography to experimental digital film making. Her choice of subject matter often explore the double consciousness that springs from living in a foreign land.
'Paperback' (08:36) by Stephen Gunning
Stephen Gunning¹s art works use the moving image and audio to examine the nature of confrontation, social conventions and the psychology of space. Working extensively in video, Gunning has exhibited widely internationally.
Covered Road (2005) Video, Mute, (02:49) by Anne Maree Barry
Covered Road documents a journey that was taken on stolen bicycles inthe fifties. It uses contemporary digital techniques to interpret anarrative of rural Ireland. At the Darklight Film Festival 2006 Covered Road was the winner of Best Irish Short.
Barry's work is provoked by an observation of spaces, urban and rural, that appear isolated and empty despite traces of human presence. The intention of the work is to document and reinterpret conventional perceptions of these spaces, making the ordinary appear extraordinary and blurring the lines between reality, fiction and memory.
Maxwell’s Demon (from Perpetual Motion Machine) tape and video, 2007
by Mike Hannon / Irene Buckley (06:31)
"If we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us." - James Clerk Maxwell, 1867.
Darklight Animation
Curated by Maeve Connolly for The Darklight Film Festival 2006.
This screening programme explores the growing significance of animation techniques in art and media practice. Stop motion features prominently, most notably in a series of works exploring urban and rural landscapes. These include Donna Conlon's Espectros Urbanos/Urban Phantoms (2004), shown at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Mohamadou Ndoye's Train Train Médina (2001), and Adrift (Inger Lise Hansen, 2003). Several works are also concerned with satire, a well established tradition in animation, such as Martin Sastre's Iberoamerican Trilogy , which offers a comic critique of art world power structures. The programme also features Who I Am and What I Want , by David Shrigley and Chris Shepherd, a new work in the Animate! series. All films in this screening are part of Darklight's Official Selection, 2006.
Adrift (10:00)
By Inger Lise Hansen
Adrift is shot on the arctic island of Spitzbergen and in Norway . It combines time-lapse photography with stop-motion animation of the landscape. Through camera-angles and framing the film gradually dislocates the viewer from a stable base where one looses the sense of scale and grounding. Adrift takes perception itself as the subject of its journey.
Espectros Urbanos/Urban Phantoms (02:34)
By Donna Conlon
Donna Conlon uses ordinary objects and images to reveal the idiosyncrasies of human nature and the contradictions integral to our contemporary lifestyle.
She has used damaged trees encountered in the woods and garbage from the streets to question human behaviour, especially the conflicts we have within our urban and natural environments.
Train Train Médina (07:00)
By Mohamadou Ndoye Douts
One day, to build a house, one begins to steal sand, the sand on the beach. In the Medina , it all becomes a muddle. Communication between people and places, it is all part of the chaos. One day everything collapses. Living together with no respect for the earth brings a time of misfortune, which buries and erases everything, leaving no trace.
Who I am and What I Want (07:30)
By David Shrigley and Chris Shepherd
UK
This film is about who I am and what I want. It's NOT about who YOU are and what YOU want. You always think everything I make is about you but it's not. It's all about me...
Ich Bin Ein Manipulator/The Manipulators (3:00)
By Claire E. Rojas and Andrew Jeffrey Wright
USA
"Ich Bin Ein Manipulator" uses sharpie markers and white-out correctional fluid to manipulate the images that are used to manipulate the masses. Advertising and fashion magazine images are covered and altered to create a retaliation of absurd humour. The animators, Clare Rojas and Andrew Jeffrey Wright, seek to help us laugh and disregard the more hurtful aspects of the media. Enjoy.
The Very Thought of You (02:45)
By Karl Hunter
IRL
The artist is filmed each day holding up the front page of the daily newspaper.
He sings the song "The Very Thought of You" and as the song progresses, the lyrics of the song replace the words of the newspaper headlines.
The film utilises the pop song's sentimental take on romantic obsession in combination with an idea of the heroic cult of adversity.
The Ibero-American Trilogy - Bolivia 3: Confederation Next (15:00) By Martín Sastre
UY
This futuristic trilogy by Uruguayan artist Martín Sastre shows us our own future as a flashback, beginning with the fall of Hollywood and extending to the creation of a new order.
"BOLIVIA 3: Confederation Next" takes us to the year 2876, and Tom Cruise is ready to tell us the History of the War for Fiction Control that started hundreds of years ago in Europe with a sword fight between Uruguayan/Sub-American artist, Martín Sastre and U.S./American Artist, Matthew Barney.
Habitat (08:30)
By Lars Arrhenius and Johannes Müntzing
In "Habitat" we follow nine people and a dog in a three-storey apartment building. An urban story, where the drama of the building mixes the ordinary and the absurd with humour and seriousness.
879 B&W (00:48)
879 Colour (01:23)
By J. Tobias Anderson
"879" is based upon 879 drawn still images from Alfred Hitchcock's classic "North by Northwest", redone into a transparent black and white version. The images that were chosen from the Swedish translation of the movie were replaced in chronological order, one frame per illustration, and through this a completely new expression and a new work is created.
And In the End (06:33)
By John O'Connell
UK
Shot on sixteen millimetres the film opens onto a timeless arena. Uninhabited, this space evolves through the language of landscape. Weather systems are performed, strange acts occur and sounds trace unknown activities. As the form of the film evolves the severity of the weather increases and in its attempt for salvation the land struggles to reform through a series of tectonic acts.
Contact: Tom Flanagan 0879202432
Email: ensoart (at) yahoo.ie
Enso is a not-for-profit artist-led initiative based in Galway since 2003. Enso creates projects and Live Art events that interact with their urban environment in a site specific way, often collaborating with multi-disciplinary practitioners and groups. Enso Artists are Tom Flanagan, Andrea Fitzpatrick, Megs Morley and Kevin Flanagan. www.ensoart.com
Darklight is Ireland’s premier festival for filmmakers, animators and artists whose work explores the convergence of art, film and technology. www.darklight-filmfestival.com/ Enso is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland, Galway City Council.
