Emile Zile

Bart Rutten of the Stedelijk invited me to come up with a short film introduction and live visual mix for this upcoming conference on museum as content creator. Thinking of Zabriskie point slow-motion explosions of the Guggenheim, youtube tourist videos from outside the represented museums, postcards and snapshots, classicism and iconography. Free entry, reserve via doku.arts@mediafonds.nl

June 11, TrouwAmsterdam, Witbautstraat 127, 1091 GL Amsterdam

http://www.doku-arts.com/2010/program/seminar_artcasting.html

12.30 coffee and tea / visual prologue Emile Zile

Emile Zile is an artist and performer engaged with popular screen iconography, hybrid performance and single-channel video.

13.10 lecture Margriet Schavemaker, Head of Collections, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

A critical analysis of the history of the intricate relationships between museums and media productions: from the early films and television productions up to the latest digital presentations of moving images on the internet and locative media.

13.45 lecture Jane Burton, Head of Content and Creative Director, Tate Media

Besides the wide variety of Tate Media productions and its online platform from which these moving images (lectures, interviews and documentation of exhibitions) are broadcast, Jane Burton will discuss the new Tate plans to produce a feature animation film.

14.45 lecture Anne-Michèle Ulrich, Director audio-visual department, Centre Pompidou

Centre Pompidou is coproducer of the film on Alexander Calder, presented by Doku.Arts. Anne-Michèle Ulrich will present a new iPhone application, and show a preview of the new internet channel centrepompidou.tv, which will premiere in November 2010.
A critical retrospective of the first year of Arttube will be offered, tuning in on the pros and cons, and focusing on the development of this media channel from marketing tool to ‘curatorial depth’.

My regular screening night returns with films that were scheduled in May, but delayed due to Icelandic gods of vulkan interruption. Full details at http://www.electric-cinema.org

Tuesday 8 June 2010 at Overtoom 301 Amsterdam

Final Flesh 90′ dir. Vernon Chatman 2009 U.S.A.
House 88′ dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi 1977 Japan

From the creator of Xavier: Renegade Angel and Wonder Showzen, Final Flesh – a feature film made by commercial porn companies commissioned to visualise the sexual fantasies of the client. This movie replaces the sex with metaphysical dialogue, cum shots with cold meat, intercourse with brain-damaged philosophy. A murky, awkward trip to suburban fantasies, existentialist longing for meaning and antibacterial hand cream. The second film on the bill is an optically intense, Japanese teen-comedy ghost film ‘House’, Dario Argento circa Suspiria meets Sound of Music on acid. Beware of singing watermelons and carnivorous pianos.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vmhyfXFtyGE

Three days in a cinema to pick the brain of Mike Figgis, director, artist and musician. Sugar and cocaine. Digital and celluloid. Grain and focus. Portrait and landscape. Hollywood and independence. Script-writing and score notation. Bullshit and real bullshit. Theatre and self-obsession.  Pornography and J.L. Godard.

Brilliant, real and inspiring.

http://www.mikefiggis.co.uk

Thanks to Janine Dijkmeijer at Cinedans.nl

BUSH “BUSHMAN COMETH” DOOF this Saturday night (00:00-02:00) in Amsterdam.

Last ever party in the current location of the Service Garage.

http://www.deservicegarage.nl

http://www.bushdoof.eu

REVISIT EXQUISIT
Duo-tentoonstelling Kaleb de Groot & Roosje Klap
(laatste tentoonstelling op de huidige locatie van de Service Garage)

Opening: zaterdag 29 mei, 20:00 uur Muziek: Nathalie Bruys & Emile Zile
Geopend: 29 mei t/m 20 juni, woensdag t/m zondag 12:00-18:00
Finissage: zondag 20 juni

“From pretty to ugly and back again; mysterious ways of beauty in photography”

http://www.tedxamsterdam.com/2009/video-hans-aarsman-on-the-mysterious-ways-of-beauty-in-photography/

Emile Zile (AU/LV) and Vela Arbutina (CH) play pre-recorded repetitive beat music that you can dance to.

N0 M0RE! th0se t|mes are 0ver. |NSTANT DANCE ENJ0YMENT SP|RTUAL HEAL|NG 100%!!!! Bel|eve!!!!D|d y0u ever th|nk….. |t d0esnt w0rk!? N0w |t d0es! Ha 4real! Read 0n–B00MB00MBUSHD00F th|s w|ll help,My l0ved fr|ends t0ld me: “b0red0m and med|0cr|ty equals b0red0m and med|0cr|ty” t0 wh|ch | had 0ne replyDANCE ENJ0YMENT SP|RTUAL HEAL|NG 24 H0urs 0NLY w|th 0ur B00MB00MBUSHD00F!!!!Try |t N0W!… t0 g00d t0 be tr00? | th0uhgt s0 t00  ….at f|rst. Try |t n0w. Be welc0me t0 y0ur new l|ves-style.

http://www.palaisparadiso.nl
http://www.bushdoof.eu

I finished post-production on this video just as the Melbourne band embark on a string of dates in the U.S.A, including shows at SXSW. Try to see them if you are in that neck of the woods. They will be touring with the equally awesome Beaches.

An occular assault edit of no-input analog video effects, courtesy of an old panasonic a/v mixer. Triangles, hexagons courtesy of final cut pro. My extended attention span courtesy of espresso and licorice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3sSK88YRGU

Vimeo alternative http://vimeo.com/9934856

(but it looks so much more electrifying on a bright tube monitor)

Official clip for ‘Forever’ by Love Of Diagrams taken from the album Nowhere Forever
Unstable Ape Records, Melbourne
dir. Emile Zile 2010

http://www.loveofdiagrams.com

https://emilezile.com

Dafna Maimon’s take on arts industry workers, recent art school graduates, art guards and the dreams and fears of the people at the frontline of cultural institutions. The protagonists use black parcan theatre lights on mic stands to frame their monologues. A white light too strong. Lights. Camera. Action.The repetitious scenes were almost nausea inducing in their hammy under/overacted delivery. Exquisitely bland dialogue, sometimes directed to audience members or the unwitting gallery visitor who becomes part of the narrative. Tiny, intoxicating scenes that would be repeated over the course of an hour.

Inane moving of lights. Incessant moving of the framing devices. The power a directed light has to focus energy and create an immediate stage is profound. The spotlight gives license to the characters to deliver lines in much the same way that social networking platforms or micro-blogging services gives licence to transmit little traumas, everyday desires and narcissistic impulses. These individuals prepare their monologues for the amorphous mass, one liners that are both media-conscious and personal. They recite language to the ether, not a directed conversational language, but a never-ending stream of quotes, self-critical comments and weak commands. The dialogue of mediated individualism. I felt we were trapped in the lucid daydreaming IM chats of bored gallery sitters and wannabe curators.

Melodramatic pauses and romantic dialogue interspersed with asides to the audience “If this was a film I would be shot over the shoulder in medium close-up”. Characters moving in highly artificial arcs. The pacing is drawn out and gives ample room for slippage, coincidences and accidents. A character sighs and delivers a highly breathy and despairing “Help. The website is stuck again”. This is anti-depressant operatic tragedy set to the scale of 21st century comment culture.

09/01/10. W139, Warmoesstraat 139, Amsterdam

Directed by Dafna Maimon

Performers: Anu Vahtra, Lot Meijers, Steven de Jong, Timothy Moore

http://www.dafnamaimon.com
http://www.w139.nl

Google screenshot painting by Tyler Wilde.

Article by Dutch-Australian media theorist Geert Lovink on google, society of the spectacle/query and the shape of critical thought in this info-glut.

‘The society of the query and the Googlization of our lives’

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-09-05-lovink-en.html

An excerpt

Ever since the rise of search engines in the 1990s we have been living in the “society of the query”, which, as Weizenbaum indicates, is not far removed from the “society of the spectacle”. Written in the late 1960s, Guy Debord’s situationist analysis was based on the rise of the film, television and advertisement industries. The main difference today is that we are explicitly requested to interact. We are no longer addressed as an anonymous mass of passive consumers but instead are “distributed actors” who are present on a multitude of channels. Debord’s critique of commodification is no longer revolutionary. The pleasure of consumerism is so widespread that it is has reached the status of a universal human right. We all love the commodity fetish, the brands, and indulge in the glamour that the global celebrity class performs on our behalf. There is no social movement or cultural practice, however radical, that can escape the commodity logic. No strategy has been devised to live in the age of the post-spectacle. Concerns have instead been focusing on privacy, or what’s left of it. The capacity of capitalism to absorb its adversaries is such that, unless all private telephone conversations and Internet traffic became were to become publicly available, it is next to impossible to argue why we still need criticism – in this case of the Internet.

Mock up on Mu
dir. Craig Baldwin (USA, 2009, 110 min)
Première: 3 December, 22:00 hrs Smart Project Space

A new movie by Craig Baldwin, straight out of the Other Cinema compound in San Francisco. The latest in his canon that includes Tribulation 99, Sonic Outlaws and Spectres of the Spectrum, all intoxicating feature-length films that use pre-exisitng media. Screening this Thursday night in Amsterdam.

Mock up on Mu dir. Craig Baldwin (USA, 2009, 110 min) Première: 3 December, 22:00 hrs. Smart Project Space Amsterdam

A radical hybrid of spy, sci-fi, Western, and even horror genres, Craig Baldwin’s Mock Up On Mu cobbles together a feature-length ‘collage-narrative’ based on (mostly) true stories of California’s post-War sub-cultures of rocket pioneers, alternative religions and Beat lifestyles that creates an alternative American history.

‘..an often hilarious, sometimes inscrutable, always original film that’s part pop-cultural fantasia, part capitalist critique’ – New York Magazine