Lee Walton:

If you had to sum up this action in one instructional sentence or formula it would be something like:

Use your hands to feel a diverse range of things in the city.

Notice he takes the common expression “Getting a Feel for Things” literally in this work, and feels things. See how he uses common expressions, and simple instructions as a formula for creating in the following videos.

If conceptually informed artworks are ones in which an idea determines the work, as opposed to the artist’s masterful technique, or the perfect handling of materials. In fact, when you follow directions, things might even turn out badly, things can break down, fail, fall apart. There is tremendous tension in this – when we really don’t know how things are going to go. Watch Jon Sasaki play with attempting to do something, and the possibility (and sometimes the reality) of failing, falling, or otherwise destroying everything.

Kelly Mark:

Sniff:

https://kellymark.com/V_Sniff1Video.html

Hello/Goodbye:

https://kellymark.com/V_HelloGoodbyeVIDEO.html

I love Love Songs but Angry Music Makes me Happy:

https://kellymark.com/V_ILoveLoveSongsVIDEO.html

Jon Sasaki:

Ladder Climb:

http://www.jonsasaki.com/index.php/work/ladder-climb/

Dead End, Eastern Market, Detroit:

http://www.jonsasaki.com/index.php/work/dead-end-eastern-market-detroit/

Harrison and Wood

Michelle Pearson Clarke:

https://michelepearsonclarke.com/suck-teeth-compositions

Lenka Clayton:

Human Beings. 1-100 (2006)

“This is first in a series of four films – People In Order – commissioned by the UK’s Channel 4 in 2006. The concept behind our films was simple: we asked ourselves if you can reveal something about life by simply arranging people according to scales. Three minutes is a very short time to communicate something – perhaps too short to tell a story, or to get to know a character – so we wanted to make this series by setting ourselves some very straightforward rules, and then following them through over a long trip. The rules had to be simple so it would take the audience virtually no time to understand them. We established what scales we’d look at, and then chose how each film would be framed. Then it was a case of getting in a campervan and driving round Britain, filming as many people as we could over 4 weeks in February, coping with microphones crackling and our camera refusing to work.

The experience was exhausting but also life affirming. In our whole trip we were struck by how happy people were to help. Only a handful of our shoots were arranged in advance. We relied instead on the kindness of strangers – and we found that everywhere, from deprived urban estates to rural aristocrats.

The resulting films are like a list of government statistics where the citizens they are referring to have broken out from behind the figures on the page. The people on the screen stop us from seeing them as numbers.

Adad Hannah:

Blackwater Ophelia:

https://adadhannah.com/2013-blackwater-ophelia

The Russians:

https://adadhannah.com/2011-the-russians-videos

arina; Ulay, «Rest Energy», 1980

Standing across from one another in slated position. Looking each other in the eye. I hold a bow and Ulay holds the string with the arrow pointing directly to my heart. Microphones attached to both hearts recording the increasing number of heart beats.

Rineke Dijkstra

Candice Breitz

Candice Breitz
‘Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley),’ 2005

Breitz’s experiments in the field of portraiture can cumulatively be described as an ongoing anthropology of the fan.

In each case, Breitz first sets out to identify ardent fans of the musical icon to be portrayed, by placing ads in newspapers, magazines and fanzines, as well as on the Internet. Those who respond to this initial call (typically numbering in their hundreds) are then put through a rigorous set of procedures designed to exclude less than authentic fans of the celebrity in question, in order to arrive at the final group of participants.

The individuals who appear in these works have thus stepped forward to identify themselves as fans, and have been included purely on this basis: all other factors – their appearance; their ability to sing, act or dance; their gender and age – are treated as irrelevant for the purpose of selection. Each of the selected fans is offered the opportunity to re-perform a complete album, from the first song to the last, in a professional recording studio. The portraits evoke their mainstream entertainment counterparts (such as American Idol or Pop Idol), but also take significant distance from their reality television cousins: Breitz promises her subjects neither fame nor fortune. What she offers them is an opportunity to record the songs that have come to soundtrack their lives in whatever way they choose. The non-hierarchical grids that she uses to organize the final presentation of the fans in each portrait, allow Breitz to deliberately sidestep the question of who has fared better or worse under the conditions that she has created for these quasi-anthropological visual essays on the culture of the fan. Whether the fans who pay tribute to their icons in her portraits are victims of a coercive culture industry or users of a culture that they creatively absorb and translate according to their needs, is left to the viewer to decide. If the dignity of the portrayed fans remains surprisingly intact, it is because rather than prompting us to laugh at the fans that she lines up, Breitz forces us to reflect on the extent to which pop music has infiltrated our own biographies.

Titling the series of works as she does, Breitz asks that we locate these multi-channel installations within the genre of portraiture, and prompts the question of how they in fact relate to this most humanist of genres. (From the artist’s video channel)

Pipilotti Rist:

Zoe

Experimental Films of Andy Warhol:

No survey of the second half of the twentieth century would be complete without mentioning Andy Warhol. More commonly known as the pop master of the silkscreen painting, Warhol was also the maker of over 400 films. From the early minimal works such as Sleep and Blow Job, to the later epic The Chelsea Girls, Warhol was a highly active disciple and proponent of the moving image, at least from the time he acquired his first film camera in 1963. Shot in 1964, and lasting a soporific five hours and twenty minutes, the film Sleep was one of his first experiments in film making and consists of Warhol’s lover at the time, John Giorno, doing nothing other than sleeping. Described by Warhol as an “anti-film”, he would later extend the same filming and cutting technique to eight hours for his subsequent film Empire, constantly solely of footage of the Empire State Building.

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist, widely considered to be the founder of video art. From 1962 he was a member of the avant-garde art movement Fluxus, and was the first proponent of utilising television sets as the principal material component of his sculptural assemblies. He is credited with one of the first video works in the mid-Sixties after the introduction of hand held video recording equipment for the general population, making increasingly elaborate stacks of video monitors and television based sculptures from the 1970s onwards.
If conceptually informed artworks are ones in which an idea determines the work. You can think of some of the works below as a response to a simple, one sentence instruction. (From https://magazine.artland.com/history-of-video-art-part-i/)

Bruce Nauman

Born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Bruce Nauman has been recognized since the early 1970s as one of the most innovative and provocative of America’s contemporary artists. Nauman finds inspiration in the activities, speech, and materials of everyday life. Confronted with the question “What to do?” in his studio soon after leaving school, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.” (From https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s1/identity/)

William Wegman

Marina Abramovic

Abramović was raised in Yugoslavia by parents who fought as Partisans in World War II and were later employed in the communist government of Josip Broz Tito. In 1965 she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade to study painting. Eventually, however, she became interested in the possibilities of performance art, specifically the ability to use her body as a site of artistic and spiritual exploration. After completing postgraduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1972, Abramović conceived a series of visceral performance pieces that engaged her body as both subject and medium. In Rhythm 10 (1973), for instance, she methodically stabbed the spaces between her fingers with a knife, at times drawing blood. In Rhythm 0 (1974) she stood immobile in a room for six hours along with 72 objects, ranging from a rose to a loaded gun, that the audience was invited to use on her however they wished. These pieces provoked controversy not only for their perilousness but also for Abramović’s occasional nudity, which would become a regular element of her work thereafter.

Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful is one example of how, in the early years of performance art, female artists used their own bodies to challenge the institution of art and the notion of beauty. Marina has said in an interview that during the 1970s, “if the woman artist would apply make-up or put [on] nail polish, she would not have been considered serious enough.”

Breathing In/Breathing Out:

‘We are kneeling face to face, pressing our mouths together. Our noses are blocked with cigarette filters. I am breathing in oxygen. I am breathing out carbon dioxide.’

In their performance piece Breathing In/Breathing Out Marina Abramovic and Ulay blocked their noses with cigarette filters and clamped their mouths tightly together, breathing in and out each other’s air.  After seventeen minutes they both fell to the floor unconscious. The viewers could sense the tension through the sound of their breathing, which was augmented through microphones attached to their chests.  Is it a beautiful romantic gesture or a comment on how relationships absorb and destroy an individual?

“Something tender and violent at the same time emerges from the performance: the couple are decided to stick together despite the effort, the danger, the damage; but as is the case with human relations of this kind of intensity, they end up with violence, pain, and a part of each other ‘dead’. It is the idea of interdependency portrayed to its extreme.” Interartive

Source

AAA-AAA (performance RTB, Liege), 1977

AAA-AAA centres on the relationship between two lovers. They started from an equal position to end up outdoing each other.

Source

Abramovic, Marina; Ulay, «Rest Energy», 1980

Standing across from one another in slated position. Looking each other in the eye. I hold a bow and Ulay holds the string with the arrow pointing directly to my heart. Microphones attached to both hearts recording the increasing number of heart beats.

Rineke Dijkstra

Candice Breitz

Candice Breitz
‘Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley),’ 2005

Breitz’s experiments in the field of portraiture can cumulatively be described as an ongoing anthropology of the fan.

In each case, Breitz first sets out to identify ardent fans of the musical icon to be portrayed, by placing ads in newspapers, magazines and fanzines, as well as on the Internet. Those who respond to this initial call (typically numbering in their hundreds) are then put through a rigorous set of procedures designed to exclude less than authentic fans of the celebrity in question, in order to arrive at the final group of participants.

The individuals who appear in these works have thus stepped forward to identify themselves as fans, and have been included purely on this basis: all other factors – their appearance; their ability to sing, act or dance; their gender and age – are treated as irrelevant for the purpose of selection. Each of the selected fans is offered the opportunity to re-perform a complete album, from the first song to the last, in a professional recording studio. The portraits evoke their mainstream entertainment counterparts (such as American Idol or Pop Idol), but also take significant distance from their reality television cousins: Breitz promises her subjects neither fame nor fortune. What she offers them is an opportunity to record the songs that have come to soundtrack their lives in whatever way they choose. The non-hierarchical grids that she uses to organize the final presentation of the fans in each portrait, allow Breitz to deliberately sidestep the question of who has fared better or worse under the conditions that she has created for these quasi-anthropological visual essays on the culture of the fan. Whether the fans who pay tribute to their icons in her portraits are victims of a coercive culture industry or users of a culture that they creatively absorb and translate according to their needs, is left to the viewer to decide. If the dignity of the portrayed fans remains surprisingly intact, it is because rather than prompting us to laugh at the fans that she lines up, Breitz forces us to reflect on the extent to which pop music has infiltrated our own biographies.

Titling the series of works as she does, Breitz asks that we locate these multi-channel installations within the genre of portraiture, and prompts the question of how they in fact relate to this most humanist of genres. (From the artist’s video channel)

Divya Mehra

Selections from Ryan Trecartin

Source

Ryan Trecartin (b.1981) is a contemporary American artist who works largely in video. While his work often incorporates ideas and images related to social media and technology, he claims that he is interested primarily in relationships and the ways in which the Internet has changed how people relate to the world and one another.[1] While Trecartin often posts his movies online and draws recurring themes and motifs from Internet culture, he also builds sculptural environments and installations in museums for showing his work.[2] In What’s the Love Making Babies For, Trecartin employs digital manipulations, extreme editing, and chaotic dialogue in a way that is characteristic of his artistic style, creating a world that is “hyper-saturated with media.” [3] More relevant to the concerns of this program, he also engages with ideas of authority, expertise, and the dissemination of information, as his characters forward their often warped and sometimes indecipherable ideas surrounding “reproduction, sexuality, and contemporary moralities” by engaging with traditional formats such as the TV commercial.[4] However, Trecartin roots his movie in the digitized Internet landscape, thus evoking questions surrounding how modes of communication and information transmission transform and morph in the digital age. (From [1] Calvin Tomkins, “Experimental People,” The New Yorker, March 14, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201…. [2] Ibid. [3] “What’s the Love Making Babies For,” Electronic Arts Intermix, accessed December 14, 2015, http://eai.org/title.htm?id=12291.he

Make a Kilometre

Video Art Project

Compilation Video: PoP

This video tooks us the longest to make, but ultimately I feel it paid off. There was a lot of learning involved durring the shoot, which took a lot of time, and we were tired. That being said there is something enagaing about this tirednesss and I am glad it happened this way.

ONE SHOT : Hubba Bubba

Something that stands out to me about this video is our braids and glasses. We talked about how these choices gave us a youthful/child like presence, while obviously not being children. This coupeld with the bubblegum makes a somewhat uncomfortable illusion to childhood and the school girl trope, which I find engaging.

LOOP:

Something enticing about this video is the the closeness. We talked in class about covid and the impliactions salvia, germs, and space and I think this video really showcases this.

Toronto Trip

The Power Plant

Audio Art Project

The Sound of 7 AM

This audio peice features a compilation of noises taken from my shared student house bathroom. Inspired by our faulty cabinet hinges ( they produce an echoing click whenever you open them) I tried to complile a varity of noises to emmualte the sounds I wake up to most mornings -in this way it becomes a portrait of my experience living in this house/time. Every morning I hear my roomates morning routines and these noises parrel the rythmn of music. The rythmn is is drawn from the sound of my hair brushing. The tempo accompaning is taken from the clicking cabinets. The fast clicking is a small clip taken from the uncapping of my hair cream bottle.

Conceptual Portrait

As Good As Gold

Artist Buttons

Stock Image Happy Man

For my artist buttons I choose to create a collection of smiling stock images. Originally I had wanted to craft buttons that played into the absurdity of stock images and what that meant socially; However, as I was collecting images I realized how much the white man domaintes the stock images (particularly a white man in a blue shirt). The more I collected these the more absurd and strange the collection became. These buttons challenge the idea of representation in media, but also what it means to objectify something or someone. This objectification does not ussually occur with people that look like the people in my buttons, which is an interesting shift. Addtionally the fact that they are buttons allows for intresting converstaitons depending on who is wearing it. What does is mean for a women of colour to wear a button of a white man?

I tried to create an intimate experience with this recording of how it feels to inject myself with hormones every week. This is my 16th time injecting myself with testosterone, hence the title. I wanted a clearer recording of the heartbeat in the background, but I feel the slight murkiness of it replicates the feeling of hearing your own heartbeat well. I think this recording would best be listened to with headphones. The noises in the background are the sounds of unwrapping the needle, sanitizing, etc. I wish I was able to remove the loud rumble in the background while still keeping the heart beat in place.

Convenient Condoms: Buttons

Conceptual Kilometre

Video of my kilometre: https://x1.experimentalstudio.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Make_A_Kilometer.Oliver_Smith-1.mov

Evidence of my kilometre: https://x1.experimentalstudio.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Make_A_Kilometer.Oliver_Smith.EVIDENCE.mov

One Feat, Three Ways

Subject of Interest, 2023 (One-Shot)

Rephrasing, 2023 (Sequence Video)

Rough Schedule, 2023 (Loop Video)

Audio Art

Opening The Door for People for Too Long, 2023

The idea to record me holding the door for others piqued my interest when I let a long string of people come through for a straight minute, unsure when it was okay to let go and walk into the building. While generous and an act of kindness, the repetition of responses—both from people thanking me and myself responding to their thanks—and the uncertainty when it was right to put my well-being before others were worth examining. Going to the University Centre around the afternoon, the audio excerpt comes from a 30-minute recording of myself holding one door open for people, documenting responses from both people and the noticeable pattern with them. Although noticeable that each response directed to me varied in the tone of voice, every person responded with a “thank you,” while I cycled through “you’re welcome” and “no worries” with little deviation. Holding doors is a welcomed gesture, but when taken to a extreme length it becomes tiring, repetitive, and degrades your own needs for the sakes of others to an unhealthy extent.

Conceptual Portrait

Eventually Finishing A Snowman, 2023

Artist Buttons

I’m getting the hang of button making, 2023

Hi everyone!

Here is my first version of my kilometre titled “A Kilometre in my Camaro”.

Week 2 – Make a Kilometre

Week 5 – Three Feats

Week 6 – Field Trip

On Wednesday February 15th, we headed down to Toronto for a Field Trip to visit 3 different galleries, two of them were public, one was a private gallery. We started off at Powerplant, and it had various artists on exhibit. The one that really stood out to me was by “Amartey Golding: In the Comfort of Embers”. This was a video piece with artifacts used in the video displayed in the back half of the room. Sitting in the dark, watching such a powerful video on a large scale screen with the intense music had made an impact and really drew my attention. Golding’s work was so beautiful to me and all I could think about the rest of the trip was his exhibit!

Moving forward we stooped to get lunch at Kensington Market for a break, which was s cut a fun stop! We were really lucky that it was so nice out that day…

Next we went to TPW and we experienced an audio piece. It is originally a 2 hour piece, although we did not listen to the entire piece, the excerpts we heard were amazing. They had 4 speakers in each corner of the room and we were welcomed to sit, lay, stand, whatever you felt comfortable to listen to the piece. I found that as I played on the giant bean bag chair I got so immersed to the sound that I started to zone out. Then came on a piece of four women who snag in unison and harmonized, as it continued I got more hypnotized to the voices to the point that I couldn’t lie down as I started to doze off. It was amazing because I never thought I would like audio work, but seeing it in a gallery and getting to experience it made such a difference. We made a quick stop next door to the Daniel Faria Gallery and it had on display a few Mark Lewis videos, which were really interesting to watch as they both had no sound. Seeing a video work with no audio made you view the story more clearly in an intentional way and almost come up with your own narrative to what the people in the videos may be talking about.

Overall, the field trip was a great experience to see art in the real world and see what we have been talking about in class. It has definitely made me want to go to galleries more consistently to experience this art.

Week 8 – Audio Art

For my audio art, I had a lot of trouble trying to decide what I wanted to do. I originally over complicated it and wanted to create a sound piece that honestly is above my skill level. The more I thought about it, I wanted something that was fun to create and experiment with. I came across the idea of incorporating myself and friends in the audio piece as it would make it more fun and real, I just had to come up with an idea of how to do that. I liked the idea of having a word or a phrase said in different ways and thus the idea was born. My room mate was having her birthday party that weekend and it was disco themed. I thought that it the best atmosphere to interview people, you have people who are mostly in a happy mood and their attention and clarity at a party would definitely…differ, depending on who you are talking to. So, I had my microphone ready and I went around asking people to say a quote, knowing some would be familiar with it and others wouldn’t have a clue. I asked them to say “Groovy, Baby!” in whatever way they chose, however they wanted. Now some of my friends knew that this is from Austin Power’s, but other gave me a weird look as to why I asked them to say this. For context I gave instructions to each person, “Say the quote however you interpret it” and “I’m gonna hold the microphone here, don’t move your head at all, just stay still”. Some people had great listening skills….others did not (of course). So I still kept those hiccups in, because in the end that is how the person said it and they kept it real. I thought it gave a proper representation of what the arty atmosphere can look like interns of people’s energy levels and the level they can follow instructions at, in the moment. I appreciate that you can hear the enthusiasm in people’s voices, the confusion, the attitude and overall the curiosity of why I am asking them to do this in the middle of a house party.

Week 10 – Conceptual Portrait

For my conceptual portrait, I chose to compile my memories, artifacts, and pictures from my concert journey starting in 2013, that is still continuing. Although I used my personal belongings for this project, it speaks to a larger idea of the portrait of a fan. Ranging from the very start of a concert-goers journey you can see that the first artifact is a physical ticket, which is not so common any more (and we see this change as the concerts move on). Throughout the pages we see how they differ in terms of number of photos, if there were any [physical artifacts like a t-shirt, confetti, buttons, signs and more. Every page shows an experience and although they are different, they have a common theme that there is a sense of euphoria when attending a concert, it is a core memory filled with joy and excitement. It properly displays the portrait of a fan that not all pictures are clean and clear, you are always at different angles from the stage, and the feeling that the attendance of a concert is to have the experience of being there. I found that this conceptual portrait embodies myself as it is my personal experiences, but any concert-goer can relate as they understand the nostalgia and the memories. This conceptual portrait spoke to a larger audience as you see what the attendee sees and from their point of view and the items collected.

Week 12 – Artist Multiple

For the artist multiple, I chose to create a project surrounding the photos I have taken of the CN Tower. For years, I have been taking photos of the CN Tower when ever I visit Toronto, whether that is for work, adventures, or for a day out. This piece represents the many views there are of the CN Tower in different season and different times of the day. We can see close up shots, views from far away, night or day, and the tower lit up or not. These buttons have a sense of being a tourist getting a piece of memorabilia from Toronto, even though they are simply just a personal collection of photos. I was inspired to do a piece where each piece is related to one another, but slightly different in its own way. These pins can be worn with two together, one alone, or all at once, and is meant to be taken as a keep sake of the most recognizable part of the City of Toronto.

Tattoo and Button Party!

What a great semester this was! It was so fun to have a party for the last day where I got the chance to be tattooed by the Experimental 2 class (and I looked really tough by the end of the day with all of the tattoos), and to trade buttons with everyone in the class! Here are some fun photos from the day!