INTERVIEW
FIELDLINES
In his projects, American visual artist Aaron Meyers has been dealing with the aspects of the visualization of sound and music. His freely available application Fieldlines, made as a supplement for the Flying Lotus record cover, functions as an interactive installation, and will be shortly discussed in the following interview.
SURF ON SURFACE (audiovisual performance, 35 mins)
Georgij Bagdasarov studied composition at the Music Academy in Moscow and film in St. Petersburg. In his musical career he has gone through stages ranging from punk and techno to free improvisation with found and prepared items. His audiovisual projects are reminders of reminiscences; he emphasises the material nature of the medium and works with references to the history of cinema.
SOFT PALATE (2010)
Austrian visual artist and experimental filmmaker comes back to PAF to give premiere of his video Soft Palate, where he for the first time works with deconstruction of animated film. During the premiere he will also show thematically preceding video Shadow Cuts, which was made during this year.
Cinema's New Possibilities – Cinema is Dead, Long Live Cinema
You have decided to show your film The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover, which is very rich in a determination to use colour. You are still very interested in this kind of work in your recent projects - feature films, installations and VJing set ups - can we still speak about the determination of film colour?
The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover was made way back in the 1980s - so is some 30 years old. We have made perhaps some 50 films since then, and all my cinema practice is experimental - searching to be alive and curious and very contemporary, push the cinematic boundaries to new places. My interests primarily have always been about form and language over content, seriously believing the medium is the message and we have seen a great many changes in cinema practice in the last 30 years - changes that primarily technically have moved from celluloid to tape which has changed everything - cinema distribution, cinema funding, cinema thinking - no longer are audiences content to sit in a dark cinema watching someone's else dreams - they want to make their own, break down the old criteria, invest in new narrativities, think in a non-linear way - such that if cinema is going to survive in any way that our grandfathers would still recognise it - it surely has to be interactive and multi-medial. Youtube has broken amazing barriers - the middlemen are disappearing - film-makers can get to audiences swifter and more urgently. Few young people spend much time in the cinema any more in Western Europe - if they watch movies they are all down-loaded from broadcast TV or pirated - and we all know European Cinema is now finished - who is there now working in Europe with vision and identity? There are now better things to do with our time.
THE PARTICIPS OF ILLUSTRATION
I’d like you to introduce the process of you creation, the uniqueness you call Particips that you linearly line up and number since 1997…
I started to use the term “Particip” for two reasons. I wanted to, in the most precise, or at least the most fitting way, define the “cloud” within which I am moving and from which emerge something under my hands or in my head, and also the feature or power determinant for this setting. It was an intuitive attempt to connect up with and join on something, it was some kind of roughly defined interest in edges and framing and in how to be involved in the given situation, how to enjoy it. For example Pariticp No. 1 is a product of boredom in the room I was to use for one month as a studio. I fantasized I could just watch TV in that room, so I cut out the stencil of television set and sprayed it onto the wall… and then I just watched it, sometimes for a while, sometimes I just glimpsed at it. The wit as a stimulus for the birth of an idea has initiatory quality, I don’t underestimate it, but I don’t invocate it either. Though I know it does work. By the term “Particip” I was also trying to handle the bizarre situation when something came into being and after that you work on how to name it. Sort of “useless” continuation of process that has already been work off. Its title or name is already present in the work from the very beginning – let it be interjection, name or compound sentence. For me the problem is once for all solved by the term “Particip”. I just add the serial number and brief description.
