I'm Just Happy to Be Here

Videoinstallation with methacrylate / no sound / 2018. Underwater Images recorded in Baja California Sur (México)

Portrait of Andy Goldsworthy, an artist whose specialty is ephemeral sculptures made from elements of nature.

Nearly devoid of editing resources, the videos feature single shots of anonymous people in daily life, subtly revealed/highlighted through zooming. Instead of uncovering reality, though, the videos end up turning it into pure invention. The “videorhizomes” are not limited to production and screening in regular, traditional circuits. The process includes sending the videos to a person that is randomly chosen from the phone book.

Nearly devoid of editing resources, the videos feature single shots of anonymous people in daily life, subtly revealed/highlighted through zooming. Instead of uncovering reality, though, the videos end up turning it into pure invention. The “videorhizomes” are not limited to production and screening in regular, traditional circuits. The process includes sending the videos to a person that is randomly chosen from the phone book.

1-channel film installation (21‘20‘‘). 2.00:1 aspherical widescreen, stereophonic sound. A wife waits for her dead husband. An adaption of three japanese poems in three different translations. An examination of waiting and the slowness of time. An exercise in slow cinema.

An unnamed passer-by is forced to trace a circular route inside an abandoned tram station, facing loss and time. The broken walls act as a channel, transmitting fragmentary, blurred and analogical memories. 

To be in Venice and see the architecture of New York, to perceive in a painting by Tintoretto the birth of animated images, to look at the burlesque Cretinetti as the ancestor of montage - so many shifts, displacements, and striking telescopings that Philippe-Alain Michaud proposes in this film dedicated to him. To follow this art historian, curator of the cinema collections at the Centre Pompidou, is to go from the oriental carpet to the film, or from the first fireworks to the cinema. And everywhere the animation of the images - projections of Antony McCall, or of Paul Sharits, Column without end of Brancusi, Pasolini's Accatone - everything moves! Under the tutelage of Aby Warburg, the great art historian of the early twentieth century, precursor of iconology and image comparison, to whom Philippe-Alain Michaud was the first in France to devote an important essay, eleven images are placed on the table to describe the singular journey of this art historian.

In the first stages of prototype, Storm is an interactive VR installation that places audiences in the path of a phenomenal, awe-inspiring storm. Take a moment to be swept into an exhilarating multi-sensory vortex.

A prestigious Stockholm museum's chief art curator finds himself in times of both professional and personal crisis as he attempts to set up a controversial new exhibit.

Falling Frames is the first fragment of a series in which Langkamp explores the framing and visualization of three-dimensional perspective through the two-dimensional medium of video, both technically as well as conceptually. To record the work, a special device was built that's attached to a tall industrial crane, which contains a stack of wooden picture frames that can be released from a height of ten to fifteen meters. The camera is placed right in the center of the action and captures the frames' movement while they fall down. The slow motion recording of 240 still frames per second allows us to experience every millimeter of movement to the very detail. While the frames get smaller and smaller in perspective as they move further away from our view, they are immediately followed by the next frame and the next one, until they've all reached the floor and found a place to rest.

2 Small Channel Video Installation, featuring a monologue excerpted from an untitled novel by Alissa Bennett

Video installation by UMMMI.

"Ummmi’s Lonely Girl features a young Shibuya girl, sometimes she messes things up, sometimes she is sad or depressed but she lives her life for the fun moments. In these moments she can forget everything which has come before her in life. She needs these moments to keep her going. In constructing this work I tried to embracing the feeling of the fluctuating heart, bouncing between happiness and sadness. Playing with the stereotypes of youth culture, such as loneliness, and a life of excess, I carried this drunk girl from my parents apartment on edge of Shibuya, to Shibuya Station to wait for the first train home. This is a performance archive video." -UMMMI.

Video installation by UMMMI.

The Other Side is a double-screen video installation commissioned as part of Breakwell’s residency at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex during the summer and autumn of 2000. The film was shot on the Pavilion’s upper landing, the camera positioned looking out through the curved windows of the stairwell across the exterior balcony to a view of the sea and the horizon. It comprises two alternating sequences projected onto either side of a free standing wall. Footage of elderly couples ballroom dancing on the balcony outside has been slowed down to the rhythm of the accompanying soundtrack, an extract from Franz Schubert’s Nocturne in E-flat Major (Op.148) overlaid by the sounds of breaking waves and seagulls. In the alternating scene, played to the same sound, panoramic vistas of the view out of the building towards the sea and horizon beyond are empty of human presence.

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...

The chasm through which light bleeds , bleeds out of proportion with bright spectral flickers flaming the trees abrading out the tissues with excruciating vigour gaining momentum

In Familiar Slip (2019) Seraj revisits places of significance that have shaped her experience as an Iranian livingabroad. Seraj physically projects her extensive archive of videos from her life in Iran onto the domestic spaces of her current life in Canada and the US. Some of these places from her past, such as her grandmother’s home in Tehran or childhood school in Dehkadeh, no longer exist. Seraj re-stages the fragments of her memories through the process of folding time and collapsing space in an effort to carve out new neurological pathways, making use of the present to recreate the past, while recognizing the impermanence of all things. Familiar Slip is an attempt to fix these recollections into a more lasting medium: a requiem for faded memories.

In the midst of the frenzy night a man finds himself lost in the crevasse of time. It was not the grotesque beings nor the monsters, but it was he who “was here, but wasn't here”. He was the phantom. Buried under memories full of inhibition and promises that never kept – words washed up on the shore – time keeps him at a distance from the “place”. And he hears poems coming on the waves from the other side rhyming and lapping against the shore. A 360° scope video Installation commissioned by Nagano Art Museum.

The virtual world generated by the real world of the twentieth century is growing exponentially, like an organism in a Petri dish. Crossing its own borders in to new zones, it absorbs its founders and mutates in to something absolutely new. In this new world real wars look like a game on americasarmy.com. Prison torture appears more like the sadistic exercises of modern-day valkyries. Technologies and materials transform the artificial environment in to a fantasy landscape of a new epoch. This paradise is a mutated world where time is frozen and the past is neighbor to the future.