Devotional Cinema Click on Pic to buy from Amazon...

Nathaniel Dorsky is a San Francisco filmmaker who is interested in the quiet, meditative and transformative power film, and the way that, like prayer or mediation it can have an effect on the viewers health and well being.

His book, Devotional Cinema, is a short (54 pages) work that explores these themes with a focus on cinema, even though the greater message of the piece can be applied to any art or art making.

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend a screening of a few of Dorsky’s works, at the Union Theatre at UWM. The screening, titled ” Three songs: Recent Films by Nathaniel Dorsky,” gave me a unique opportunity to experience the type of meditative work that Dorsky is known for.

The title of the screening was interesting in itself. Dorsky is known for working with silent films. The word song of course evokes music, and I was pleased to find that what I saw projected on the screen was, in a way, a kind of music… without notes, without sound.

Dorsky has often referred to his films as “poems.” …. this serves the pieces well as it evokes the rythyms and moods that the films create. Using the word songs suggests this in an even stronger way. And as I watched the “songs” I was able to enjoy them as just that.

The kind of music Dorsky makes comes from the variables in each frame. For example, instead of pitch, there is variation in depth. We are often looking upon images through things near, we may see a car traveling down a road through a dense thicket of vegitation, or objects with curtisns in the fire ground.. and then there are camera movents. Some swift, changing in different directions and along with the colors and textures the film begins to dance, like a symphony of vision that is so vivid you can almost hear it.

Of course, you can’t. Even so, with everything else going on the silence becomes such a part of the work that one can’t help but feel it was part of it’s creation. The silence becomes the contemplativeness, mindfulness and meditaion of the maker. A maker who, even in the fury of activity that was clearly immersed in a quiet and centered mode of creation. Zen filmaking that delivers a Zen film viewing, with a silece so deafening it almost makes a sound.

And in that silence you can feel connected with the maker, both in the act of creation, and the art of looking. You can feel connected with the people experiencing the films along with you, the sounds of breath, chairs creaking, and bodies shifting, until it all blends together, one experience shared between, maker, lookers and listeners, together during a powerful act of creation.

The Haggerty Museum of art’s current exhibition, stop.look.listen (October 23, 2008 – February 22, 2009) is an interesting travel through some of the more adventurous artists in video and performance art currently working. One of these artists, Patty Chang, has developed a series of works that highlight where exactly our focus is drawn on within the piece itself (more on that some other time.)

One of her works, “Fountain” shows her and her mirror image seemingly facing each other. She leans forward, it would appear that she is going to kiss her self, but suddenly she begins to drink… because she is kneeling over a pan of water with a mirror in it she is able to slurp water out of it.

The sound carries the most weight.

The moments between the “kisses” are introspective. A person look upon their reflection in the mirror. The mood is set by the silence… we are left to be introspective as well. But as the reflections meet we are confronted with a new reality… the moment she begins to drink the piece becomes something else…  the introspection vanishes and we are suddenly removed to tangle with what’s and how’s of the video.

But without the sound this impact would be far less dramatic… we can hear her slurping up the water… and it is the suddenness of this aural event is the largest agent of change in our experience with the piece. In the image we can see the ripples begin to grow around her mouth, and the shape of the mouth itself are an indication of what is going on, but the sound itself, breaking the complete silence adds a weight to the  change that the visuals could not, and do not deliver on their own.

I made a recent visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum to check out the current exhibition Act/React. It is a fantastic journey through some of the most interesting and engaging artists creating interactive art at this time.

Of all the artworks I was most intrigued by a piece called Healing Pool by the artist Brian Knep. Healing Pool consists of a large area of vinyl flooring upon which is projected a pattern of organic looking nodes. When this pattern is interupted by shadow in any way… if for instance a person walks on or lays upon the floor, the nodes disapear. As soon as the obstruction is removed, the surrounding nodes begin to grow inwards to fill up the space. The nodes will grow in until they touch, but will not grow together, creating a kind of scar.

The result is a piece that encourages a great deal of interaction, both between the individual and the artwork, and between the groups of people that are interacting with it.

While this social interaction could be interpreted as the main function of the piece, I was more intrigued by the mechanics of the work. The patterns nodes and their growth shows an order and logic that seems to be the function of written computer programing. The piece grows back in a way that is in a way simple and predictable. This can be used to create unique and beautiful patterns than promote contemplation much the way a zen rock garden would… ones own interaction had an effect on the asthetic appearance of the work.

But many people didn’t seem to be interested in the asthetic appearance of the piece much at all. A good many of the people I observed seemed much more interested in their ability to destroy than the eventual asthetic result that their destruction would generate. The piece becomes more about ones own interaction, magnifying our own importance in relation to the work.

This is, in a way fitting. One of the the things that make this exhibit so unique and enjoyable is it’s dependace upon us to complete the work. One could make the argument that this could be said of all art (and people have said just that) but I think it is safe to say that this statment rings truer here with these works than many other examples I can come up with.

It is human nature to be interested in ourselves and our effect on the world around us. And this interest is reflected in a most obvious way in Daniel Rozen’s piece Peg Mirror.

This piece is a fascinating artwork that uses many rotating pegs. This rotation is able to change the amount of shadow on each peg and thusly how much light each peg reflects. Using a camera in the center of the piece the image of the viewer is displayed with the pegs acting as giant pixels.

This increases ones importance to the work by imposing our own image upon it… It is harder to leave a more telling impression on a work than our own reflection.

Act/React showcases our own interaction with the art and the way integrating that interaction into the asthetics of the work informs the experience the individual has. Each work on display somehow incoperates everyones favorite subject… themselves.

On September 25th I attended “Traces of the Wild” a presentation of films by the filmmaker Robert Schaller in the Union Theatre at UWM. It was an interesting experience on many levels, not to mention the fact that the filmmaker was there, in person, and projecting many of his own films. 

Unfortunately, I was there with a class, and we were not able to stay for the whole screening, but I did enjoy seeing the works i did see. Of these, my favorite was a piece entitled, “The Tree of Life.”  The film is made up of individual frames of a tree, taken from various angles and distances. It was shot on 16mm film, and edited entirely in the camera, which was advanced one frame at a time, essentially taking a long series of still photos of the tree. 

The effect was fantastic. Each shot of the tree could be described as having negative (blue sky) and positive spaces (tree parts.) Each overlapping frame created a moving, shifting pattern of tree. The fractal nature of trees came through to manifest a tapestry that was as much texture, and flashing light as it was familiar because of my familiarity with trees. 

It reminded me in more than a few ways of Mothlight, a film by Stan Brakhage.  In both pieces the materiel was gathered frame by frame (Mothlight by gluing moths on each frame, and The Tree of Life by taking still shot after still shot) without real knowledge of how the footage would look when ran through a projector. 

The pieces where also similar in the overall mood created. This may have to do with the intent of the makers. After seeing The Tree of Life I read a description on the internets that said that Schaller was trying to “portray six stages of life.” I thought this was similar to Stan Brakhages attempt to creat, “the life and death of a moth” in his piece. It seemed to me that both pieces increased in pace and motion in a sort of climax.

As popular as Mothlight is, I can say that I enjoyed looking at and experiencing “The Tree of Life.” While the method used to create both pieces has some effect on the artistic merit of each, I found Tree of Life more aesthetically pleasing and moving. It left quite an impression on me. End Bog.

Check it out…

Cool article from WIRED that… well just read it. Gosh. 

Is an artist who makes these awesome sculptures and installations. Check out his site by clicking on the image

Finally the return of good television (Besides of course, NFL football.) PBS is now in it’s fourth season of the series Art In the Twenty First Century. I suggest that you not miss it this year. Click below or on the pic (you can always click on the pic) to find out more…

Art21 Website Click Here

Season Four of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century premieres nationwide on PBS on Sunday nights, beginning October 28, 2007. Please check local listings below as dates and times may vary by city and PBS station.

Episode 1: “Romance”
Premieres: Sunday, October 28, 2007, at 10 PM (ET)
Artists: Pierre Huyghe, Judy Pfaff, Lari Pittman, and Laurie Simmons

Episode 2: “Protest”
Premieres: Sunday, November 4, 2007, at 10 PM (ET)
Artists: Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, An-My Lê, and Nancy Spero

Episode 3: “Ecology”
Premieres: Sunday, November 11, 2007, at 10 PM (ET)
Artists: Robert Adams, Mark Dion, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Ursula von Rydingsvard

Episode 4: “Paradox”
Premieres: Sunday, November 18, 2007, at 10 PM (ET)
Artists: Allora & Calzadilla, Mark Bradford, Robert Ryman, and Catherine Sullivan

Past seasons of the series are subject to re-broadcast by local PBS stations. Season One premiered in 2001; Season Two in 2003; and Season Three in 2005.

Theo Jansen is this dude from the Netherlands who makes these amazing walking scupltures/incredible feats of engineering. Click on the picture below to scope out his website…

I am most excited about any new or improved way to interface with my media. I found this very interesting. J. Han has developed a new kind of touch screen that is able to sense multiple points of contact. Check it out. Click on the pic…