Welcome to Underground Worlds, a show inspired by Hastings’ subterranean network of tunnels and caves. This programme, which will take place at the Electric Palace Cinema in Hastings on the 28th Of September, features work by 17 artist/film-makers, including work from as far a field as South Korea, Taiwan, Chile and Latvia. Much of the work is unseen in the U.K. The artists in this show represent a diverse cross section of today’s underground artist/filmmakers, some have been making films for decades whilst others are emerging newcomers. These films represent fascinating glimpses of an underground shadow culture, it’s practitioners operating on their own terms, outside the mainstream. The programme also highlights the proliferation of methods and materials employed by today’s artist/filmmakers. We will be showing work produced on 35mm, hacked CD ROM, Super-8, ripped found footage, JPEGS and varieties of digital video. This webpage includes information on all the artists featured in the show, including films, biographical information, links and interviews.
Tickets for the show can be purchased direct from the Electric Palace Cinema here: http://www.electricpalacecinema.com/index.php?content=book&film=493
Underground Worlds, Notes on Contributors
Vincenzo Pandolfi, Strange Rocks Rocking, VHS, duration 30 seconds, 2003, Italy
An inner journey into the most dangerous place to be. Our mind.
Strange Rocks Rocking Film Still
Vincenzo Pandolfi, biography
Born Terracina, Italy, 1971.
Studied Film History at the University “La Sapienza”, Rome and took a Diploma in Film-making at the New York Film Academy. Vincenzo Pandolfi has made numerous short films. His film Anatomy won the BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM at the Horror Dance Film Festival in Houston.
For more information about Vincenzo Pandolfi visit:
http://videoart.net/home/Artists/ArtistPage.cfm?Artist_ID=4840
Lee Hyung-suk, DIGITAL INTERMEDIAED SWIMMING, 35mm, duration 5.00 mins, 2009, South Korea
Sometime in the near future. In an old, abandoned film processing laboratory, films were floating in developing solutions like water weeds.
The digital lens swims freely in the solution and breaks into the area of the films.
DIGITAL INTERMEDIAED SWIMMING Film Still
Lee Hyung-Suk, biography
Born in Seoul, South Korea. He is currently studying at Yonsei Graduate School of Communication & Arts. His first short film, Templementary (2001) was screened for the Wide Angle section in the 6th Pusan International Film Festival. Chapter 2 ; How To Breathe (2002) won Best Short Film Award at Pusan International Film Festival. Under Construction (2005) won Best Asian Short Film Award at Bangkok International Film Festival.
DIGITAL INTERMEDIAED SWIMMING Film Still
Devin Horan, Boundary, DV, duration 16.46 mins, 2009, USA/Latvia
“In life it is possible to become angelic, human, or animal. I have become none of these things.”
Boundary is the first installment in a projected tetralogy of films (three shorts and a feature) that explore the implications of this phrase by Sadeq Hedayat. It is an experimental documentary of a remote landscape and an isolated community near the Russian border. In issue No.42 of CinemaScope Quarterly, “The Decade in Review,” film-maker and curator John Gianvito cited Boundary as one of the top ten films of the last decade. He described it as “a brooding non-narrative mood piece shot in an indeterminate East European twilight that brings to mind the lyric intensity of Georg Trakl or Vladimir Holan.” Boundary documents a space of ambiguity, a psychogeography, an absence of personal histories.
Boundary film stills
Toby Tatum, The Sealed World, MiniDV, duration 6.00 mins, 2009, U.K.
Mist parts to reveal two young women seated in an overgrown garden surrounded by wild flowers.
Toby Tatum, biography
Born 1974 Reading, England. Studied Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, London. Toby Tatum’s films have been exhibited at numerous film festivals and arts events worldwide, including screenings at: the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the London Short Film Festival and the Berwick Upon Tweed Film & Media Arts Festival.
For more information on Toby Tatum visit:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Toby-Tatum/165982176767236
http://twitter.com/#!/TobyTatumFilm
Anne Kathrin Greiner, Keimkasten 3, HD-Video, duration 8.42 mins, 2010, Germany
A man travels, seemingly involuntarily, between spheres physical and temporal, each remaining largely anonymous. The protagonist, too, appears to have only the vaguest notion as to where he may be. It soon transpires, however, that he has found himself isolated for a particular reason and that there is no going back.
Inspired by historical and political developments, social rites and personal memories, as well as literary and cinematic sources, Keimkasten 3 is intended to trigger associations and to therefore work in conjunction with the viewer’s individual experiences and perceptions. Positioned within the grey area between narrative and experimental film, the piece is concerned with the standing and position of the individual within society and what occurs when the status quo is called into question. The title of the film conjures up various associations: A Keim (seed or germ) can stand for the birth or growth of something, e.g. an idea, but it can also have less positive connotations, such as unhygienic conditions and disease. The Kasten (box) evokes an environment that is physical, spatial and also, potentially, enclosed.
Keimkasten 3 film still
Anne Kathrin Greiner, biography
Born in southern Germany. Studied photography and film at Napier University in Edinburgh and Fine Art Photography at the Royal College of Art, London. Anne Kathrin Griener has exhibited her work widely in both solo and group exhibitions.
Keimkasten 3 film still
For more information on Anne Kathrin Greiner visit: http://www.akgreiner.com/
To view an excerpt from Keimkasten 3 visit: http://www.alexanderhill.net/Keimkasten_3.html
Clint Enns, Spider-Man vs. Macrovision, FOUND FOOTAGE/MACROVISION’S RIPGUARD, duration 2.49 mins, 2010, Canada
A video examining digital copy protection. Macrovision’s Ripguard is a technology designed to prevent or reduce digital dvd copying. by ignoring it, and copyright infringement in general, the artist is often able to produce new and innovative work.
Clint Enns, biography
Clint Enns is a video artist and film-maker from Winnipeg, Manitoba, whose work primarily deals with moving images created with broken and/or outdated technologies. his work has shown both nationally and internationally at festivals, alternative spaces and mircocinemas.
For more information on Clint Enns visit:
http://www.vimeo.com/clintenns
http://cineflyer.wordpress.com/
Stuart Pound, Laundry, Animated Jpeg, duration 1.00 min, 2010, U.K.
A zoom away from a wall marked by past bullets to clothes drying above a courtyard, an unseen church bell strikes.
Stuart Pound, biography
Stuart Pound lives in London and has worked in film, digital video, sound and the visual arts since the early 1970’s, and hopes to return to painting in the future.
For more information about Stuart Pound visit:
http://www.youtube.com/user/stuart007
Clare Charnley & Patricia Azevedo, Cave, HD Video, duration 2.57 mins, 2009, U.K./Brazil
Individual audio recordings were made by residents and visitors in rural Northumberland. Descriptions of views stripped of their visual referents, they are played out as monologue, chatter or cacophony. Forced together, they become a fictitious community, though a sense of isolation persists. As the light diminishes they take on other connotations; stars, souls, cities – though these romantic readings are undercut by the ordinariness of the speech they transmit. In the dark, and with a strong wind blowing, the poor shelter provided by the ‘cave’ posits the countryside as something much less hospitable than that described by the voices.
Clare Charnley, biography
Clare Charnley was born in 1949. She is the Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University. She has exhibited extensively worldwide. Her work includes numerous collaborations with Patricia Azevedo.
For more information about Clare Charnley & Patricia Azevedo visit:
http://www.juliangermain.com/projects/patricia-azevedo.php
Peter Rose, The Indeserian Tablets, DV, duration 14.30 mins, 2011, USA
An annotated nocturnal portrait of a vanished culture- its stories, scripture, technology, religious practice, art and poetry as reconstructed from fragments found in the archive at Kiens. Offered in the spirit of Calvino and Borges with a nod to Greenaway.
Peter Rose, biography
Since 1968 Peter Rose has made over thirty films, tapes, performances and installations. Many of the early works raise intriguing questions about the nature of time, space, light, and perception and draw upon Rose’s background in mathematics and on the influence of structuralist filmmakers. He subsequently became interested in language as a subject and in video as a medium and generated a substantial body of work that played with the feel and form of sense, concrete texts, political satire, oddball performance, and a kind of intellectual comedy. Recent video installations have involved a return to an examination of landscape, time, and vision. Rose has been widely exhibited, both nationally and internationally, having been included in shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, the Centre Pompidou, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Film Society at Lincoln Center, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. He has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Pew Foundation, the Independence Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and is fond of writing descriptions in the third person.
As he has written: Some of us work in a proximate relation with our intended audiences, speaking familiar languages so that the archetypes of our culture may be recognized; and some work out a self-creating interiority from which, if we are lucky, we bring back the shape of a newly imagined alphabet of feeling. I find myself oscillating between these two agendas and find the dialectic a productive one, a reflection of the complex, contradictory nature of our times.
For more information about Peter Rose visit:
http://www.peterrosepicture.com/
http://www.ubu.com/film/rose.html
http://www.youtube.com/user/esorp#p/u
Leslie Supnet, sun moon stars rain, Super-8, duration 3.20 mins, 2009, Canada
mother nature mourns the death of her children
Leslie Supnet, biography
Leslie Supnet is a visual artist from Winnipeg, MB. Supnet aims to represent sincerity, lived experience, and the ineffable in both her drawing and animated work. Her animations have screened at various festivals, such as the Images Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Signal & Noise, Image Forum Festival in Japan, and LA Film Forum.
For more information about Leslie Supnet visit: http://sundaestories.com/blog/
Kiron Hussain, Slick Horsing, Digital Video, duration 2.22 mins, 2010, U.K.
“A fragmented allegory. A portrait. One lady kindling her photo-sensitive epilepsy”
Kiron Hussain, biography
Kiron Hussain is a film-maker based in Newscastle Upon Tyne. His film Slick Horsing was awarded BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM at the London Short Film Festival 2011.
For more information about Kiron Hussain visit:
http://www.apengine.org/2011/01/kiron-hussain/
http://www.artreview.com/profile/kiron?xg_source=activity
Max Hattler, 1925 AKA Hell, Animation, duration 1.36 min, 2010, U.K.
1925 aka Hell is one of two animation loops directed by Max Hattler, inspired by the work of French outsider artist Augustin Lesage (1876-1954). 1925 is based on Lesage’s painting A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World from 1925, below. The second loop, 1923 aka Heaven, is based on Lesage’s painting of the same name from 1923. The films were created during 5 days in February 2010 with students at The Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark.
Max Hattler, biography
Max Hattler is a filmmaker and visual artist interested in the space between abstraction and figuration in the moving image, where storytelling is freed from the constraints of traditional narrative. He works across the fields of film, video installation and live audiovisual performance, and has collaborated with music acts including Basement Jaxx, Jovanotti, Jemapur, The Egg, Ladyscraper, and his dad’s outfit Hattler. Max has shown his award-winning works at hundreds of festivals worldwide, including the European Media Art Festival, onedotzero, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, Annecy, Animafest (Zagreb), and Image Forum Festival (Japan). He has performed live audiovisuals worldwide, including ICA (London), Animae Caribe (Trinidad), Cimatics (Brussels), Animation Show (California), SuperDeluxe (Tokyo) and the Museum of Image and Sound (Sao Paulo). Max graduated from Goldsmiths College in 2001, and from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Animation in 2005.
For more information about Max Hattler visit:
http://www.facebook.com/maxhattler.artistpage
http://twitter.com/#!/maxhattler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Hattler
Wei-Ming Ho, The Art Qaeda Project, MiniDV, duration 7.03 mins, 2010, Taiwan
In a weird atmosphere, the project set out for an exciting adventure. Do the images represent the secret signals, an extraordinary parade or a silent protest? By means of guerrilla art action, we use the high power projector to project the images in motion with high mobility to display a stunning visual firework and present the conversation between the images and the city environment.
This video includes various elements of statistics and symbols such as Environmental Sustainability Index and Morse code. We use the concept of Morse code in the background music metaphorically and interpret the meanings of ESI behind the scenes by measuring the volume, capacity, square measure, quantity, time…etc. We mean to mix calculations, environment and visual images to present different thoughts.
Wei-Ming Ho, biography
Wei-Ming Ho is engaged in research and creations of visual art. He focuses on experimental media, film and video art.
For more information on Wei-Ming Ho please visit: http://vimeo.com/artqaeda
John Davis, Frequency Mass, Super-8, duration 4.40 mins, 2011, USA
Experimenting with light, movement, and various darkroom techniques, abstraction and repetition coalesce in an array of chance encounters that harmonically resonate to an original music score.
Images by John Davis
John Davis, biography
Utilizing sampling, appropriation, and recorded observation, I am interested in interpreting the ways meaning is constructed and represented culturally. Utilizing film, video, photography and sound, I incorporate conventions like detournément and the re-processing of the familiar as ways to trace the feedback loop between media, culture, and identity. I am also interested in celluloid film as a medium, and have been experimenting with alternative hand-processing and shooting techniques with both the Super 8 and 16mm formats. I also work with Electroacoustic music, experimenting with recording techniques and sonic variables.
Images by John Davis
For more information about John Davis visit: http://www.noiseforlight.com/
Jorge Catoni, Hoy Juega Chile (Chile Plays Today), Video, duration 30 seconds, 2010, Chile
Taped on “La Vega Central” Popular Market (Santiago, Chile), meanwhile was developing the World Cup 2010 (Chile v/s Spain game), and almost all the country were watching TV.
Jorge Catoni, biography
Jorge Catoni is a mixed media artist, illustrator, graphic designer, and photographer. He lives in Chile. His work has featured in numerous international screenings and exhibitions.
In April 2011 he was awarded the Video Art First Prize at Close Up Vallarta which took place in Vallarta, Mexico.
For more information about Jorge Catoni visit:
Evan Meaney, The Well of Representation, Hacked ROM on Video, duration 7.20 mins, 2011, USA
Evan Meaney, biography
Evan Meaney is an artist, curator and educator currently teaching time-based media design at the University of Tennessee. His practice dives into the “liminalities and glitches of all sorts, equating failing data to ghosts, seances and archival hauntology.”
At the moment Meaney is hard at work experimenting with the super computing team at Oak Ridge National Laboratories as well as preparing for this years GLI.TC/H noise and new-media gathering. He is also just about to release his Ceibas Cycle DVD, a series Meaney has been working on for the last five years.
For more information about Evan Meaney visit:
Testcard, In Search of Hitler’s Bunker, MiniDV, duration 5.42 mins, 2011, U.K.
Continuing the British obsession with World War 2, our heroes Lepke B, Matt Gray and Adrian Shephard once again lampoon into peacetime Berlin in search of Hitlers Bunker…
Testcard, biography
The Testcard is the symbolic end to programmed schedules, the fear of losing structure, the fear of habitual behaviour patterns. We operate under the premise that there can be very little conscious awareness of a structure to one’s action, but unconsciously one is subject to a loosely determined destiny: future, present and past existing as one, accessed intuitively through divinatory methods…
Testcard explore the shifting world of the mind . Performance research range from Ouija board transmissions to brain frequency and mind/ body experiments seeking answers to hidden truths through intuitive approaches. We have performed in Russia for the festival of visual and performing arts in St Petersburg, the CYNET arts festival in Dresden, and Tate Modern in London for World Book day, and most recently in KIEV for the KIMAF festival.
For more information about Testcard visit:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Testcard/104949306255399
http://www.last.fm/music/testcard+radio
