Portable Media

The following research paper exposes an experience case applying 'The Alter Bahnhof Video Walk' technique in students of three semesters of the Social Communication career at the Technical University of Machala (UTMACH), in the 205-2016 period. The Technical University of Machala is an institution of higher education located in the south of Ecuador country, specifically at Machala city. The objective of this experience case was to record the subjective and intimate world of students by using the mobile phone in order to unveil their thoughts and those scenarios that have marked, in a deep way, their existence. In this exercise, the past and the present are united in moving images that reveal meditations and memories of each student. 'The Alter Bahnhof Video Walk' was designed for the old train station in Kassel, Germany as part of 'Documenta', an art installation created by Canadian artists, Jane Cardiff and George Bures Miller. With this technique an alterna...

There has long been a relationship between artistic work and the influence of the world, though it is taking a new turn in trends of conceptual relationality and an ‘expandedness’ is prevalent in contemporary art. In this essay I think through categories and the meanings of expanded cinema to argue that a relation exists for contemporary artists to use ‘the world’ as source material in their creative reiterations. As most theory on expanded cinema focuses on an historic position I argue for the relevance of ‘expanded cinema’ in a contemporary art context. I consider the ecological approaches by artists in fields of expanded cinema, sound and relational listening, 16mm film, and expanded thinking through worlding and framing. I consider work by Lawrence English, Amy Hanley, myself and briefly, Stan VanDerBeek, and Philip Samartzis. The essay considers ideas that exist in processes and conceptual peripheries of my collaborative 16mm film work with Amy Hanley’s sound work, which was commissioned for Speak Percussion as part of their Social Distancing (SD) Series over April to June 2020. Amy spent time at Bogong Centre for Sound Culture as a sound artist in residence and I spent time with The Weight of Mountains film residency in Dawson City, Canada working with 16mm film1 of which the SD Series work evolved from. Our collaboration is contextualised by ideas existing in contemporary sound and arts, including artist’s craft or t​ echnē that uses the world as source material for creating expanded objects or recorded and re-framed ‘worlds’.

Keywords: expanded cinema, relational listening, field recording, 16mm film, sound, hauntology, worlding, frame, and/or re-framing, contemporary art.

Screening notes to accompany the programmes shown as part of Towards Other Cinemas, a series of screenings and discussions, exploring renewed interest in diverse strands of experimental film and video works made in 1970s Britain. With an opening event at Close-Up cinema, followed by a day of screenings at the Whitechapel Gallery, this series brought together works made in 1970s Britain, to consider how younger generations re-activate this recent past in response to the book Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (IB Tauris, published in July 2017), edited by theorist Laura Mulvey and writer and director Sue Clayton.

Curated by Sue Clayton (Professor at Goldsmiths University London), Claire M. Holdsworth (Research Fellow, Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London) and Laura Mulvey (Professor in Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London) in partnership with LUX, London and the Whitechapel Gallery.

Alter Bahnhof Video Walk, presented by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller at dOCUMENTA 13 (2012) in Kassel, is discussed by Andreas Hudelist and Elena Pilipets in the wake of the recent debate on ‘relational’ art and accordingly situated as an ‘inbetween’ frame of media and space which blends the affective with the performative and the visual with the material.

Within Urban Media Studies, current research on media practices in urban space is by and large informed by a phenomenological conceptualization of space directly derived from traditional audience studies of the 1990s. This conceptualization has as its linchpin the distinction between space as abstract location, and place as space endowed with symbolic meanings and affections through practices of place-making. This approach has the merit of going beyond deterministic hypotheses of media-related placelessness and clarifying how specific media-related practices can contribute to fostering people's attachment to places and to endowing them with symbolic meanings. Yet, as shown through a discussion of an original case study on "captive audience positions" (situations in which we are somehow forcedly put in the position "to audience" a media spectacle), this conceptualization seems less adequate to addressing the relationship mutually shaping space and practices enacted in urban space, whether media-related or not. These limitations could be overcome by extending the phenomenological conceptualization of space into a fully fledged relational one.

In this paper I present three artworks that were created for portable digital screens: Alter Bahnhof (2012), Top Shot Helmet and Weaving-Scape I (2011). The artworks are used to discuss the creative possibilities that portable electronic devices offer to contemporary creative practitioners and to analyse how these devices influence the construction of the "self" and "place" in public space when mediated through artistic practice.

A critical commentary that presents and contextualizes a film and video making practice spanning three decades. It locates a contemporary visual music practice within current and emerging critical and theoretical contexts and tracks back the history of this practice to the author’s initial screenings of work as part of the 1980’s British Scratch video art movement.

At the heart of the body of work presented here is an exploration and examination of methods and working practices in the encounter of music, sound and moving image.
Central to this is an examination of the affective levels that sound and image can operate on, in a transsensorial fusion, and political and cultural applications of such encounters, whilst examining  the epistemological regimes such work operates in.

A combination of factors has meant that work such as this, arising in the UK provinces, can fall below the historicizing and critical radar – these include the ephemeral and transitory nature of live performance work; the difficulties of documenting such work; the fragility and degeneration of emerging and quickly obsolescent formats; and a predominance of a London–centric focus on curating, screening and historicizing of experimental film and video art practices.

The author's film and video practice has been screened nationally and internationally over three decades, and has been recognized as exemplary practice both in the early 1980s at the inception of the Scratch movement and in more recent retrospectives. The critical commentary argues that this work contributes new knowledge of the history, contexts and practices of film and video art and audiovisual and visual music practices.

I thought this might be useful for any other art practice based researchers, I have recently passed my PhD by art practice. I submitted a thesis which described my own practical work alongside other relevant practice and critical debates, and also exhibited my work and some of the practical research- sketchbooks clippings etc as part of the viva process.  I will upload the thesis abstract here as well. To view a video documenting the Apollo Pavilion sound installation follow the link .