Andy Warhol “Screen Tests”

Andy Warhol, “Screen Test: Jane Holzer,” 1964. 16mm film, black and white, four minutes, Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Founding Collection, Contribution the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © 2006 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, All rights reserved.

Warhol produced over 500 Screen Tests during the 1960′s, shot on 100 ft 16mm film at 24 fps. He showed the works slowed down to 16 fps resulting in a slow motion duration of  approx. 4 min each. These works  are silent portraits of his friends and colleagues. Any references you see on Youtube that have soundtracks have had the music added later by the Youtube user.

From “Screen Tests“, the Warhol: Resources and Lessons, http://edu.warhol.org/aract_screentest.html

These film portraits, referred to by the Hollywood term of “screen test,” were not created for the purpose of actually testing or auditioning actors. A traditional Hollywood screen test is a method used to judge whether an actor is suitable on film, and beyond that, if they are right for a specific character. Usually he or she is given a scene, a script, and instructions to perform in front of a camera. The director then watches the test to make a determination about the actor’s appearance and film qualities. In these short films, Warhol creates his own cache of “Superstars.” Superstars are actors interesting enough to carry a film on their own—not by playing a particular role but simply by being “themselves.” Some of the individual screen tests were selected for Warhol’s conceptual projects, such as “Thirteen Most Beautiful Women” and “Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys.” Screen Tests were also featured as part of the light show for his 1966 multi-media happenings, the Up-tight and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. In these shows, The Velvet Underground and Nico performed their ear-splitting, urban-style drone music, accompanied by Superstar dancers bathed in colored lights in front of large projections of slides and Warhol’s films.

Here is a PDF list of from the Museum of Modern Art of the reels and who shows up on each Screen Test reel. https://www.moma.org/docs/learn/Andy_Warhol_Screen_Tests-inventory.pdf

This is a great catalogue of the Screen Tests that were shown at Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver in 2003: “From Stills to Motion & Back Again: Texts on Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests & Outer and Inner Space“

Doug Aitken “Electric Earth”

In relation to the crits yesterday of DIVA200 spring 2010, there were a number of student works looking at electricity, urban space, travel in urban space. Please have a look at Doug Aitken’s work “Electric Earth” installed as a multichannel video installation.

Here is an article/interview from Artform, May 2000:

A Thousand Words. Doug Aitken Talks About Electric Earth

In many ways the process of my work is an ongoing experiment to see how I can open myself to a larger field of experience and information. At times I live nomadically, wandering, going from project to project and city to city. I find myself moving through space and responding to experiences in a way that’s very different from the way you do if you stay in one place. A moment that might ordinarily just flash by now makes a deep impression on you. Your sense of time expands or contracts, and you become extremely sensitized to things you might not have noticed before. As I found myself in constant motion, I became increasingly attracted to in-between places, places that were not destinations, places that were somehow in limbo or were outcast and passed by. read more

The video link below is a documentation of the installation by a user on Youtube. It captures only one or two projections, but gives you a bit of an idea of the narrative.

Oh no! We’re All Hipsters!

from Wikipedia:

Hipster is a slang term that first appeared in the 1940s, and was revived in the 1990s and 2000s often to describe types of young, recently-settled urbanmiddle class adults and older teenagers with interests in non-mainstream fashion and culture, particularly alternative music, indie rock, independent film, magazines such as Vice and Clash, and websites like Pitchfork Media.^[1] In some contexts, hipsters are also referred to as scenesters.^[2]

“Hipster” has been used in sometimes contradictory ways, making it difficult to precisely define “hipster culture” because it is a “mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior[s].”^[1] One commentator argues that “hipsterism fetishizes the authentic” elements of all of the “fringe movements of the postwar era—beat, hippie, punk, even grunge,” and draws on the “cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity” and “gay style”, and “regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity” and a sense of irony.^[3]

1. ^ ^{a b c} Douglas Haddow (2008-07-29). “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization”. Adbusters. Retrieved 2008-09-08.
2. ^ Tim Walker (2008-08-14). “Meet the global scenester: He’s hip. He’s cool. He’s everywhere”. The Independent. Retrieved 2008-09-08.
3. ^ ^{a b c d} Lorentzen, Christian (May 30–Jun 5, 2007), “Kill the hipster: Why the hipster must die: A modest proposal to save New York cool”, Time Out New York

From Adbusters:

“Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.”

Mejor Vida Corporation

Barcode Stickers

website

GraffitiWriter

by Institute for Applied Autonomy

GraffitiWriter is a tle-operated field programmable robot which emplys a custom built array of spray cans to write linear text messages on the graound at a rate of 15 kilometers per hour.

The decade Google made you stupid

Technology has changed your brain over the past ten years, mostly for the worse. Douglas Rushkoff on Internet-driven ADD, virtual-reality delusions, and how computers changed how you think.

The results are a bit scary. Not only have computers changed the way we think, they’ve also discovered what makes humans think—or think we’re thinking. At least enough to predict and even influence it.

Here are the four things cognizant people should know about the decade when computers mastered our cognition.

GOOGLE MAKES US STUPID read more…

- Julie

DIgital Situationism and Urban Intervention

“The Interactive Spectacle.pdf -    http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:XUjvnSC8SH0J:www.idl.dundee.ac.uk/~shaleph/pdfs/The%2520Interactive%2520Spectacle.pdf+digital+Situationists&hl=en&gl=ca&sig=AFQjCNH12Z3_O3x40yKpOwUiEv0cZl20mw

“Department of Ongoing Digital Situations.”  http://www.toysatellite.org/doods

Paul, Christianne. “interventions in Virtual Public Spaces.” http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1616/1531

Patricia Piccinini

fascinating work: i love some of her essays

Web 2.0 on youtube

although generally i don’t encourage too much you-tubery, this is what i showed this week

Instant Images

This excerpt is taken from an essay by Kathrin Peters published on Photo/Byte:
“since the 1980s the majority of theoretical considerations with regard to digital photography concerned image processing, the following will deal with electronic signal storage, i.e., not with the implications of image manipulation with the aid of computer technology, but with a more or less private photographic practice that uses digital cameras and/or stores photographs in digital distribution media. In this field, the notion of photographic authenticity is consistent; even more, due to the instantaneousness with which photographs can be taken and displayed under electronic conditions, it seems to have gained appeal. Disregarding some of the premature decisions with regard to the effects of the «digital revolution,» i.e., that photographic images will largely lose their reference to reality, immediacy and true-to-lifeness also remain central criteria for the image recorded on a chip or circulating in the Internet. ….