Site Archive
Kevin Sweet Intervals Series in the Brant Gallery through April 21, 2013Written by David Tames on April 17, 2013
Filed Under Art, Events & Screenings, Films
Now through Sunday, April 21st, from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. each night in the Brant Gallery (3rd floor, South Building) at MassArt, filmmaker Kevin Sweet is orchestrating an { installation | performance | workshop } that is part of... Continue Reading...
provocative.objects: the extradition (Fri., Nov. 12, 2010)Written by David Tames on November 9, 2010
Filed Under Art, Events & Screenings, MassArtDMI, New Media
You are cordially invited to attend provocative.objects: the extradition, a cybersurreal exhibition + event on Friday, November 12th at MassArt in the Patricia Doran Gallery. The event is scheduled to start at 6 p.m. and end around... Continue Reading...
2010 Bumpkin Island Art EncampmentWritten by David Tames on July 27, 2010
Filed Under Art, Documentary, Events & Screenings, Filmmaking, New Media, Photography
If you live in the Boston area, here’s an idea for what to do this weekend: The 2010 Bumpkin Island Art Encampment! Consider making a day of it and come out and visit on one of the public visitation days, Saturday, July 31st... Continue Reading...
Pearls of wisdomWritten by David Tames on April 23, 2010
Filed Under Art, Books, Design, Reviews
Back in February I attended a conference “Who’s Afraid of New Media” held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Wendy Richmond, who has recently published a book, Art Without Compromise* (Allworth Press, 2009), was... Continue Reading...
Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is PresentWritten by David Tames on April 6, 2010
Filed Under Art, Documentary, Events & Screenings, Reviews
I was in New York on March 27th to participate in The Conversation at Columbia University. In a recent blog post about the event, Rania wrote, “the paradox—though the topic was digital, the excitement came from face-to-face,... Continue Reading...
What happens when artists annex an island?Written by David Tames on July 28, 2009
Filed Under Art, Events & Screenings
The Bumpkin Island Art Encampment, a weekend-long interactive art exhibition, will be open to the public on Saturday and Sunday (August 1-2, 2009). Sharon Haggins Dunn, Alice Apley, and yours truly are among the artists participating... Continue Reading...
Metropath(ologies): ecstasy of communication or ambivalence of information?Written by David Tames on May 23, 2009
Filed Under Art, New Media, Reviews
Judith Donath recently spoke at MassArt. In anticipation of her talk I went to see the Connections exhibition of works by Donath and her Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. I was particularly taken by Metropath(ologies), an... Continue Reading...
A postmodern remake of a futurist classicWritten by David Tames on March 29, 2009
Filed Under Art, Documentary, Filmmaking, New Media, Sticky, Web
Video artist Perry Bard’s Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory project made with contributions from people around the world who upload video clips interpreting Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera... Continue Reading...
Bard’s work is the kind of machine-assisted participatory filmmaking that brings Vertov’s vision into the new millennium and enabled by computers and the net. I’m sure Vertov would have loved it. Man With A Movie Camera was Vertov’s mechanical vision of a new socialist society with Vertov as auteur, Mikhail Kaufman as the cameraman, and Yelizaveta Svilova as editor, and with Soviet society and the machinery of the industrial age as the protagonists. Bard’s project presents a global social reality in the new millennium. Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, or as I like to think of it, “People with Video Cameras” brings the machine and ordinary people into the process of movie production and delivery, providing a collective vision consistent with Vertov’s futurist masterpiece of the modern era but remade in a postmodern setting with the media and tools of our generation: participation, camcorders, the internet, and computation. The perspectives of multiple contributors is consistent with Vertov’s philosophy, Joseph Schaub wrote in his essay, “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye“, “Kino-eye, then, is a cyborg construction that contains multiple positions for the production of film meaning.” OK, I’m stretching a little, but ideas are fun to play with, I see them as guides to possible worlds.
Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake provides a crisp example of the first, second, and fourth characteristics that Janet Murray suggests in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, make new media a powerful vehicle for literary creation: 1. Procedural, 2. Participatory, 3. Spatial, and 4. Encyclopedic. The site does not make use of the spatial dimension (except for some aspects of the interface, which traditional cinema lacks completely), however, It’s pretty easy to see how the project could become more spatial in an interesting manner by adding geographical information related to the video when it is uploaded to the site, underscoring the truly global nature of the effort. Regardless of being light in the spatial dimension, Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is one of the most interesting participatory video projects I’ve had the pleasure to experience and points the way to the future of cinema. While theater owners worry over sagging ticket sales and studio moguls fear the audience’s move to net, as creators and participants we can move beyond the industrial practices of the past and look forward to a re-invented, participatory, global, postmodern, Kino-Eye.
This post is based in part on a post written for my Design Seminar II class at MassArt in response to Scott Kirsner’s Media Tech Tonic presentation, “Inventing the Movies.”
--> Artist Encampment PhotosWritten by David Tames on October 21, 2008
Filed Under Art, Events & Screenings, Photography
These are the photos from the recent artist encampment on Bumpkin Island (a Flickr slide show). The Berwick Research Institute joined with the Island Alliance and Studio Soto to present the 2nd Annual Artist Encampment, a "homesteading"... Continue Reading...
Art of the Interview (Podcamp Boston 3 presentation)Written by David Tames on July 19, 2008
Filed Under Documentary, Filmmaking, New Media, Podcasting, The Media, Video on the Web
The interview is a fundamental element of most documentary films and many video blogs. Through examples and discussion this session, which I presented at Podcamp Boston 3, covered practical strategies and techniques including how and... Continue Reading...
