Documentary

Vimeo Festival 2012: Captured Finalists

There’s nothing quite like being there, but until cloning and teleportation become everyday technologies we’re always going to need people out there to be our eyes and ears. The captured category of the Vimeo awards features video which captures your own artistic expression or performance as the subject and so provide an experience as close to the artists’ original intentions as possible.

QUAD TIME BY THE JOY OF BOX

Combining found objects, musical instruments and video into a symphony for the senses, collective Origamibiro were ripe to have their live experience translated into video. Artist Jim Boxall who has been addressing the inherently anomalous process and practice of live audio-visual performance: how it works, how it is interpreted, how it is misunderstood, how it doesn’t work, where to start, where to stop, was the perfect choice to craft this 15 minute live performance into a sample of the band’s audio/visual journey.

SNAIL TRAIL – LASER SCULPTURE BY PHILIPP ARTUS

Described as an audiovisual sculpture, Snail Trail is a captured installation which climbs and falls across a barely visible landscape of peaks and troughs, leaving light echoes in its wake. Despite its mollusc based title, Philipp Artus’ piece is actually inspired by processes of exponential acceleration, which can be observed at different levels.

IMMATERIALS: LIGHT PAINTING WIFI BY TIMO

Light Painting Wifi, is the only finalist which shows much more in retrospect than in the ‘live’ phase of the project. If you’d happened to see the team carrying around a four-metre tall measuring rod with 80 points of light that respond to the Received Signal Strength, it would probably never occur that this seemingly eccentric wifi mapping would later be transformed into beautifully etherial light paintings, revealing the mesh of connectivity which saturates our every space.

SWEATSHOPPE VIDEO PAINTING EUROPE BY SWEATSHOPPE

‘The video you’re about to watch was shot live, it does not use post production or paint‘, then my immediate question for Blake Shaw and Bruno Levy is how hell are you doing that? The answer is a mixture of the electronic paint rollers they’ve built, coupled with the custom position tracking software they wrote. The result is jaw dropping electronic graffiti pieces that no one will have to power wash down come the morning.