A stream of consciousness from a found journal entry.
Tag: video art
Of extinction
Questions for a Dinosaur
The Divine Visions of Hildegard von Bingen
A short film visualizing the ecstatic visions of the divine by renowned German medieval nun, philosopher and mystic Hildegard von Bingen, born in 1098, who invented the language Lingua Ignota, composed music and made discoveries in natural science. These were seemingly bestowed upon her by God through her visions in a period of time when this was forbidden for women. She was a writer, botanist, painter and a truly mysterious female trail-blazer. What did she see?
This abstract film by Paul Vernon was commissioned by Filthy Lucre supported by Arts Council England, with vocals from Josephine Stephenson, arrangement and recording by Joe Bates and music by Hildegard von Bingen.
MEMORY VI An Ostrich’s Eye Is Bigger Than Its Brain
MEMORY VI An Ostrich’s Eye Is Bigger Than Its Brain is a rumination on why people remember certain trivial or mundane facts but might be unable to recall ostensibly larger ideas or details/events of greater significance. The works in this series, MEMORY, reflect different facets of human memory that I am interested in. They attempt to visualize my own questions about and inquiries into how human memory functions and how it might be reflected by the moving image. (Chung)
the Dark Rift
We are pleased to present the final video in our series spotlighting the work of Michael Betancourt.
the Dark Rift is a 2 minute movie produced from a mixture of archival footage and a NASA video of the Moon rotating, synchronized with music by composer Dennis H. Miller, who also produces visual music animations. The title for this movie is a reference to Maya mythology. They believed the “Dark Rift,” a group of interstellar dust clouds that divide the bright band of the Milky Way galaxy lengthwise, and whose alignment with the Sun marks the winter solstice on Earth, was the road to the underworld. Moon imagery demonstrates this fantasy::reality dynamic throughout my work. The multiple windows and glitches appearing throughout this movie appear not as interruptions, but as shifts in resolution. It is only at the end when an astronomical photograph of the Dark Rift begins to appear ‘behind’ the Moon that these windows become physically present as layers of image—it is through the shifting relationship they have to the black areas on screen that they become physical. This change in perception is a shift between abstraction (the windows as glitched parts of the image) and realism (layers lying in front of a more distant background).
Dancing Glitch
As part of The Florida Review and Aquifer: TFR Online’s celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month and Latinx contributors, we are featuring three videos by multi-media artist, theorist, and historian Michael Betancourt. This week we present the second video in this series, Dancing Glitch. Betancourt’s work will also be featured in the upcoming fall print issue of The Florida Review.
Loie Fuller, the American choreographer and dancer, was an early inspiration for Cubist abstraction with her Serpentine Dance; her performance in Lumiere vue no. 76 (1896) provided the original source material for this visual music work.
Our Pool
Our Pool is about the space in-between. Digitizing my family’s VHS collection of home movies was an experience I don’t think I could forget (an experience ironically filled with moments I didn’t remember). Some of the tapes featured family members I had never met or only met once or twice. Others, like this short clip of my mother, father, and siblings in my grandparent’s pool, affectionately labeled “Our Pool,” brought back a swell of memories. One part haunting, another exhilarating; nostalgia meets revelation in the space between screen and memory: boy and girl: self and family.