Imagine an Audience Day 2, 01022011, a semi-live report

The second day focuses more on filmmaking in the fine arts, and the strings attached to that… The first panel is moderated by Edwin Carels – who worked on preparing the conference and came up with the title: Imagine an Audience. Many in the audience were not present yesterday, so Florian kicks off with a short recap of the first day.

On the panel are John Smith, Luke Fowler and Michel Chevalier. Each one does a short (10-minute) presentation, after which “the real discussion and fighting” can begin.

Luke Fowler

Luke Fowler (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Fowler), (lux.org.uk/collection/artists/luke-fowler), (spikeart.at/index.php?option=com_magazine&func=show_article&id=104&lang=en), speaking with a beautiful Scottish voice, gives a brief introduction to his life as an artist. He has been quite fortunate to have his work shown both in art galleries and at film festivals. He has always resisted the new media – the Internet – as a way of distributing work.

One of his “seminal” moments as an artist was a friend giving him a videotape of “Wavelength” by Michael Snow. As he watched it alone in his flat in Dundee, he felt alienated, not knowing what to think of it – knowing nothing about the film or its context. (VHS also not being the right format for this film.) To him, a community is essential if one is to understand new ways of dealing with audiovisual content. British public television in the ’80s and ’90s was also an influence, particularly the documentaries shown there – in the days before the decline of  television programming. He also saw the work of Douglas Gordon in Glasgow. At that time he was not involved in the discourse of video art – not part of that community – and he found much of video art self-indulgent. He was looking for a way of making film that was less solipsistic, and would relate more to life. This is when he made his film “What You See is Where You’re At” about a psychiatric experiment – a film constructed mainly from interviews, using archive footage. He wasn’t particularly self-conscious about the form; because the film deliberately lacks a coherent narrative, it can be seen as challenging dogmatic ideas of documentary filmmaking.

Then his 10 minutes are over. He hasn’t even said a word about his later films.

Imagine an Audience Day 1, 31012011, a semi-live report by Arie Altena

Kino Climates: Micro-cinemas worldwide

At noon, on monday the 31st of January 20011 Florian Cramer starts off the conference Imagine an Audience. He states the general idea of the conference: looking at cinema in a post-television and post-cinema world. What has changed for cinema in a world in which television and cinema are not anymore the only and not even anymore the most important ways of distribution for audiovisual content? Cinema has to imagine its own audience, how is it doing that? During the conference, he says, we will speak about micro-cinema, about using Youtube for cinema, about filmmaking for art spaces and the future of low budget filmmaking. The idea is to look at what the future of filmmaking is in an artistic sense – and not speak about funding, money and economy too much, as economist can do this much better.

Simon Pummell (http://www.pummell.com), who co-organized the conference with Florian Cramer relates a story about bicycles, as a second introduction. With the ‘advent’ of the bicycle the space in which people traveled grew in size, and they came into contact with more different people. As a result the general genetic health of the people went up. The question is would what was true for genes, also be true for memes, for cultural ideas, for cinema? Is such a Darwinian perspective valuable or true for the field of filmmaking?