Today I made a welcome return to Allenheads Contemporary Arts in Northumberland for the first of my meetings to talk about video and performance. Curator and video artist Alan Smith proved to be as useful a source of practical and conceptual information as I could hope to find. Starting off in front of the TV with Boris Johnson holding fort, we talked broadly about video as it circulates in popular media and online and then narrowed down to artist’s video.
It was really useful to be able to make the connection between this broad visual culture and some of the processes of artists’ self-produced video. Like Figgis, Smith also stressed the need to keep things simple in the sense that you shouldn’t allow the technology to run away with you but rather you should consider the work as a whole from the start and understand your tools thoroughly. There were plenty of useful tips on sound recording and the wise words of bad image usually being more forgivable and fixable the bad sound. Archiving was also a useful topic to touch upon and I have started to clean up my overcrowded laptop and put more material onto an external hard drive. Finally, in terms of image, I immediately started doing a few tests on my camera’s video and made a useful discovery there.
We looked at some of Smith’s videos which combine text and moving image and talking about the processes by which they were made. This in turn lead us to looking at some trailers, most notably that for Man Bites Dog with the idea that the asymmetrical timing of the cuts in this video is really rather good. This lead to the challenge of using it as a musical template and putting ones own material into it and seeing how that worked. Given where I am this sort of formal exercise is quite a useful one for me to work within.
