Welcome to The Only Constant - Video Collective Blog / Discussion Board

Hello all and welcome to The Only Constant video collective blog. We are The Only Constant, a collective of emerging video and filmmakers based in London. Our ethos is to challenge visual taboos and create forward thinking moving images. Our aim? To rant, rave and INSPIRE.

If you would like to get involved in the discussions on our blog, get involved in our collective or submit work for our Video Is The Only Constant screening and open discussion evenings at Corsica Studios please contact us on: theonlyconstant@ymail.com


Monday 29 March 2010

Video Is The Only Constant April 7th 2010: Sarah Carrea


'Petrella Tifernina'

Petrella Tifernina is a short documentary exploring my romanticised view of Italy and contrasts this with my grandmother’s stories of the country and her reasons for moving to England. I travelled to Petrella, the village where my grandmother was born, to discover more about my Italian heritage and to understand why she left.
The film explores the struggle of Italy’s poor agricultural workers, as there were many Italians that came to Britain in search of work in the late 1950s; many later returned to Italy, but for her own reasons my grandmother did not.

The film begins with a letter which my grandmother wrote for me after she found out I was making this film. As she could not travel with me, my gran sends a message to her brother in Italy, who she has not seen for twenty years. The film combines moving image with still photography, black and white with colour, and old with new, to compare my perceptions with my grandmother's memories.

Video Is The Only Constant April 7th 2010: Morgan Beringer














The Yud, 9:38, UK

A short document of abstract painter Xiana Wolfram's installation / performance in Highgate Wood last Autumn. The Yud is an ongoing project revolving around the installation of a massive canvas in various contexts. This video documents the Yud at a particularly playful halfway point in its overall development.

Morgan Beringer is an American video artist based in East London. Having spent and continuing to spend much of his life in transit between different countries, the thrust of his creative concern stems from the dilemma of living in-between cultures. An academic background in both philosophy and art pushes these concerns further into the realms of linguistics, performance, and film/video art.

Video Is The Only Constant April 7th 2010: Paul Kindersley


Star, installation


'Star' consists of hand made screenprinted cushions of a random womans face, the way it is done and the Warhol references make her look like a famous person allowing each viewer to have their own interpretation...is it Yoko Ono, is it Sharon Tate Etc....It shows the stalker, obsessive nature of fandom, and the saturation of popular culture in our lives. What we see on the cinema screen, becomes part of us, and we can no longer separate between reality and fantasy. The 'star' becomes an empty vessel for us to project our fantasies onto.

Paul Kindersley is an artist and curator based in London. After having lived and worked in Berlin, Cambridge and London, Paul graduated from Chelsea College of Art & Design with a First Class Hons BA in the summer of 2009 and was awarded the Transition Gallery Prize which resulted in a solo show, 'She wanted his soul, but he could only give her his blood', last October. He has exhibited widely in London and Europe.

http://sites.google.com/site/paulkindersley/

Video Is The Only Constant April 7th 2010: Michael Marczewski


14.7 Metre Psycho, 4:40, UK


14.7 Metre Psycho is a redelivery of Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller; stills from the film have been reconstructed into a long three-dimensional set,which has then been filmed with an unedited tracking shot.

http://www.mmarczewski.com

Video Is The Only Constant April 7th 2010: Monica Elkelv


KAOS, 3:48, UK


'Kaos' is a film based on the earliest condition of the Universe, before matter and the lower atmosphere that surrounds the earth: the great void of emptiness within the Universe. The film symbolizes the cosmic cycles of creation and destruction, and shows the relationship between the body and the natural environment representing the extremes of emotion by the loss of the body. Kaos is a paradox, between body and nature, and universe and matter: the space or gap between heaven and earth.

Monica Elkelv combines dance and film as an art form, pushing the art of modern dance into the forefront of the experimental film world. Movement and its manipulation enable her to create a space, which has no reference to time, transforming the body in a depersonalized figure. Through her films, she approaches the relation between the human and the natural world upon a metaphysical level, exploring the connection between mind and matter and the transcendental state of consciousness. In her dance films, we see the limits of the dancer’s body in contrast to the unlimited experimentations the filmmaker can have by using the body as a material, as an object. As an object, the body can be accelerated, without limits. The result is the creation of another imaginary space through a multidimensional perspective, resulting into an impossible dance.

Video Is The Only Constant April 7th 2010: Dustin Grella


Prayers for Peace, 7:38, 2009, USA


Prayers for Peace is a narrative stop-motion animation confronting the memory of the artist's younger brother killed in the current conflict in Iraq. Drawn entirely with pastels on a slate chalkboard, the materials used to create the animation become a metaphor for the impermanence of life.

Dustin Grella was born in North Carolina, grew up in Ohio and lives in New York City. In May 2009 he graduated from the School of Visual Arts with an MFA in Computer Art, having received scholarships from the department and the Alumni Association as well as the Paula Rhodes Award for Excellence in Computer Art. His animated short, Glimpse, won awards in international underground festivals including Best Animation, Audience Choice and Best Experimental film. Dustin’s first solo show, in 2007 at Summit ArtSpace in Akron, OH, was the first solo show in ArtSpace’s history. His work is the subject of a documentary film scheduled for release in July 2009.

Grella develops artifacts and events that explore the human experience through the passage of time. His work focuses on the design and creation of systems that gather the thoughts or feelings of individuals at particular moments. Through animation, installation, and even the postal services, Grella combines equal measures of sincerity and absurdity, structure and improvisation. By highlighting seemingly mundane tasks, he focuses on the importance of the moment. Notes To Self [2002-], is a ongoing series of over twenty-five hundred letters that he writes and mails to himself daily. These letters occasionally surface as objects in his work.

http://www.dustystudio.org

Video Is The Only Constant April 7th 2010: Alexandros Pissourios


Non-Fiction, 10:04, 2009, Cyprus


Does one ever stop remembering?
In 'Non-Fiction’, the aim was to go back to a personal archive and excavate images from events in order to come to terms with, or even relinquish them. In a sense, by remembering, what is remembered is then subjected to decay :
"Things in the past are in some ways nurtured if kept forgotten. Forgetting, like burial is a preservative. A kind of storage".
Perhaps what is at play is the contingency of memory as it is enacted in a dialectical opposition between sound and image. Truth and truthfulness become distinct from one and other, corresponding to ideas around immediacy (the belief in what one is being presented with as true) and mediation (the acknowledgement of art as art).

Alexandros Pissourios (born Cyprus 1982) graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2009, following a BA in Performance (Music) and Visual Art from the University of Brighton, 2007. Recent screenings and performances include Acoustic Images, BFI, London, 2009, Equator Project, St Lukes, London, 2008, Ars longis vita brevis, University of Brighton, 2006 and Urban Soul Festival, Nicosia, Cyprus, 2006. Alongside his practice he works as a sound and visual designer producing music videos (Floating Points, Mr Fogg) and alternative performances (A Man to Pet).

http://www.alexandrospissourios.com

Video Is The Only Constant April 7th 2010: Marianna and Daniel O'Reilly


Delivery, 14:00, 2008, UK


J-P Sartre once stated that the only free man is the man in chains. Stemming from an attempt to develop this idea, the film ‘Delivery’ wrests its suspense structure from two cases of men seeking meaningful performances within confined parameters; the now infamous chess game between Garry Kasparov and IBM computer ‘Deep Blue’, and the case of Anthony Blunt; art historian and KGB double-agent. Central to this attempt is the production of a synthetic universe in which contrived scenarios, filmic devices, edits and sound loops constantly refer back to the process of ‘reality production’ and the parameters by which individuals engage in producing images. ‘Delivery’ consists in a deconstructed journey of the image of free choice and the absurd quest for a meaningful existential performance both in front of the camera and behind it.

Marianna was born in Russia and Daniel in the UK. Having met undertaking their Master Degrees in Fine Art in London (Royal Academy of Arts and Chelsea College of Art respectively) they have developed multi-media installations, published artist’s books, participated and curated art exhibitions, screenings, debates and performances.

Since 2008 they have worked exclusively in video using their relationship as the basis for a series of protracted studies on subjectivity. These symposia focus primarily on the relationship between human freedom and individuality, the operations of self-deception, frustration and alienation, and a critical re-examination of identity. By employing a variety of incognitos and pseudonyms to articulate conflicting points of view, they have attempted to produce a synthetic reality occupied exclusively by these characters, placing them in extreme situations in which the dynamics of force and freedom enter into a critical relation.

http://www.mariannaanddaniel.co.uk

Video Is The Only Constant April 7th 2010: Tom Estes


Storm, 1:39, UK, installation


Estes' latest video work, 'STORM' is a true companion piece to his existing practice of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work. 'STORM' deals with the Biblical tale of Noah and the Ark- in the style of the Keystone Cops on acid. The work, is a re-recording of a film that is being projected onto a Bible. The Bible is open on the page of the account in Genesis 6-9 which details how God sends a great flood to destroy the earth because of man's wickedness and because the earth is corrupt. Estes’ choice of projecting fast-motion slapstick comedy directly onto the Biblical text is a deliberate mitigation of surrealist shock. The speeded action alters the tone of what seems a traditional childrens story- but with the mad attention urges of a Play Station gamer.

This updated version references the latest of shock art and horror film and so serves up a re-evaluation of the grim tale in which God in a final act of violence, decides to extinguish all life, (with the exceptance of Noah and a few choice animals). It is this element that drives the intellectual engine of the fantastic. As images flash by they become signs referring to an earlier reading of the Biblical text as well as a twisted view of our new millennium.

Times change, and so do people's outlooks. Today's audiences are gorged with violent spectacle, which though still shocking and frightening, can no longer traumatize to the degree that it once did. And yet in real life we probably have a greater distance from, and abhorance to, violence than in any other time in history. STORM is able to penetrate the audience's inner fears and mirror their masochistic desires. Even as religion, magic, alchemy and the occult seem to be on the wane in our culture, they preside over the gestation of science fiction and invest STORM's gothic subject-matter with an aura of comic gloom. In an age of global warming, the grimoire of the Magus becomes the mad-scientist’s user manual or the bad-science of popular opinion. Estes above all, wants to communicate with this audience; their pity and fear matter to him. With a condensed expression of these mental states, the tragic drama remains here on a level of emotional liquidation and dark indifference. The final success of STORM must be attributed to the risks it takes in revealing Estes' maverick artistic vision, and in Estes' final presentation of the work as still photographs.


"As a creator of multi-media performance & installation, my work has been hung, played, performed and installed in a few of the world’s right places and a couple of deliciously wrong ones. I am interested in the role of Anthropology in the study of human behaviour. My area of research is based on issues surrounding longing and desire, and so often intermingles elements of personal stories with wider historical and social narratives. Most scholars consider modern Anthropology as the study of the 'other' and as an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment and the first European colonization wave. I attempt to reverse this relationship, turning the anthropological eye and placing particular emphasis on the perspective and impact of long-term, experiential immersion, often known as 'participant-observation'. The central premise of my research is that fantasy and illusion are not contradictions of reality, but instead an integral part of our everyday lives."

http://www.myspace.com/testes2

Video Is The Only Constant April 7th 2010: Vivienne Todor


Contact, 1:13, UK


This short animation aims to explore the idea of micro and macrocosms; how details can be mistaken for being much larger structures than they are and vice versa.

Vivienne Todor has been brought up in London. Her interest in creativity came from a consistent influence from both her parents who encouraged a love for fine art and music. It lead her to study Photography, Music Technology and later, Animation at the London College of Communication.
She continually strives to produce work that engages and entraps the audience with rich textures, intriguing lighting and concealed subject matter. There is an ongoing fascination with ideas of perception, both visual and cognitive but there is a particular interest in the relationship between sound and image.

Video Is The Only Constant April 7th 2010: Sebastian Lindberg



A comedian, 7:40, Finland


A man practises for a stand-up comedy competition that will be boadcast on TV. But he forgets his jokes and what was meant as comedy turns into something else.

Sound, camera, editing, actor: Sebastian Lindberg
Music: Dmitri Shostakovich, violin concerto no. 1

Sebastian Lindberg is an artist from Helsinki. He has graduated from the Finnish academy of fine Arts in 2008, and has worked mainly with video and installations, in forms that are more or less narrative.

http://www.sebastianlindberg.net

Sunday 28 March 2010

Video Is The Only Constant @ Corsica Studios - April 7th 2010



The line up and flyer for the next VOC night at Corsica Studios on April 7th is now online. Feel free to download/print/distribute it. A higher quality copy can be found via the link below.

High Quality Copy of Flyer

Wednesday 17 March 2010

The Octoclub

A new blog attempting to chart the development of an artistic venture by a group of WSA graduates around the concept of the noble octopus. Please follow or email me for access if you would like to contribute!

http://www.octoclub.blogspot.com/