A brief Introducion to Video Installion
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Installation and experimental video work
Experimental film and video is made to express artist's feelings and thoughts through a different medium to pen and paper, or paint and canvas, you can find this art literally anywhere, Bill Viola made a piece called "the messenger" and installed it in Durham Cathedral (he had it projected onto a wall inside). An installation is setting up your work somewhere other than a room with a screen; this could mean in a cathedral (like Bill Viola) or simply changing things in a room such as setting the room up to look like a forest, or projecting it onto lots of different screens like Jayne and Louise Wilson's piece which was shown in the Baltic Flour Mill.
Louis Bunel and Salvador Dahli
Un Chien Andolous
This piece was made in 1928 and it was a silent movie, however Salvador Dahli sat in the room with two grammar phones with a record of the tango and a record of Wagner and he switched between the two while the film was playing. He used sexual harassment/perversion (the man being turned on by the woman being knocked down and killed, and the man chasing the woman round the room trying to feel her up), mutilation ( the rotten donkeys in the grand piano, the woman's eye being sliced open by the razor) and there was a lot of subtle digs at the catholic church ( the priests being dragged by the man.
I think the artists aimed to show they're own interpretation of "limbo" and dream worlds, while also showing death destruction and mutilation.
Chris Marker
La Jetee
This film shows the violence of death through the eyes of a kid, and how he only realises that the death he witnessed was his own after world war 3, all in all quite a confusing film. The entire piece is made up of stills, which makes the whole thing have more of an impact, it is narrated. I'm not quite sure what the aims of this piece were, but whatever they were I'm sure they were achieved.
Bill Viola
The messenger
This piece is a film of a man under water, slowly floating to the surface, taking a gasp of air and then slowly going back under. It was shown in Durham Cathedral against a wall on the inside...