Vinyl Video.

Art Vinyl Video was an installation at FACT Liverpool in 2003. Vinyl Video was created by artists Gebhard Sengmuller, Penny Hoberman and Julia Scher and within the space resembled a boutique record shop. The premise was that in a parallel dimension, the home viewing format of choice was black and shiny and through a technological miracle, analogue moving images could be played from an LP. Miraculously it worked and in this moment between dvd and streaming had a real buzzy element as you took the disc from the shelf, cued it up on the turntable and watched the blurry faces of what resembled a pirated tenth generation copy of The Web of Fear: Episode One or at least something from the dawn of television. Ironically, a few years later, the creators uploaded this advert for their wares to YouTube and it offers a real flavour of what they accomplished.

The Krazyhouse in Washington.

Art In 2009, Dutch photographer and videographer Rineke Dijkstra visited The Krazyhouse in Liverpool on Wood Street for an art piece. Now that art piece is to be displayed in Washington for a few months at the Corcoron Gallery of Art:

"The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nikky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK is a four channel video installation by Rineke Dijkstra, created in 2009 at a popular dance club in Liverpool. It presents in sequence a group of five young people in their teens and early twenties dancing and sometimes singing along to tunes they selected themselves. Dijkstra met her subjects at the club and invited them to perform their choice of music for her video camera in a special studio that she had built in a back room on one of the dance floors. They dance while a DJ plays live mixes of their selections and their friends watch. One of the most important portraitists working today, Dijkstra’s style produces an uncomfortable, almost confrontational realism rather than a snapshot aesthetic. She draws nuanced feelings from her subjects that are quite poignant. In The Krazyhouse, the selection of music, type of dance and mimicry, and the choice of dress all come together to evoke a social spectrum that speaks to the time and spirit of its location. While the kids’ selections of music and dance are diverse, each one seems both self-conscious and lost in the moment looking for some way to transcend their daily lives and make an impression for others."

As you might expect this isn't its first appearance having previous turned up in retrospective exhibitions at The Guggenheim and The MMK Museum of Modern Art. Here are videos from each which include interviews with the artist and glimpses of the video:





There are some screenshots on Pinterest too.

Recovery of Nazi-Looted Art.

Art The Ben Uri Gallery is The London Jewish Museum of Art, originally founded in 1915. Find above one of their periodic Q&A events with David Glasser, Ben Uri's Chair and Chief Executive interviewing NY attorney Howard Spiegler.

Our Beautiful Game.

"Our Beautiful Game" National Football Museum from Centre Screen Productions on Vimeo.

Film "Our Beautiful Game" was created to feature on a massive 180 degree screen at the National Football Museum in Manchester which is now housed in the old Urbis building. As the producer Lucy Faye Dawson explains on her website, it was "shot at 4K resolution on the RedCam, the film is projected at a huge scale in the museum's dedicated cinema and together with Bent Ear's full 7.1 surround audio mix, it works to completely immerse the audience in the world of football."

Like Cinemarama which was equally designed to be projected in a circular space, watching this on a flat screen on offers a partial indication of what the experience must be like though unlike Cinerama it has less of the bendy line syndrome due to the original photography compensating for the curvature of the screen, though the slight crooked nature of some of the goal posts shows it hasn't been eliminated completely.

The ratio works well for the subject matter.  Those goal posts fit just within the centre of the shot while allowing for the sides of the image to still show foreground play and background landscape, of allowing action scenes to include both a goal and the crowds reaction unhampered in the same shot. The shots of the two kids in what looks like Everton Park are gorgeous.  Perhaps all Cinerama needed was time and better technology.

Mostly it's poignant and nostalgic and even manages to resonate with someone like me whose interest in football ended with Everton's loss to Manchester United in the 1985 FA Cup final with its subsequent hours of tears and heartache and tweenage vows of never again.  Football was mostly killed for me that day.  I was eleven.  This rather makes me wonder what I've been missing.  Too late now, though.

JFK's Final Days.

JFKs Final Days from Amon Carter Museum on Vimeo.

History Produced by The Sixth Floor Museum at the Dealey Plaza, this documentary shorts cuts together film and video footage from a range of sources to create a visual collage of the Kennedy's final few days, detailing the various events attended and speeches in chronological order.  The effect mimics the editing style of Oliver Stone's mid-career films, the cross cutting between colour and black and white and film stocks, but this, despite the rather forbidding voiceover, is more involving because this is about what would otherwise have been incidental moments in a President's life given greater import by subsequent events.

It was created to coincide with an exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Hotel Texas: An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, which brought together a collection of paintings which had been gathered and hung in the Kennedy's hotel room during their stay in Dallas which included a Russell, a Picasso and a Van Gogh. Presumably because this was the most secure hotel room in the city at the time it was felt they'd be quite safe. The exhibition's landing page includes clearer images of the paintings in situ as well as the paintings themselves along with audio testimony from witnesses.

Beyond The Visible: The Story of the Very Large Array.

Beyond The Visible: The Story of the Very Large Array from NRAO Outreach on Vimeo.

Space This can't be described much better than the text from the Vimeo page:

"Created in 2013 as the new interpretive film for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) public Visitor Center, this 24-minute production explores the synergies of technology and human curiosity that power the world's most productive radio telescope. Narrated by Academy Award-winning actress Jodie Foster (star of the film "Contact," which was based on the novel by Carl Sagan and filmed at the VLA), the program depicts many of the people whose diverse efforts enable the VLA to be a cutting-edge resource for astronomers and humanity worldwide."

Worth watching for the section about how the telescopes are transported around the site, miles and miles of railway track, and how their positioning changes the kinds of imagery and the parts of the universe the dishes are able to survey.

One Nation, Five Million Voices.

One Nation, Five Million Voices from National Museums Scotland on Vimeo.

People For Burns Night, a film created by Spiral Productions for National Museums Scotland in which what seems like half the population of the country try to describe their culture. If you've ever wondered what happened to Carole Smilie, she's in here, floating around in one of the boxes.  Spiral has another excerpt here.

Where are the Women artists?

Art For the Tate, Jemima Kirke who plays Jessa Johansson in HBO's Girls, presents this short history of women artists and their marginalisation in the history of art. I'm not sure what the answer is to redressing the balance, but certainly the BBC could make a start with a documentary series laying out the whole history of women artists in context, not unlike the section on Judith Leyster here.