BELGIAN FOCUS (2002)

What the most part of film and video productions in Belgian Focus share is the fact that they came about in a very personal, highly individual context. They are the fruit of micro systems. With hardly any means their authors, originating from all directions and disciplines, cultivate a biotope of their own. Rarely do these productions have a broad visibility. Since 1997 argos has offered them a forum on the argos information days and since last year on the argos festival. The growing number of participants over the last years demonstrated the necessity of visibility, but gradually expanded into an overload of work, which was not always of equal strength. For this reason argos decided to steer the offer in the right direction this year and carry through a selection.

After selections there are still some ninety self-willed film and videomakers left this year. All the productions can be consulted freely in the media library. Next to that a broad selection will be screened in Black Box, argos’ screening theatre. From the selection at hand curator Edwin Carels compiled a programme series in twelve parts, together they draw a representative picture of the work of short and medium length as it was made in Belgium over the last year. Carels thematically brought together productions under suggestive generic terms like ‘Observatorium’, ‘Construction Sights’ or ‘Stopped Motion’. Because of the unconstrained, purposely non-critical or analytical character of the twelve-part series - which is in fact simply some kind of jam session for the benefit of the audience - it was only comprised in the festival brochure and not in this catalogue, which merely contains an alphabetical repertory. Apart from Carels’ compilation series ‘shorts’ there will be attention for a number of other productions, films and videos in Black Box, which can be shown separately because of their greater length.

SCREENINGS

dialogue as film practice

In this part, after a selection made by Dirk De Wit, the dialogue as film practice is investigated. This ‘dialogue’ is a notion with which we try and refer to the attention for the procedural in filmmaking. Over the last couple of years new initiatives have been sprouting in Brussels where filmmakers and groups explicitly explore the dialogue in their work.

21 okt, 16.00: Process as film practice #1

23 okt, 20.00: Process as film practice #2

24 okt, 18.00: Process as film practice #3

25 okt, 18.00: Process as film practice #4

Il y était une fois Vidéographie

Fragile, cluttered and badly managed patrimony of audio-visual art productions. These productions, however, - unlike the bulk of Flemish and Belgian film production - have been enjoying international repute for years. For years argos has been taking the initiative in this field. We clean video, for instance, and convert tapes onto new digital carriers. In 2000 the centre preserved some hundred films and videos - a mere fraction of the audio-visual production under threat. The next year about thirty productions were safeguarded for the future.

The French-speaking part of the country has no structure like argos, but since 2002 the asbl ‘Vidéographie’ has been taking care of the video works that were shown and presented in the RTBF video programme ‘Vidéographie’. The foundation preserves the videos by converting them to new carriers. The argos festival 2002 shows a selection of the most significant works broadcast by ‘Vidéographie’ in the period 1977-1986. Apart from this selection the argos archive does contain about ten other tapes containing episodes of this historic(al) programme.

A larger selection of the RTBF-program ‘Vidéographie’ (1976-1986) is available in the media library of argos.

18 okt, 20.00: film museum

- Jacques-Louis Nyst B, Aile Quatre Neige (19’07, 1978)

- Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne B, Lorsque le bateau de Léon M. descendit la Meuse, pour la première fois (38’, 1979)

- Marie André B, Un ange passe (43’, 1985)

- Jacques Charlier B, Roll around the plinthure (18’, 1979)

Antonin De Bemels: Scrub & Dance

Scrub Solo Series

Video, b/w, non spoken, 37’00’’, 1999-2001

Prod: Antonin De Bemels

The Scrub Solos are the result of collaboration between the videographer Antonin De Bemels and the dancer/choreographer Bud Blumenthal. The first step was a series of slow motion improvisations filmed in semi-obscurity with a super 8 camera adjusted to ‘long exposure’ setting (dynamic low light automatic exposure). Using this technique, an interaction occurred between the dancer and the camera, between the movement and the light, leading to a kinetic transformation of the body itself. A soundtrack was then added, after digitalisation, and sounds and images were manipulated by the process of «scrubbing», similar to the record «scratching» techniques of DJ’s, to transform and recreate the movements of the choreography. Each part of the series is based on one or two shots, each shot corresponding to one improvisation; one particular setup.

Peau Pierre

Video, colour, non spoken, 20’, 2002

Prod: Antonin De Bemels

To make this video, Antonin De Bemels used images taken during a photography session at an old palace. There were two naked bodies and walls and dust. The photographer was speaking all the time, telling the dancers what to do. The filmmaker was hidden in a small alcove, silently watching and filming. An intimate relationship came about between those bodies and his. Using digital means, he tried to communicate the sensations and potential meanings that were not captured by the photographer.

19 okt, 20.00: film museum

Scrub & Dance

- Antonin De Bemels, Scrub Solos Series (37’), Peau Pierre (20’)

In the presence of the artist

Shorts

Curator Edwin Carels compiled this year’s Shorts section. It is intent on delivering an outline of the different types of media art produced in Belgium over the past year. For this edition argos chose to show a representative cross-section rather than confronting the viewer with an exhaustive overview or an overly broad selection of the material. In order to stimulate the process of discovery and distinction the works were brought together under evocative titles.

Shorts #1: TIME AND TIDE

19 okt, 22.00: argos

Shorts #2: GO FOR IT

20 okt, 14.00: argos

Shorts #3: STOPPED MOTION

21 okt, 20.00: aros

Shorts #4: NOTES ON MUSIC

21 okt, 22.00: argos

Shorts #5: WOULD BE

22 okt, 18.00: argos

Shorts #6: IN DUBIO

23 okt, 14.00: argos

Shorts #7: MEETING GROUND

23 okt, 18.00: argos

Shorts #8: STOLEN MOMENTS

24 okt, 16.00: argos

Shorts #9: OUTSPOKEN

25 okt, 20.00: argos

Shorts #10: SIGHT LINES

25 okt, 22.00: argos

Shorts #11: OBSERVATORIUM

26 okt, 16.00: argos

Shorts #12: CONSTRUCTION SIGHTS

26 okt, 18.00: argos

Single presentations

20 okt: argos

18.00: Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Selection of recent works

20.00: Chantal Akerman, De l’autre côté (99’)

22.00: Gauthier Hubert, Georg Hans: Le retour (30’)

21 okt: argos

14.00: Philippe de Pierpont, La ville invisible (56’)

18.00: Jan Florizoone, Koen Theys (30’45’’)

22 okt: argos

14.00: Geoffroy De Volder, Looking forward, fragmenting the edges of love (60’)

16.00: Fernando Alvim, Gela Uanga (45’)

20.00: Claudio Pazienza, L’argent raconté aux enfants et à leurs parents (53’)

22.00: Genoflex/Sitoïd, Performance audiovisuelle

23 okt: argos

16.00: Martha Bergman, Heureux Séjour (56’)

17.00: Nicolas Dufranne, Sans Titre - Un jour Agnès rencontre son double dans un hôtel (13’40’’); Moi, mon frère, la fille (14’); Vacances (14’49’’)

24 okt: argos

14.00: Joacquim Pereira Eires, Realtime: 3e verdieping: Tentoonstelling opening (33’)

20.00: Thierry De Mey, FASE (57’)

22.00: Wim Vandekeybus, In spite of wishing and wanting (50’45’’)

25 okt: argos

14.00: Boris Lehman, Histoire de ma vie racontée par mes photographies (210’)

26 okt: argos

14.00: Paola Stévenne, Terres de confusion (59’55’’)

Arnaud Meuleman, The Emperor (9’45’’); aa-lum nuit + aa-vide (17’); aampli (5’15’’); aaction-serie (7’02’’)

MEDIA LIBRARY

film and video

Chantal Akerman (º1950)

De l’autre Côté

Video, colour, Spanish spoken, French subtitled, 99’, 2002 • Prod: AMIP

The story is as old as the hills, yet every day more urgent and every day more terrible. Sometimes people will risk their very lives and leave everything behind in an attempt to survive, to live elsewhere. But they’re not wanted elsewhere, and if they are wanted then it’s only as manpower for jobs that no one else wants. But then, there’s always somebody who will pay just to get others to do those jobs. Pay, yes, but not too much. In this particular film ‘elsewhere’ is North America, and the people living in poverty are mainly Mexicans. For years, they passed through San Diego. But the INS have managed, with cutting-edge technologies invented during the conflict in Vietnam and brought to fruition in the Gulf War, to quell the flow of illegals in this part of California, deporting them to the desert and mountain regions of Arizona. At the start they had figured that the hardships and the dangers, the cold and the heat would be enough to stop them altogether. But you can‘t stop someone who’s hungry. Yet you fear him. Fear the other; be afraid of his filth, of the diseases that he brings in with him. Be afraid of an invasion. But never be afraid to kill him.

Beatrijs Albers (º1959) & Reggy Timmermans (º1959)

The work of Beatrijs Albers & Reggy Timmermans questions the underlying structures of social reality and the way in which reality is codified. It questions the mechanisms, which lead to political or ideological control over space, or what it is that is defined as the requisition and occupation of a territory.

Construction

Video, colour, English spoken, 8’ 37’’, 2002 • Prod: C.H.E.A.P. vzw

In ‘Construction’ the thought process of a building project is confronted with urbane and rural travellings.

Marinadivenezia

Video, colour, silent, 1’ 28’’, 2002 • Prod: C.H.E.A.P. vzw

‘Marinadivenezia’ investigates the social context of a campground resort, this time relying on a series of images of sailcloth-covered cars.

Fernando Alvim (º1963) & Valérie Van Nitsen (º1969)

Gela Uanga war and art of elsewhere

Video, colour - & b/w, English spoken, 45’, 2001 • Prod: Sussuta Boe

The Angolan artist Fernando Alvim’s body of work has been typified by a strong political engagement. Alvim’s works are outspoken and unconventional statements on the complex historical relationship between the African continent and the West. Alvim speaks of the abuses in Angola and starts with events like these to expose this relationship. ‘Gela Uangu - War and the Art of Elsewhere’, a documentary film collaboration by Fernando Alvim and Valerie Van Nitsen, comprised a part of the gigantic touring exhibition Memorias Intimas Marcas. Images of a war-torn Angola are overlapped with text taken from Alvim’s anti-war manifesto and interspersed with interviews with ex-soldiers and artists from the surrounding countries. A stark reminder of the devastation war brings to a country, and the taxing price that the population must pay.

Simon Arazi (º1971)

In Limbo

Video, colour, English spoken, 43’, 2001 • Prod: Polymorfilms

A satirical homage to the contemporary doctrine of propaganda, this film consists entirely of intercepted American satellite feeds: unfiltered and raw fragments of live news footage as well as corporate and political broadcasts, destined for employees and interns in multinational firms and law enforcement institutions. Essentially a collage, ‘In Limbo’ works like an archaeology of the ‘culture of persuasion’, where discourses from advertising, business and politics continuously contaminate each other.

Stéphane Aubier (º1964) & Vincent Patar (º1965)

In connection with the animated film series ‘Picpic le cochon magik et André le mauvais cheval’ (Picpic the magic pig and André the evil horse), Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar have created a new animated series using plasticine figures. Cowboy and Indian play the main roles, as two inseparable characters - like brothers against one other - each is jealous of the other and they argue about everything ... And just like real brothers they only discover each other in adversity, or in pulling all sorts of pranks. They both live with The Horse, an uncommonly moral character in the ‘Panique’ (Panic) universe. Horse might be thought of as the surrogate father (or is it mother?) of Cowboy and Indian. Anyway, it is just this moralising side of his personality that gets on the nerves of all the farm’s inhabitants.

Panique au Village: Cob’Hulk

Video, colour, French spoken, 4’ 30’’, 2002 • Prod: Vincent Tavier / La Parti Productions

In ‘Cob’Hulk’, Cowboy swallows a meteoroid. Every time he gets irritated, he undergoes a transformation and regresses a step further down the evolutionary chain, ‘til in the end he ends up a lizard. Happily he spits the meteoroid back out, and he’s normal once again.

Panique au Village: Le Relax

Video, colour, French spoken , 4’ 30’’, 2002 • Prod: Vincent Tavier / La Parti Productions

In ‘Le Relax’, Horse, Cowboy, and Indian are baking waffles; only, they haven’t any eggs. Horse and Indian leave to go find some on the farm, meanwhile Cowboy opens an enormous package intended for Horse (who had made a heartfelt plea for him to keep his hands off it). It is a ‘relax’ (‘Lazee-boy’) armchair with a massive amount of functional options.

Panique au Village: Une belle excursion

Video, colour, French spoken, 4’ 30’’, 2002 • Prod: Vincent Tavier / La Parti Productions

‘Une belle excursion’ (A Beautiful Excursion) is an episode that has Steven, Janine, and Bénédicte go on an outing. On the coach the guide explains that they will be visiting a farm which is maintained only by animals. Steven, Janine, and Bénédicte don’t catch on immediately to the fact that the farm being referred to is their own ...

Sven Augustijnen (º1970)

Le guide du parc

Video, colour, French spoken, English or Dutch subtitled version available, 44’, 2001 • Prod: Sven Augustijnen

This fake documentary allows you to discover hundreds of details in the ‘social life’ of the park. The artist lets himself be led around the Parc Royal in Brussels, a well-known cruising-spot for homosexuals. The guide, a neatly turned-out bank employee who knows the neighbourhood like the back of his hand, points out the lesser-known ‘tourist’ attractions for him: the remote pathways and the gloomy little clumps of forest. "If you have an eye for it you can see just about everything happen", the guide says. But all we can see are playing dogs and happy nuptial couples. Until the moment dusk sets in, and suddenly from every side lonely men come walking into the park. While they’re walking up and down these same pathways tens of times, they leer at each other from a distance. On their quest for anonymous sex these wandering souls unconsciously serve up a wonderful and macabre choreography. An educational film, it not only tells all about the historical facts surrounding the Parc Royal, it is also a ‘sociological’ document and above all a humorous film about a surprising character: the park guide.

Johan

Video, colour, Dutch spoken, English, French and German subtitled version available, 23’, 2001 • Prod: Sven Augustijnen

‘Johan’ is a purely documentary film that shows the therapy undergone by a patient suffering from aphasia. Aphasia is an illness that affects the language centres of the brain and that can be generated by, amongst other things, a cerebral -tumour or -haemorrhage. Patients suffering from aphasia are often subject to chronic memory loss, and due to the ensuing semantic or interpretative disturbances they cannot recognise as such or correctly categorise certain specific objects. With the beginning of Sven Augustijnen’s film, the camera and the filming process themselves go to comprise some aspect of the therapy, thereby itself functioning as feedback for these media.

Heine R. Avdal (º1970) & Christoph De Boeck (º1972) & Yukiko Shinozaki (º1969)

Terminal

Video, colour, non spoken, 16’, 2002 • Prod: Heine R. Avdal, Christoph De Boeck, Yukiko Shinozaki

‘Terminal’ shows us the body as a container along which signals or ‘presences’ can travel. Signals that impinge through the flesh, entering and departing. A presence laded with information. There are only slight traces of these motions perceptible. These series of performances works with some of these traces, the effects of presences that are alien, that are not of the body. The concept of ‘Terminal’ manifests itself for instance in someone who is dying: medical apparatus exhibits a sort of consciousness, often in the shape of electrical impulses, whilst the body itself can already seem like a dead object. Sometimes it seems as if an alien presence overtakes our nervous system, allowing a routine action to degenerate into nervous contractions of the muscles. The sound design matches this idea of a spiritual presence by capturing, processing and recalling signals that float through the air, through rooms, through bodies. This performance’s sound was made by means of ‘multiple digital processing’ of recorded software or system failures. The concept of ‘Terminal’ also implies that bodies can be compared with processing units, which calculate input-streams and alter them to produce a transformed output. The relation between eye and camera lens is predominant in ‘Terminal’. Input of visual data is of the greatest importance to the human way of acquiring knowledge; it is a form of ‘reality processing’. In ‘Terminal’ the information processing of both man and machine glide inter-twined along one another, sometimes they fuse together, sometimes they break apart.

Pascal Baes (º1959)

HF Remix 1

Video, colour, non spoken, 12’, 2002 • Prod: Pascal Baes

‘HF Remix 1’ is a mathematical ‘re-cookery’ of fragments of old 16mm films through the systematic adaptation of the ‘Height Field’ effect on images. The film ‘Rainbow market’ shows a series of performances carried out at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the Sint-Gilles’ flower market in Brussels. The images have been digitally enhanced frame by frame with the ‘Height Field’-effect, boosting the grey values to their black and white extremes. The end-result is 3D images creating an explosion of light and colour. Highly accelerated and compressed musical fragments by DJ P accompany the images.

Christophe Bailleau (º1965)

La Pause

Video, colour, non spoken, 4’ 20’’, 2002 • Prod: Christophe Bailleau / Chants opératoires asbl

‘La Pause’ (The Pause) deals with those rare and everyday moments, that never shall return. Elements of varying origins are brought together, but in the end they show an unexpectedly close coherence; that is, every observed moment corresponds to a dead moment, before or after an action, showing us that which would normally never be of any interest to us. The whole is a poem that bends under the weight of loneliness and absurdity.

Pascal Baes (º1959)

HF Remix 1

Video, colour, non spoken, 12’, 2002 • Prod: Pascal Baes

‘HF Remix 1’ is a mathematical ‘re-cookery’ of fragments of old 16mm films through the systematic adaptation of the ‘Height Field’ effect on images. The film ‘Rainbow market’ shows a series of performances carried out at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the Sint-Gilles’ flower market in Brussels. The images have been digitally enhanced frame by frame with the ‘Height Field’-effect, boosting the grey values to their black and white extremes. The end-result is 3D images creating an explosion of light and colour. Highly accelerated and compressed musical fragments by DJ P accompany the images.

Orla Barry (º1969)

Foundlings

Video, colour, English spoken, 40’, 2002 • Prod: argos

‘Foundlings’ was shot near Wexford, in the south-east of Ireland where Orla Barry grew up. This visual poem without a particular narrative and full of autobiographical elements is set to a rhythm that’s been immensely decelerated. Floating images and deep voices are central to the associative strategy that is at work here. The images allow one to listen to a hypnotic voice, meanwhile the eyes are allowed to wander ... to daydream ... to travel over the length of already-reckoned time. The images reflect landscapes, images full of repetitive calm, the kind of calm one finds between wakefulness and falling into sleep. The velocity of the sea determines the rhythm, regular and yet irregular. People who do not speak inhabit the images. They are terribly busy doing nothing, except passing time. Silent brothers and sisters of the sea.

Orla Barry (º1969) & Els Dietvorst (º1964)

Act One

Video, b/w, English spoken, 1’ 40’’, 2002 • Prod: Firefly

‘Act One’ is a short video loop by Orla Barry and Els Dietvorst, made in the attic of an abandoned schoolhouse in Bruges. It was intended to elicit and recall the ambience in the house between dusk and nightfall. The house itself seemed to spew forth a whole series of stories and atmospheres, the way a landscape sometimes does in the twilight, when the light corrupts and troubles all forms and feelings.

Marta Bergman (º1962)

Heureux Séjour

Video, colour, French and Romanian spoken, 56’, 2001 • Prod: Luna Blue Film - Serge Kestemont

‘Heureux Séjour’ (Happy Stay) is the name of a home for the elderly where the grandmother of the artist lives. She is of Romanian descent and relates, as grandmothers do, all her recollections and memories from old times. A film portrait free of awe.

Yves Bernard (º1957)

Martini Ground Zero (The Trailer)

Video, colour, non spoken, 6’ 30’’, 2001-2002 • Prod: Yves Bernard

From September 2001 to end of May 2002, a camera recorded, and webcast on the internet, the destruction process of the Martini Tower (International Center Rogier, Brussels) - the first skyscraper of Brussels, built in the late 50’s and famous for its audacious functional architecture and programme. ‘Martini Ground Zero (The Trailer)’ is a shortened version (10 months in 6 minutes) of the time-lapse video resulting from this recording process, one that began a few days after September 11, 2001 and ended on Ground Zero Day (May 23, 2002).

Pascal Bernier (º1960)

Safe-Sex

Video, colour, non spoken, 3’, 2001 • Prod: Pascal Bernier

‘Safe-Sex’ speaks about the going over from sexuality to obscene a-sexuality. The playthings and the erotic objects presented by Pascal Bernier are on the borderline between allegory and silent objectivity. The elements evoke a polarised universe in which play and death, pain and the commonplace are reflected in each other. Bernier, alternating between being cold and being aggressive, travels through an apparently private world.

Aline Bouvy (º1974) & John Gillis (º1972)

Whatever the theme of the work might seem to refer to, it is often potential seduction, and the alienation of that same seduction, that are recurrent in the works of Aline Bouvy and John Gillis. Projections of a constantly changing ‘I’ - just as the many different roles that artists like to play as for each part they find out its proper staging, decorum or medium - concentrate their work on the central aspects of existence.

Unreleased (Kiss)

Video, colour, silent, 17’’(mirrored loop), 2001 • Prod: Aline Bouvy & John Gillis

The watercolor animation film ‘Unreleased (Kiss)’, 2001, is a sort of light and airy treatment of a serious theme, an impossible desire - a desiring desire, that never obtains its object.

Unreleased (Shooting)

Video, colour, silent, 40’’(loop), 2002 • Prod: Aline Bouvy & John Gillis

‘Unreleased (Shooting)’, 2002, is concerned with an equally tragic theme, the ‘primal wound’, or trauma. These are things we all know about and that everyone has to experience in everyday life. That is why it is difficult to undertake serious treatments of these themes, as if seriousness would become then sentimental.

Can’t be Zarathoustra all the time

Video, colour, non spoken, 2’ 03’’, 2002 • Prod: Aline Bouvy & John Gillis

Things that are comic-pathetic, like cartoon representations, seem more ‘real’: that sums up the music video ‘Can’t be Zarathoustra all the time’ and the song lyrics performed a cappella on the similarly titled audio CD.

Pierre Bismuth (º1963)

The Jungle Book Project

Video, colour, multiple languages, 57’, 2002 • Prod: Pierre Bismuth

‘The Jungle Book Project’ is a multilingual re-composition that plays on the universality of Walt Disney in 1967. Pierre Bismuth took the liberty to edit a new soundtrack, based on 18 translations chosen by each character in function of the resonance of each language. The editing and montage, that serves to fundamentally modify the understanding of the story, draws the attention on the mimicry of the characters, on their gestures and facial expressions. The visual language contributes just as much to a correct understanding as does the spoken language, which is made secondary in this process and becomes a type of aesthetic sound-expression. The spectator, who has lost his linguistic reference points, is led to invent a new type of understanding that mingles the visual and the auditory with each other well beyond the borders of any codified languages. This interpretation of the Walt Disney classic contextualises the mythical film, rendering it paradoxically abstract and permeable to new poetic and political interpretations.

sound section

‘Belgian Focus’ is also an attempt to follow up on local audio production, without claiming to offer a genuine outline of the field. The few works which have been taken on into the programme segment after careful selection are - even though this should not be generalised - mostly sound recordings by visual artists. Often this audio work takes up a logical place in their body of work as a whole and/or it is inseparably linked to a body of other (multimedia) artworks. In other cases they are the sonic outcome of, for instance, an installation project or a video work. Formally argos does not wish to impose any boundaries upon the selected work, which ranges from, for instance, spoken word over electronical soundscapes, field recordings and all possible crossovers.

Orla Barry (º1969)

Unsaid, Soundsculpture

Audio CD, English spoken, 15’, 2001 • Prod : Orla Barry

The CD ‘Unsaid, Soundsculpture’ is part of a collaboration between Orla Barry and Rui Chafes with the same name: Chafes created a large metal sculpture in which somebody can take place to experience this audio work written and read by Barry. That sculpture concerns a small black tower of five metres high. Inside there is a black, enclosed and claustrophobic space. Seated inside the sculpture the visitor sticks his head in an enclosed sphere: a set-up that surrounds him with darkness and leaves him alone with nothing but his heartbeat, a heartbeat that is accentuated by the sound installation. In that setting a voice is addressing the visitor directly, on highly intimate terms from the start. ‘Unsaid, Soundsculpture’ is a work that revolves around the constant struggle between the physical and the spiritual. In the installation the visitor needs to stand firm to undergo it all from the beginning until the end: the seat is made very hard and uncomfortable on purpose.

Aline Bouvy (º1974) & John Gillis (º1972)

Can’t be Zarathoustra all the time (album)

Audio CD, 7’ 57’‘, English spoken, 2002 • Prod : Aline Bouvy & John Gillis

In the varied work of Aline Bouvy and John Gillis there is focus on the potential of seduction and the alienation of it. The same holds for ‘Can’t be Zarathoustra All the Time’: an audio-visual work that can also be conceived a short musical album. In seven tracks cartoon-like, comical and at times pathetic world is outlined which partly refers to the world of young teenage girls. German and English a-cappella voices - sometimes electronically altered into stammering, robot-like or intermingling voice sections - create a sweet and dreamy atmosphere, formally reminding of pop music. "Sometimes comical-pathetic things like these cartoon-like representations are more ‘real’ than reality", according the artists.

Building Transmissions/ Antwerpen (Kris Delacourt (º1978), Nico Dockx (º1974), Dave Vanderplas (º1976), & Peter Verwimp (º1974)

curious004: 220V (a remix)

Audio CD, 51’ 49’’, non spoken, 2002 • Prod : Nico Dockx for CURIOUS/ releases

Building Transmissions is a collaborative corps of artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, and architects articulating experimental audio-visual writings, improvisational structures/ performances, and multi-media installations - rethinking our communicative possibilities of esthetical production and compassionating circulation of radical ideas in relation to both text, image and sound. With mixed media and sound techniques - input-output frequencies, field recordings, feedback loops, resonance, broken beats, voice experiments, drones, filters, delays and remixes - the soundscape ‘curious004: 220V (a remix)’ creates a dark and brooding atmosphere. Paraphrasing both contemporary electronic music as the ever evolving noise-underground, the work sometimes interacts with abstract images and video-projections, choreographies (concerning memory, body and space) growing uncanny structures of time.

Isabelle Martin (º1978)

Starting from interviews the Brussels’ artist Isabelle Martin wrote three portraits of women. Initially she wanted to elaborate the ‘portraits’ project into an audio-visual document, but the solicited women could not be caught in images. Instigated by the conversations Martin had with them she worked out three short stories, ‘auto-tales’ published by the artist in three CD’s with matching text booklets. In the ‘spoken word’ part the artist puts herself in the shoes of those three women: her voice tells the story of their fleeting musings. As for content ‘Portrait nr. 1: Annie: Un jus d’oranges pressées’, ‘Portrait nr.2: Maibritt: Pas de musique cette semaine’ and ‘Portrait nr.3: Ingrid: des gambas géantes’ both set out from the domestic, the personal and the anecdote. In their high detail, however, they touch upon a deep, human, reflecting layer. Moreover Isabelle Martin puts herself in the position of her three female subjects with a huge dose of subtle humour and among others the accents, the rhythm and the tone of her voice she makes these auditory works into music.

Portrait nr. 1: Annie: Un jus d’oranges pressées

Audio CD, French spoken, 4’ 54’‘, 2001 • Prod : Isabelle Martin

Portrait nr. 2: Maibritt: Pas de musique cette semaine

Audio CD, French spoken, 3’ 57’‘, 2001 • Prod : Isabelle Martin

Portrait nr. 3: Ingrid: Des gambas géantes

Audio CD, French spoken, 6’ 45’‘, 2002 • Prod : Isabelle Martin

Anne Penders (º1968)

No Home

Audio CD, French and English spoken, 22’, 2000-2001 • Prod : Anne Penders

The work of Anne Penders as a whole - mainly images, texts and sound - constitutes a reflection on travelling and nomadic life. She considers the traveller as someone who, as a result of constantly being here and elsewhere, actually keeps disappearing. ‘No Home’ is an auditory story with a strong cinematic dimension: the sonic work evokes direct images. Field shots of actual, clearly delineated acts and events - footsteps, peeping doors and thundering trains for instance - French spoken word (Penders’ soft, sometimes murmuring voice), music and fragments culled from the ether join to tell the intimate tale of the traveller. A person who is continually on his way to new destinations and encounters, though he never seems to arrive anywhere.

new media

The ’new medium’ selection proposed in the framework of the ‘Belgian Focus’ aims, before all else, at being a general assessment of the status of Belgium: that creates existing works through information and communication technologies, and what type of works. It is therefore not strictly speaking about a ’critical’ selection, we have not reached that point (even though there is - obviously - a choice according to personal criteria of what I believe to be an interesting works in terms of the ’New Medium’). The emergency today lies in the affirmation and recognition of the creators and shapes of emergent creations in a sector, which is in constant evolution, with actors from a wide range of different origins (visual arts, plastic arts, info-graphics, data processing, architecture, etc.), to the too little (un)structured framework of the public services. The conditions are again far from being filled to develop a vision that would propose a critical selection (that most visitors - due to a lack of references - could not criticize) and it is not where the urgency lies. (Although there are currently some excellent achievements).

This selection decomposes itself in several categories: Internet projects, off-line projects, (CD-ROM) but also installations (interactive environments, ’mixed realities’, ’increased environment’) and audiovisual performances (ex. laptops bands). First tendency: the near-disappearance of the CD-ROM, of which only one is proposed this year (and here again by default). Second tendency: the wealth and diversity of Internet projects; from collaborative sites to artists’ project with a political dimension and that use all the mechanisms of the online media, to the personal universes and studies around the aesthetics of interactivity. Third tendency: today, here, just like anywhere else in the area of electronic arts, the creators want to get out of the screen mouse paradigm, off the too-tight relationship of ’a user interacting through his mouse with his computer through a flat surface of visualization’. Increasingly, the borders that exist between the different types of disciplines explode, and both visual and other artists invest the area of space and performance, offering environments where the visitor is an actor, or even playing their audiovisual creations ’live’, directly from their computers.

How does one archive and document these new shapes and forms (Internet site, installations, performances) to unsteady or indeterminate supports, how does one account these works in days like these? So many questions are thereby put to argos and all the other institutions that have similar missions. Thereby, because of a lack of space and means, it is this year alas not possible to display a lot of installations or to propose performances in the ‘Belgian Focus’-programme. Nevertheless, we decided to stage Genoflex with the performance ‘Sitoïd’.

texte originale en français

Agentschap/ agence / agency

Founded in 1992 by Kobe Matthys. Collaborators: Andreas Behr, Lieven Deboeck, Alexandra Dementieva, Romana Perecinec, Wilfried Prantner, Mafalda Ribeiro dos Anjos, Rebecca Verreth, Tristan Wibault, Elke Zimmermann, Guy Zurkinden ...

Database for the use of ownership

Website, 1999-2002 • www.agency-computer.com

The agency database gathers the different ways in which we use property in our daily lives. How do people deal with (in)tangible objects like copyright, shares or houses? The users themselves further complete the data: a driver for example describes how he uses his truck and sends these data through the web-site. ‘Agency’ processes the information into the database, which can be consulted by the visitor/spectator. Even though the usage of property is strictly limited in the West by determining rules, the appropriation of that same property by different people results in countless practices. These practices are completely unpredictable and they each respond to an inner logic of their own.

Bert Balcaen (º1978) & Ingrid Stojnic (º1976)

Interfaces

Website, 2001-2002 • www.rekalldesign.com/interfaces

Interfaces is an ongoing web-project realised by Ingrid Stojnic and Bert Balcaen (Rekall Design, www.rekalldesign.com). It is an environment in which the power lines between the notions of body-mind-world are investigated. In a series of multimedia sequences, the three aspects of these triangular relations are being disclosed from various perspectives. The title refers to the fact that every section is an entrance or an interface to the body-mind-world environment. Each part focuses on a particular aspect, of which the meaning is revealed through the interaction between the audience and the work. The project started in 2001 but continues to evolve: new elements are added, older ones disappear. ‘Interfaces’ was previously nominated for the art prize of the ‘Stichting voor Kunstpromotie’ (Foundation for Art Promotion) in Brussels; it was part of the Hypertekst exhibition at Stuc in Leuven, 2002; and it was presented during the Zapping session at the Numer02 conference in Paris.

Eva Cardon (º1979)

ephameron / ephade

Website, 2000-2002 • www.ephameron.com

‘ephameron’ is about moments, thoughts, and about convincing the viewer how ephemeral life is. By using pictures, drawings, paintings and text, Cardon creates a whole that reflects her world. The graphic-pictural approach of the virtual medium, enables her to develop a site which takes the visitor to an intimate place somewhere between here and elsewhere, between present and past, without relying on technological trends or gadgets. Her most r ecent project, ‘ephade’, tries to broaden the contemporary aspect of the website, and makes it more inviting for viewers to stay, by showing little texts that attract the attention. Every couple of weeks new material is added so that ‘fans’ may come back for more. By the end of 2002, a third project will be online.

Cathy Coez (º1968)

52 amis

Website, 2002 • web.wanadoo.be/cathycoez/flash/sectionflash/flash.htm

As a starting point Coez asks the following question: "what does a friend mean to you?" to 52 people from her surroundings. Then she takes pictures of their faces. Starting from these Coez creates animations. The purpose is to imagine a visual correspondence between the meaning of each answer and the instigator for the event animating it. The result consists of 52 animated portraits which constitute an open answer to the question: "what does a friend mean to you?" To Coez this is an excellent working topic. There are those who feel that one is better off without some of them, others feel one loses without realising the exact reason. There are people who disappear and people who stick around. And there are the others.

Michel Cleempoel (º1954)

Point de Rencontre

CD-ROM, 2002 • Website: www.michelcleempoel.be/index2.html

As a starting point Coez asks the following question: "what does a friend mean to you?" to 52 people from her surroundings. Then she takes pictures of their faces. Starting from these Coez creates animations. The purpose is to imagine a visual correspondence between the meaning of each answer and the instigator for the event animating it. The result consists of 52 animated portraits which constitute an open answer to the question: "what does a friend mean to you?" To Coez this is an excellent working topic. There are those who feel that one is better off without some of them, others feel one loses without realising the exact reason. There are people who disappear and people who stick around. And there are the others.

Anouk De Clercq (º1971), Anton Aeki & Joris Cool

Game of mobile forces

Website, 2001- 2002

www.portapak.be, www.aeki.be, www.jo-co.be

‘Game of mobile forces’ is an interactive experiment with music and 3D-software, a collaborative work around sound- and image-manipulation, with live music, projections and state of the art software. ’Game of mobile forces’ is the desire to visualize music and to put together two disciplines - music and image - into something that transcends the boundaries of each discipline involved, using the new and revolutionary software touch101 - a 3D-program that allows us to link certain elements in the image to certain sound frequencies - the music makes the images. ’Game of mobile forces’ is a game in which music flirts with images (and vice versa), in which electronic music flirts with acoustic music (and vice versa), in the minefield between man and machine, nature and technology.

Arnaud Jacobs (tmrx, Mark Mancha, missfit) (º1968) & Alexandra Dementieva (ademXL) (º1960)

Tmrx.org

Website, 2002 • www.tmrx.org

This is the information website of tmrx, Mark Mancha and missfit, three pseudonyms which stand for the different musical activities of sound artists Arnaud Jacobs. The approach of tmrx is rather abstract and focuses on the relationship between sound, space and perception, the music of Mark Mancha is embedded in post-techno and missfit creates sountracks for films and theatre, and also audio for CD-roms, website, etc. His collaboration with visual artist Alexandra Dementieva resulted in a very interesting cross-fertilisation between the auditive and visual medium (cf. Belgian Focus). The structure of this site develops in accordance to the different types of music. Each activity is represented by a separate interactive page where the visitor can discover the compositions and sounds, and manipulate them by opening the pages simultaneously.

Robert Kot (º1976)

www.robertkot.com

Website, 2001 • www.robertkot.com

This site presents a brief general overview of the photographical work of Robert Kot. On the lookout for new visual concepts, moving sometimes outside of the frames instilled by what one may call traditional photography, Kot is especially interested in the expression and materialization of his ideas through the pictures, while manipulating them continuously. Each page contains three sample images. The presentation is divided into two main frames being relevant to his personal work and works more commercially orientated.

LAB[au]: Jérome Decock (º1973), Manuel Abendroth (º1969), Alexandre Plennevaux (º1973) & John Knight (º1950)

Worlddebt, you can count on it

Website, 2001 • www.encorebruxelles.org/jk

The website designed by LAB[au] is more than a mediation support; it is a project in itself, evaluating the state of contemporary art production through the graphical transcription of numbers and interactivity. LAB[au]’s Statistics Navigator deals with sub/inter textual reading of contemporary art, its production, diffusion and mediation logics, in this case specifically related to the art structure of the multidisciplinary project ‘encore ...bruxelles’.

‘Worldebt’, the working title for a new project by John Knight, was realized in collaboration with the architectural office of LAB[au]. This on-line project deals with the internet as a support, a medium, for new contemporary art productions extending the mediation of art to new fields of investigation, it engages the internet as a subtextual site for the diffusion of information(s). This collaboration project thus investigates the condition, inscriptions and modalities of contemporary art according to information networks, economic and social structures and their multiple inter-relations.

When interested visitors log on to the project’s web site, multiple layers of informational systems open up so as to allow the receiver the opportunity to select their nation of choice, and become one of the 181 individuals to receive a fully illustrated Worldebt card and membership that will ensure the kind of lifestyle we all seek. By doing so, the users’ interactions are tracked, providing a new layer of information displayed through ‘scientific-like’ statistics and geo-political maps displaying the relation between new communication technologies, art and economics.

Tamara Laï (º1954)

Tell A Mouse

Website, 1997-2002 • www.tellamouse.be.tf

This site presents evolutive works that are somewhere between ‘happening’ and ephemeral art, plural, hybrid, trans-disciplinary, based on the principle of proximity from afar. The collective art spaces in this network are accessible to all, artists who are either confirmed or improvised. First, the artists are invited to bring a contribution. It starts as a series of isolated stones that, once they have been assembled, will build the building. These elements can be scattered on different servers, and united through a programming process or through hyperlinks on a same page. Secondly, there is a research of symbiosis by direct and reciprocal intervention on the other’s work in order to develop new relational shapes: an art without borders and out of time, where art is relational and relationship, an art.

Annemie Maes (º1955)

People Database Archive

Website, 2000-2002 • www.unamas-projects.org/peopledatabase

The ‘People Database Archive’ is an interactive art project, set up according to the structure of a virtual meeting space, a lab for experiments and exchanges. Instigated by Annemie Maes in 1977 it extended into a collaboration project between artists and anonymous participants. It is based on an extensive collection of Polaroid negatives of passport photos. They are gathered in a worldwide identity archive in which each individual is presented in an identical way. The participants are requested to pick out one photo, to use it as a mirror and associatively express their recollections, dreams, wishes and reflections in textual, visual or audio form. All contributions are reflections of a specific ’state of mind’ of the participant. In a constant interaction between reality and fiction, fiction and documentary the private world of the individual is made public. In this way ‘People Database project’ is a study in identity, it investigates what happens in and around us on a subconscious level. By archiving all these different reactions and contributions the ‘People Database Archive’ defines itself as an interactive network, an ever growing, flexible organism.

Olivier Meunier (º1976)

Genoflex

Website, 2000-2002 • users.skynet.be/genoflex

‘Genoflex’ is the project name for an actual practical research project. Its goal, technically speaking, is the exploration of a certain kind of synesthesia, which is in this case the audio-visual connection in a live situation.(what you hear is what you see, and the other way around). The work focuses on the actual and future techniques permitting audio-visual pieces and plays, and on the symbolic and/or semantic derived from those techniques. Establishing a series of personal instruments-shells that easily can be accommodated to the context. The techniques are partly the means and partly the subjects of this study, considering a larger socio-cultural context. The site is a small version of a public display which is echoing the past and actual work on this project, and is now germinating other branches: 3D space inclusions, opening larger in the future, dedicated to space installations work; and a video section dedicated to experimental documentaries like ‘dhübxl’ and future projects. The aim is to develop a video work, which is an object in itself but come to live with the addition of music. (in the best way...it will lead to some videodisc, playable on the screen of your lounge...) Playing with the images like Meunier plays with the sounds, loops on tempo’s, with a structure of an open toolbox or construction set game, to create something solid but streamline fluid on the projection wall playing the whole night long.

Alok Nandi (º1964)

Transfiction/ Hyperadventures

Website, 2002 • www.transfiction.net

Transfiction is a concept, a system as well as an area for scientific and artistic exploration. Designed by Alok b. Nandi and developed by Xavier Marichal, it has seen its first development in a collaboration project allowing transportation into fictional spaces (hence the coined term of transfiction) of people in the streets of the city-university of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. It then moved into the design of interactive installations, especially featuring immersion and intuition for the users, exploring ubiquitous computing. ‘Transfiction’ is designed for mixing synthetic and natural images in real time and allows one to interact in these input/output screens. Transfiction is a system for intuitive interaction in a non-obtrusive manner, allowing one to develop a novel media, accumulating the representation knowledge of previous media, such as cinema, performance, and theatre. Successful interaction relies on user ability to co-ordinate cognitive perception and physical action within the virtual environment. In these hybrid action spaces, narrative modalities are investigated through body tracking, position detection and image recognition systems. The developed technical architecture allows the implementation of ‘narrative graphs’ (interactive scenarios) and opens the possibility to analyse the cognitive and visual actions and reactions to an immersive intuitive interactive system.

Michael Samyn (º1968) & Aureia Harvey (º1971)

Entropy8zuper!

Website, 1999-2002 • www.entropy8zuper.org

What is most remarkable about ‘Entropy8Zuper!’ is the designers’ recognition of the Web as a place where abstract images, text, representations and sounds can come together to create compelling and seductive narratives. Grand in ambition and sophisticated in the use of the many programs, sub-programs and "applets" now available to artists, the team’s sites have an unabashedly romantic aura that is all the more impressive for its emotional honesty and directness. At times enigmatic, sensuous and purely beautiful, theirs is one of the few bodies of Web-based art that can answer the barrage of images and sounds coming from our computers with allusive, elusive and provocative alternatives.

Stijn Slabbinck (º1976)

Scratchrobot.com

Website, 2001-2002 • www.scratchrobot.com

The ‘Scratchrobot’ is an installation consisting of two record players, a computer and a robotic arm. When you send e-mail to robot@spess.com the message is analysed and processed into signals which will control the robot. He ’scratches’ a sound fragment, which is recorded and sent back to the originator of the mail. Thus every mail is converted into a unique sound. The ‘Scratchrobot’ came about by the questioning of communication systems, their laws and regulations. Its construction is an attempt to control the daily information flow.

Lode Steenhoudt (º1974), Dirk Bernaerts (º1978), Waldo Degroote (º1974), Brecht Devoldere (º1976) & Bruno Vierstraete (º1976)

De Chemische Circus Tent

Website & Cd-rom, 2001-2002 • www.chemischcircus.be

The ‘Chemisch Circus’ is a collective of creative forces gathering video, audio, graphics, photography and visual arts under a single category of which the experiment is the major foundation. From this the collective distils not only the obvious shapes and contents. As a collective the Chemisch Circus also ventures itself into performance and installation art, though video always constitutes a major part. ‘De Chemische Circus Tent’ became their virtual location project. The looked around for what was to be found in the tent and gave themselves one week to get going with raw material from previous projects.

Ward Weis (º1956)

Fridges and streets

Website, 2000 • www.fridges.yucom.be

Prod : Randfilms vzw

This web space is dedicated to the humming sound of the refrigerator. A (city) map is divided in 16 equal squares. In each of them the artists makes a one minute recording of the sound of a refrigerator. Also a one minute sound-picture is made in the front of the house where the refrigerator was recorded. The site is build with these recordings. By clicking the squares on the maps you can hear the sound of the refrigerators or the streets associated with the location of the fridge. Its his intention to have this project growing and that other places will be added. The artists responds to those who are interested to have her/his city added to the list and is looking forward to support if someone wants to record 16 fridges & 16 streets.

This event is part of argosfestival 2002