How can you document the elusive stuff myths are made of? That is what the furtive chalk graffiti on freight train wagons is, the fleeting consecration of their anonymous creators. The word “graffiti” stands for an art with schools and aspirations, very different from that other fleeting and legitimately popular art, which may bring to Argentinian minds the painted messages on the rocks of Mar del Plata. Bill Daniel pulls it off by getting onto those bare wagons with his camera, by traveling with those who load them and the tramps who use them.

A semantic and numerical collapse, analogue-digital flow led by the voice of David Larcher. Video Void text is a mystic journey through analogue-digital noise. 3D, multicoloured butterflies navigate through seas of stormy text.

The American paranoia, collective fears and media justification through a hallucinatory conspiracy in which Fidel Castro, the satanic forces and the aliens threaten America. 3 Mostra de Vídeo Independent de Barcelona 1996.

Third Known Nest brings together Kalin's witty and poignant "video diary" pieces with new interstitial material that thematically links the works with cogent literary quotes. Merging elements of music video, text, and intimate Super 8 "home movies," Kalin has created a personal and cultural chronicle of the 1990s. Tracing a trajectory that moves from stylized AIDS activist spots to alternative music videos and poems of love and loss, Kalin' video journal culminates in a performative self-portrait.

It is an erotic response on the Helms Law, the American government's refusal to subsidize the prevention and awareness on AIDS. Kalin writes: "They are lost to vision altogether acts as erotic retaliation on legislation such as the Supreme Court sodomy ruling — declaring the private bedroom as open target for the State — or the Helms Amendment — the U.S government's refusal to fund explicit AIDS prevention information for gay men, lesbians and IV drug users. An attempt to reclaim eroticism and to address the contradictions of sexuality and romance in the face of a monolithic and culturally compulsory heterosexuality, They are lost to vision altogether finds queer history where it can and invents the rest." 2 Mostra de Vídeo Independent de Barcelona 1994.

Observatory Archives 2002

The Observatory Archives

/ CONTEXT 1994 - 2020

Observatory Archives 2002

The AObservatory Archives cover a huge range of works that are very different from one another, but share a commitment to freedom of expression and reflect on our individual and collective fears and pleasures. Together, they offer a multifaceted view, thousands of tiny eyes that probe and explore our world and announce other possible worlds. It is a discourse that above all values heterogeneity, plurality, contradiction and subjectivity, an antidote to the cloning and repetition of the current corporate mass media.

The Net explores the incredibly complex backstory of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. This exquisitely crafted inquiry into the rationale of this mythic figure situates him within a late 20th Century web of technology - a system that he grew to oppose. A marvelously subversive approach to the history of the Internet, and a circling through themes of utopianism, anarchism, terrorism, CIA, LSD, Tim Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, The Net exposes a hidden matrix of revolutionary advances, coincidences, and conspiracies.

The result of over five years of Super 8 and 16mm filming on New York City streets, Lost Book Found melds documentary and narrative approaches into a complex meditation on city life. The piece revolves around a mysterious notebook filled with obsessive lists of places, objects, and incidents. These lists serve as the key to a hidden city.