[ video art - animation ]
9th Biennale de l’image en Mouvement, Geneva
02.11.01
Black jellybeans are cast as the subcultural biker boys in Kenneth Anger’s classic art-cinema “Scorpio rising” to a black metal soundtrack.
We are London based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration.
Our artwork is primarily film, video and performance based, though we also make collages and sculptures / installations related to our films. It explores utopian discourses of the twentieth century and the way they operate in the context of a changing landscape of creative work and instrumentalised leisure and the role of politics and commerce in relation to the paradigms of modernism and the avant garde. They often use choreographed movement and ritual as both an aesthetic and a thematic dimension, reading dada and the Bauhaus backwards through punk and new wave to rescue the humour and critical vitality that have been subsumed by the canonisation and commodification of modernism, while finding new uses for the failed utopias of the past. Our short video animation films, influenced by Russian constructivism, early European cinema and children’s television cartoons from the 80s, employ appropriated imagery to produce anthropomorphic metaphors of violence and desire, decay and regeneration. We are interested in urban life from the perspective of the objects that define it, the way the buildings, cars and surveillance cameras that we construct look back at us and mirror our desires, fears and perversions.
As well as making art, we write about it for several publications. We also write extensively about music and film and teach at Goldsmiths College, Hertfordshire university and elsewhere.
We do not have a band.
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