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Nov 15  |
Gregg Biermann's Material Excess Gregg Biermann in person! NEW TIME AND LOCATION FOR TONIGHT: 8:00PM at Echo Park Film Center 1200 Alvarado Street (at Sunset, northeast corner) Los Angeles CA 90026 Material Excess (2002-03, DVD, color, sound, 73 min) Material Excess is a large-scale animated movie, which borrows its structure from Dante's The Diving Comedy. The animation is for the most part created in a digital process related to the hand-made film tradition. In a photo-editing program, scans of various objects are placed on a digital image strip without regard for individual frames. These images are translated into video sequences and the result is an exploding jumble of images. By its very nature, the animation cannot directly illustrate the various bits of narration that appear in the soundtrack. The two things simply happen simultaneously. Many cultures have beliefs and related depictions about what happens to the soul after death. Material Excess provides an exhaustive tour of the various neighborhoods of the afterlife. The voyage that you will undertake is similar to Dante's journey, however the sights have been changed to relate to our secular, postmodern, and existential setting. Our particular setting is one in which most of the world's resources are brought to bear to provide material items for our consumption. The three major sections of the piece (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso) are roughly equal in length. After making our way through the trees of dark wood, we find that Inferno is made up almost entirely of the junkmail that these trees died to make. This material represents one month's worth of the various fliers, catalogues, and circulars that appear in the mailbox of my suburban New Jersey home. Each advertiser is relegated to its own section of hell. The narration in this section is performed by a computer voice and relates various traumas of the shopping experience. It also contains material from Baudrillard's Impossible Exchange. Perhaps it is not an accident that Baudrillard appears in the Inferno as fast talking mastery over logic and language is often seen by the orthodox as opposed to true faith. Satan appears as the light of pure television. The flatness and printed text of the ads gives way to the supple, textured, three-dimensional shapes of the concluding sections. Purgatory is made up entirely of useful items and the narration relates the gray details of everyday life. These include perfunctory communications and an authentic message from cousin Martha from Richmond.Paradiso is constructed entirely out of junk food and new age music. Nothing in paradise needs to have nutritional value. The only requirement is pleasure. My best Monty Python accent posits the question of whether Jesus was ever truly happy as gummy bears and chicklets dance on the screen in what critic Fred Camper calls a "half ironic vision of redemption". – Sarah Markgraf Preceded by: Hackensack Motet (2006, 5 min, video, stereo) Recorded on Main Street in Hackensack, New Jersey and animated in the same software that is responsible for 3D animated features like Shrek, this video transforms an ordinary street scene into a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria with stunning depth effects. The original audio composition has associations with early choral music and thus imbues the otherwise worldly imagery with sacred, almost cosmic qualities. Inspired by the film “A Trip Down Market Street Before The Fire” (1905) Director’s Statement: My work comes out of the avant-garde tradition of film as visual art. Avant-garde cinema is an important and relatively young artistic project. While it maintains its scrappy integrity, and while many significant works have been created in subsequent decades, current practioners have not fully moved out of the shadow of the prodigious 1960's and 70's. The development of new instruments has often determined the significant aesthetic developments in the arts. Consequently I've looked to new technologies to discover vast unspoiled frontiers no longer available to small gauge filmmakers. My recent works can only have been achieved in the digital age. The meaning of digital technology lies in its ability to copy, but also in its plasticity. Its capacity to alter, mask, fragment, re-mix, randomly access, super-impose, mutate, reflect, transmit and reframe are its prime currents. – Gregg Biermann Gregg Biermann is a film, video and multi-media artist and has been active since the late 1980’s. |