Public Artwork, Installation and Performance
Performance and video projection.
Autopsy Pavillion Performance, video by Salvi Vivancos
Hampshire College Gallery, October 2011
Hole in One juxtaposes a video with a pencil drawing and two photographs.
“Bibi Pier 25”, HD digital video, 4½ min. loop, 2011
“Hole in One”, photographs, pencil drawing and video, 2011
"Bibi" pencil on paper, 15" x 20": "Bibi Pier 25" HD digital video, 4½ min. loop
“Bibi Roof 3” and “Bibi Roof 5”, archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper, 12½ ” x 20”, 2007
“Bibi Roof 3”, archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper, 12½ ” x 20”, 2011
“Bibi Roof 5”, archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper, 12½ ” x 20”, 2011
This installation/performance is a playful portrait of the artist in the studio built around the reciprocating mirror machine from Brand's 1971 film installation Pong Ping Pong. In this newer 2006 video and film installation, the scanning frame catches the artist looking back in retrospective self-reflection. The piece includes previously unreleased film experiments, home movies and bits and pieces from Brand's studio including selected optical printing fragments from among his hundreds of projects as BB Optics since 1976. Among these are film fragments of the artist Ray Johnson at Black Mountain, dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fontaine in the New York City Ballet plus atomic bomb tests in the Bikini Atoll and a death squad in Guatemala.
16mm | color | silent | looped | projector performance
This installation/performance is a playful portrait of the artist in the studio built around the reciprocating mirror machine from Brand's 1971 film installation Pong Ping Pong. In this newer 2006 video and film installation, the scanning frame catches the artist looking back in retrospective self-reflection. The piece includes previously unreleased film experiments, home movies and bits and pieces from Brand's studio including selected optical printing fragments from among his hundreds of projects as BB Optics since 1976. Among these are film fragments of the artist Ray Johnson at Black Mountain, dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fontaine in the New York City Ballet plus atomic bomb tests in the Bikini Atoll and a death squad in Guatemala.
16mm | color | silent | looped | projector performance
Masstransiscope is a public artwork that consists of a 300 foot long painting made on reflective material and installed in the tunnel in the NYC subway. It is in a special enclosure which has 228 narrow slits on the front side near the train and the painting on the far side. The inside is illuminated by fluorescent lights. You see the work through the slits and the light reflects off the painting and back through the slits. To someone who's passing by, it looks like an animated movie.
How does it work?
Imagine sitting in a movie theatre—one that plays actual film reels. When the projector’s shutter is up, you see the frame of film. When it’s down—nothing. In fact, half the time you’re sitting in a movie theater, the screen is completely dark.
That intermittency—the “on and off” flicker between image and shutter—you need that to create the illusion of motion. But how do you create a shutter in the New York City subway?
“The way it works in the Masstransiscope is that you actually view the painting through a wall of slits,” Brand says. “So the painting sits inside a box that I created and put on the platform. In the front of the box, every 15 inches is about a half-inch wide slit. So as you pass by, you’re looking through that slit.”
You might ask why subway riders don’t notice a flicker. It has to do with how our visual system registers images.
“When you look at something, or when light passes through your eye, it creates these chemical changes and it persists for a period of time. And we all know that if you’ve had your picture taken with a flash bulb, you see this ball of light for a fairly long period of time that’s quite annoying. But actually that process is happening all the time, consistently, and if it didn’t, we probably wouldn’t see at all,” Brand explains.
You could think of each Masstransiscope frame like a camera bulb’s flash. It makes an impression on the retina that takes time to fade away. Not a long time, but long enough that if those flashes happen quickly enough, we won’t notice the gaps between them. In fact, we’ll swear we’ve been looking at one continuous image the entire time.
- text from Science Friday, NPR
Bill Brand's 1980 public artwork restored in 2008 can be seen on the Q and B trains from DeKalb Ave. in Brooklyn going into Manhattan toward Canal or Grand St. Look out the window on the right.
Paul Sharits' first "Locational" work, made in collaboration with Bill Brand, was commissioned for the 1972 opening exhibition of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston,Texas. The piece was restored by Bill Brand in 2007 for the General Council of the Territory of Belfort, France for the Espace Multimédia Gantner.
“...Sound Strip / Film Strip consists of four film loops simultaneously projected sideways so that the four images abut one another horizontally. Sharits made each loop by filming colored surfaces, scratching the film, projecting it so that the sprocket holes showed on the screen; he then filmed that projection, scratched the result, and projects that as the final object. The resulting image is a continuous flicker of various color ranges with both actual and ‘virtual’ scratches and sprocket holes running horizontally (normally vertically) across the screen. Thus, Sharits is working with filmic abstraction which employs no image save for that inherent in the medium itself....”
- Art International.
16mm | color | silent | loop
Sound Strip / Film Strip by Paul Sharits
Restored by Bill Brand in 2007 for the General Council of the Territory of Belfort, France for the Espace Multimédia Gantner.
film and sound installation and performance
A film installation revealing the circular and reciprocating nature of the film medium and activating the space between projector and projection. The film is projected from a custom turntable that moves the entire image back and forth and slowly around 360 degrees. The image is projected onto a 40 foot diameter circle of 24 screens. The subject of the film is a ping pong game. The camera, mounted on the turntable machine, swings back and forth while the entire mechanism slowly moves around and around the table looking in at the game. With the film projected from the center, the space is turned inside out.
16mm | film and sound environment | 25 minutes
