Ken Jacobs: 02

5 April, 2014 - 15:30
SPHINX

This screening brings together a selection of Ken Jacobs’ recent videos. In his digital work, Jacobs has continued to develop the ‘eternalisms’ of his Nervous System performances, creating the illusion of movement disarticulated from time by reanimating early film footage (Let There Be Whistleblowers) or old stereoscopic images (Capitalism – Child Labor), as well as recent still and moving images of his own (Seeking the Monkey King). Eternalism – a visual effect that Jacobs has patented – is created through rapid repetition, and the blending of two almost identical images interrupted by flickering black frames. A work by artist and writer Angela Ferraiolo, chosen by Ken Jacobs, will open the programme.

 

Subway

Angela Ferraiolo
,
US
,
2011
,
video
,
8'

Many of my films have been inspired by Ken’s work. Subway is a good example. Like Whistleblowers, this film tries to take the viewer to that instant where each thing is the thing it really is, a deep moment that somehow evades normal time, hovering just outside everyday life. These instants are elusive, unreachable except through the rush of these definite, yet fleeting, images that light up, die away, then light up again. The apprehension of these moments is what links us to something we might term infinity, or the sublime. Ken is right to refer to these images as ‘eternalisms’. After many attempts at an ‘eternalism’, Subway was my best result. Thanks, Ken, for insisting that we see. (Angela Ferraiolo) 

Let There Be Whistleblowers

Ken Jacobs
,
US
,
2005
,
video
,
18'

A train passes though a tunnel and hurtles on to a station. Time and space are toyed with; things enter an impossible state of ongoing movement while going nowhere. The actual tunnel experience sets off a metaphysical one. Composed to the first part of Drumming by Steve Reich. (Ken Jacobs) 

Capitalism: Child Labor

Ken Jacobs
,
US
,
2006
,
video
,
14'

A stereograph celebrating factory production of thread. Many bobbins of thread coil in a great skylit factory space, the many machines manned by a handful of people. Manned? Some are children. I activate the double-photograph, composer Rick Reed suggests the machine din. Your heart bleeding for the kids? The children will surely be rescued and by their bosses! ‘Boys,’ they will say, ‘Have we got a war for you.’ (Ken Jacobs) 

Seeking the Monkey King

Ken Jacobs
,
US
,
2011
,
video
,
40'

The film could have well been called Kicking and Screaming but that only describes me in the process of making it, questioning its taste. Once the message kicked in it overrode all objection. The piece demanded J.G. Thirlwell’s music, normally way too overtly expressive for me as most of my stuff comes out of painting and is also to be absorbed in silence. Who will even notice visual innovation now, or what’s happening with time? Determining a place between two and three dimensions, pushing time to take on substance, is what I do. Seeking the Monkey King is a reversion to my mid-twenties and that sense of horror that drove the making of Star Spangled To Death. (Ken Jacobs)