Concept: Ida Hiršenfelder
Production: SCCA-Ljubljana, 2013
Duration: 8 40′ 44″
Premiere: October 30 – November 6, 2014, Projection on media facade (MSU Zagreb)

Feedback Loop video program presents the segment of video archive that is extremely important for understanding of video art and its social impact, but remains almost entirely unnoticed. It is the part of a video archive DIVA Station, which holds little potential for public presentation, yet a strong impact on the part of research and understanding the media. In this works the artists are dealing with experimental use of video language, and more often than not it is quite difficult to show them in a conventional presentation formats at galleries or festivals. One of the basic criteria for presenting time-based art is a limit on their duration, which makes sense when considering the attention span of the viewers whose interest is after all the final aim of any public presentation, thus it should not last longer than an hour.

Faced with such video works we meet with the second, more content based reason of why such works are rarely included in curated programs. This kind of works are non-representational, they do not fit into the logic of a narrative story line, which might hold onto the viewers attention, even more than that, they intentionally evade any kind of storytelling. These are visual experiments that include the aesthetics of boredom with constant repetition and slight modulation of visual effects.

The third reason for little attention to this works would be their close connection to the space (habitat) in which they have been produced. Initially, a lot of them were not meant to ever be shown at a gallery space to start with. Numerous long format video artworks with constant feedback loops were recorded by artists as a by-product of their VJ performances (Maja Smrekar); or as a collage of recordings that had been treated as invaluable material ever since the 80s and had been constantly re-cut, re-mixed, re-used (Rok Sieberer – Kuri); or these videos were first produced as an exploration of telecommunication possibilities and production of video that had been interdependent of this systems e.g. experiments with early video oscillators (such as early experiments by Miha Vipotnik Video Graphics from 1975); or in the last decade these experiments had been produced by generative computer programs for audio-visual manipulation and transfer of data via streaming (Tanja Vujinović, Luka Dekleva, and Luka Prinčič).

Video manipulation that forms an internal cycle of repetition with constant modulation characteristic for video manipulation is one of the key methods used by all the selected artists.

The initial production environment of the selected works was not art institution, therefore it seems only fair to the works to present them outside the strict gallery or museum setting, where the projection as well as the conditions of viewing are naturally changed. The public outdoor space does not demand a fixed attention, but rather attracts a numerous casual passers-byes.

Mirko Simič, Parabola, 35′ 28″
VPK & Human Creative Net, 1997
» video

Parabola is a short version of six hours long video performance in a club Gavioli Ambasy in Izola, Slovenia that the artist VJ Simo has performed at a live visual act. It is presenting a collage of numerous found fotages and documentary recordings from this tiny costal town. The video is interlaced with a rich electronic manipulation of image and patterns.
 

Maja Smrekar, Imaginarium of Electromagnetic Transformations, 28′ 39″
M.S., 2009
» video

Experimental video and sound work with multi-layered structure is made with various technological means from the perspective of investigative and formal video and sound approaches that the artist finds in the crossroad of analogue and digital manipulations of images. She uses numerous means for manipulation and processing of picture such as layering, fast switching between the shots and distortion that together make complex abstract effects. The motives are changing with speed, and they are notably connected – in content and in form – to sound and spoken word with repetitive pulsation. The repetitive images of two faces are interchanging with motives of industrial landscape, communication infrastructures, and shapeless background.
 

Neven Korda/Borghesia, Poppers, 4′ 55″
ZANK, 1989
» video

The images are synchronized with music (in frame of Borghesia multi-media group). We are faced with a flood of symbols that are indiscriminately mixing the images of pop heroes from comics with topless gay men with muscular figure and a cigarette in his mouth, and instant moments with flashing women figure on display. The images are overlapping, cutting, sneaking over the screen in a fast tempo with spilled saturated colours.
 

Nika Špan, Per aspera ad astra, 4:05:00
N.Š., 1999
» video

A footage of over four hour long constant changing of 150 television channels (over Astra satellite). Video has been recorded without a video camera directly from television onto a VHS cassette with a VHS recorder. The duration of the video is determined by the length of the VHS tape. Video was shot on 5th July, 1999 between 5:23 pm and 9:27 pm in Düsseldorf.
 

Luka Dekleva: Sen/za Televizijo/a, 28′ 38″
Miha Vipotnik, 2009
» video

The video is a result of artistic collaboration with Miha Vipotnik during the Sen/za Televizijo/a project at Jakopič Gallery, marking 30 years to the date after the first transmission of Vipotnik’s television video project Videogram 4 on May 4th, 1979. Dekleva’s work is a re-make of Videogram 4. The image has been deformed with an oscillator in order to achieve an entirely abstract video, thus making the image and sound completely illegible and seemingly playing in a slowed down mode as though the Videogram 4 tape would have been seriously damaged. The oscillating version of Videogram 4 was made at Jakopič Gallery and simultaneously streamed to Kapelica Gallery where DJ Nova deViator was playing an audio performance for the 40th anniversary of Radio Student in the frame of XL Experiment Project.
 

Rok Sieberer – Kuri, Technotime, 30′ 11″
Media Teror, 1999
» video

Video is playing with abstract forms of coloured masses dancing on the screen and changing shapes. The artist uses found footages from television news reports that he digitally manipulated, he typically uses fast changes of scenes and fast rhythm of video editing.
 

Tanja Vujinović, Extagram / Oscilo 15′ 26″
Exstat, 2007
» video

Stuffed plush objects, electronics (speakers, video camera, contact microphones, computer, audio mix) are a part of series of projects entitled Discreet Events in Noisy Domains. The installation is a tactile-sonic objects or environments. Multiple nonlinear video and audio systems are (re)encoding events into data streams of audio-visual noise. The cycle Discrete Events in Noisy Domains unveils soft pulsing and oscillations of discrete units. It consists of multimedia toys that create interval spaces through a granulated flux of signals and interactions. Extagram is a series of micro artworks that have been conceived in the relation between drawing and sound, as well as in the recycling process of audio-visual material. The resulting audio-visual Extagram(s) are opening fields of indeterminacy of the state, a possible mapping and distribution of signals, and are at the same time also a sketch of space vibrations and temporary transitions – trajectories. Extagram(s) set out a framework for exploring relationships between two-dimensional drawing and sound, where sound functions as an agent that connects the invisible electro-physical (inter)actions that occur in a specific space. Extagram-ST807 is made entirely from television test signals. Oscilo is a series that embodies the features of contemporary toys in close and personal contact with users through a simplified cute shapes. It has the possibility of modular design of micro-worlds that are based on limited, mostly sound-based interactivity.
 

Miha Vipotnik, Video grafike, 17′ 20″
RTV Ljubljana, 1975
» video

The video is an early attempt of computer animation through an interaction of camera and monitor. The graphic symbol is in constant motion. Effects vary with the intervention of a hand in front of the monitor. Notwithstanding the fact that Vipotnik’s early works were created under the influence of classic painting, the Video graphics are interesting, since they consider painting in the spirit of the current time and – more importantly – provide an experimental dimension of painting that classic painting was not able to convey. The importance of experimental practices is its unpredictability, which also completely changed the political stance of the artist. The artist does not control the entire process from beginning to end. He does not want to compete for the right to control, the artist proved he strives to be the one who can surpass oneself, only setting the conditions for the experiment, he sets the relation between technique and an operator. He strives to prove that the process would affirm the autonomy of the artwork.
 

Emil Memon, Blue Movie, 51′
Emil Memon, Pawel Wojtasik, 1983
» video

Blue Movie is an intimate narrative of the author immediately after his arrival to New York. These became the central motifs and themes of this work, and formal meditation on the terms of “Artistic Cinema”,“non narratives films” and “video performance art”. The author demonstrates fascination with the monumental urban spaces, architectural structures and the position of the individual in the middle of this surrounding, while exploring their aesthetic and artistic elements. He situates his body in a relationship with the city by sitting in a small room overlooking the cityscape. Repetitive sequences of the film and video works are presented without sound. In a non-linear narration the artist is looking for a variety of formal visual effects. The film was shot using a special technical process: first as a black-and- white video, then played on the screen and recorded with a Super 8mm film camera, then the material is re-recorded in the art color video – hence the blue colored recording. Video work can serve as an independent screening. Several times it has also been screened as a visual element acoustic performances by the author.
 

Luka Dekleva in Luka Prinčič, Singing Bridges Bizovik, 4′ 07″
Kapelica, Codeep, KinoDvor, 2008
» video

Singing Bringes Bizovik is a video performance in which the sound is coming from the microphones mounted on cables and construction of the bridge. Thus, Jodi Rose and Luka Prinčič combined the recorded sound material in a live event and a video of the bridge that has been simultaneously manipulated by Luka Dekleva. Artists escalate the presence of environmental sound, in order to expand the importance of sound architecture as the structure of the sound field, and connect it directly with the space. Physical interference in public space is translated into sound and video pulsation.