Hotel Diaries 1-8
John Smith
These simple, one-take videos, relate personal experiences to the current conflicts in the Middle East via the most basic of means (a hotel room, a camcorder, John’s personal thoughts, concerns and convictions).
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
These simple, one-take videos, relate personal experiences to the current conflicts in the Middle East via the most basic of means (a hotel room, a camcorder, John’s personal thoughts, concerns and convictions).
Investigate film as language, via the language of film reduced to the basic units of film and language. A film as text in which each frame is a single word.
A film performance about Guy then, and Guy now, as a metaphor for the passing of time, which of course all film is inherently about.
Quintessentially British, The Bohman Brothers’ music is a home-made and DIY conflux of some of the most virulent strains of experimental music.
Usurper jamming live in a skip at the site of Bud’s Neill’s Lobey Dosser statue on Woodlands Road.
A recreation of one of Gustav Metzger’s celebrated auto destructive performances.
A double bill. A simple first person, Dundee-specific tracking shot that approaches the cinema/ screen/ space the film will eventually be shown in and in Brazilian opera house, a fixed camera gazes at a local audience from the stage: a choir, hidden in the orchestra pit, sings and gradually fades to silence.
Goofily deformed, deeply thought vocal jams: like the sound of your own breath rushing through your head.
A Feral Choir of people who’ve never improvised with their voices before, conducted by improviser yodeller, composer Phil Minton.
Sound and image slipping out of synch and into discord, the programme includes (in London at least) a very special version of Hollis Frampton’s masterful (nostalgia) with a live narration by Michael Snow.
5 days of film, music, discussion and study of our collective incompleteness—arrayed against the colonial ordering of how we come to know the world—practicing how we might exist otherwise, right here and now. Can we start to know and practice the world to come?
Bleu Shut reveals, and allows us to enjoy, our gullibility within the pervasive absurdity of modern life.