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).
Emotional fantasies, towers of cakes, identity troubles, collapsed distance and time and Samuel R. Delany’s rarely seen 1971 film The Orchid.
One of the most startling cinematic debuts on record, The Flicker is more a hallucination than a film, an out of body experience and riotous celebration of visual harmonics frequencies. An experiment in perception, come with your mind and eyes open.
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
A slowed down single tracking shot along a corridor as workers at the Bath Iron Works, (Maine, USA) take their lunch break.
Discussion: If we approach “care as an event” rather than as a “contract of exchange” then what becomes possible in how we know, care for, and appreciate each other?
Droner responsible for Fordell Research Unit, Muscletusk’s murk manipulator and Metzian concrete-mixer cement international relations and yr heids.
A conversation about the movement for prison abolition and refusing the logic of race and sex that underpins the criminalisation and mass incarceration of communities.
Social and party with all proceeds going to the Unity Centre, featuring DJ SETS with Dj@Christelle, DJ D-Harsh, Nena Etza & Moor Mother.
A concrete walkway ending in mid air, a ridiculously tight squeeze between three office buildings and various other sites of Labour politician and council leader T. Dan Smith’s modernist regeneration projects and ‘slum clearances’ of the 1950’s and 60’s.
First live show outside the USA featuring one-off film pieces and live theatre from the ringleaders of the ‘weird new America’ psych folk explosion.
Are artists powerless in the face of technology? These often whimsical and amusing films are minimal technological interventions and appropriations but maybe also rigorous takes on the role of popular media and culture in our hyper-technological world.