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).
Black Boned Angel’s is a rock sound, stripped of all extraneous detail right down to its core, stretched out and nailed to the ceiling.
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.
Using violin and cello the duo map out a twilight sonic world that seems to tread the faultlines between improvisation and composition.
Equal parts spectacle, installation and performance, his set for us is a specially developed work, ‘turning’, which features an orchestra of multiple turntables, 4 projections and a collection of old, and, quite probably, misfiring analogue kit.
Beat poet Ira Cohen’s now infamous and wildly psychedelic film odyssey feeds one’s own seeing apparatus through beautifully warped and distorting mylar mirrors, resulting in a film dense and rich with visual arcana and poetry.
In this workshop we will imagine ourselves as time travellers from a glorious and chaotic neurodivergent-led future.
What is the radical concept at the core of ‘rhythm’, expanded from simply musical or mathematical notions to encompass personal, social, collective rhythms?
A film as a translation of Monique Wittig’s landmark feminist novel Les Guérillères, in which a plural protagonist of militant feminists inhabit a fantastical, enigmatic and hallucinatory miasmatic space-time of post Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico.
Christian Bök‘s work spans thrillingly conceptual poetry to body-shaking vocal performances.
A stroboscopic and intense sensory overload of flashing abstract forms, cut to ribbons by modified projectors.
Mirror and Phantom Engineer performing an improvised soundtrack to Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 horror film prototype, Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages.