Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.
Scratch Free State has great energy and straddles an interesting line between a popular culture and fine art sensibility. This piece was made at the same time as Tilt. It is probably the best example of what an artist can do re-cutting and processing David Attenborough's Life On Earth programmes.
This revolves around Tim West, an advertising executive who is developing a Channel 4 programme on cooking for terrorists. Disillusioned by the hyper-reality of the media world, he joins Robert de Niro evening classes, but also falls under the pastoral influence of Johnny Morris. From the opening...
A beautiful woman screams at something unseen off camera. Paul Newman appears eating salad and soon the famous sequence of Paul Newman closing a car door cut with a helicopter takes place. Absence of Satan is probably one of George Barber's best Scratch works and is a deft reworking of cinematic...
What’s it like being a Renaissance man when your host is a jerk-of-all-trades? What’s it like being obsessed with memory when you host lives in the perpetual present? George Barber’s The Venetian Ghost has as its hero a former ruler of Venice who, as a result of a semantic boo-boo, finds...
Made using footage from USA Olympics in Los Angeles 1984 and snippets of Alistair Cooke's America: A Personal History of the United States. The footage was combined at Goldsmith's Art Department using an unusual Grass Valley mixer that had oscillating wipes which created the signature colours and...
A home movie on permanent loop. Live action up for grabs. A family walk the walk across a field, disappearing into memory as they do. Who knows where the families go? In the countryside on a sunny day a family group repeatedly walk towards the camera. The ‘home movie’ is looped and the footage...
"Walking Off Court concerns a story I saw in the Times about a tennis coach called James Goodman who had a nervous breakdown around about the time that a motorway was built right outside his house. He spent a lot of time aimlessly walking in circles around new roads and road works. I contacted him...
The inside story of the long-running Hovis TV advertisement as Barber’s voice-over highlights the psychological emptiness of the narratives delivered daily by consumer culture.
An unmanned drone deviates from its destined flight path, as it wanders through time and space its camera surveys its surroundings and the robot narrates its findings.
On the left side of this video diptych sequences of a typical Hollywood movie of the genre "airplane catastrophy" are showing, while on the right side a man liying in a bath tub talks about how he gradually came to terms with the actual trauma of such a catastrophy and his fear of water. Not only...
