#theinfinitemix

Stan Douglas - Luanda-Kinshasa (2013)

Shot like a documentary film on a set carefully crafted to resemble a legendary New York recording studio, Stan Douglas’s Luanda-Kinshasa depicts a fictional 1970s jazz-funk band engaged in a seemingly endless real-time jam. The band’s music echoes the then-current confluence of American jazz, funk and Afrobeat – a musical fusion made possible, as the video’s title indirectly implies, by the emerging independence and rising profile of African nations.

As the camera appears to seamlessly circle around the studio, the sound mix highlights whichever musician it lingers on, enhancing the impression that we are watching a live performance. But the band’s improvisation is actually a construction: intricately remixed by Douglas in the editing room, it extends through over six hours of ‘alternate takes’ created by recombining various shots and accompanying sections of music. Conjuring a never-ending sequence of variations, Luanda-Kinshasa conjures a vision of culture as a potentially ‘infinite mix.’

Cyprien Gaillard - Nightlife (2015)

Cyprien Gaillard’s 3D film and audio installation Nightlife was shot at night over a period of two years in Cleveland, Los Angeles and Berlin. Like much of Gaillard’s work, the film is a meditation on the ways in which traumatic events of recent history can be read in – or have been memorialised by – urban or ‘natural’ landscapes, architecture and public space. Accompanied by a dub soundtrack featuring a looped sample of Alton Ellis’s 1970 classic ‘Black Man’s World’ and the 1971 remake ‘Black Man’s Pride’, the film takes in a bomb- damaged sculpture in front of the Cleveland Museum of Art; the riotous swaying of windblown trees in dark LA streets; and a fireworks display above Berlin’s Olympiastadion.

The final scenes return to Cleveland, where the German oak tree gifted to African-American gold-medallist Jesse Owens by Nazi organisers of the 1936 Olympic Games stands in the courtyard of the athlete’s former high school. Despite being comprised of two time-based mediums – film and music – Nightlife has distinct sculptural qualities. The vacillating volume and reverb of the film’s dub soundtrack conjures a shifting sonic space that mirrors the ghostly materiality of the film’s 3D visuals.

Cameron Jamie - Massage the History (2007–9)

Cameron Jamie has described his films as ‘a way to visit hidden worlds within our world.’ In Massage the History, the artist combines footage of young men in Alabama performing an erotically charged, provocative dance with living-room furniture in middle-class homes, with found footage of violent or surreal events filmed in anonymous American suburbs. In the resulting hallucinatory collage, it is difficult to distinguish where one world ends and the other begins.

The soundtrack to Massage the History is provided by a Sonic Youth track of the same name, from their 2009 album The Eternal. This hypnotic track, which replaced the hip-hop that the young men originally danced to, features vocals by Kim Gordon that Jamie describes as resembling ‘a voice from another dimension.’ As Jamie explains, the track helped to ‘refine and punctuate’ the film, which was shot and re-shot over a number of years using a variety of different formats, including 35mm film and the cameras of several mobile phones.

Elizabeth Price - K (2015)

In this two-screen video installation Elizabeth Price brings together disparate elements – text, image, synthetic voice and a stark, percussive soundtrack – in a dense and complex exploration of collective emotion, performance and mechanised production. A ghostly stop-frame animation of the sun – created from thousands of glass plate slides taken between 1870 and 1948 – plays continuously on one of the two screens. On the other, a hypnotic CGI animation of the production of nylon stockings, each packaged under the brand name ‘K’, is interrupted or accompanied by footage of dancing performers, including 1970s country singer Crystal Gale.

Binding these visual elements together is a narrative composed by Price and attributed to the Krystals, a fictional group of ‘professional mourners’. The synthetic voice – created using text-to- voice technology – describes the group’s highly ritualised practice, noting that ‘as sorrow has increasingly become contingent to all public and social affairs, any occasion of significance requires its proper acknowledgement.’

Ugo Rondinone - THANX 4 NOTHING (2015)

Ugo Rondinone’s immersive video installation features legendary beat poet John Giorno performing THANX 4 NOTHING. In this poem written on his 70th birthday, Giorno looks back at his life – and the people and events that shaped it – with humour and compassion. Performing in a tuxedo and bare feet on an empty stage in the Palais des Glaces theatre in Paris, as well as in a brightly-lit TV studio, Giorno gives thanks to ‘everyone for everything,’ before speaking frankly on the death of friends and lovers, sex, betrayal and his frequent periods of depression.

Rondinone’s carefully choreographed multi-screen installation – which features long shots, intimate close ups and passages of high-speed editing – keeps pace with Giorno’s theatrical delivery and draws attention to the poem’s many rhetorical twists and turns.