winner of the image award at the transmediale festival in berlin - february 2003
the
wire – January 2003
as
if to emphasise the decentralized and borderless flow of new audiovisual data
streams, the 242.pilots are drawn from a wide geographical sprawl:
With
increasingly sophisticated software permitting the live interplay of the
abstract and the figurative, the representational and what duchamp chose to call
the “non-retinal”, fixity of location has become less important than the
permanent shifting of relationships. The
visuals are an undifferentiated mixture of geometric complexities, street scenes
and landscapes, interspersed with fragments of found footage.
The
perpetually unresolved relationship between these elements ultimately becomes
more engaging than any intrinsic meaning or impact they might convey.
The issues of focus, interpretation and attention thrown up during the
live collaboration don’t always appear to be fully confronted by the group
themselves. In an accompanying
interview feature for Belgian TV at the end of the DVD, they express a clear
preference for presenting their work before a seated audience in a theatre
rather than in the random swirl of a club environment.
But do new technologies and approaches belong in auch old structures?
It’s
listening that Bennett, in supplying a live soundtrack to the visuals, speaks of
trying to determine a narrative development in the spontaneously generated
imagery. Undoubtedly, he wouldn’t
be the only one attempting to do so within the confines of an auditorium.
The members of 242.pilots have the technology and skills to cover all
four walls of a space, not just the one their audience happens to be facing.
It would be great to be there when they do it.
- ken hollings
exclaim
– dec/jan 2003
Trevor pinch and frank trocco’s new book, analog days: the invention and impact of the moog synthesizer (Harvard press), contains a quote that says a lot about live electronic music performances. According to british synth pioneer peter zinovieff, “anybody who has listened to electronic music a lot knows that it’s nearly 100 percent terribly boring.” While this statement is overly brazen, there’s no denying that over its history, electronic music has been plagued by its practioners’ persistently staid public displays. 242.pilots is a trio of digital video artists who employ their own custom software in pursuit of uncharted cinematic realms. To the accompaniment of a beatless soundscape, the pilots paint the screen with shards of concrete and geometric images, augmenting received modes of visual manipulation, like chromatic reversal, with a host of unduplicateable real-time techniques. While many A/V performances subordinate one medium to the other – by deeming that a given change in the aural will automatically trigger a preset change in the visual – live in bruxelles is a truly organic enterprise. As musician Justin Bennett says during the disc’s bonus interview: “it’s like improvising a soundtrack to a film, but the film also responds to what I do. [the pilots] are also listening, obviously. So it’s very much a two-way process.” MUTEK’s curators would do well to book 242.pilots for the 2003 festival. They’re at the leading edge of a newly energized field.
-
martin turenne
res
magazine – November/December 2002
My
first experiences with video art sucked. Curious, I bought a couple Bill Viola
laser discs, eventually procured an LD player, and hunkered down to what was
supposed to be an artistic / cultural experience. The first LD of Viola’s
works featured some truly outdated Dr. Who style special effects and a calm
circular pattern to his work. The pace was his saving grace, turning such
imagery into their intended koans on ecological affairs.
The
second LD came from Viola’s nature period where he swore off all video effects
and just shot beautiful scenes. This LD was better in its emphasis on
composition a.k.a. getting as much cool stuff in the frame at once. Viola lived
with a herd of buffalo for a sequence, and another features ecstatic Hindus
piercing themselves with (and I’m not kidding) those little plastic swords
that come in cocktails. Yet, even this stuff failed to really impress me. Video
art didn't have the sense of purpose that painting has, it just lacked the
production values to make it glimmer.
Video
art from the bygone era of disco and glam was abstract and mostly gaudy. The
theory perked up when Nam June Paik invented the video-mixing desk. An analog
series of instruments, the mixing desk allowed artists to constrain and edit
video images to the point of abstraction. This abstract work proliferated and
became the face of video art throughout the 70’s until Bill Voila gave up the
special effects for straight shooting. Looking back at the 70’s, you can
understand Viola's disgust with his abstract oriented contemporaries. The glut
of video work consisted of low-budget projects that seemed more tests of the
latest filters than works of art. "Arcade," by Lyn Blumenthal and
Carol Ann Klondardies, for instance, features some video footage treated to
effects that look remarkably like the Technicolor abstractions that would dot
Dire Straight's "I Want My MTV" video 10 years later. "
Twenty
years after Viola's work premiered, 242.Pilots are making video art the sexy
commodity it always could have been. Laptop in hands, they provide digital
abstractions that are both compelling and beautiful. Burned to DVD, their
improvised work polishes once cheesy abstractions into vivid jewels of optical
consumption. Those familiar with video art from that period know: those jewels
needed shining.
If
cameras had glass brains to match their eyes, then the work on this DVD might
begin to capture the unconscious workings of optical instruments everywhere.
Consigned to window seats during long road trips, the cameras dream in tandem
tearing their memories into organic collages. The Pilots layer their images over
one another, improvising loops of processed imagery that eerily flow together in
both juxtaposition and assemblage. What makes all this work is the sense of
style that each members of 242.Pilots give their work. The live processing is
impressive, and their abstractions can resemble minimalist painting and, well,
every cool effect you've ever seen in a music video. Learning from the licks of
former artists, the pilots coherently contort these images, creating dynamic
environments for the eye to surf across. As glitched and abstract as the sounds
that accompany them, the Pilots dispense with plot, narrative, and even
representation preferring stuff that's just pretty and fun to look at.
The
improvisation is what makes this work: Constantly having to change keeps the
Pilots interesting and, like a good painting, the Pilots know where to draw the
eye and how to use the medium. Lukasz Lysakowski's solo consists of TV test
patterns with tropical colors blurped to industrial static backdrops and the
sounds of faltering filters. It's simple, but its kitsch videogame dances make
regular television seem boring in comparison. This work hasn't gone unnoticed,
German media fair and discussion board Transmediale03 has issued awards to
242.Pilots for their work. But are the Pilots part of video art's 30 year
struggle to legitimacy, or are they just another hip fixture for club life?
-
Andrew Jones
junkmedia.org
Carpark
have already released one DVD, Takagi Masakatsu's Opus Pia, a companion
piece to a CD of the same name. In the next logical step for the adventurous
The
DVD opens with a trio improvisation. The group charge forward at a relentless
velocity, preferring the comfort of forward momentum to the uncertainty of a
gradual and unhurried aesthetic. As Justin Bennett's slow chamber orchestrations
and reverberating raindrops tinker away, 242 Pilots piece together rapid-fire
images of crashing surf juxtaposed with plumes of industrial smoke, clouds and
birds. The trio piece is an unswerving jumble of images that are doubled,
tripled, stretched and filtered like their analogues in modern electronics. 242
Pilots seem to draw an intentional arc here between video editing and production
and the equivalent processes common to recent experimental electronic music.
Following
the trio are solo works by each artist. HC Gilje's entry, with music by
Kurt
Ralske weighs in with a set of lush, implacable images (seemingly extracted from
natural objects) that flutter and ooze into dark shades and empty white squares.
A shifting keyboard drone, composed by Mr. Ralske as well, floats gently along
with the images.
Lukasz
Lysakowski's piece is the most formally experimental composition on Live in
Bruxelles, as well as the most arresting. A harsh, telephone-signal feedback
drone shifts in violent fits and jumps in perfect time with pinstripe red and
white test pattern lines. The alignment between video and audio is so sharp that
they appear to be triggered from the same source.
This
gives way to abrupt clicks that squawk along with corresponding color fields set
in pastoral oranges, purples and blacks. The pace ratchets up to epileptic
levels in a disconcerting, even nauseatingly sharp, treatment. The outcome is
brutal and compelling, like a televised execution; it's hard to watch and harder
still to take your eyes off. 242 Pilots weave an abstract and absorbing fabric
of image and tone.
- ben sterling
logo-magazine
–
Recorded
at Brussels’ Le Petit Theatre Mercelis in February of this year,
American-based video improvisation trio 242.Pilots present a collage of video
works that encompass pastoral nature, flocking and swarming wildlife and stark,
industrial cityscapes that are a visual evocation of the works of such as Plone,
Squarepusher and Hrvatski. Musically however 242.Pilots eschew glitch ‘n’
burn electronica for languid musicality inspired by the images before them and
the activities of their colleagues. It proceeds as a conversation, an approach
they have in common with the pioneers of free jazz, here built on a contemporary
post-rock framework that recalls acts such as Dälek, Exhaust and Godspeed!
Comprising an ensemble performance, solos by each member (
- Alan Downes