Previously I posed a video postcard of our first public ‘imaginary translation’ experiment, with no explanation. Now Giacomo Blume and I have created a longer, more explanatory video (above).

The video starts out silent and is best viewed full screen.

Imaginary Translation on vimeo

Just a video to document an installation from this past week. An experiment in context and association.

On the 5th of April I participated in a two week project in the Witte Zaal gallery space (Sint Lucas, Ghent) whereby, daily, new artists responded to the gallery space as it was left the day before.

Items and resources could be introduced to the space but not removed. The artist before me put all the previous works in garbage bags and numbered the bags by day.

I responded to that by making a trashy, anxious environment with ink-scrawled messages denying the value of art and announcing the waste of time art represents. A classmate arrived then and further added to the visual aspect of it by arranging old records and empty drinks cans in the space. Then I declared that I would just read and study all day, because it was more important than making art. I taped the pages of my art history syllabus to the floor and the walls (with a note saying I was keeping it safe for later because it was important).

I began to read a novel (Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence), flicking through pages at random and only reading full paragraphs when they immediately appealed to my present state of mind. Then whenever I felt a strong connection to the words — whenever they appealed to an immediately relevant memory, a philosophy, an attitude, etc — I wrote down the whole paragraph or line or lines. In the end I had a big scroll of paper which when read functioned as a portrait or snapshot of my mind as it was that day. So it became an experiment in literary portraiture.

If I can track down the text that was created, I’ll post it here (it had to stay in the gallery space, and was used by an artist in a subsequent performance during the project).

The above is just a video postcard from yesterday in the atelier. More info about this, my latest project, later.

Here’s a video I made almost a month ago but didn’t reveal because I wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not. Looking at it again, I like it enough.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXXIII

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old,
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow and this shall ever be;
I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.

A second experiment in stop motion. The soundtrack is First Light by Brian Eno and Harold Budd, with added samples from the film The Quiet Earth.

Something bit me on the arm when I was in that tree and now my forearm is swollen and looks like a club. I’d be ok with that if I were happier with the video.

Some of the words I wrote for my paper-making class project that I mentioned, coupled with music by John Zorn and videos found on youtube.

Better watch it now because i’ll probably delete it out of shame before too long.

I don’t have the original files anymore so you have to play the audio separately (it was originally a video installation where the audio file was played on a loop, independently of the video).

So first click play on the audio stream below, and then on the video below that. They don’t have to be synchronized.

Immigratie from Jonathan Beaton on Vimeo.

There are some parts of the video where you won’t be able to understand it if you don’t speak Dutch and/or Czech – it was intended for a Dutch-speaking audience, most of whom speak good English.

Also important to note is that sometimes the dutch grammar is not perfect – this is mostly due to being a rough transcript of the actual speakers’ words, and the speakers are not all native speakers of the languages they are speaking. I have to apologise for the spelling mistakes in the dutch though – I notice many now that I was too poor in dutch to notice at the time we made the video.

To quote myself from the video page:

The idea of the video is to decry the unfortunate associations many people still have with the German population as a result of their dark past being so frequently and overwhelmingly covered in the media, despite their having moved on and despite their longing for progress.

It is absolutely not my intention to justify Nazi mentality or behaviour from WW2 or today – rather it is my intention to draw attention to the fact that this history still mars, to varying degrees, the world’s perception of Germany.

I made a video!

It wound up being a bit ambiguous in terms of the message, which was of course not my intention, so I consider it somewhat of a failure. But I like it in parts.

And in other news, I saw Rushmore and Transamerica recently and they are both great films.