Wherever you go, your entertainment should go with you.
The sales argument for Playstation Portable is that it offers video images to travel in your pocket. But the development is not only concerning the hardware. What happens with the medium and opportunities to alter it with new technologies that we bring in a shoulder bag.
Its easy to cut and paste in sound, to slaughter the last piurchased album by changing the context of a song, but why not make a compilation video where scenes and sequences are brought out of the contentions of narration. Its a new film and why not claim to be the author.

Video is today not only a medium for the creation and distribution of moving
images, but also a diverse forum for critical discourses on modes of production,
ownership and accountability. The production of narratives can therefore sink
into a second layer of importance whereas understandings of procedure and
operation in relation to the media itself can become central. Fundamental to
the video works of International Festival is to differentiate and specify how the
project participate in the production of moving images. To an extent the intention
of the ongoing work with video is to create the smallest possible gesture.

Today the artist doesn't need to produce something but it is enough to change
some things position, context or mode of circulation. In today's digital ontology
recontextualisation is also a kind of production. To sign, or label, something is a
minimal version of such a recontextualistion, a process which in video among
other strategies can be one of reediting. However there are evident traps if modes
of post-production is understood as procedure, where there is nothing ideologically
implicit in e.g. appropriation of imagery. It is rather through an awareness of what
those operations are that post-production can venture out of the dialectic between
mix and collage.
International Festival's video work focus on the production of coordination of
space and time, and it is thus the passage between cinematic effect and corporeal
affect that opens due the operation of appropriation of images.

International Festival's video production is to be understood as cinematic operation,
in its more recent tradition, however not as content but as production and
use/organization of a certain dispositif. International Festival further takes an interest
in how moving images through digital technology has become accessible to anybody
to use or transform. What is it that says that we buy DVD's in order to look at them and
not to make new moves, new compliations DVD's as much as we compilation tapes in
the 80's. International Festival is not interested in piracy or to critique a commercial
circulation but in the use of images to create forkings within video practices.
International Festival does in non of their video works use cameras and
are only using home electronics.

It Happened The Day After Tomorrow was edited and created in Lisbon 2003.

The Corridore was edited and created in Stockholm in the spring 2004.

Plastic Bag Videos

In October 2005 International Festival issue a series of video created around the representaiton
of platsic bags in cinema. The starting point is a scene from American Beauty where the plastic bag is
addressed as a dancer. International Festival is here interested in using a particular scene and in fast
processes of editing issue as many different perspecitves into scene as possible. How wast is the
potentiality of a particular scene, and what can post-production processes offer to it.

The series of videos created under the motto many and half good continues. In this third video a sequence from a recently released film “Four Brothers” (John Singleton) are used to recontexualize the scene. To the tacky soundtrack and the tremendously sentimental narrative highly violent images are attached, which render the scene a radically different quality. However, in respect of cinema, it is still American Beauty.

The efficiency of the not so great. Perfection understood as universal so went out the window with Bill Viola. The forth video in the Plastic Bag Video series brings an epic dramaturgy into play. Here the amazing soundtrack by Thomas Newman in its original version plays out its full potentiality of Aristotelian drama. Spliced with the unbroken stream of images however a sort of alienization is produced. A confession of the love of Brechtian sentimentality.

Check out the 5th International Festival Plastic bag video an excellent collage of computer sentimentatlity.

Almost but not quite. The potentiality to be disguised into the absolutely common. In number five of the series a sequence from a recently released advertisement for Citroen is used to recontexualize the scene. To the tacky soundtrack and the tremendously sentimental narrative a computer rendered voise has been addred, which render the scene a radically different quality. Questions about subjectivity is here asked in respect of contemporary notions on mediatization.

In the sixth video a different mode of reference is proposed. The video works by Bruce Nauman from the early 70s is here recycled and recontextualized. The narrative through an appropriation of Nauman's structure introduce a kind of exhaustion, or rather complete which passes notions of technique and ability.
To the tacky soundtrack by Thomas Newman is this time superimposed with Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells which we all recall from "The Exorcist", yet a reference to turning bodies, and perhaps also a hidden desire to offer a way out of the grip that the neo avant-garde still hold on contemporary art practices; to exorcise the avant-garde. On another level this version also alludes to Nauman's relation to his studio as a site of production of art. "Whatever I do in the studio it will be art" - this series of works understand digital editing devises similarly as a site for production of video.

In this seventh extended version of 17 minutes yet a new mode procedure is used. The scene from American Beauty has been crossed edited with the scenes from Hitchcock's Rear Window were the curious James Stewart is looking out onto his backyard. A dialogue between the two subjects of the movies are established and we can both experience how we introduce subjectivity to the plastic bag and at the same time see to what extent Stewart is producing direction and causality. Classical action images are thus transformed through the process of post-production into a kind of time image.

The Plastic Bag Video 1-7 was edited and created in Stockholm and Brussels in the autumn 2005.

Download the video here: Comrades (53 MB DivX)

Download the video here: It Happened the Day after Tomorrow 2003 (60 MB PC: Use DivX or VLC player)

Download the video here: The Corridore (82 MB PC: Use DivX or VLC player)

Download the video here: The Plastic Bag 1 (20 MB PC: Use DivX or VLC player)

Download the video here: The Plastic Bag 2 (3.8 MB PC: Use VLC player)

Download the video here: The Plastic Bag 3 (3.9 MB PC: Use VLC player)

Download the video here: The Plastic Bag 4 (117 MB PC: Use DivX or VLC player)

Download the video here: The Plastic Bag 5 (5 MB PC: Use DivX or VLC player)

Download the video here: The Plastic Bag 6 (5 MB PC: Use DivX or VLC player)

Download the video here: The Plastic Bag 7 (61 MB PC: Use DivX or VLC player)

Download the video here: The Plastic Bag 8 (146 MB Quicktime)

Download the video here: The Free Spirit 2 (10 MB Quicktime)

International Festival with a new video originally created for the performance Avantgarde, now also availble in DivX for a great night at home.
Get the video NOW Download here: After Pollock (22 MB DivX) VLC-media player here
Look out for up-coming releases of doubled videos this spring as International Festival goes ballistic in smudging references together.

"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of "get acquainted" period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well." Jackson Pollock

"How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.' This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001." Stanley Kubrick