Hans Op De Beeck

Over the past few months my recent avenue of inquiry regarding my work is Installation Art, (I know that is quite a broad term but....) more specifically, I'm interested in re-creating environments; the idea of the representation of everyday objects and the subjective reading of this by the viewer/audience. I'm interested in re-creating these environments life size so as to completely immerse the viewer into another world as such, where they not only become the observer but are also the actor within the staged set.... (I hope to elaborate on this more as my blog continues....)
But anyway, so I came across this artist the other day while researching, and he has quickly become one of my favourites: Hans Op De Beeck

Hans Op de Beeck http://www.hansopdebeeck.com/
The multi-disciplinary oeuvre of the Belgian visual artist Hans Op de Beeck (b. 1969) consists of sculptures, sculptural installations, multi-media works, videos, animation films, drawings, photographs, publications and stage designs.

Hans Op de Beeck conceives and builds contemporary fictional urban and household locations and scenes sometimes featuring human characters that viewers feel very familiar with. These include both secluded spots suitable for inner reflection, as well as crowded areas populated by sometimes inept characters shedding light on our own present-day lives; our dreams and ambitions; and how we look upon time, space and each other.









http://www.hansopdebeeck.com/
Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck lives and works in Brussels, where he has developed his career through international exhibitions over the past ten years. His work consists of sculptures, installations, video work, photography, animated films, drawings, paintings and writing (short stories). It is his quest for the most effective way of presenting the concrete contents of each work that determines the medium that the artist ultimately selects. The scale can vary from the size of a small watercolour to a large, three-dimensional installation of 300m2.
The artist not only uses a very wide variety of media, but also deliberately employs a diversity of aesthetic forms, ranging from an economical, minimalist visual language to overloaded, exaggerated designs, always with the aim of articulating the content of the work as precisely as possible.

Thematically, the work concentrates on our laborious and problematic relationship with time, space and each other. Op de Beeck shows the viewer non-existent, but identifiable places, moments and characters that appear to have been taken from contemporary everyday life, aiming thereby to capture in his images the tragicomic absurdity of our postmodern existence. Key themes are the disappearance of distances, the disembodiment of the individual and the abstraction of time that have resulted from globalisation and the changes to our living environment that developments in media, automation and technology have brought about.

Hans Op de Beeck sometimes calls his works "proposals"; they are irrefutably fictional, constructed and staged, leaving it up to the viewer whether to take the work seriously, as a sort of parallel reality, or immediately to put it into perspective, as no more than a visual construct. His work is nourished by a keen interest in social and cultural reflection. The artist also questions the difficult relationship between reality and representation, between what we see and what we want to believe, between what is and what we create for ourselves in order to make it easier to deal with our own insignificance and lack of identity. The visual output of that investigation often produces slumbering, insidious, melancholy and astonishing images.










http://www.hollandfestival.nl


On 31 May 2008, the new installation “Location (6)” by Hans Op de Beeck will premiere as part of the Holland Festival in Amsterdam.

Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck has now created “Location (6)” (2008) – a monumental installation intended for the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. The Westergasfabriek is a former gas works that has been turned into a thriving multifunctional cultural center. This installation-art creation draws on Op de Beeck’s interest in manmade vistas, as well as his fascination with melancholic barren spaces devoid of human life.

His new work is a worthy successor to the sculptural installation “Location (5)” (2004). This particular installation was earlier on display in the Municipal Museum in The Hague and the Art Unlimited exhibition in Basel, Switzerland and has now been given a permanent home at the Towada Art Center in Japan. “Location (5)” is a pitch-black “mockup” of a motorway fast-food restaurant looking out on a deserted motorway (highway) in the dead of night.

The new installation “Location (6)” is based on a similar principle: the viewer is inside a building and is looking out at the wider world – in this case, a vast expanse of land stretching out as far as the eye can see. The exterior space has once again been created in the form of a monumental landscape sculpture with an incrementally manipulated perspective (perspectival trompe-l'œil). Visually speaking, however, “Location (6)” is almost the opposite of its predecessor. Through a hallway, the spectator reaches an observatory with a panoramic window offering a view of an imaginary desolate snowy landscape. Everything basks in white light and is shrouded in a fog. The whole place has an ephemeral, almost immaterial feel about it that invites viewer to gaze into the near-nothingness.





Hans has his hands full with a range of artistic projects, and Merry-go-round typifies his work in taking abstract normality and creating meaning around it. The walk-through installation attracted lines of people who would step into another world, a winter scene of dark childhood memories and eerie music that transport the crowds into another world. It's magic.

It's a new year

It's a new college year and I've decided that it's time for the return of the blog! I need to keep tabs on what I'm looking at and researching so I can look back through my ideas to see a clear line of inquiry in my work.... Roll on 4th year....

Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen

Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen
Helsinki Complaints Choir (2006)

This is gas...

Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collect the grievances and pleas of people in cities like Helsinki and turn them into affecting choral works in their ongoing "Complaints Choir" project.

Ernie Gehr

Ernie Gehr

Serene Velocity (1970)
Ernie Gehr's structuralist masterpiece SERENE VELOCITY is a hypnotic film which is nothing more than a rapidly edited, rhythmic piece consisting of two shots of an office hallway (one long shot, one zoomed-in close up). Our persistence of vision makes us believe that this film is a perpetual zooming in and out from one end of a hallway to another. Rather, it is a carefully edited and timed film, which consistently cuts back and forth between these two shots. The result is a mesmerizing piece which, as it progresses, treats the eyes to much profundity out of something so simple. We begin to notice the perfect geometry of the composition as the lines of the hallway converge to the center. The film becomes some kind of cosmic heartbeat, as this meticulously timed work of art becomes visual music. There is no beginning, middle or end."---IMDB


Studies for Serene Velocity

Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman

Hotel Monterey (1972)

Akerman's early feature, marked by the influence of structuralist film, explores the interior of a cheap New York hotel.

Kurt Kren

I found this on the Expanded Cinema Blog

"It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife. I had a photograph camera with me; I stood in a corner of the entrance hall and took 36 pictures on slide film. At home I put the slides into a slide projector. I took out the lens and filmed the slides by filming directly from the projector - using single frames according to a certain plan. " Kurt Kren

Liisa Lounila

Lounila makes images at the threshold between photography and cinematography. Her claim to fame is a series or films shot with a homemade device that creates bullet-time effect, giving the impression of a camera moving through a space frozen in time. Some of these films were shown in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale.

Lounila's recent exhibition at the Marabou Park Annex [September 15—October 29, 2006] included two text-based works, two of the bullet-time films—Flirt, 2001, and Play>>, 2003—and Roma, 2003, a series of lenticular prints. Mounted with a special technique, these photographs give a vague impression of movement and spatiality as you look at them from different angles, similar to the postcards that miraculously show different things when you manipulate them.

Lounila's use of temporal suspension and atmospheric sound is clearly intended to heighten the emotional charge. The bullet-time effect converts the films' scenes into slices of a larger narrative. The sound produces a feeling of impending drama or joy. Combined, these techniques give rise to expectations of totality that nevertheless remains undefined. Lounila does experiment with or even question the most traditional of narrative structures. She just renders storytelling elliptic. In fact, the films' cinematic language and logic are both close to those of television commercials and movie trailers. The only difference is that Lounila's work does not have any actual products or movies to sell.

This could also be said of her lo-fi appropriation of the bullet-time effect. The production of complex special effects with a homemade pinhole camera is, undoubtedly, an impressive technical feat.

Lounila's interest in a single moment and bringing it to life is connected to another dimension in her way of working: performativity, understood as the process approach to making art.

Susan Sontag has noted that photography doesn't simply reproduce reality but also recycles it. By presenting photos in new contexts they can say different things and serve very different purposes.

Lounila tells about the shooting technique for POPCORN, a technique she developed together with her colleague Henri Tani: "I used a camera I built myself from cardboard. It was 18 m long and surrounds the subject that I film. It simultaneously exposes 528 frames on 35mm film. The technique is also known under the names time-slice, temps mort, virtual camera, timetrack and multicam. The camera functions by picturing the subject simultaneously from all directions with many separate cameras. When these pictures, each taken from a slightly different angle, are joined together as a film, it creates the illusion of movement around an unmoving subject. The effect the technique creates is familiar to us from music videos of recent years and from movies. The material from one take can bring you about 35 seconds of moving image."



Wiki
BULLET TIME
\Bullet Time refers to a digitally enhanced simulation of variable speed (i.e. slow motion, time-lapse...) photography used in films, broadcast advertisements and computer games. It is characterized both by its extreme permutation of time (slow enough to show normally imperceptible and un-filmable events, such as flying bullets) and space (by way of the ability of the camera angle--the audience's point-of-view--to move around the scene at a normal speed while events are slowed). The first movie to use the Bullet Time technique was Blade in 1998, where bullets were computer-generated and digitally implemented. However, the actual term Bullet Time is a registered trademark of Warner Bros., the distributor of The Matrix.[1] It was formerly a trademark of 3D Realms, producer of the Max Payne games.[citation needed]

This is almost impossible with conventional slow-motion, as the physical camera would have to move impossibly fast; the concept implies that only a "virtual camera," often illustrated within the confines of a computer-generated environment such as a game or virtual reality, would be capable of "filming" bullet-time types of moments. Technical and historical variations of this effect have been referred to as time slicing, view morphing, slow-mo, temps mort and virtual cinematography.

Jeff Wall's Milk, 1984


Milk is another depiction of a socially charged subject. 'Suffering and dispossession remain at the centre of social experience', Wall has commented. The explosive burst of liquid is emblematic of the man's frame of mind, but what might have provoked such extreme emotion is not revealed, a state of ambiguity that ensures the work cannot be understood as moral commentary. The process of reconstructing an event allows Wall the freedom to reinvent the composition. He often relocates the action to a different setting, a place chosen for its formal or pictorial qualities, as the case here. The grid-like order of the brick wall background, and strong vertical bands that stripe the left side of the image contrast sharply with the tension in the man's arms and the uncontrolled arc of milk.