Danish site Netfilmmakers.dk provides what it terms "a non-commercial projectionspace for netfilm, net art video and net art," structured around a series of online curated mini-exhibits of just three works each. The latest and 13th edition is "To Kill at Dusk With Foam," featuring videos by Jana Eske, Andreas Kurtsson and Abhishek Hazra. In Eske's Apfelschnappen, a camera poised at the bottom of a tank of water records various individuals bobbing for a green apple, Kurtsson's Debris narrates the witnessing of a crime within a dream over images of depopulated exurban architecture, and Hazra's nicely inscrutable Nasal Sceptre portrays a pixelated rotating teapot covered with inscriptions of what may be bizarre online lingo ("RLAIAADKTEATCOR: rotate left arm in an anticlockwise direction keeping the elbow as the centre of rotation" -- one left out of Marisa Olson's recent Netacronyms?) The accompanying essay's attempt to tie these three works together under the themes from the Mahabharata and the anthropological concept of liminality constitute theoretical lily-gilding, but the site's micro-curated format nevertheless bears the satisfying succinctness of a video haiku. - Ed Halter
Image: Andreas Kurtsson, Debris, 2008
Dear Ed,
As author of the thematic essay that accompanies the 3 remarkable works in Netfilmmakers' 13th edition, I would like to clarify a gross misconception in your concise yet fleeting review.
The 13th edition is the result of an exercise in correlation where the theme of liminality is visited through the respective phenomena that the productions address. Each of the works, including the essay, nevertheless stands in their own right - a structural element which you have noted and which is apparent in that the artists present their own descriptions of their individual works. The point you miss in your review therefore, is that the thematic alliance between the essay and the works is based on reciprocity and not on conflation, which is implied when you say, '…tie these three works together under …'
My approach to the curation of the 13th edition being informed by pedagogical and epistemological responsibility to the net gallery visitor, I would prefer being labeled 'onion-peeler' instead of the pretentiously vacuous 'lily-gilder'.
Yours truly,
Zeenath