Alma Mater features work by six UK-based artists, dealing in representational methods of experience and social interaction. Alma Mater takes cultural identity as its starting point, to encompass the influence of visual culture on everyday experience; questioning ideas of Britishness and conceptions of national identity. Working with digital media, each artist invests a degree of experimentation and innovation in their approach to Moving Image that embeds the process within the work – the media itself becoming a near-character in the linear, and non-linear narratives. The screening includes a range of works made between 2000 and the present, and charts a significant period of change in our relationship with visual culture, and the society that shapes it.
Information for venues
The programme is in High Defintion and is available either as a Quicktime file (h.264 or Apple Pro Res codec) or Blu-Ray disc for single screenings. The screening fee is £100 (+VAT) for UK venues, £150 (+VAT) for overseas venues (excluding shipping and handling). Preview DVDs for preview and press are available on request. The curator Steven Cairns and/or artists may be available to introduce the programme if costs can be covered, please contact LUX to discuss.
Torsten Lauschmann Let’s Kiosk 2000, 7 min 24 sec
Steven Claydon Bestiary 2009, 19 min 22 sec
Clunie Reid Wen u travel u go 2 sleep 2011, 5 min 55 sec, silent
Stephen Sutcliffe Please, please, please… 2001, 2 min 3 sec
Hannah Sawtell You’ll Never Walk Alone 2006/7, 7 min
You’ll Never Walk Alone forces together three forms of dissemination; a series of slide format images appropriated from a campaign for a life insurance group, an ‘Acid’ recording from the same period and a contemporary computer slideshow programme of a turning cube. Hovering between satire, horror, belligerence and social entropy, the video displays an aesthetic of prescribed resistance.
Rachael Reupke Deportment 2011, 3 min 32 sec, silent
Hannah Sawtell Entroludes 4: Means 2010, 4 min
Part 4 of Entroludes 1-6.
Means utilizes stills, sound and moving image retrieved from the internet; what Sawtell refers to as ‘the detritus of the contemporary arcade’. Sound fragments are edited purposefully leaving the audio glitches to reveal the cut and paste nature of digital work. Made specifically for the context of the cinema; pushing a private/ low resolution reception into a place of group/ high definition reception. The video explores the disjuncture between manual labour and digital economy.
Stephen Sutcliffe Come to the Edge 2003, 1 min 49 sec
Come to the Edge uses a recording of the poet Christopher Logue reciting a poem originally written in 1968. The poem is combined with video footage shot in a 6th form common room. In the footage a good-humoured scene is suddenly transformed into something altogether more sinister as the group of schoolboys enact a ritual humiliation upon a seemingly older, mustachioed boy.
