random, contagious, passing on, viral connection, chaos, order, subject, object, spreading ,freedom, fantasy, epic, still, moving, abstract, variable, recorded, live unseen, experiment, focus, visible, aesthetic, contaminatory, subversive, rapture, metaphor, allegory, exciting, changeable, be-able, induced, silent, 'a dizzying sophism whir' one global context, narrative, explosion, sense, nonsense.
 

To coincide with the Athens Olympic Games in August 2004 and to open at the Gazon Rouge Gallery Athens, the artists Natasha Makowski and Peter Lloyd Lewis would like to invite you take part in a global art event that will incorporate work from artists from all around the world. Its a celebration of image diversity and unknown connections. Welcome to……

the SNEEZE...............a Featured Film

80 artists x 80 seconds 106 minutes
 
 
 

A  celebration of a new equation

Referring to Thomas Edison innovative kinograph film of a sneeze where Frederic P. Ott ¹ stood before the worlds first movie camera on January 7th 1894, this  project pays homage to and refers to this epic event of early cinema, the creation of one of the first moving images.
Acknowledging both the importance of the event in moving image history and considering the idea of its experimental reference we intend to explore the relationships between video art, feature film, and the idea of connections being made between artists and their work, through the  questioning of hierarchies, the exploration of narrative and the creative use of time structure, all through the equation of 80 x 80.  The idea is not necessarily to form a cohesive and unquestioning result but to use the format for ideas to clash and provoke rereading of work and their relationships through their placing with the other pieces presented.

106 minutes is the average time of a contemporary feature film, together the videos will become/be viewed as a feature that incorporates the work of 80 artists.

Its focus is to form an innovative and questioning work that reinvents and represents itself continually through the random interjection of a program. One research project in the production considerations is to write a computer program that emulates a virus pattern, one that controls order and sequence, calculated chaos, working with other installation variables attempting discourse in the formal viewing pattern, so no experience of the piece will be similar.

Part visible and invisible the act of sneezing is an act we experience visibly in terms of the physical act yet we don't necessarily see the viral agents. It's a random connective act > one that releases with variable effects. It is this idea of the unknown connection that we wish to discover through this process.

In his book Relational Aesthetics the writer and curator Nicolas Bourriaud writes about forms coming together through encounters that pile up and produce the birth of the world. From the “deviation” and random encounter of a group of elements a form is produced through this lasting relationship.

We are asking artists to consider this fact as we ask them to make videos that not only can be seen as unique pieces of work that have integrity and can be shown separately but also when placed together they form a piece, ' a whole' that can make unexpected connections and might or might not make a rational or part rational statement.

The viewer will have the opportunity to engage fully with the piece and see the total event if desired or similarly will be able to engage in partial connections, seeing two or three pieces in conjunction and then moving on, channel surfing.

The artists invited will be from a  global context-and interdisciplinary practice. Some will be chosen because their subject matter does bare some relationship to the project idiosyncrasy. But in keeping with the ethos of the project we are inviting a surprising and innovative selection of practitioners so that expectations are perpetually confounded. Their responses can be allegorical or metaphorical.

Artists will be free to interpret the invitation as they want. All we ask is that they embrace the ethos of the project fully in terms of a collaborative event with a multidisciplinary exhibition designed for global outreach > spreading.

 ¹January 7, 1894, in Thomas Edison’s film studio, where WKL Dickson the inventor of the Kinetograph used his laboratory assistant, Fredric P Ott to depict an action, Ott sneezing, 'Record of  a Sneeze’,  the creation of the first moving imagery- forty-five frames- a little over a second in length.