Bill Millett is a visual artist working in video and photography, occasionally indulging in sound. His works focus on the multiple levels of reality, its illusion and construction towards cognitive framing. The images drift towards the abstract and meditative. His works can be viewed on his website.

My Top Five

I have chosen have a human thread running through the works; as you progress the thread will become obvious. Hopefully the chosen works illustrate the importance of documentation that now seems lost as its submerged, in a digital tsunami.

Jessica Lloyd-Jones: Hidden Energies

Lloyd-Jones’ works illustrate the beauty and fragility of the human body through the use of manipulated materials and light to reveal new perspectives.

Thibaut Clamart: Genesis & Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge

I saw this during the festival, thought it the best show. It does what art should confront, and is poignant in relation to the recent global dynamics. I don’t think you will ever see GPO trending.

David Lyons: Eye for an Eye

A precise and empirical use of art and science, illustrating that artwork can be intentionally created to be experienced differently depending on the individual’s visual abilities, perception there is more than meets the eye.

Simon Norfolk: Afghanistan – Chronotopia

I remember seeing a documentary on Norfolk’s work and found it a powerful way of illustrating war in a media stream that has become sanitised. In his works we see a painting of a landscape from a distance. On closer inspection, you start to notice the objects of war. It’s not Stalingrad but just as effective.

Ian Hughes: Unearthed Tongues Set Free

The last is the work of Ian Hughes who recently passed away. This is a powerful illustration of dehumanisation.

This is the second in an ongoing series selecting films from SummerhallTV’s archive. See the first in the series by Dave Rushton here. For a chance to curate your very own SummerhallTV film selection, please email Central Station on hello@thisiscentralstation.com.

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David Rushton was a founder editor of Coventry-based Analytical Art in the 1960s and subsequently worked for Art & Language from 1972 to 1975, notably on the Art & Language Indexes.

Rushton was a key agent in student-led activism and print throughout the 1970s and co-edited Politics of Art Education, 1979. Since then he has divided his time between an analysis of ‘making art’ and local and community based communications. Throughout the 1990s he work on policies and legislation towards the introduction of a more locally accountable TV and with Edinburgh Television and Channel Six Dundee (2000-2002) introduced a browser TV service with programmes scheduled by the viewers using their phone’s key-pads. These channels featured local and international music videos and pioneered short local arts-news.

Rushton is the Founding Director of the Institute of Local Television launched in 1989. The Institute’s most recent arts-news sites include www.summerhall.tv, www.artinscotland.tv, www.writerstories.tv and in partnership with Craft Scotland, www.craftscotland.tv.

My Top Five

As the first Top Five I’ll let my selection start with the early days of making news-clips on Super 8 film. Many of these films are now accessible on the Archive pages of www.summerhall.tv and also form part of the National Library of Scotland film collection … in chronological order:-

So this is Christmas … 1980

A roughly edited film of a demonstration in Glasgow in 1980. As a single copy Super 8 film this had a maximum audience of fifty viewers when it was shown two weeks after filming at Red Star’s Cinema held at the Netherbow (now the Storytelling Centre) on Edinburgh’s High Street. In August 2014 it went viral and was watched almost 3000 times over a couple of weeks, as a digital clip from Red Star’s Super 8 films archived on www.summerhall.tv.

Gore Vidal : In Conversation

Another ‘sleeper’ clip, this time made by Robert Morgan for Edinburgh Television in 2001. It started to be more widely seen after we launched www.writerstories.tv in January 2014. One of several hundred short arts, political and community clips originally shot on standard definition mini DV for Edinburgh Television and Channel Six Dundee between 2000 and 2004. The author interviews continued throughout many of the Edinburgh International Book Festivals with clips now finding a home on our Vimeo sites.

Angelika Schnabel

Moving away from arts-news this film from 2004 opens-out an interview with artist Angelika Schnabel. Here the construction is more lyrical, a montage of picture and soundscape, affecting the quiet confidence of working in the enclosed slow-paced discipline of Angelika’s Buddhist tradition.

Phillipa Aitken : Gerhard Richter

Shot by Ben Grieve for www.artinscotland.tv this interview with Phillipa Aitken is a good example of our daily arts-news coverage of exhibitions and artists throughout Scotland. These are now filmed on a variety of HD camcorders and DSLR cameras. Published openly via social media arts-news, these clips fit the short-time span required of .tv and increase the ‘virtual footfall’ to Scotland’s artists, writers and performers by remote and international ‘visitors’.

Ellie Harrison : After the Revolution, Who Will Clean Up the Mess?

Luci Wallace’s clip of Ellie Harrison’s Referendum Canons was our most watched arts-news clip of 2014. Luci’s film explores an event that at the time of filming may or may not take place depending on the Referendum result. A sequel was filmed on the morning of the announcement [Ellie Harrison : Counterpoint]. While the project didn’t go off with a Bang, the metaphor proved resilient; the result not so much a whimper as a Bigger Bang postponed.

This is the first part of an ongoing series selecting films from SummerhallTV’s archive. For a chance to curate your very own SummerhallTV film selection, please email Central Station on hello@thisiscentralstation.com.

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

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