Casual Fragrance

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Formerly The Scottish Screen Archive, the resource has a vast range of footage from documentaries to home videos. Using the search tool you can explore films made for public information, industry, and entertainment.

If conducting research you can call up particular films or use a keyword filter, and browse information on specific filmmakers and film productions. Alternatively, simply browse through genres, subject, place and decade to while away the hours!

Register free online to access the archive and even create a ‘My films’ list, request a copy of films or buy DVD compilations.

Whether the landscapes and architecture is familiar to you or not, this is something that everyone can appreciate having right at their fingertips.

Explore the NLS Moving Image Archive here.

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Are you willing to participate?, 2015

With the help of the objects and sculptures that I produce or select, I lead an investigation of what objects communicate and are able to modulate within social relations. Through my work I tend to question the impact and subversive potential of our material environment in our lives. I use fiction as a means to negotiate reality: it allows me to explore and point out the artificiality of what is engraved as being intuitive, natural or presented as the norm.

Lately video has taken a substantial place in my practice. I write the scenario at the same time as I produce the objects that will later play a part in the video. In this sense constructing the characters happens both in words and through material research. Therefore the two processes influence one another in the construction of the narration. I see exhibitions as occasions to extend the fictional space developed in videos through sculptures and installation that generate new directions for the work. Likewise the installation of a video can engender another installation, until it reaches a sense of exhaustion.

When I arrived at the Cooper Gallery Summer Residency in July, I’ve just finished the video Nothing Remains, Only Us and freshly set it up in a group exhibition. The video presents a man recalling a community he was part of. The people living in this community aimed to inhabit together a shared house in a way that will disturb their way of living and therefore create new means of experiencing and acting in society. The only rule which is said to have existed and been stressed was to produce a new object a day “which implied as a tacit agreement to break one thing beforehand”. The work shown in Dundee extends the research explored in the video on strategies of resistance towards productivity and participation. It addresses what relations and ways to inhabit the world can material empowerment invent. The sculpture presented acts as a body that spatially regulates the three approaches to material production in relation to individual withdrawal to the logic of labour.

One side of the sculpture shows the video on a flat screen TV. Viewers are invited to sit in this space filled with objects being in a bad mood or displaying their feelings and weaknesses. They express their dissatisfaction toward their functionality echoing a broader contemporary requirement of being happy, complete and accomplished but also functioning and productive. Inter-dependence is put on focus when care is applied to wherever the sculpture needs to: bandages cover flat angle brackets that needed to be added during the install to fix the fleshy beam as for the cushion that stands where the beam needed support.

During the residency, I started to reflect on notion of productivity within an artistic practice when responding to invitations to work. That’s what the opposite side of the sculpture draw upon. There, a drawing of an open mouth made with pink glitters rests on a curvy wall. The hole is cut out which allows to see the inside of the structure. Through this hole I’ve thrown the genuine and organic ceramic objects I made in the first weeks of the residency when aiming to populate and decorate my working environment Dundee. Performing a mindless and wrecker maker seemed to be an appropriate reaction when thinking of perpetual mobility and immediacy of production. I came here reading over The Lesbian Body of Monique Wittig again. The author is known for a statement she made in The Straight Mind, which was that lesbians are not woman since woman is nothing but a social class that they refuse to be part of. What is interesting is how she implies that lesbians refuse to become or to remain heterosexual, implying a conscious decision over passing a simple desire to revolt by taking concrete action endangering the patriarchal society. In The Lesbian Body she recalls the physical, material and mental love from one woman to another. This desire is mediated through the consumption of every bit of the partner’s body. A carnivorous, violent and destructive experimentation where the body has to be eaten and digested in order to be understood adored and re-invented. That was an opening point in considering the motif of destruction as a form of empowerment over one’s existence. This is extremely present in the video and I extend this aspect in the back of the sculpture when thinking of my own relation to labour.

Finally, on top of the structure, I’ve placed a terracotta pot that my mum made before I was born. We had a discussion around this pot a couple of days before I left for Dundee. It served as a proxy to discuss her long life living-and-working economy in which I was raised.  My stepfather and her started to rehabilitate a house whilst we were living there decades ago. Once the house was ready, it was sold in order to buy a new site. This process happened over and over and merged work and life. The pot is one of the rare objects that remain from all the relocations. Family and friends already appeared in some of my works, either through their material production or featuring some videos. Florent Dubois who plays the interviewee in the video presented at the Cooper Gallery is also a friend of mine. It was his first experience as an actor and for me the first time I asked someone to enact a well-defined role and to deliver a script. We spent three days together in what used to be my studio in Lyon and shot the whole thing on green screen.

Anouchka Oler will exhibit at Cooper Summer Residency Exhibition 2015: THINGNESS? until 10 October.

Images courtesy of the artist and Cooper Gallery DJCAD, University of Dundee. Photographer: Ross Fraser McLean.

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Edinburgh based artist Catherine Street presents new work at the Reid Gallery this spring. Expect an exhibition which can also be considered as an unfolding piece of theatre. Voice recordings, flickering projections and live performances combine to create an atmosphere of intense reverie.

Street often incorporates her own body into an installation setting that has video, audio, drawn, sculptural, and written elements. The atmosphere is usually unnerving, tense, sensual, comical. Intense breathing sounds give the viewer the feeling of moving inside the lungs, the body’s cavities – whilst her writings often describe a desire to break apart the flesh and return it to its constituent elements.

During the exhibition, there will be several live performances where the artist’s voice is slow and meditative as she combines live and recorded spoken word. The looped imaginings, calculations and speculations mingle with intense breathing and whistling sounds as well as field recordings made in the streets surrounding GSA. The performance is conceived as part of the installation, audience members are encouraged to come and go as they please.

Catherine Street will be exhibiting new works at Reid Gallery, The Glasgow School of Art from 18 – 30 April. Performances will take place on 22 – 25 April and 29 – 30 April from 3.30-4.30pm.

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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.

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Herman Kolgen is an internationally renowned, multifaceted artist, who has been modelling sumptuous ‘audiocinetic’ performances for over twenty years. The Montréal-based sight and sound virtuoso, continually hatches new conceptual approaches to celebrate the powerful synergy (and intimacy) at the heart of his audiovisual works. Constantly exploring, Kolgen works at the junctures of different media, as well as elaborating a new technical language and distinctive aesthetic. Kolgen’s works take the forms of installations, video, performances and sound sculptures. He has performed at prestigious international events such as Berlin’s Transmediale, the Venice Biennale, Austria’s Ars Electronica, Elektra and Mutek.

He tells us about where he makes:

During the last 7 years, I’ve been living in an old factory near an incinerator (converted into a recycling center) and a railway. It’s a refurbished space, in an up and coming area that serves me both a place to live and work and is not far from downtown Montréal. Situated near the metro, bike lanes, shops and markets, the area is both quiet and lively.

The physical and practical organisation of my creative space revolves around my different work mediums and interests. In this way, I can go from the sound studio to the digital image studio, from the painting workshop to the little film studio, and from the carpentry and metal workshop to the little electronic lab.

Throughout my working days, I fluctuate from one pole to another, constantly using these additional resources. I test and renew my point of view, my perceptions and I find new options, new approaches and creative responses. It’s a dynamic way to reach my goals while combining development phases, tight deadlines and international tours.

The workshop:

The Storyboards:

The Studio:

All images courtesy of Herman Kolgen.

To see more of Herman Kolgen’s work, don’t miss Herman Kolgen: Inject & Dust as part of Alpha-ville LIVE at Kings Place, London on 18 May. You can book tickets online here or read more about the event in our feature here.

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‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.

Launching this year, The Make Works Directory makes it easy to find makers, manufacturers and material suppliers.

Detailed information in each listing includes high quality photography and short films about factories that Make Works have visited themselves. They offer information on what each manufacturer/maker does and what you need to know before approaching them.

Think of it like digital video dating for creative professionals with fabrication.

Here is a selection from The Make Works Directory so far:

Bespoke Atelier are a textile based screenprinting studio in Glasgow working on commissions, their own collections and renting out their studio facilities to other designers.

NPI Solutions are a subcontract machinists based in Irvine, mainly working in metal. They will work with entrepreneurs looking to manufacture prototypes and small batch runs of products.

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Dazed Vision, the in-house video art arm of Dazed Group, launches today. It specialises in branded and editorial visual content for online, broadcast and beyond, translating Dazed & Confused‘s rich and unique print heritage for the video era.

Its first major editorial project will be the launch of a year-long landmark video strand, Visionaries on dazeddigital.com. This will see weekly video takeovers from some of the world’s most exciting creatives and collectives. Dazed‘s December cover star, James Franco, is first off the mark, while confirmed future Visionaries include Björk, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Kim Jones, Rankin and Warp Records.

Dazed Vision is simultaneously commissioning and scheduling a rich weekly content cycle across the worlds of style, documentary, art, music and culture for dazeddigital.com.

On launch Dazed Vision is proud to announce partnerships with the likes of Channel 4, Arte Creative, Copenhagen international Documentary Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest and Tribeca Film Institute, with many more to follow.

The video arm is also working with a host of brands on large-scale moving image projects, looking to push the way audiences view and interact with branded content.

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American born visual artist, Michele Marcoux is from Cleveland, Ohio but is now based in Edinburgh. Here she tells us more about her upcoming exhibition at The Old Ambulance Depot.

The impossibility of memory – It’s all about telling stories…

In the late 1980s at a time when more than 2000 people a year were murdered in New York City, Southside Williamsburg, Brooklyn was an extremely hot and heavy neighbourhood. But it was also a place where I lived…

In April 2012 I went back there with my camera to capture the past, but where was it…?

The video shows me in the studio working on drawings for the upcoming blood/MarcyAV exhibition and talking about the inspiration for the show.

blood/MarcyAV includes myself, visual artist Michele Marcoux, sound artist Lynne Thermann and poet Sheila Black and explores the nostalgia but also the pain of youth, and the implicit as well as explicit violence of life in the city, especially for women. The show features painting/drawing, moving image, sound and text.

Lynne Thermann says “We cast back to our collective past. Traditionally, we honour our ancestors; however in modernity, we commit nostalgia. The show presents what survives from a shared city of dreams, which now exists only in artefacts of terror and love. We give life to the lost, re-animating the missing: young girls in the city, alive inside it.”

Sign up for the event on Facebook or get more info from my blog.

blood/MarcyAV is on display at The Old Ambulance Depot, 77 Brunswick Street, Edinburgh EH7 5HS. There will be a private view at 7 – 9.30pm on 31 October and the exhibition continues until Sunday 3 November 10 – 5pm.

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Harvest is a new company from Scotland, specialising in artist designed skateboard decks, apparel and editioned prints. It is run by artist Jamie Johnson and tailor Kieron Forbes. Jamie Johnson tells us more:

To promote the launch of our website www.harvestskateco.com, we arranged with Edinburgh City Council access to an abandoned swimming complex, to take photographs and videos of our sponsored skateboard team using the space in a unique way. We grew up using the pool and were sad to see its closure, but felt this repurposing of the space was a positive and interesting project to undertake before the building is renovated entirely.

Here is our video edit, with music by local artist Benjamin Seeley and animations by Jamie Johnson –

This project came about through us looking for a new video project to launch our website with. We both knew about the closure of Leith Waterworld, although sad to see it go we saw potential for it as an interesting place to skateboard in and take photos. With the help of an artist friend (Dickie Webb) we contacted Edinburgh City Council and proposed our idea. We gained access and filmed and shot everything within a couple of hours.

Since we were awarded funding from Cultural Enterprise Office’s Starterfor6 creative business programme, we have launched our website alongside a line of skateboard decks, apparel and artist prints. We held preview exhibition nights at Superclub Gallery in Edinburgh and Recoat Gallery in Glasgow, where we premiered our first promotional video and product line. It’s been a very encouraging first year of existence as a company, with good press and feedback from a variety of sources.

We are currently working on a new filming project and collaborative printed publication, alongside a new clothing line. We will be releasing a new run of limited skateboard decks and artists prints, with graphics designed by ourselves and other local artists in the near future.

Hopefully we can find more interesting unseen spots to film skate videos and inspire animations, we would also like to hold another exhibition/video premiere before too long.

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