Colin Marshall

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 34. Cory Arcangel's F2/F1 Racer Mod/Japanese Driving Game (2005)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

F2 (or F1 Racer Mod or Japanese Driving Game). 2:46 min., color, silent, 2005. By Cory Arcangel. Ubuweb's description:

This is a simple mod Cory did of the old Japanese Famicom driving game F1 Racer. Basically the cars, etc., were removed from the game and all that was left was the road.

Procedurally, this is a close cousin to Clouds, the older game modification where Arcangel hacked everything but the clouds out of Super Mario Bros. Now all we've got left from this driving game is the scenery and the scrolling road. Getting what I've come to think of as the Standard Cory Arcangel Ubuwebified Work Disclaimer, this (probably) really isn't meant to be viewed as a clip but as a continuously running cartridge in a gin-u-wine NES console. Or in this specific case, I suppose, a Famicom console, which is the NES' Japanese equivalent. Or an NES with some sort of converter, though I remember from my heavy NES-collecting days that those were tricky to come by. (But you know what? Given the ingenuity I've seen from Arcangel thus far, I wouldn't be surprised if he somehow just willed one into existence.)

I may well be of the last sub-generation to get nostalgic for driving games like the one Arcangel has here stripped of its cars. These were the games from before moving cameras, before infinite draw distances, before real-time 3D rendering. It was all scaled sprites and alternating strips of color to make sure you knew the road was supposed to be passing. This particular game just uses a stream of center lines to evoke that, but the result is basically the same. (This stuff is close to my heart; OutRun was my first-ever computer game, and boy, did I play the hell out of it, never well.) And now that I think about it, I'm not sure "nostalgia" is the right term; do I simply long for the days of these prepolygonal racers, or do I genuinely prefer the games themselves? I can't speak for the 25-year-olds buying Bob-omb shirts from Urban Outfitters, but I think my enthusiasm comes from a place of honest, "objective" enjoyment. I liked games made before 1995-ish even in 1996, and I like them now.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 32. Cory Arcangel's Video Ravingz (2002)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

Video Ravingz. 1:01 min., color, sound, 2002. By Cory Arcangel. Ubuweb's description:

A hacked version of Mario 2 where the user wins the game simply by inserting the cartridge. With rave-style graphics and music, there's an air of celebration about this work because everyone's a winner.

Visually, Video Ravingz looks a lot like the glitchy patterns you get trying to play old, dirty NES cartridges. The canonical technique to address this situation has always, I suppose, been to blow vigorously on the contacts and hope for the best, and I admit to having done that myself in my dissolute youth. But I now understand that move isn't advisable. Sure, you might get the game to work in the short term, but your spittle (or whatever) corrodes it in the long term, causing even worse contact issues. These days, I'm a Q-Tip-and-Windex man. Works every time.

Unlike those cartridges encased in 20 years' buildup of human saliva, though, Arcangel's features a coherent soundtrack. It's an NES sound chip rendering — I guess you'd call it a "chiptune" version today — of a popular 80s pop song that I've been hearing all my life but about whose title, artist or lyrics I have never known anything. I feel like I'm supposed to know this song, and that I'd probably slap my head in recognition if I were to hear who recorded it originally. It's not Tears for Fears, I think, but it's a band on their order. Friends assume I know these things because of the knowledge I display of the well-known pop musicians of that era, but I don't generally know the chart-busters. Thomas Dolby? Most definitely. "She Blinded Me With Science"? Nah. Wang Chung? On intimate terms. "Everybody Have Fun Tonight"? Psh. And so on, even to whatever band has been chiptuned here.

Though Arcangel apparently made this out of what was once Super Mario Bros. 2 — my childhood favorite of the series, though one that's earned only the legacy of a lukewarmly-regarded oddity — you'd be hard-pressed to identify it from what remains. Of his vintage-game transformations that I've seen so far, this is the most complete, though I can't imagine what I'd do with an installation of it.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 31. Cory Arcangel's I Shot Andy Warhol (2002)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

I Shot Andy Warhol. 1:47 min., color, 2002. By Cory Arcangel. Ubuweb's description:

Cory Arcangel is one of a group of artists who work within the strict limitations and visual styles imposed by early digital technologies and media. For I Shot Andy Warhol, Arcangel reprogrammed a 1980s Nintendo videogame, Hogan's Alley, and populated the game with mass-culture icons. The artist chose the iconic personalities based on their ability to be readily recognizable even at the extremely small pixel size in which they are rendered.

Like Arcangel's Clouds, I Shot Andy Warhol probably isn't meant as video art, per se. Presumably it works best as an installation consisting of the actual reprogrammed cartridge running in a real NES console on a television; then you could actually play it. You could pick up the Zapper^TM shoot Warhol, the Pope and Colonel Sanders yourself. I'd jump at this chance, since, despite how much NES I've played in my very Gen-Y life, I've never had the chance to put in time with Hogan's Alley, Arcangel'd-up or otherwise. It looks like fun.

So the best this Ubuweb video can do is give you an idea of what the modified game looks like, which is still pretty funny and even kind of impressive. Reprogramming an NES cartridge in this way is probably a simpler project than the Herculean thing I'm envisioning, but it's clearly not easy. You can get an idea of the task on the I Shot Andy Warhol subsection of Arcangel's "Things I Made Page", the exploration of which has actually been the most interesting side quest of reviewing his videos on Ubuweb. He appears to be a pretty cool dude, and seems to understand, on some level, the benefits of creating under near-Draconian rule sets, such as those imposed, per the above description, "by early digital technologies and media." If indeed he does, he's in the company of great minds. Wasn't it Errol Morris who said that art is establishing arbitrary rules and following them slavishly? Wasn't it Brian Eno who said that, when a technological limitation is lifted, accepting that limitation becomes a valid aesthetic choice?

Arcangel's page also reveals that, yes, you're really supposed to play it:

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 30. Cory Arcangel's Clouds (2002)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

Clouds. 5:15 min., color, silent, 2002. By Cory Arcangel. Ubuweb's description:

Cory took an old Super Mario Brothers Nintendo video game and erased everything but the clouds.

Easier to describe, I daresay, than to hazard a guess as to how he did it. The easiest explanation is that he played Super Mario Bros. in an emulator, recorded it, and then visually erased everything onscreen but the clouds and the blue background. But no! He actually hacked the physical NES cartridge, which he shows you how to do on his site. So the "video art" here isnt so much what's embedded above as what you get when you put the home-soldered cart into the machine.

Even watched in the form of Ubuweb clip, Clouds (a.k.a. Super Mario Clouds, or whatever) is actually pretty hypnotic. I somehow never realized, in all my childhood hours of playing that game, that the clouds drifted to the left by themselves, even absent the player's scrolling the screen by walking ahead. Here's a picture of Arcangel's own modified game — note that it is, and must be, just Super Mario Bros., not the Mario/Duck Hunt pack-in everyone has seven of — for no better reason than that it amuses me:

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 29. Ant Farm's Dirty Dishes, Part I (1968-1978)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

Dirty Dishes, Part I. 34:39 min., color, sound, 1968-1978. By Ant Farm. Ubuweb's description:

Ant Farm continued their antic explorations, making videotapes that were rollicking, informal, and scruffy. Every style of delivery was plundered — the talk show, the industrial, the diary, the travelogue, the magazine. Dirty Dishes (1970) brought us Ant Farm direct from their studio, drug-inflected, performing scenes from character Bill Ding's wedding, a topless talk show, and a syrupy portrait of another Ant Farm regular, Honey Bear.

First, these dates are all over the place. Ubuweb's page title says 1968-1978, its description says 1970, the video itself says 1971, and I'm sure, with patience, I could turn up yet more signals of chronological inconsistency. But the liquid-y gray Portapak visuals that open the video date it more evocatively than any number could. As the description above suggests, this is a dog's breakfast of material, some quite interesting, some less so. If nothing else, it makes me wish I could have put in a stretch as a scrappy early-seventies art team. (Are there "art teams" any more? Sure, Blue Man Group, I guess, but they're the polar opposite of scrappy.)

Speaking of that decade, I'm convinced that the creators of That 70s Show lifted their signature rotate-the-camera-from-within-a-circle-of-characters-getting-stoned setup from this video's opening. I have no hard evidence to confirm this notion and Google hasn't really got my back, but... come on. Behold the uncanniness. If "lifted" seems like an ugly word, sub in "paid homage to Ant Farm with." Not that I'd really care if they did lift it; I'm not exactly into those "big corporate entertainment lucratively swipes pure bohemian artistry" narratives. I bet Ant Farm could've eventually had their own sitcom, though I don't bet they would've wanted to work in such a pre-debased form.

There's some footage of a dude in eating a burger (which, despite its wobbly lo-fi look, feels somehow modern, at least nineties-modern), girls discussing Warhol and a "Top-Less Talk Show from Topanga", in increasing order of the gulf between how interesting they sound and how interesting they are. This all precedes Inflatables Illustrated, a long middle segment on what appears to have been Ant Farmer Curtis Schreier's prime avocation at the time: ironing together scraps of plastic to make gigantic balloon-ish constructions.

These "inflatables," for what it's worth, actually do look kind of fun. A few striking color Super 8 (so I assume) sequences show kids tumbling around on top of one and hanging out inside another. I'm reminded my early elementary school "movement" class, wherein we would lift a large parachute into the air and then bring it down behind us, offering us a few moments in a gradually collapsing dome. It's anyone's guess why Ant Farm would be attracted to something like this, though; how much public attention could even the grandest inflatable attract compared to, say, a Cadillac crashing through a wall of TVs?

The final segment, "World's Longest Bridge, 1971, Ant Farm Truckstop Tour" is, in its way, the most effective. Whether or not this really is the world's longest bridge is unclear — and if so, the record's no doubt been superseded in the intervening near-40 years — but it's long enough for the video's purposes. The whole thing's a first-person view of a drive across it. After the Ant Farmers pay the toll man, it's just a straight-ahead cruise down what's made to look like a bridge that stretches on into infinity. The cloudy sky, choppy water and eerily unoccupied asphalt, rendered by Portapak, almost become an abstraction of mildly varying grays, set to a soundtrack of flute and percussion. But gray happens to be my favorite color, so if you prefer purple or whatever — if you're Prince, for example — just tint it in the closest available video editing application.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 28. Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch (1974-1994)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

Cadillac Ranch. 14:28 min., color, sound, 1974-1994. By Ant Farm. Ubuweb's description:

There's probably no better-remembered public artwork than those ten Caddies with their butts overheating in the prairie sun. A paean to the triumphant tailfin, a camp commemorative to fifties optimism, a jab at the promise of mobility with its down-in-the-dirt terminus. Whatever meaning may well from its wheel wells, Cadillac Ranch, situated just a few hundred yards from Route 66, could probably do just fine without the companion videotape. The tape, however, more properly monikered as The Cadillac Ranch Show, serves as a kind of spin control, or, better yet, as a fishtail on a different shoulder.

Rather than interpret the sculpture, Ant Farm offers up a raucous cast of characters, with a sterling performance by Stanley Marsh 3, the fat-cat patron of the arts, playing Leo Wyoming. In one wildly referential scene, a cowboy-costumed Marsh slaps leather, then shoots the words "Ant Farm" in the door of a Caddie while singing "the Cadillac Ranch will take you away, take you away," the tune ripped from the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour."

Here's another of the videos on Ubuweb where the operative artwork isn't so much the video itself but the thing out there in the world that it documents. But if you'll never make it out to Amarillo and experience this array of midcentury luxury cars half-buried at pyramidal angles for yourself, this is potentially valuable viewing. You'll certainly never be able to witness it in life as it exists in this video, since the whole shebang was quietly moved a bit, to 35°11′14″N 101°59′13.4″W, in 1997. Plus it's always getting re-painted, re-graffiti'd, re-painted, re-graffiti'd, etc.

The above-mentioned performance by Stanley Marsh 3, who's an actual real dude and the installation's real patron, qualifies as Something You Don't See Every Day, especially in the art world. He cowboy-camps it up in both 1974 and 1994, the years between which the video intercuts. I get the impression that most patrons of the arts are desperate not to make fools of themselves, but Marsh seems to have elevated a certain flavor foolishness to a raison d'être. Then again, I suppose if I came into an inheritance of oil wealth, I'd also try my hardest to earn the title of "prankster."

The video's second half is news broadcast from 1994, one of those brief local-wackiness segments covering the Ranch's 20th anniversary. This is the sort of thing I would expect Ant Farm to include, what with their evident give-and-take relationship with the non-artistic media. In fact, I sort of wish that all artists' videos about their own concrete works or the concrete works of others' included excerpts from the reaction of the mainstream. Though I'm as sick as you are of hearing talking heads ask, "But is it art?", there's oftentimes an interesting clash of perspectives to be explored.

And, unsettling realization: mid-90s TV looks old.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 26. Laurie Anderson's Difficult Listening Hour (1986)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

Difficult Listening Hour. (Two Moon July segment #3) 4:21 min., color, sound, 1986. By Laurie Anderson. Ubuweb's description:

[Quoted from the NYT's Stephen Holden:] Laurie Anderson, who has lately been acting as a sort of official greeter for the avant-garde, leads off the program with one of her surefire bits, ''Difficult Listening Hour,'' in which she introduces an imaginary radio show, intoning her words through a harmonizer that lowers her voice to a sinister robotic baritone.

I'm surprised there's not more Laurie Anderson on Ubuweb, given how big a name hers is/was/sometimes is/arguably might be in the avant-garde. This clip, a segment from the hourlong television special Two Moon July, appears to be it. Ubuweb's separate page on the program lays out some context:

The television production Two Moon July was a multidisciplinary event that featured experimental video, film, visual art, performance and music in a theatrical framework. More than thirty artists participated in the program, which was produced for the Kitchen by Carlota Schoolman and directed by Tom Bowes. This production reflects a moment when art centers were experimenting with new modes of presenting the arts for television. The participating artists read like a "who's who" of 1980s downtown art icons. Short excerpts from video and film works (by artists including Vito Acconci, Dara Birnbaum, Bruce Connor and Bill Viola) are intercut with performances and art installations in the Kitchen's gallery spaces.

But what may be a clearer explanation comes from the aforequoted Holden piece:

No New York City cultural institution has been more hospitable toward the development of experimental interarts performance over the last decade and a half than the Kitchen. Since it was established in 1971 in SoHo, the Kitchen has helped nourish a roster of talent in the visual arts, dance, music, and performance art that reads like a who's who of the avant-garde. And this evening at 10 on Channel 31, many of those artists and their work can be glimpsed fleetingly in the one-hour special ''Two Moon July.''

The program, produced for the Kitchen by Carlota Schoolman and directed by Tom Bowes, is really a glossy video brochure that presents tempting little tidbits of work, much of it filmed in the Kitchen's gleaming new headquarters on West 19th Street.

That said, what's Ms. Anderson's contribution like? It's almost exhaustively described by the above. One unbroken shot of Anderson speaking into the mike, through a severely pitch-dropping vocorder, which serves as an introduction to a bit of a video for "O Superman (For Massenet)", the track remembered as her "hit single."

The character she builds upon the vocorder's robo-Barry Whiteization, which the description calls "Soul Doctor", is actually pretty funny. She/he/it utters lines like "Who tore up all my wallpaper samples? Who ate all my grapes? Ones I was saving" and "Holy smokes! Looks like some kind of guest-host relationship to me." The story she/he/it tells, such as it is, finds the Doctor returning to his trashed home, finding a white-tooth fellow full of cryptic utterances sitting there. I couldn't stop wondering how David Lynch would have shot such a tableau.

As for "O Superman", everyone in the developed world has heard it and a decent chunk of them have seen a video of it. How much more can I add? Were I some channel-flipper in 1986 happening upon Two Moon July, though, I'd probably feel at least a little motivated to go out to the local Tower and pick up a copy of Big Science. I look forward to seeing the program's other segments as I come across them in my alphabetically-driven walk journey through Ubuweb's video archive. I feel as if it represents a deliberate, optimistic engagement of the avant-garde with the wider culture that, for the most part, we no longer get.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 25. Eric Andersen's Opus 74 Version 2 (1966)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

Opus 74 Version 2. (Fluxus film #19) 1:40 min., color, silent, 1966. By Eric Andersen.

Though Ubuweb offers no description specific to Opus 74, it comes as one of a collection of 37 short Fluxus films generously hosted there. But you dare cut me off right away with a question: "What's a Fluxus film?" Please enjoy the following blockquote:

Starting in the early sixties, Fluxus followed in the footsteps of the Futurist and Dada avant-gardes, going against the established grain of Fine Art and Official Art and promoting imposture as an aesthetic dimension.

Fluxus interdisciplinary aesthetic brings together influences as diverse as Zen, science, and daily life and puts them to poetic use. Initially received as little more than an international network of pranksters, the playful artists of Fluxus were, and remain, a network of radical visionaries who sought to reconcile art with life.

These films (some of which were meant to be screened as continuous loops) were shown as part of the events and happenings of the New York avant-garde.

Of Andersen himself — and, contra the many spelling variations around, the name seems to be c-Eric e-Andersen, not k-Erik and/or o-Anderson — little information is available. Despite the impressive number of references listed below his Wikipedia entry, it's one of the oddest stubs I've read:

Born in Antwerp 1940. Living in Copenhagen, Denmark. One of the first Fluxus artists. If the anti-art label can be attributed to anyone it's Eric Andersen. He tries through his actions and neologisms to disorientate the public as much as possible.

Andersen was often a guest in the former East Block countries. In 1966, he held a three-day event in Prague with the Fluxus artists Tomas Schmit and Milan Knížák. Those have been the first Fluxus events in Czechoslovakia. In Poland he exhibited in Galeria Akumulatory 2 in Poznań and in the Galeria Potocka in Krakow.

Despite how often I hear it name-checked, I admit to knowing shamefully little about the Fluxus group/movement/collective/aesthetic/sensibility/philosophy/whathaveyou, much less the specific place of Eric Andersen within it. So why not harness the awesome power of Internet to figure it out? The right time seems certainly to have come.

The Wikipedia claims, right off the bat, that Fluxus people were interested in "Neo-Dada" noise music (choice) and visual art (choice), literature (choice), urban planning (choice), architecture (choice indeed) and design (choice). Choicer still, they seem to have been into punching holes in the walls between those pursuits. "Interdisciplinary" has today met the sad end of the academic buzzword, but perhaps the concept itself held more credibility in the sixties, when Fluxus had its heyday.

Fluxus had roots in Europe, but, surprisingly for a Western artitude (as distinct from a "Raditude"), it grew out to Japan as well. This is perhaps just a representation of Fluxus' internal variety: it contained not just a wider artistic spectrum but a wider biological one. It claimed the membership of a lot more womenfolk than usual, for example.

These are the listed planks of Fluxus, some of which contradict the foregoing:

1. Fluxus is an attitude. [Again, see also "Raditude".] It is not a movement or a style.
2. Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
3. Fluxus works are simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief.
4. Fluxus is fun. Humour [sic] has always been an important element in Fluxus.

Eric Andersen's Opus 74 Version 2 has, I would to some degree argue, all these qualities. At one minute, 40 seconds, it unambiguously brings the brevity. What images it presents appear to be not original from the piece but "found" from other sources, some seemingly of the everyday. It does this with simplicity, only displaying those images unadorned and in a linear sequence. "Fun" mileage varies wildly from person to person, I realize, but did I have it? Yes indeed.

For a solid 1:19 of the film, white-on-black titles flash by, announcing the following:

FLUX

FILM

NO.

19

©

by

FLUXUS

1966

OPUS 74

ERIC ANDERSEN

Then we get a dizzying array of pictures that are pretty much unreadable without a finger hovering at all times over the pause button. I can pick out a pair of boots, shelves of books, vases, knotholes, spotlights, catatonic-looking people in spotlights, typewriters (maybe)... but by repeatedly freezing the fast-paced flipping to see what I can identify, aren't I just totally defeating the purpose of the film?

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 24. Francis Alÿs' The Politics of Rehearsal (a.k.a. Ensayo 2) (2005)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

The Politics of Rehearsal (a.k.a. Ensayo 2). 29:55 min., b&w, 2005. By Francis Alÿs collaborating with Rafael Ortega:

The Politics of Rehearsal is a metaphor of Latin America's ambigous affair with Modernity, forever arousing, yet always delaying the moment it will happen.

What is it with European artists and Latin America? So many of them seem to be at least deeply fascinated by the region, if not enamored with it, if not total fetishists of it. From the work I've seen, Francis Alÿs doesn't seem to be too much worse about this than the average Latin America-loving Euro-artist; I doubt he showers behind a curtain emblazoned with the face of Che. But it must be said that a full 100 percent of his videos on Ubuweb — that's two, count 'em, two pieces — revolve around the place.

This installment of The Politics of Rehearsal, the second of three "ensayos" — that's "essays," for you non-Hispanophones — grapples with the vexed relationship between Latin America and modernization. It does this in metaphor — Alÿs seems fond of metaphors — by representing the elusive lure of full, first-world development with a dancer rehearsing a striptease.

It's not as if this is made oblique. The Ubuweb page description quoted above isn't just the Ubuweb page description; it actually appears onscreen, verbatim, during the piece. For just about its entire runtime after a clip of Harry Truman's inauguration speech, a narrator, though one who sounds like the dominant half of a conversation whose other participant is unheard, makes a series of pronouncements about Latin American modernization and how it's like a striptease. No danger of missing the point here, unless this is all a smokescreen for the "real" thrust.

As the voice heard off lectures, we watch the dancer, a pianist, a woman who's probably a director of some kind and, at one point, possibly Alÿs himself. They practice, fine-tune and discuss their allegorical show in a dramatically-lit black-and-white space. The attention naturally goes straight to the dancer, who's the focus of most every shot. She's also the reason I couldn't write this post at the coffee shop, as I'd originally intended. This isn't the evocation of a striptease; it's a genuine striptease, start to finish. (I watched it publicly as long as I could, but we're into nipple territory by 21:58.)

By presenting a stripper who, at least at this streaming resolution, looks genuinely attractive, the ensayo stretches credibility. Credited as "Bella Yao", she's got an intriguing Asiatic look — Merriam-Webster tells me that term "Asiatic" is "sometimes offensive," but I don't buy it — that I didn't expect. But hey, maybe modernization, prosperity, joining up with the first world and all that is a more alluring prospect than the typical hopeless crackhead lolling around a pole. Then again, Ms. Yao clomps around in standard-issue clunky lucite heels (though she removes them off for a couple minutes in the middle) and appears to have a tramp stamp. It's a small one, though.

It's genuinely, entertainingly bizarre to hear some dude intone about "the definition of the temporal," "the structure of temporality" and "the paradox of praxis" while this Asian girl takes it off, puts it back on, and takes it off again. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be as humorous as I found it. Whether or not where the viewer's attention goes speaks volumes about them, I can't say that I've ever seen the intriguing and the deadening framed together so starkly.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 23. Francis Alÿs' When Faith Moves Mountains (2002)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

When Faith Moves Mountains. 15:00 min., color, 2002. By Francis Alÿs, collaborating with Rafael Ortega and Cuauhtémoc Medina. Ubuweb's description:

On April 11th 2002, 500 volunteers were called in order to form a line to move a sand dune situated in the surroundings of the city of Lima. This human comb progressed pushing forward a certain quantity of sand with shovels in order to move the dune from its original position. The actual displacement was of an infinitesimal proportion, but not its metaphorical resonance.

This is less a piece of video art on the displacement-by-volunteer of a big Peruvian sand dune than a mini-documentary on the displacement-by-volunteer of a big Peruvian sand dune. Though I do find the effort itself fascinating, there isn't much going on here in the form department. It's footage of the preparation, footage of the process, interviews with participants and shots of the gaunt, none-too-in-place-looking Alÿs staring up at the immobile dune that is his rival.

Should I stop right here? Is it my place to comment on the project documented, or should The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project concern itself only with the specifically audiovisual elements of these pieces, or go further? I suppose I could spill a healthy amount of digital ink on some of When Faith Moves Mountains' most striking images, but it won't mean much without context.

In order to move the dune, Alÿs and his collaborators recruited 500 locals, many of whom seem to be college students, to don identical t-shirts, form a line and slowly advance across it, shoveling all the way. The video gives a final dune-displacement distance of 10cm, which is small enough to be plausible. Provided a close look at the line's actual technique, though, it's still somewhat difficult to believe. But hey, it ain't about literally getting an enormous pile of sand from one place to another, very similar place; it's about mobilizing the humanity and firing the will to give it a shot.

The "faith" of the title seems ambiguous. This is South America, yes, and I understand a certain amount of religion goes on there, but direct references to god in the video are few, if there are any at all. (And Alÿs himself is a Belgian, one of those nationalities that I just can't picture doing anything god-y in this day and age.) The faith could equally be faith in oneself and one's collaborators to pull off neato art stunts, or, as Tao Lin said, "doing really ‘retarded’ things in order to relieve boredom, like buying a large billboard on Houston street and putting a hamster drawing on it."

Plus, they also created something that is, aesthetically speaking, pretty damn cool. At one point, someone mentions the purely geometrical difficulty of getting a line to move over the surface of a cone, but the striking picture of a thin, white-and-blue (most of the diggers wear jeans) arc gradually crossing a vast brownness as hazy sand clouds blow across turns out to have been well worth the blood, sweat and sandpants.