A meditation on pollution. Based on treatments of footage I produced and shot for the Los Alamos National Labs on the subject of Radioactive Waste Water Treatment.
Performance by Carl Stewart. Carl wears a suit made of Camel packs, all of which he smoked. Filmed in the garden at his house in Rye, NY, wearing a pumpkin head which he grew. Inspired by Marlon Brando’s portrayal of the death of Vito Corleone. Dearly loved by me, this video exists somewhere outside of my other artworks and was never publicly exhibited.
I was commissioned by Andy Marko of Semantics Gallery in Cincinnati to create a live show as the concluding event for his annual Autumedia Festival. The space at Semantics was filled with other work in the show, so he approached Third Party, another artist run space down the street, to host the performance. I sent a general call out to friends at CCM looking for improvising musicians with the idea of forming a fairly large ensemble. I had a a number of responses and the musical group was ultimately made up of Regan Brown (Bass Clarinet), Dave McDonnell (Sax and Electronics), Carrie Magin (Percussion), Steve Weimer (Keyboard), and Zach Larabee (Drums). I also invited Loraine Wible, former student and previous collaborator, with Discerning Crane, to contribute a second stream of images. When we got to the space I decided to throw Loraine's images obliquely across the long wall with mine in the center.
A meditation on the pleasures of observation. Image music and text weave in a multi-layer dance. Images built around a pre-recorded soundtrack.
Text: Jack Kerouac
Music: Michael Fiday
Image: Charles Woodman
Performers: Carla Kihlsteadt, Graeme Jennings (violins)
Narration: Matthias Bassi
Performance organized in conjunction with Passages, my one-person show at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati.
Suzanna Barnes (violin)
Regan Brown (winds & autoharp)
Zach Larabee (percussion)
David McDonnell (electronics & horns)
Loraine Wible (images)
Charles Woodman (images)
Collaboration with Poet/Performer Enrique Aviles. This video has its origins as a part of the “video set” for a performance by Aviles, directed by Davis Chung. In the theatrical piece Aviles played the roles of two immigrants to the US (one Mexican and one Korean) who live on opposite sides of a rooming house in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in DC. Subsequently, Aviles and I decided to create a stand alone video using one of his poems. The original footage of the neighborhood was supplemented with images of graffiti he produced and a shot of him reciting the poem in the backyard of his house in Arlington, VA.
My first multi channel work for synchronized video streams. The piece starts in Cape Cod and moves gradually across the North American continent, ending at the Pacific Ocean. There is no attempt to cover all this of ground in any compete way - the work is an assembly of the places I traveled to and landscapes I admired during the four-year period in which I collected the material. All the scenes were shot with a single camera, then staggered in editing to create the appearance of a continuous shot. During filming I would pan, pause, and then move again, resulting in a series of staggered movements in which the different screens appear to drift in and out of synchronization. Installed at El Camino Medical Center in Mountain View, California.
A mostly formal exercise in composition and image processing, using footage of water. Probably the first in a ongoing series of works dealing with landscape, investigating the idea of video as a contemplative viewing experience akin to painting. Filmed in California and Mexico, Developed over the course of two visits to ETC, Final editing at PPG onto 1” open reel tape.
Contribution to the "Exquisite Video Corpse" project. The first 8 seconds are the video I was given as a departure point, the remainder is my contribution to the chain. The final 10 seconds were given to the next contributor.
Music Luigi Nono ...sofferte onde serene... 1976, for piano and tape. Produced for Collide-o-Scope Music on the occasion of our performance at Atlas Performing Arts Center, Washington, DC in 2011.
The image was filmed off a decorative plate with a live camera which was being processed dimming, and then coming to brightness then back again. It looks like the hue was off too, giving Jesus a green tint. Produced during a residency at the Experimental TV Center.
Produced on ¾" tape at Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe; features music by the Memluks, a band from Norman, OK, and appearances by my friend Willy.
Filmed on VHS, mastered on Betacam SP at Public Production Group, Washington DC. Ceramic artist Betty Woodman demonstrates her technique of ceramic art, discusses her background and talks with critic, curator and painter John Perreault about her work.
Two channels or two versions of a video made with an early non-linear editing system "The Video Cube." Purchased by Matt Dibble, to which I made a contribution and got some time on the system. The tape attempts to form a series of wipes as if constantly changing channels. All footage is appropriated from cable tv.
A collection of images and sounds from television cop shows is interwoven with texts (selected by Scott Davenport) taken from pulp detective stories, the literary predecessor of the same genre.
A meditation/celebration of the Spaghetti Western and the pornography of violence. An homage to Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone. Copies of scenes from the original films, rented on VHS, were edited into a compilation reel. That material was processed at ETC, where Scott Davenport also added the text layer. Several versions of that were edited at PPG in an additive process, A+B=1 C+D=2, then 1+2= X, to create a ‘’final” hour-long version. The shorter “ sit down version was then created from that material.
My reaction to the Gulf War and the continuing transformation of war coverage into media spectacle. Edited at PPG and an early exploration of the Ampex ADO-1000 Digital Video Effects unit.
An early experiment with time based correction and the ability to mix two tapes together, as well as one of the few projects in which I worked with an online editor who operated the controls at my direction. This tape features two versions of the same image (shot in Santa Fe) slightly staggered in time and then wiped over each other. Edited at Eve Muir studio by Trevor Long. I was paying for the studio time to edit a project for LANL and was able to squeeze extra time in to edit two videos, this one and San Mateo Drive.
This first 16mm film made after graduate school, and also my last. Coyote Tracks culminates my interest in Semiotics and the exploration of cinema as a linguistic system. Each shot represents a single “pictograph” in a sentence describing a narrative journey. Shot in New Mexico and featuring a cast of old friends.
"Ye Ying Di" uses a video camera to track the movement of a dancer on stage. The performer's speed and position determine which sounds are heard and what image is displayed.
Live Audio Visual Improvisation on 11/03/10 at Herron School of Art, Indianapolis, IN. Eddy Kwon (violin), Lief Fairfield (violin), Margaret Schedel (midi cello), Valierie Opielski (guitar), Charles Woodman (images)
Live Audio Visual Improvisation on 4/24/10 at Gallery CS13 in Cincinnati, OH.
Music: Lief Fairfield, Issac Hand, Steve Kemple, Eddie Kwon, Ethan Philbrick, Images: Loraine Wible, Charles Woodman
Live cinema audio/visual improvisation. Brief excerpts from three recent performances - Albright-Knox Art Gallery , Lateral Thinking at 21C Museum/Hotel, Villa Douce, Riems, France
Documentation of an audio visual improvisation. Performed at Headlands Center for the Arts Spring 2015. Charles Woodman (images), Zachary James Watkins (sound)
Live audio visual improvisation with Phi 4 on 06/11/2015 at Spazio Contemporanea, Brescia, Italy.
Charles Woodman (images), Maurizio Rinaldi (Electro-acoustic sound act), Fabrizio Saiu (Percussion act)
Live audio visual improvisation on 09/3/2015 at Micro Mini Cinema in Cincinnati.
Zach Larrabee (percussion), Dave McDonnell (saxophone and electronics), Loraine Wible (images), Charles Woodman (images)
Live audio visual improvisation on 12/13/2015 at Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, CA.
Zachary James Watkins (guitar and elecronics), Charles Woodman (images)
Live cinema audio/visual improvisation. Brief excerpts from four 2015 performances - San Francisco Cinematheque 4/15, Headlands Center for the Arts 5/15, Spazio Contemporanea, Brescia, Italy 6/15, Micro Mini Cinema, Cincinnati 8/15
""Pulse Generator Pastry" is my first collaboration with my mother, the ceramic artist Betty Woodman. Betty created the shapes which contain the patterns in the video, based on the forms she uses in her work. I used those shapes as stencils into which both the positive and negative spaces were filled with textures, created using a piece of electronic test equipment called a pulse generator. The video was show in the storefont window at Salon 94 Gallery, during Betty’s show there in spring 2016. on Somehow the rapper ASAP Ferg ended up shooting part of his video for "Let It Bang" standing in front of the work.
Live audio visual improvisation on 06/10/2016 at Modern Makers in Cincinnati, OH.
Ofir Klemperer (electronics), Eddy Kwon (violin), Zach Larabee (percussion), Sayak Shome (images), Charles Woodman (images), Matt Coors (wall treatment), Andy Knolle (projector massage), Harry Sanchez (projector massage), Dan Leonard (live camera), Melissa Godoy (documentation)
Produced almost entirely at Experimental Television Center (ETC), the video uses a simple animation of a rotating rectangle (produced in Deluxe Paint on the Amiga Computer) as a stencil into which are keyed various versions of a processed live image of the river outside the window at ETC. This was my second attempt at a multi channel piece. The four programs have been shown in grid’s of twelve and sixteen monitors. While relatively simple in structure and shown only three times, this remains a personal favorite.
