Playground, 2002. Made in collaboration with Michael Smith
Single channel video with installation components
Color, sound, 2:58
Music, editing, and graphics by Price.
Video made to accompany Price & Smith’s installation Playground at Galerie Emi Fontana, Milan (2003) and at CAN, Neuchatel, Switzerland (2002). The exhibition was comprised of an installation of wooden toys and video projections. Baby Ikki, Smith’s alter ego, is featured in the video. Additional performance videos were placed on monitors.
Untitled Film/Right, 2006
16mm film installation
Color, silent, 15:00 loop
Part of a three-gallery exhibition, featuring a video version of the film (see above), which went into unlimited distribution at EAI, and a second 16mm film, Untitled Film/Left, which was exhibited at Reena Spaulings.
The three films were proposed as different considerations of filmic abstaction, both historically and contemporaneously, in both the art world and the world of underground or experimental film. Price’s thoughts on the issue were collected in the book "Notes on this Show," published on the occasion of the exhibition.
Untitled/Right was based on a short, black and white clip purchased from an online distributor of "multi-use video backgrounds.” Such video loops serve as content aids in presentations, promotions, and advertisements, as well as more serious applications like TV news backdrops. Price's purchase of this computer-generated, six-second clip includes screening rights, and he visually altered the clip and repeated it hundreds of times before transferring the digital file to film.
When exhibited at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in 2006, the film was presented with Price’s lithograph series 'Addresses', which featured a web-derived image of Caravaggio’s David and Goliath. As an installation, the film and the lithographs can be considered part of a series of works Price made over the years on the subject of beheading, headlessness, and the digital circulation of imagery.
Note: A digital video version of this film, with a soundtrack, was made later (Köln Waves/Blues, 2005-2008.)
See also Eight Photographs (2007) a suite of photographic prints by Price, developed from this film
Related reading: Notes On This Show (2006)
Untitled Film, Left, 2006
16mm film installation
Color, sound, 10:00 loop
Part of a three-gallery exhibition featuring a video version of this film and a second 16mm film, Untitled Film/Left. See above for details.
Online Music VideosFrom 2010 on.
In 2010 Price turned his attention to the short-form, web-distributed music video form, in part to circulate some of his older music, which was produced before the existence of online music distribution platforms like Myspace or Soundcloud.
Although the videos are intended for online circulation Price has also exhibited them in gallery and museum contexts, often by installing an arcade of single-user kiosks in which visitors must stand inside, don headphones, and press play. In writing, Price has described the thinking that lead to this mode of display:
"The history of film, or more accurately the moving image... performed a three-part arc, veering from individualistic beginnings to a mass middle period before finally returning to individualism with a vengeance. Early cinema enthusiasts had been briefly excited about a personal experience of film, devising zoetropes, phenakistoscopes, and other devices in which the viewer needed to lay hands on the machine physically to set the film in motion. This culminated in the kinescope, a coin-operated booth that ensured a controlled, strictly private experience of the moving image. Before long, however, cinema bloomed as a mass medium, and over the ensuing decades film came to mean the crowd, and a shared experience that encompassed not only the theatrical audience but the culture at large, even the nation. In exchange for this expanded sphere, the moving image was removed from the physical touch and control of viewers, departing the individual body and entering the social body. This was the middle period. By midcentury, though, things had already started to change due to the proliferation of television, which again allowed a person to touch the machine, to push a button, to manipulate the picture physically. Such a viewing space was bodily and domestic and no longer quite so communal. However, while this new public may have been spatially scattered, they were compelled to watch the same broadcast, and thus they still composed a single audience, albeit one united within the time of the image. The introduction of the VCR, however, uncoupled even this temporal link, and by the ’80s neither the time nor the space of the image had to be shared with anyone else. The spread of the PC, the internet, and all the ensuing mobile devices only reinforced this situation. By the hundredth anniversary of The Birth of a Nation the pivot was complete: now, just as at the beginning of cinema, moving images were consumed largely by individuals, who once again laid hands on their machines to set private pictures in motion, thereby fully commanding both the time and the space of the image."
- Fuck Seth Price, 2015