See UbuWeb Mirror Page Download Flash Artifacts (2009, AVI) In Flash Artifacts (2009), Danny Snelson and João Enxuto re-edit selections from UbuWeb's streaming video archive, exploring the conditions that momentarily "clothe and house" classic avant-garde film and video works. In particular, this editorial exercise investigates online versions of media-reflexive cinema, reprograming works designed to address media technologies now verging on obsolescence. Standish Lawder turns the camera back on the projector; reveling in the deliriously rhythmic mechanics of a film zipping through the machine. Paul Sharits constructs a rigorous series of dot matrix bursts of light; flashing the ecstatic visuality of pure cinema. Vito Acconci invades the most intimate of gallery spectator spaces; destroying any supposed distance from the film. What interests us about these works of consummate media-reflexivity in their current state of digital dereliction? Why screen these virtual leftovers when online viewing is properly dismissed as an inferior cinematic experience? History completes itself: in remarks on the foundation of UbuWeb, Kenneth Goldsmith argues for the astonishing way in which the computer screen has always inhabited concrete poetry, even from within the page. Similarly, a hidden magic is revealed in these works as they've found themselves mixed up in the contextual economy of UbuWeb. Interweaving, juxtaposing, and re-editing dozens of films and videos from the UbuWeb archive, we attempt to resurface the more remarkable moments of digital prescience: rewiring these essential historical works as allegories of online distribution networks, internet-specific poetics, media encoding technologies, and the peculiarities of our rapidly expanding social networks. |