ABOUT...
(Documentation of) recent screenings / performances:
*** Glasgow, UK - Videonale screenings at GOMA *** begins 18th January 2010***
*** video_dumbo festival screening *** New York, 25th-27th September 2009 ***
*** Bonn, Germany - Videonale Festival screenings *** begins 26th March 2009 ***
*** Market Gallery motorised event *** Glasgow, Scotland, 24th January 2009 *** FLYER ***
see photos of this motorised event here
*** Glasgow, Scotland - Rob Kennedy Upgrade! Scotland event *** 26th Sep. 2008 ***
*** New York screening event *** 25th June 2008, NYC *** PRESS *** FLYER ***
*** Weimar, Germany - Backup Festival screening *** 20th June 2008 *** Rob Kennedy 'forum' event ***
ABOUT Hapless, Helpless & Hopeless:
35 mins, 2008
- a video by Rob Kennedy and Peter Dowling
- produced at PRIM, Montreal, Canada (2007) and in Glasgow, UK (2008)
- funded by Artists’ Film and Video Award, Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen
'Hapless, Helpless and Hopeless', is a collaborative work, borne of an improvised relationship between sound and image. This improvising relationship between sculptor/video maker and musician/composer was engendered in order that the direction of the work relied entirely on this shifting, mutable process and not on any preconceived structure of screenplay, storyboard or soundtrack.
The sounds and images in the work have, in their entirety, been sampled from television adverts, the origin of the work being a need to form a dialogue with the norms and conventions of television production in order to understand, adapt and re-define these codes into a grammar that could subsequently be used to suggest other readings, other outcomes, other problems, than those previously prescribed within the role of the advertisement. This involves as much ‘luxuriating’ in the technique, craft and seductive qualities of the original clips, as it does pulling apart the elements in critique of the formulas used. To this extent the work is all about looking. Looking in the sense that to look hard at something, to read the possibilities and associations that a picture or sound can have, takes labour and effort. It is this looking that enables both the producer and the viewer to change those associations and to create a new grammar or a new set of rules with which to build different relationships.
more documentation (including videos) coming soon...
[HHH is a development (completion) of the 2007Untitled Video. To see video extracts, view that documentation page]
click here to go to general Dowling / Kennedy page to view other collaborations and projects...
