press release
PERRY BARD
Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake.
With exhibitions in 50 venues to date, Studio 10 is pleased to present the first New York City installation of Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake, an experiment in database cinema by Perry Bard, opening Friday, December 9, 2011 from 7 – 9 PM. The exhibition will also feature screenings, events and Diplomathèque, a philosophical karaoke.
The award winning participatory project, which has been in progress since 2007, invites people around the world to interpret Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man With A Movie Camera for the 21st century. A website at http://dziga.perrybard.net contains every shot in Vertov’s film, while the scene index and tags allow people to select the shots they want to interpret. Software developed for this project archives, sequences and streams their uploads as a film. As each shot can be uploaded more than once, infinite versions of the film are possible. A new film streams daily on the website selecting from the database of submissions.
Inspired by Vertov’s intentions to create “a new language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theatre and literature,” the global remake asks how that language might transform in the age of the internet. Both writer and director, Vertov imagined an army of cameramen updating world news every four hours. Today we have that army of cameramen and the internet is the world stage. Bard’s generative project engages this public space to crowd source uploads, 3000 to date from 60 countries. The work was named by Google one of the 106 best uses of the internet and won a Guggenheim award as one of the Top 25 for its Youtube Play Biennial.
Perry Bard ‘s videos and installations have been exhibited internationally: at MoMA, Lincoln Center, New Museum, Reina Sofia Museum Madrid, Sao Paolo Biennial, Montreal Biennial, Joyce Yahouda Gallery Montreal, Sheldhalle Zurich, Toronto International Film Festival, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Moscow Film Festival, Transmediale Berlin, Ars Electronica Linz.