Author: Mike Leggett

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Raqs Media Collective: casebook

2016
Mike Leggett

Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta (the
collective), with Philip Monk, curator and writer. Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2014)

Raqs – the term comes from the whirling dances of Asia – regard other artists, researchers and writers as part of the complex interchange of their ideas and practice. Selecting strands from the international army of practitioners, the Collective have curated artists into specific institutions, festivals and biennales. (Leonardo Digital Reviews 2016)

The Extinction Poker Machine Series

2017-18

The interactive installation, The Extinction Poker Machine, proposes to animate a warning about the loss of biodiversity. In the first in the series, a selection from an online collection of 206 digital images of native bees is reanimated in apparent flights of the long dead, across three electronic screens, animated by a generative system. Not the model from biology, but one based on the integers favoured by computers. The system halts the flight of the bees on each of the screens successively, but randomly. A pause, before they take to flight again. Inevitably the generative system will align all three images to match. In preparation are Birds, Fishes and Bush. (Consultation and HTML5 coding by Adam Hinshaw. Bees first installed at Siteworks 2017, Bundanon homestead).

inn7o – Art & Economics (documentation)

1971 – 2012

"APG [Artists' Placement Group] was a milestone in Conceptual Art in Britain, reinventing the means of making and disseminating art, and anticipating many of the issues facing cultural workers today. It represented itself in a number of exhibitions and events, notably in the exhibition Art and Economics at the Hayward Gallery in 1971 with artistic interventions by Garth Evans, Barry Flanagan, John Latham and others.  Over three weeks, representatives from industry and government were invited to gather around a table at the Hayward to discuss APG's ideas with its associated artists. Exhibition visitors were not invited to participate in the discussions, separated from the discussants by PVC curtains, although the conversations were recorded on video and rebroadcast via monitors throughout the gallery. The video recordings shown for the first time since inn7o at Raven's Row in 2012 – were considerably deteriorated but revealing of a dramatic confrontation between artistic and corporate cultures – were made by Mike Leggett."

Twenty-four Hours: Bristol mid-summer 1985

1985
20 mins

The film was commissioned by South West Arts and Watershed as a community project celebrating the longest day of the year, 21st June in Bristol, UK, 1985. The project was shot on Super 8mm film, edited on video and played later on a screen as part of a photographic exhibition at Watershed Media Centre.
Using several strategies combining recordings of picture and sound made throughout the twenty-four hours, the city and its inhabitants are encountered in the street, in places of work and at play whilst radio, television and newspapers bring music and news of events occurring simultaneously around the planet. Clarity and purpose of image in the film, both picture and sound, is challenged as being capable of communicating any specific sense of what occurred, throughout the longest day.

 

 

 

This Way Out of England: Gallery House in Retrospect

2017
Antony Hudek and Alex Sainsbury (Ed)

A Survey of the Avant-Garde in Britain was the title of a series of exhibitions in 1972 at Gallery House, 50 Princes Gate, Kensington, UK during which films from the London Filmmakers Cop were screened. The catalogue for the exhibition at Raven Row, London E1 in 2017 revisits some of the issues of the original event.

Screen Ecologies: Art, Media and the Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region

2017
Mike Leggett

by Larissa Hjorth, Sarah Pink, Kristen Sharp, and Linda Williams
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016
Leonardo Book Series, Roger E. Malina, Editor
224 pp., illus. 61 b/w. Trade, $37
ISBN: 978-0-262-034562.

The introduction is a topography to this very complex field of study, where artists, enthusiasts, inventors, activists, technologists, hackers, ecologists, and scientists are all simultaneously responding to the climate changes of the technology industries and the environmental market place of human interactions. For some, this section will be sufficient. The complexities hinted are unraveled in eight chapters, taking cuts through the data and enabling the reader to experience from the inside the magnitude of our mediated effect on each other and the planet we call home.

Between Categories

2017
Sarah Neely

The films of Margaret Tait: portraits, poetry, sound and place. Published by Studies in the History and Culture of Scotland and Peter Lang AG.

Citations from my unpublished MS, correspondence and audio recordings with Margaret Tait, etc. retrieved from the BFVASC and Kirkwall Public Library

 

Exposing the Film Apparatus: The Film Archive as a Research Laboratory

2016
Mike Leggett

 Giovana Fossati and Annie van den Oever, Editors. Leonardo Digital Reviews (2016) and Leonardo, Vol. 50, No. 2, April 2017: 224-224. 

Audience studies is a recent field of study related to the work of film archives drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data but does not form part of this collection other than by inference. The emphasis is on the projector and other tools for darkened rooms, like printers; in the showman days of fairground entertainment these were one and the same with the camera. It is these three tools of practice where attention is focussed, strung between the vastly different worlds of Hollywood and the amateur filmmaker. 

Shoot Shoot Shoot – the First Decade of the London Film-makers Co-operative 1966-76

2016
Mark Webber (ed)

The 1960s and 1970s were a defining period for artists’ film and video, and the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC) was one of the major international centres. Shoot Shoot Shoot documents the first decade of an artist-led organisation that pioneered the moving image as an art form in the UK, tracing its development from within London’s counterculture towards establishing its own identity within premises that uniquely incorporated a distribution office, cinema space and film workshop. Illustrated throughout in full colour, this book brings together a wide variety of texts, images and archival documents, and includes newly commissioned essays by Mark Webber, Kathryn Siegel and Federico Windhausen.