Clemens Klopfenstein and Ian Wooldridge
Online screening
Until 15.05.2020
Intro
Clemens Klopfenstein, Geschichte der Nacht, 1978
Ian Wooldridge, loose homme, (2016-2020)
Online screening
Until 15.05.2020
Istituto Svizzero is pleased to announce two screenings by artists Clemens Klopfenstein & Ian Wooldridge which will be available for the limited time of one week.
Both Geschichte der Nacht (1979) by Klopfenstein and loose homme (2016-2020), 15 cams for Istituto Svizzero (viewed in the form of an installation work) by Wooldridge, were part of the group exhibition “Retour Ă Rome“.
Ian Wooldridge, loose homme, (2016-2020)
15 cams for Istituto Svizzero
<<In 2016 I started collecting
fevered sealed conditions
insomnia and endless flows
depressed porn & dank dead cum
I called this collection loose homme
It’s a collection of 1000 live broadcast video screen grabs taken from a sex-cam site. Taken from the “males” room. Grabbed when the men are absent. I roughly grab 2 minutes of footage each time.
These left-on cams are not as apparent in the “females”, “couples” or “trans” rooms. Over the 4 year period of collecting the empty spaces, the sex-cam sites have swayed from amateur to amateur-professional. First tips were introduced and more recently adverts interrupt the viewing of non-premium account users. It began with what felt like a single tier in the quality of the broadcasts. Interior homogeny/ Decorative musk. Now the qualities range in ratio, resolution and frame rate depending on the cammer.
In 2016 a friend told me “it’s sometimes terrifying, the erotic charge of an increasingly mediated everyday”
In 2019 another told me “you are disembodying men”
I can’t remember when the option to roll the dice appeared.>>
Clemens Klopfenstein, Geschichte der Nacht, 1979
Documentary, 1h 1min
Clemens Klopfenstein composed this experimental ode to the city in 1979, in the same decade when city dwellers were moving out en Mass to the suburbs. He filmed in no fewer than 150 urban centers, from Istanbul to Dublin, and from Helsinki to Rome. And he did so not during the daylight hours that mercilessly expose the decline and depopulation of shrinking cities, but under the cloak of night. This is when the urban environment appears most ghostly, with empty offices and residences calmly illuminated by buzzing streetlamps. Litter tumbles across the screen as a couple hurries home along a deserted sidewalk. A siren sounds, and in the distance a car engine turns over. Nighttime is clearly no time for people. Wherever human activity is to be found—in smoky drinking dens or at religious processions with fireworks and prayers—it resembles some kind of exorcism. Story of Night is a visual poem without narrative and with the minimum of camera movement. Klopfenstein captures the essence…