Kraljica remiksiranja.
peoplelikeus.org/
illegal-art.net/home/
Under the guise of People Like Us, British sound collagist and DJ Vicki Bennett blends samples from music, radio and television in a Cut Up style to form "plagiarhythmic" new melodies. A frequent theme of her music is the extraction of familiar snippets of popular music, which are subsequently interrupted or morphed just when the listener has begun to feel comfortable with what they're hearing. This style has been dubbed "irritainment".
People Like Us has collaborated with musical peers Wobbly and Negativland.
Most of the People Like Us material is available under a creative commons license from http://www.peoplelikeus.org. Also do check the archives of Do Or DIY program on freeform radio WFMU.
Then there was also the South African Hi-NRG act around Paul Crossley and Terry Owen that formed out of the ashes of Shiraz.
With the additional vocal talents of Cindy Dickinson the group achieved a surprising measure of success in the mid-80's with their "Deliverance" song.
People Like Us "Skew Gardens" 2008:
Skew Gardens on Ubu: http://www.ubu.com/film/plu_skew.html
GESTURE PIECE (2013) by Vicki Bennett
Pastiche sound and video artist, Vicki Bennett, was served the first copyright violation of her 22-year career. Better known as People Like Us-- of WFMU's Do or D.I.Y. fame-- Bennett has been cutting together pop culture and found material for two decades, making strange everythig from archival footage of scientific experimentation on humans to pop song earworms. The work in question here is The Zone, a live juxtaposition of Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. Mosfilm, who owns the distribution rights to Stalker, served the injunction. Despite high-profile institutional support from the likes of the BBC and Tate Modern, this is the first time Bennett has had attracted this dubious honor.
Check how Vicki Bennett feels about THE CINEMATIC GAZE. - http://adhoc.fm/
ubumexico.centro.org.mx/video/Vicki-Bennett_4min33-The-Movie_2011.mp4
People Like Us
Welcome to the only official site for People Like Us and Vicki Bennett
Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been an influential figure in the field of audio visual collage, through her innovative sampling, appropriating and cutting up of found footage and archives. Using collage as her main form of expression, she creates audio recordings, films and radio shows that communicate a humorous, dark and often surreal view on life. These collages mix, manipulate and rework original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film, television and radio. People Like Us believe in open access to archives for creative use. In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, The Barbican, Royal Albert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre, Maxxi in Rome and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show 'DO or DIY' on WFMU has had over a million "listen again" downloads. since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.
Vicki recently completed the creation of a new live a/v performance called "Consequences (One Thing Leads To Another)", which premiered at transmediale in January 2013. She is now working on a film for live improvisers called "Gesture Piece".
People Like Us
The Complete Recordings on UbuWeb
People Like Us - This Is Light Music (2010) DO or DIY - Awful Fun (2009) Vicki Bennett - Jean Baudrillard - Le Xerox et L'Infini (2009) People Like Us - Reworking Daphne Oram (2008) People Like Us - Breaking Waves (2008) People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz - Codpaste (2008) People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz - JJPLURGO (2008) DO or DIY - Downloadable DO or DIY (2008) Vicki Bennett, curator - Various Artists - Smiling Through My Teeth (2008) People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz - Rhapsody in Glue (2008) DO or DIY - Wet Sounds (2007) People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz - Live Score to "Screen Play" by Christian Marclay (2007) People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz - Perpetuum Mobile (2007) People Like Us - Re-Mixing It - for Mixing It on BBC Radio 3 (2007) People Like Us - On The Rooftops of London (2007) People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz - Boots! (2006) People Like Us - All Together Now (2006) People Like Us & Felix Kubin - Molaradio (2004) People Like Us - The Sounds of Christmas, Tate Modern (2004) DO or DIY (WFMU) - Premium CD (2004) People Like Us - Abridged Too Far (2004) People Like Us - Nothing Special (with Kenny G) (2004) People Like Us - BBC Radio 1 Session (radio - John Peel) (2003) People Like Us - Live on Resonance FM (2003) People Like Us, Matmos and Wobbly - Wide Open Spaces (2003) People Like Us - When I Was Young / Downtown Once More (2002) People Like Us and Wobbly - There Goes Nothing (2002) People Like Us and Wobbly - Live at Black Box (2002) People Like Us - Stifled Love (2002) People Like Us - Recyclopaedia Britannica (2002) People Like Us and Wobbly - Live At ATA, 12 October 2002 (2002) People Like Us, Wobbly and Don Joyce - Baby Makes Three 2 on Over The Edge, KPFA (2002) People Like Us - PLU & Friends Volume 1 (2001) People Like Us, Irene Moon and The Evolution Control Committee - ABC Radio National, Sydney, Australia (2001) People Like Us - Home-Roam-Play / Work-All-Day (split 12" with Matmos) (2001) People Like Us - Thermos Explorer (2000) People Like Us - SwingLargo / Going Out Of My Town (2000) People Like Us, The Jet Black Hair People and Wobbly - Campfire Special on KZSU (2000) People Like Us - A Fistful of Knuckles (2000) People Like Us, The Jet Black Hair People, Wobbly and Don Joyce - 2000 Announcements on Over The Edge on KPFA (2000) People Like Us, The Jet Black Hair People and Wobbly - What's The Use - Live (1999) People Like Us, The Jet Black Hair People and Wobbly - Live At ATW (1999) Various Artists - Hate People Like Us (1999) People Like Us - Hate People Like You (1997) People Like Us - Jumble Massive (1995) People Like Us - Beware The Whim Reaper (1995) People Like Us - Lassie House (1995) People Like Us - Guide To Broadcasting (1994) People Like Us - Lowest Common Dominator (1994) People Like Us - Another Kind of Humor (1992) video:
Music Of Your Own (1999) Discovering Electronic Music (1999) Burning (1999) Well If You'd Like To See (1999) New Knowledge (2000) We Edit Life (2002) The Remote Controller (2003) Resemblage (2004) People Like Us At The Movies (2005) Story Without End (2005) Work, Rest & Play (2007) WFMU Record Fair (2003) Live Excerpts (2002-2007) Trying Things Out (2007) Skew Gardens (2008) People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz "In The Waking" (2008) Parade (2009) DrivingFlyingRisingFalling (2009) The Look (2009) Induction is a Draft is a Gust of Air (2009) The Sound Of The End Of Music (2010) People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz "Blue Moon" (2010) Clean Your Room (2011) The Atlantic Conveyor from The Magical Misery Tour (2011) Vicki Bennett - "4'33" The Movie" (2011) Vicki Bennett - "The Doors Of Perspection" (2011)Vicki Bennett: Queen of the digital folk underground
Colm McAuliffe
Friday, 31 May 2013
“Every time I watched The Sound of Music, I imagined Julie Andrews running up the hill, spinning around and triggering Armageddon. And when I watched Apocalypse Now with all these aerial views of helicopters, I thought ‘Wow! That’s like the air over Salzburg at the beginning of The Sound of Music’.
“Every time I watched The Sound of Music, I imagined Julie Andrews running up the hill, spinning around and triggering Armageddon. And when I watched Apocalypse Now with all these aerial views of helicopters, I thought ‘Wow! That’s like the air over Salzburg at the beginning of The Sound of Music’.
“So I put ‘The End’ by The Doors on the audio timeline next to ‘The Hills Are Alive’, and it turns out they’re in the same key. And I only had to time-correct one of them slightly and the two films played perfectly on top of one another. But that happens a lot…”
I’m sitting in the south London home of Vicki Bennett, aka People Like Us [homepage], surrounded by computers, hard drives and scribbled sheets of film descriptions, cut out and pasted together in apparently random manner. But there is order to the disorder: this is the heartbeat of her spellbinding visual and filmic collages, created through raiding online archives and splicing hitherto unrelated filmic scenes together. Bennett’s world is one in which the aforementioned Julie Andrews and Jim Morrison sing together in glorious disharmony (The Sound of the End of Music, 2010) and Ingmar Bergman enjoys a day at the races with Telly Savalas (Genre Collage, 2009 [homepage]).
“The thing about the mind and the universe of creativity is that they are both sympathetic to you, they all want to talk to each other,” she says. “I really believe the work we make isn’t ours, it already exists, it’s folk culture. I’m a folk artist working in a digital age, or the age of mechanical reproduction.”
The work of People Like Us no longer exists purely on the fringes of the cultural milieu. While her origins lie in the Brighton improv scene of the early 1990s, Bennett has since seen her work shown at the Tate, Sydney Opera House and the Barbican, and, on the afternoon we meet, is preparing to tour two performances – Gesture Piece [homepage] and Consequences (One Act Leads to Another) [homepage] – while finishing a piece on cryptozoology commissioned by Channel 4, to be screened this autumn.
The paper version of Consequences: One Thing Leads to Another “I started a degree in Fine Art and didn’t finish, which I don’t regret,” she reflects. “I made my first tape pieces by recording Radio 3 and 4 in the daytime and making spoken-word cut-up pieces. I knew about Burroughs and cut-ups, but wasn’t really aware of the wider field of language. I was naïve, just trying to fill up my time with being creative in a way that was affordable in my twenties.”
This naivety reached archive fever pitch with the advent of broadband and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. “Before 1999, finding material was done through VHS and hiring things from places like Blockbuster and taping it,” she now says. “But when I found Napster in 2000, that transformed the audio I was making. And when I found people [through online communities] who had something I liked, I’d download everything else they had. I still do that with Pirate Bay, just to give me ideas. I believe in abundance creating your own limitations. I don’t want other people limiting my creativity due to a lack of distribution. We all have our own codes of ethics and creative limitations and that’s enough.”
Of the copyright issues involved, Bennett is defiant. “Steven Stapleton [from Nurse with Wound] was the person who made me realise you could actually publish things and not get sued. Because there was this stupid thing in the early 80s which said if you publish anything with appropriation on it, you were gonna get in big trouble – ‘they’ would know.
“It scared people, and still does. But if you carry on down that line of thought you get very depressed and you make no work. There’s a policeman inside your mind whom you have to be careful not to let loose because he’ll start telling you you can’t do things. If you get the fear and paranoia, it’ll lead to nothing and you won’t be an artist, you’ll be a worrier.”
Bennett performing The Magical Misery Tour! in Vancouver This isn’t to say the films created by People Like Us are just famous film scenes piled on top of one another. Her work is a feverishly illuminating conflagration of the burlesque and carnivalesque – and often incredibly funny.
In Genre Collage, the beautiful, pastoral imagery from Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter of the sleeping children on the riverboat bleeds into the earth-rise from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, before the sky erupts amid the tornado from The Wizard of Oz. 2011’s The Magical Misery Tour! [homepage] deconstructs the horror movie genre only to reconstruct it as a strikingly witty and upbeat journey through the canon of ghastly scenarios.
This is even more evident in the live shows. Her new Gesture Piece sees Bennett collating hundreds of scenes containing gestures or instructions which are interpreted in turn by live musicians and artists to create unique audio accompaniment. Bennett is the only constant, acting as a conduit through which all this energy surges.
“I’m making lists and trying to order them in a way that makes sense,” she says. “There’s that whole idea that there are only a certain number of story archetypes. It’s nice to think that narrative has always existed for human beings, that we’ve always gathered around stories.
“It’s more about discovery [than invention],” she adds, of her divining method. “A lot of the time when I’m making work, I laugh and think ‘I didn’t do that, it did itself!’. It’s the incongruous things that happen along the way that make it funny.”
Bennett’s notes towards Gesture Piece (2013) Looking back, Bennett expresses surprise at what she has achieved, but she’s clearly proud of her role as cultural catalyst, forcing the hand of chance.
“This is about sharing knowledge and information. Being creative is all about making connections,” she says. “For each piece, I watch about 150 films and make notes on each film I watch. I put them on the floor, cut them into scenes, put the name of the film on it and look at all the different things they have in common through the text description.
“It’s like the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. You’ve got all this information but it’s partly blind because you don’t know where it’s going; you make it by putting the story together on a tangent.
“All these pieces of paper are about connections,” she continues. “That’s all there is; you can call it art or whatever the hell you want! The art part, as Duchamp said, doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that you are using your intellect and creativity to make magical connections between things.”
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/vicki-bennett-queen-digital-folk-underground
People Like Us
Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been an influential figure in the field of audio visual collage, through her innovative sampling and appropriating of found footage and archives. Using collage as her main form of expression, she creates audio recordings, A/V performances, films and radio shows that communicate a humorous, dark and often surreal view on life. These collages mix, manipulate and rework original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film and radio. People Like Us believe in open access to archives for creative use. In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, The Barbican, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre, Maxxi in Rome and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show 'DO or DIY' on WFMU has had over a million "listen again" downloads. since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.
Cutting Across Media book and “Mixtape” by People Like Us
CUTTING ACROSS MEDIA by Kembrew McLeod & Rudolf Kuenzli
We highly recommend this book, which Vicki Bennett has written the back of book blurb for. More info about it here.
Accompanying the book is a “mixtape” (in digital form!) of our favourite sample or sampled music. Take an epic six hour survey of audio collage with People Like Us’ Collarge, a mixtape commissioned for Kembrew McLeod’s co-edited Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionalist Collage, and Intellectual Property Law, which serves as a companion volume to Creative License.
Creative License website:
http://creativelicense.info/mixtape.php
DIRECT DOWNLOAD LINK HERE.
We highly recommend this book, which Vicki Bennett has written the back of book blurb for. More info about it here.
Accompanying the book is a “mixtape” (in digital form!) of our favourite sample or sampled music. Take an epic six hour survey of audio collage with People Like Us’ Collarge, a mixtape commissioned for Kembrew McLeod’s co-edited Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionalist Collage, and Intellectual Property Law, which serves as a companion volume to Creative License.
Creative License website:
http://creativelicense.info/mixtape.php
DIRECT DOWNLOAD LINK HERE.
About THE ZONE
The Zone is the first feature-length film by Vicki Bennett a.k.a People Like Us. Running Stalker and The Wizard of Oz side-by-side, it tells one story of two journeys to “the promised land, the world where dreams can be made real and reality is like a dream.” The films sit side by side, staying loyal to the linear narrative, but editing the longer film to the length of the shorter, revealing delightful harmonies and synchronicities both in images and narrative occurring far more than either pure chance would dictate or the imagination construct. The Zone is inspired by the Chance Operations of John Cage, Cut-Up techniques of Gysin/Burroughs and Kurt Schwitters, and single shot/durational films (Andy Warhol, James Benning).
The film was only screened once before being silenced by a legal claim by Mosfilm, the owners of the Tarkovsky film Stalker. It was due to be screened at at the opening of transmediale 2013 but was cancelled as a result of the film ceasing distribution. In reaction to this, transmediale screened a statement of protest in their auditorium for the length of the film. The statement is as follows:
Welcome to the auditorium of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Tonight you were supposed to see the video work The Zone by People Like Us. This work of appropriation art refers to two historic films: The Wizard of Oz(1939) by Victor Fleming is screened on the left, on the right Stalker by Andrey Tarkovsky (1970).
At first, the films seem to be screening alongside but without relation to each other; when Judy Garland starts jabbering away, the opening credits in Stalker are still on the screen. But an increasing number of reference points appear between the images, as if the silly figures on the left and the dead serious characters on the right are communicating with each other. Both films in their original version switch from black and white to colour and the subtle interventions in montage are only apparent when both films are adapted so that this happens at exactly the same time.
The installation of The Zone in this auditorium, a hall built in the 1950s at the Inner German border to represent the communication possible between worlds, would have created an imaginary museum.
But unfortunately the legal department of one of the copyright holders, Mosfilm, insisted on stopping the distribution of the The Zone, which is why it has been withdrawn from circulation. Therefore we are not able to show the work right now.
We can just invite you to imagine an imaginary film museum.
This is the first legal claim made against my appropriation work in 22 years. I pay homage to content and my motivation is to make conceptual connections between context and content using folk art, and the majority of critics have found the result highly positive and often humorous in intention, as a result my work has been funded and supported by bodies such as The BBC, BFI and Arts Council England. I have received nothing but support, and heard nothing but outrage from those who have heard of this incident. The concept of this film remains strong, although it has transformed into something else rather quicker than I expected! – Vicki Bennett
INTERVIEW WITH ALASTAIR CAMERON ABOUT THE ZONE, Autumn 2012
Could you say a little about how the idea of making The Zone came about?
I was watching Stalker in a cinema in Newcastle earlier this year, it was being screened as part of AV Festival 12‘s cinema program. The festival theme was “As Slow As Possible” and I’d not only been watching/hearing a number of events based around the wider theme, but also had spent the previous six months programming a radio station for the festival. All of this had obviously affected my hard circuitry. I’d watched both Stalker and Wizard Of Oz a number of times, but this time around when the switch came from monotone to colour I thought of the transition from monotone to colour in Oz. This started me thinking about the journeys that they all were going on of both through landscape and inner worlds of multiple levels of discovery.
What is it about the Wizard of Oz and Stalker in particular that led you to them – is it the formal or coincidental similarities that exist between these films, or is there something more universal about cinema and the idea of “zones” that you want to explore?
It was a very simple idea – and only by exploring something that isn’t process-based can you find out if there is more to it than the flash of light that comes to you in a moment. My response was one of inspiration rather than anything intellectual at that point… only by putting this into practice could I see what the exploration really might be, indeed if it would work at all.
What did the process of editing involve, and how much did you need to do in order to bring the two narratives closer?
Stalker is much longer than Wizard of Oz, so I had to decide how to deal with that without too much manipulation. I decided to edit Stalker down to the length of Wizard of Oz, of course still keeping edits in chronological order. I begun editing initially from the frame where both films change from monotone to colour – then worked my way forwards and backwards from those points, always keeping the sequence of events in order to keep the possibility for chance elements to occur.
The process with The Zone seems quite restrained or minimal compared to the grand cut ups and digital overlaying of some of your other films. Can you say something about why you went in this direction for this work?
Actually there are a number of works (film and audio) that I’ve made that relate to this – ones that are based on either an idea rather than work in progress, or on the idea of placing just two things next to/on top of one another to see how they may relate. Examples that come to me immediately would be
The Sound Of The End Of Music
Stand By YourAnd lesser so (because it is edited but still relates in terms of mixing two things together, in this case genres) – The Keystone Cut Ups
It is more unusual of course that I would make something that mixes two things together that is also feature length rather than 10 or 20 minutes, and it took some courage on my part to do this since I am used to being more “pop” in my approach to the audience, but I realise that this is an illusion and a constraint, so it’s important for me to make this in this way. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while – I’ve always liked durational works, things that aren’t necessarily “fast”. That part is different to my work as People Like Us, and that is one reason why I’ve used my own name since although some people find People Like Us difficult (since it is sometimes dense/chaotic/collaged a lot), I don’t want them to have expectations in the other direction that it will be a particular kind of entertainment. In the large scale I don’t think this falls outside of my general tastes though.
I guess you’re aware of the old experiment with Dark Side of the Moon and Wizard of Oz, where there is supposed to be a synchronicity between the two. Was this in your mind when you decided to use the Wizard for your project?
No. I figure you can play Dark Side of the Moon with anything anyway! Once again, the mind is very willing to synchronise audio with images and desperate to make connections.
Do you see The Zone as a critique of this kind of “apophenia” – the unmotivated seening of connections and the ways we experience an abnormal meaningfulness in these moments? Or is this something you feel an affinity with?
Stalker is one of the most shamanic films I’ve seen – a journey within yourself as well as within the film narrative – I interpreted many levels and doorways, which were as much my own making as anything ”real”. I saw a talk about Stalker, and people were coming out with all kinds of things that hadn’t crossed my mind or meant nothing to me, and on the other hand didn’t mention shamanism much at all! But this is how it should be – that one doesn’t impress too much into the narrative, leaving it open to flow… allowing multiple interpretations and different kinds of journeys.
The mind will try to make connections with whatever is presented to it, or hidden from it – and then relate this to the larger landscape of what one is experiencing, which results in perceptions that aren’t always “reality” – leaving space for one’s own imagination. And ”space” is an important part of this kind of work – creating room for the imagination to be fed.
For some, cinema itself has always a form of artificially induced apophenia – with or without its dream zones. For example, it relies on our willingness to perceive a series of still images as moving, and because image sequences are constructed, we watch films with the assumption that something more magical will happen in them than in reality – that somehow everything connects. Equally, the idea of “the zone” seems to be very important in cinema as a whole. Not only in the sense that there are a lot of films, like the wizard or stalker, where characters journey into a place where the so-called laws of reality are challenged – time no longer runs in a linear way, dreams come true and space is differently composed, but more that this is part of the “magic” or escapism of cinema. In this sense, do you think cinema itself is a zone?
Yes – any artform that works by engaging with the audience in multidimensional levels is inviting them into a zone, or The Zone. For me, part of the effort is made by the creator, but another part has to be made by the person experiencing it. The experience should be open to interpretation in many ways, there should be many doors, windows, entrances and exists to a piece of work or a story, one should expect the audience to work a bit too!
Equally, there’s also a strong theme of entering the zone in The Wizard, and in Stalker, in a quest for self fulfillment, or spiritual illumination. In both, the characters do realize their quest in a sense, just not in the way they thought it would be (Dorothy and her travelling companions realise they have the power themselves to overcome their deficiencies, Stalker’s characters realise their quests were quite different to what they thought). Of course, the end result is quite different emotionally in the two – what do you think The Zone’s experiment achieves in these terms? Is is intended to provoke an emotional response?
I can only say what my discoveries were – I don’t intend anything other than to engage with the audience by presenting something of substance, so I hope that people will get something out of it. I don’t agree with injecting singular messages/intentions. I realise that this is different to instant entertainment, it requires more effort… is not immediate. The reason I put these two films on an editing timeline myself was to find out if I would find more than the sum of the two parts by them going on a journey side by side. This is the pleasure of working with found footage. It already happened and you have to walk with it, leaving it open to chance as much as manipulation – there is magic that can happen. And I think this does happen in The Zone, there are additional messages that could not have been found without doing this, and some humorous/incongruous and/due to unexpected coincidences. Most of all I wanted to see if something magical happened, like making a spell. And for me, that magic did happen.
You can find a review of screening of The Zone at Bristol Arnolfini in the January 2013 edition of The Wire here.
The film was only screened once before being silenced by a legal claim by Mosfilm, the owners of the Tarkovsky film Stalker. It was due to be screened at at the opening of transmediale 2013 but was cancelled as a result of the film ceasing distribution. In reaction to this, transmediale screened a statement of protest in their auditorium for the length of the film. The statement is as follows:
Welcome to the auditorium of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Tonight you were supposed to see the video work The Zone by People Like Us. This work of appropriation art refers to two historic films: The Wizard of Oz(1939) by Victor Fleming is screened on the left, on the right Stalker by Andrey Tarkovsky (1970).
At first, the films seem to be screening alongside but without relation to each other; when Judy Garland starts jabbering away, the opening credits in Stalker are still on the screen. But an increasing number of reference points appear between the images, as if the silly figures on the left and the dead serious characters on the right are communicating with each other. Both films in their original version switch from black and white to colour and the subtle interventions in montage are only apparent when both films are adapted so that this happens at exactly the same time.
The installation of The Zone in this auditorium, a hall built in the 1950s at the Inner German border to represent the communication possible between worlds, would have created an imaginary museum.
But unfortunately the legal department of one of the copyright holders, Mosfilm, insisted on stopping the distribution of the The Zone, which is why it has been withdrawn from circulation. Therefore we are not able to show the work right now.
We can just invite you to imagine an imaginary film museum.
This is the first legal claim made against my appropriation work in 22 years. I pay homage to content and my motivation is to make conceptual connections between context and content using folk art, and the majority of critics have found the result highly positive and often humorous in intention, as a result my work has been funded and supported by bodies such as The BBC, BFI and Arts Council England. I have received nothing but support, and heard nothing but outrage from those who have heard of this incident. The concept of this film remains strong, although it has transformed into something else rather quicker than I expected! – Vicki Bennett
INTERVIEW WITH ALASTAIR CAMERON ABOUT THE ZONE, Autumn 2012
Could you say a little about how the idea of making The Zone came about?
I was watching Stalker in a cinema in Newcastle earlier this year, it was being screened as part of AV Festival 12‘s cinema program. The festival theme was “As Slow As Possible” and I’d not only been watching/hearing a number of events based around the wider theme, but also had spent the previous six months programming a radio station for the festival. All of this had obviously affected my hard circuitry. I’d watched both Stalker and Wizard Of Oz a number of times, but this time around when the switch came from monotone to colour I thought of the transition from monotone to colour in Oz. This started me thinking about the journeys that they all were going on of both through landscape and inner worlds of multiple levels of discovery.
What is it about the Wizard of Oz and Stalker in particular that led you to them – is it the formal or coincidental similarities that exist between these films, or is there something more universal about cinema and the idea of “zones” that you want to explore?
It was a very simple idea – and only by exploring something that isn’t process-based can you find out if there is more to it than the flash of light that comes to you in a moment. My response was one of inspiration rather than anything intellectual at that point… only by putting this into practice could I see what the exploration really might be, indeed if it would work at all.
What did the process of editing involve, and how much did you need to do in order to bring the two narratives closer?
Stalker is much longer than Wizard of Oz, so I had to decide how to deal with that without too much manipulation. I decided to edit Stalker down to the length of Wizard of Oz, of course still keeping edits in chronological order. I begun editing initially from the frame where both films change from monotone to colour – then worked my way forwards and backwards from those points, always keeping the sequence of events in order to keep the possibility for chance elements to occur.
The process with The Zone seems quite restrained or minimal compared to the grand cut ups and digital overlaying of some of your other films. Can you say something about why you went in this direction for this work?
Actually there are a number of works (film and audio) that I’ve made that relate to this – ones that are based on either an idea rather than work in progress, or on the idea of placing just two things next to/on top of one another to see how they may relate. Examples that come to me immediately would be
The Sound Of The End Of Music
Stand By YourAnd lesser so (because it is edited but still relates in terms of mixing two things together, in this case genres) – The Keystone Cut Ups
It is more unusual of course that I would make something that mixes two things together that is also feature length rather than 10 or 20 minutes, and it took some courage on my part to do this since I am used to being more “pop” in my approach to the audience, but I realise that this is an illusion and a constraint, so it’s important for me to make this in this way. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while – I’ve always liked durational works, things that aren’t necessarily “fast”. That part is different to my work as People Like Us, and that is one reason why I’ve used my own name since although some people find People Like Us difficult (since it is sometimes dense/chaotic/collaged a lot), I don’t want them to have expectations in the other direction that it will be a particular kind of entertainment. In the large scale I don’t think this falls outside of my general tastes though.
I guess you’re aware of the old experiment with Dark Side of the Moon and Wizard of Oz, where there is supposed to be a synchronicity between the two. Was this in your mind when you decided to use the Wizard for your project?
No. I figure you can play Dark Side of the Moon with anything anyway! Once again, the mind is very willing to synchronise audio with images and desperate to make connections.
Do you see The Zone as a critique of this kind of “apophenia” – the unmotivated seening of connections and the ways we experience an abnormal meaningfulness in these moments? Or is this something you feel an affinity with?
Stalker is one of the most shamanic films I’ve seen – a journey within yourself as well as within the film narrative – I interpreted many levels and doorways, which were as much my own making as anything ”real”. I saw a talk about Stalker, and people were coming out with all kinds of things that hadn’t crossed my mind or meant nothing to me, and on the other hand didn’t mention shamanism much at all! But this is how it should be – that one doesn’t impress too much into the narrative, leaving it open to flow… allowing multiple interpretations and different kinds of journeys.
The mind will try to make connections with whatever is presented to it, or hidden from it – and then relate this to the larger landscape of what one is experiencing, which results in perceptions that aren’t always “reality” – leaving space for one’s own imagination. And ”space” is an important part of this kind of work – creating room for the imagination to be fed.
For some, cinema itself has always a form of artificially induced apophenia – with or without its dream zones. For example, it relies on our willingness to perceive a series of still images as moving, and because image sequences are constructed, we watch films with the assumption that something more magical will happen in them than in reality – that somehow everything connects. Equally, the idea of “the zone” seems to be very important in cinema as a whole. Not only in the sense that there are a lot of films, like the wizard or stalker, where characters journey into a place where the so-called laws of reality are challenged – time no longer runs in a linear way, dreams come true and space is differently composed, but more that this is part of the “magic” or escapism of cinema. In this sense, do you think cinema itself is a zone?
Yes – any artform that works by engaging with the audience in multidimensional levels is inviting them into a zone, or The Zone. For me, part of the effort is made by the creator, but another part has to be made by the person experiencing it. The experience should be open to interpretation in many ways, there should be many doors, windows, entrances and exists to a piece of work or a story, one should expect the audience to work a bit too!
Equally, there’s also a strong theme of entering the zone in The Wizard, and in Stalker, in a quest for self fulfillment, or spiritual illumination. In both, the characters do realize their quest in a sense, just not in the way they thought it would be (Dorothy and her travelling companions realise they have the power themselves to overcome their deficiencies, Stalker’s characters realise their quests were quite different to what they thought). Of course, the end result is quite different emotionally in the two – what do you think The Zone’s experiment achieves in these terms? Is is intended to provoke an emotional response?
I can only say what my discoveries were – I don’t intend anything other than to engage with the audience by presenting something of substance, so I hope that people will get something out of it. I don’t agree with injecting singular messages/intentions. I realise that this is different to instant entertainment, it requires more effort… is not immediate. The reason I put these two films on an editing timeline myself was to find out if I would find more than the sum of the two parts by them going on a journey side by side. This is the pleasure of working with found footage. It already happened and you have to walk with it, leaving it open to chance as much as manipulation – there is magic that can happen. And I think this does happen in The Zone, there are additional messages that could not have been found without doing this, and some humorous/incongruous and/due to unexpected coincidences. Most of all I wanted to see if something magical happened, like making a spell. And for me, that magic did happen.
You can find a review of screening of The Zone at Bristol Arnolfini in the January 2013 edition of The Wire here.
CONSEQUENCES (One Thing Leads To Another)
Introducing the new People Like Us audiovisual performance:
“Consequences”, has two definitions; it is the result of some previous action, and a game (called Exquisite Corpse by the Surrealists) in which a larger picture/narrative is created by assembling subject matter “blindly” in relation to a small amount of information made visible before it as a continuation point. As a result, content surprisingly and sometimes magically changes over a short period of time or space, with every part still connected to that which goes before or after it.
This new audiovisual performance by People Like Us places similar but emerging subject matter side by side to construct the narrative, where a story emerges as a sum of the parts that came before it yet digresses on a tangent. All actions have consequences, and here we see them played out, to wondrous and catastrophic effect!
“The subject of authenticity, the “original” in relation to the “copy” (coming from the word “copia”, meaning multitude and abundance) interest me as an artist working in the field of collage and appropriation. “Original” has limited connection with “quality” or “engaging”, and (at least in the past 300 years) nothing created as an object or product can be traced 100% to an origin – everything is relative, literally – it has a mother and father. Much like speed, dimensions, size, the terms are reliant upon the conditions of the person experiencing it, where they are and when, there is NO absolute. This is reflected when very similar creative works and inventions occur at the same period by people who have no knowledge of each other’s works existence. In Consequences we reflect that no man is an island, but the island has lots of mirror mazes… in fact some mirrors can be walked through.” – Vicki Bennett
Trailer:
Artist Statement:Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been an influential figure in the field of audio visual collage, through her innovative sampling and appropriating of found footage and archives. Using collage as her main form of expression, she creates audio recordings, A/V performances, films and radio shows that communicate a humorous, dark and often surreal view on life. These collages mix, manipulate and rework original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film and radio. People Like Us believe in open access to archives for creative use. In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, The Barbican, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre, Maxxi in Rome and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘DO or DIY’ on WFMU has had over a million “listen again” downloads. since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.
“Consequences”, has two definitions; it is the result of some previous action, and a game (called Exquisite Corpse by the Surrealists) in which a larger picture/narrative is created by assembling subject matter “blindly” in relation to a small amount of information made visible before it as a continuation point. As a result, content surprisingly and sometimes magically changes over a short period of time or space, with every part still connected to that which goes before or after it.
This new audiovisual performance by People Like Us places similar but emerging subject matter side by side to construct the narrative, where a story emerges as a sum of the parts that came before it yet digresses on a tangent. All actions have consequences, and here we see them played out, to wondrous and catastrophic effect!
“The subject of authenticity, the “original” in relation to the “copy” (coming from the word “copia”, meaning multitude and abundance) interest me as an artist working in the field of collage and appropriation. “Original” has limited connection with “quality” or “engaging”, and (at least in the past 300 years) nothing created as an object or product can be traced 100% to an origin – everything is relative, literally – it has a mother and father. Much like speed, dimensions, size, the terms are reliant upon the conditions of the person experiencing it, where they are and when, there is NO absolute. This is reflected when very similar creative works and inventions occur at the same period by people who have no knowledge of each other’s works existence. In Consequences we reflect that no man is an island, but the island has lots of mirror mazes… in fact some mirrors can be walked through.” – Vicki Bennett
Trailer:
Artist Statement:Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been an influential figure in the field of audio visual collage, through her innovative sampling and appropriating of found footage and archives. Using collage as her main form of expression, she creates audio recordings, A/V performances, films and radio shows that communicate a humorous, dark and often surreal view on life. These collages mix, manipulate and rework original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film and radio. People Like Us believe in open access to archives for creative use. In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, The Barbican, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre, Maxxi in Rome and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘DO or DIY’ on WFMU has had over a million “listen again” downloads. since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.
Old-Timey Comedies, Surrealist Cinema Get Sampled and Cut Up in Magic
Geeta DayalVintage slapstick comedies and 1920s experimental cinema collide with found sounds in Magic, a new piece by British collage artists People Like Us and Ergo Phizmiz.
The video uses a split screen, so two films are always showing simultaneously, leading to strange and unexpected contrasts and connections. The dreamy music — which was also collaged together from vintage source material — lends a whimsical, wistful effect to the piece.
“We wanted to show the connection between the two kinds of films by presenting them together at the same time, and to present them together can sometimes bring about a third meaning,” said Vicki Bennett, the artist known as People Like Us, in an e-mail exchange with Wired.
The video is part of a larger series of audiovisual collages by People Like Us and Ergo Phizmiz called The Keystone Cut Ups. “It is a pun on ‘The Keystone Cops’, plus ‘Keystone’ is an editing term, as is ‘cut ups,’” explained Bennett.
Bennett said the project, which was originally performed live in 2010, was designed to “challenge perceptions of high and low art, by questioning limitations and perceptions of taste.”
“The 1920s avant-garde established many of the genres and forms that shaped avant-garde film, and use of collage and montage was also first seen in this era,” Bennett said. “Hollywood silent comedies have been revered within the high arts, and although many avant-gardists have seen their position as opposing high art, we believe that the further pigeonholing of ‘high’ versus ‘low’ is a prohibitive barrier in itself. In response to this, we would like to demonstrate how one can bridge the gaps between audience and art form.”
The Keystone Cut Ups will be released on DVD in the coming months by Illegal Art.
Many thanks to Ubuweb, PennSound, Centro and WFMU for hosting the tracks on this site to make it more accessible for more people to download for free.
We strongly believe in the power of profit through free distribution, and the publicity that comes along with that - so we are putting our money where our mouse is. Often people have never heard of an artist because they aren't being distributed through as many channels as they should be, due to the very poor state of music/media distribution for non-major label music coupled with ignorance of the way that avant garde art forms infiltrate mainstream culture. Also many prints of a work are allowed to go out of circulation or are deleted for no reason other than cost effectiveness by a label/publisher. This makes perfect sense financially, but no sense whatsoever that a year's work by an artist should also disappear for such reasons. So get all of this while you can, and we completely endorse getting one's work out there, no matter what. If you don't share, your profit is limited.
We encourage all creative use of our work, and although we don't encourage duplicating of our work for commercial use you are welcome to share as mp3s or sample.
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, Rhapsody In Glue, 2008.
The second People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz album "Rhapsody in Glue" can now be downloaded free at Ubuweb.
Following the success of the critically acclaimed "Perpetuum Mobile" CD of 2007, renowned UK collagists / composers People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz reunite for "Rhapsody in Glue", a cycle of bricolage-ballet-music, skewed-waltzes, and skewiff-pop.
There is a story behind every album, and with "Rhapsody in Glue" we find a unique approach to constructing a record. Both long-term contributors to New York radio station WFMU, People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz decided to publicly tear apart their respective practices and create an album "in the open", presenting on a seafood-filled-platter the process of collaborative collage composition - informally discussing and jabbering nonsense to one another, resulting in the "Codpaste" free podcast series. "Rhapsody in Glue" is the culmination of the ideas explored in the podcast series.
"Rhapsody in Glue" continues in the bizarre ballroom vein of their previous efforts together, however,increasing the sonic palette into textural depths previously uncharted in their work. If "Carmic Waltz" is an expressionist painting by aged ballroom dance teacher who's eaten the wrong kind of mushrooms in her soufflŽ, then "Gary's Anatomy" is a slice of pure absurdist pop shot through with slabs of exotica and Ethel Merman. Recurring through the record is an apparent obsession with Prokofiev's "Troika (Sleigh Ride)", which merges and mashes with Burt Bacharach and Queen on "Snow Day", and lapses into pure fantasy on the almost entirely acoustic "Withers in the Whist", jarring with Ergo's strange, Victoriana obsessed lyrics. Then on "Dancing in the Carmen" we discover what happens if Nana Mouskouri is thrown into a pot with Peggy Lee and let simmer for 10 minutes, whilst "In The Waking" shimmers along on multitracked guitars, meandering melodies, and music boxes.
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