MTV Buzz: avant-garde television
"Buzz is a long forgotten MTV experiment from 1990. In 1988, Mark Pellington developed an idea for a non-linear collage program he called "Buzz". Created in partnership with MTV Europe producer/director Jon Klein, Buzz was an ambitious 13-part global series commissioned by MTV and channel 4 (UK). It was hailed by critics as ground-breaking, adventurous television. This is episode 1 of the 4 episodes that have managed to survive on an old VHS tape to be digitized for your edification in this modern, digital age."
(Black Flag Party, YouTube Channel)
Fig.1 Buzz Episode 01 Segment 01
Fig.2 Buzz Episode 01 Segment 02
Fig.3 Buzz Episode 01 Segment 03
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
CRYSTALPUNK: The Chain-Reaction Glitterati
http://socialfiction.org
Crystalpunk is a self-invented movement for self-education making itself real. Crystalpunk is a panoply of ideas revolving around the same few Wandering Stars: the Game of Go and the Game of Life, the origin of language and the origin of mind, the suspected but never-realised capabilities of mind, matter, memory and computers whispered into your inner ear by unknown writers and succumbi, the power of abstraction and a melancholy for the noise lost, the BacterioPoetic and the cybernetic writing machine envisaged by Italo Calvino and William S. Burroughs.
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
The Avant-garde Has Had A Variety Of Different Approaches To Narrative
Rob Bridgett
Rather than completely destroying narrative, the avant-garde has had a variety of different approaches, from Godard's gestures of "counter cinema"4 through the feminist perspectives of Constance Penley5 to the various forms of Dada hostility. It is into this reconsideration of narrative that the recent "structural-materialist" films of the ?50s and ?60s fit. They operate in an arena of the "independent" and harbour a concern with the connection of an avant-garde cinema with similar gestures in other areas of the arts. In the case of William Burroughs, the cut-up technique is an extension of a literary concept, and in the case of the New York-based Fluxus group, cinema represents extensions of "concept art." Throughout this history of alternative cinema there is evident this spirit of extension and collaboration, from Surrealism and Dada, which also began as literary endeavours, through to the Fluxus group and the French Situationists who work throughout various mediums in the spirit of "expanded arts.
[4]. Wollen, Peter. "Counter cinema: vent d?est, " Afterimage #4, 1972.
[5]. Penley, Constance. "The Avant-garde and Its Imaginary. " An expanded version of a paper presented during the avant-garde event at the Edinburgh Film Festival, August 1970, from Camera Obscura.
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
Testimony: Connecting-the-dots
"Norton did not begin Testimony with a linear story or a plot. Inspired by the collage writing technique developed by novelists William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in the 1960s, Testimony emerged from cutting-up newspaper articles, literature and his own writing. He then drew a few sketches, cut them up into squares, laid them out on a table and checked whether they could make sense in any order. They did, and since he had only precursive control over the readers' associations he looked forward to their unpredictable inventive links."
(Christy Dena)
[Animated interactive narrative created by Simon Norton. The events of the story are able to be explored through connecting-the-dots.]
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
