Our mission is to distribute and archive works of time-based art. Each issue highlights artists working in new or experimental media, whose works are best documented in video or sound.

A Good Place to Stop
Volume 21:
04/01/2013

After ten years and hundreds of published works, ASPECT has decided to cease publication. Good gamblers and good artists both possess the same important skill: knowing when to walk away. The ending may be artificial, such as a time limit, or it could be external, as in the case of an authority figure, but the time comes when we must put our pencils down. We may never be done, but we can find “A good place to stop.”

No Junk
with commentary by John Bell

No Junk is a series of videos created in collaboration by Seattle based artist Kayo Nakamura and Providence artist J.R. Uretsky. Initiated by Nakamura in 2009, the No Junk project is an interesting look into a creative world generated by two artists on opposite sides of the United States. The eleven video series is guided by a loose set of...

From Twilight 'til Dawn
with commentary by

From Twilight ‘til Dawn is a video installation giving multidimensional expression to the experience of three soldiers: the filmmaker’s father, an Army paratrooper in the Vietnam era, her friend Henry, an Army paratrooper in the Second World War, and her grandfather, who never directly...

Pulse Machine
with commentary by

This electromechanical sculpture was “born” in Nashville, Tennessee, on 2 June 2012, at 6:18 PM. It has been programmed to have the average human lifespan of babies born in Tennessee on that same day: approximately 78 years.

The kick drum beats the sculpture’s pulse at 60 beats per minute, and the mechanical counter...

Shift Change
with commentary by

From the series In Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream.

Twitter estimates there are over 340 million tweets daily, creating a vast sea of digital noise. We select locations then examine Twitter for posts that occurred recently in the surrounding area, utilizing these tweets as the spoken soundtrack. We imagine ourselves as virtual...

The Quitter
with commentary by

"The Quitter" depicts me smoking my last cigarette before attempting to quit. It was shot in two parts (both on Super-8 film), half in 1999 and half in 2005. Like many people who attempt to quit smoking, I have had many "last" cigarettes. Both films (1999 & 2005) are shown simultaneously and are accompanied by a...

Real Snow White
with commentary by

The absurd logic of the "real character" and the extreme discipline of Disneyland become apparent when a real fan of Disney's Snow White is banned from entering the park in a Snow White costume. We discover that "Dreams Come True" refers to dreams produced exclusively by Disney. Anything even slightly out of control...

Dead End
with commentary by

This experimental short video consists of three segments: workers loading a truck with waste paper to be shipped to China, a night view of Lower Manhattan as shot from DUMBO, Brooklyn, and a list of chief executives at the time this video footage was produced (2007-2008). Credits are a part of actual video. The 2007-2012 is considered the worst...

The Johnny Cash Project
with commentary by Ute Meta Bauer

A "living portrait" of the Man in Black.

The Johnny Cash Project is a global collective art project, and we would love for you to participate. Through this website, we invite you to share your vision of Johnny Cash, as he lives on in your mind’s eye. Working with a single image as a template, and using a...

Dead End

Dead End
6:34
video
with commentary by

This experimental short video consists of three segments: workers loading a truck with waste paper to be shipped to China, a night view of Lower Manhattan as shot from DUMBO, Brooklyn, and a list of chief executives at the time this video footage was produced (2007-2008). Credits are a part of actual video. The 2007-2012 is considered the worst financial crises since the Great Depression of the 1930. After the introduction of Euro in 2002 and making public the cost of the war with Iraq, the U.S. dollar began to depreciate steadily in value.

Shift Change

Shift Change
9:09
video
with commentary by

From the series In Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream.

Twitter estimates there are over 340 million tweets daily, creating a vast sea of digital noise. We select locations then examine Twitter for posts that occurred recently in the surrounding area, utilizing these tweets as the spoken soundtrack. We imagine ourselves as virtual flâneurs, ethnographers of the Internet, exploring real world locations 140 characters at a time through the lives of others.

The Johnny Cash Project

The Johnny Cash Project
5:46
interactive online platform
with commentary by Ute Meta Bauer

A "living portrait" of the Man in Black.

From Twilight 'til Dawn

From Twilight 'til Dawn
14:52
video
with commentary by

From Twilight ‘til Dawn is a video installation giving multidimensional expression to the experience of three soldiers: the filmmaker’s father, an Army paratrooper in the Vietnam era, her friend Henry, an Army paratrooper in the Second World War, and her grandfather, who never directly shared his WWII experiences with her before he died.

Pulse Machine

Pulse Machine
5:29
kick drum, solenoid, flip digit numerals, Arduino micro controller, mixed media
with commentary by

This electromechanical sculpture was “born” in Nashville, Tennessee, on 2 June 2012, at 6:18 PM. It has been programmed to have the average human lifespan of babies born in Tennessee on that same day: approximately 78 years.

The kick drum beats the sculpture’s pulse at 60 beats per minute, and the mechanical counter displays the number of heartbeats remaining in its lifetime. An internal, battery-operated clock keeps track of the passing time when the sculpture is unplugged.

The sculpture will ‘die’ once the counter reaches zero.

Real Snow White

Real Snow White
9:15
documentation of performance
with commentary by

The absurd logic of the "real character" and the extreme discipline of Disneyland become apparent when a real fan of Disney's Snow White is banned from entering the park in a Snow White costume. We discover that "Dreams Come True" refers to dreams produced exclusively by Disney. Anything even slightly out of control evokes fear of the real, possibly dark and perverse dreams coming true.

Forced Empathy

Forced Empathy
7:29
video
with commentary by

Forced Empathy, questions the ineluctable relationship between recording and reproduction, by addressing the fundamental constraints of visual documentation.  In the video, an algorithm is used to freeze an orientation buoy in the center of the frame. The information gathered by the analyses of the buoy’s motion is acquired by the background which “stabilizes” the position of the swaying object - an exercise on the formal and technical implications of time based documentation.

HOLLYWOOD 1

HOLLYWOOD 1
5:00
video
with commentary by

“…a playful piece of metacinema, a postmodern talkie refracted through linguistic zigzags and conceptual ricochets…Sound-image-text relationships merge and diverge, relate and negate, allude and preclude, yielding puns, triple entendres, and all manner of yokes.” (V.O.) Images speak volumes. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a five-minute video is worth a lot more than that. Tagline: A big-budget film that demands your attention!

100 Meters behind the Future

100 Meters behind the Future
6:24
Video documentation of a live event
with commentary by

100 Meters behind the Future is a film that is being shot, acted, directed, edited, screened, watched and deleted in real time. It’s a film about delay, the expansion of cinema and the paranoia that creeps in when the mash-up of several time zones and realities escape rational explanations. The screening room is the front row of a van in which one or two people are being driven around while following the action in double view – through the windshield of the car and the screen of the device they hold in their hands.

Selected Works

Selected Works
10:40
installation
with commentary by

Jason Dee examines the complex renegotiation of cinematic time created when increasingly obsolete and decaying film-reels are transferred to digital formats. Are the personal/collective memories of previous eras rescued by this process, or reconfigured to fit today’s perceptual models? Films both reflect and outlive their times- when they also outlive the media that recorded and stored them, what do they become, what is lost, preserved or altered?

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