Eutopia

Eutopia was a unique performance designed as a live streaming of image and sound between Prague and London. The work was a collaboration with Czech artist Martin Blazicek where we prepared a range of video material related to the environment of each city.

The video and sound was manipulated in real-time using Keyworx software responding to and improvising with the images streamed by the other. The images were presented in varying numbers of simultaneous loop sequences on a two screens, one in Prague, one in London.

The work brings together two continuing strands in my creative research: a concern with the contemporary urban environment and experimental use of new forms of video presentation using digital systems and the internet. It relates to particular works of early experimental cinema like Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov treating the city as subject using simultaneity and parallel montage but extending this formal language through digital techniques and live interaction.

Steven Ball

Research Interests

Artists’ Moving Image, Archives and Collections, Experimental Film, Video Art, Landscape, Urban
Space.

Current Research

As Research Fellow attached to the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, my research activity broadly encompasses the history and contemporary practice of artists’ moving image. The Study Collection includes video copies of artists' works, writing by and about artists, institutional documents, books, catalogues, posters, etc., it is accessible to internal and external academic and curatorial research. In this context my research activity involves the collection, cataloguing and digitization of copies of artists' film and video works, documentation and publications, the dissemination of Study Collection research outputs, and facilitating research in artists’ moving image across UAL and beyond. I am also developing research projects around the nature of the relationship of artists’ moving image practice to that of the wide range of contemporary collections and archives in their analogue and digital forms, online and physically located.

My other research interests are in the relationship between audio-visual media practice, spatial representation, landscape, and urban space within a practice encompassing audio-visual media, performance, curation and writing. These have manifested themselves in projects such as: Figuring Landscapes, artists’ moving image from Australia and the UK, touring programme co-curated with Professor Catherine Elwes (Camberwell), (2008 ongoing until 2010); The Centres Project, an ongoing exhibition and publication research project in collaboration with Irene Barberis, Metasenta Projects, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, which has included the Transcentric exhibition at Lethaby Gallery (2008); After Lethaby video performance with Martin Blazícek, (Czech Republic), Lethaby Gallery, 2009.

• http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=...
• http://www.steven-ball.net/