Sometimes a proposition,
sometimes a state of mind.
Recent songs
A suite of short pieces made during 2020/21. During quarantine I began digging through the previous 5 years archived footage looking for recording sessions, sequences, fragments, which were previously ignored. Looking for media images which had latent creative choices I hadn’t seen at the time. And rather than fitting them to a narrative enclosure I wanted them to be viewed lightly, as work that skates within the layered space of the digital medium, its colour, movement, branching relationships. Contingent, trifling, disjunctive, glimpses of truth and reality, looped on itself. Found material widens the field of play and opens out the context and possibilities. About the act of making itself as language coming into being. Songs or poems.
What Is
Parallel Lines
Nature Nurture
Sea Window
Swiss Firs
Everyday Life
In The Cupola
New Start
Barge life of the artists.
Riverloops
4.16 seconds.
Genevieve Remix
What happened,what didn’t, when we all got together.
Other Work
circling the drain
2023
2023. not looking good. Morbid symptoms everywhere.
Swiss Bells
2022
Dream space……
Homeless
2022
An advanced and egalitarian civilisation would not have homelessness. It is the result of deliberate and vicious political strategy and an economy based on greed and the psychopathic pursuit of wealth and power.
Entanglement
2022
Elsegord, Denmark. Fecundity…
This This This
2022
Indeterminate image, never in focus, always in focus, always moving between layers, about movement and against story. Movement in movement is story. Sound and structure. Imbricated meaning.
Influencer
2020
An experimental narrative.
My first.
A story of a friend who lives on a barge with her partner. She describes the process of how and why she became an Influencer in a series of interviews that often contradict or elide each other. The unreliable stories echo their multiple versions in the image field, which fluctuate in importance and legibility. Oftentimes the images are simply formal plays with image and narrative space. The story becomes a support for examining the image construct we are presented with, at the same time as we follow it. The experience becomes the visibility of the process, of seeing, and understanding the image construction before us.
Valencia
2016
It was March in Valencia.
We took the car down to the beach.
With the dog.
We lost the dog.
Later I made a two minute haiku with the casual clips. Much later this became a longer meditation on its times, and its shapes, and its embedded harmonics.
Interregnum
2015
In response the governments bailed out banks with tax-payers money and restarted the broken system. The ruins of the old system blocking the way to the birth of the new. This Gramscian situation gave rise to our current condition of an indeterminate interregnum between the old and the new. We don’t have a lot of time.
We live in interesting times
2015
The piece is built on a framework of tracking down and up a parking garage staircase, with a carwash in the basement, (since demolished) the same take repeated a number of times, and therefore a different, but same repetition. In 2008 de-regulated globalised finance capital brought the world to the brink of disaster. Its ideology proved to be utterly bankrupt.
A second strand of the work is formed by an ostensibly unconnected set of ideas and concerns, dealing with the gradual movement of our social system from a democratic, to an oligarchic global system. There is no metaphor in this work. We live in a political reality whether we like it or not, our ideas about the world, our ability to act on it are all products of largely unthought ideas, a narrative ordering of our expectations that is often completely wrong.
Biography
Goldsmiths school of art 1964 – 1968
Royal college of art 1974 – 1976
I began working with film in 1968 as a member of the London Film-makers Co-operative until 1976 when I left to go to California. I started working in early video in San Francisco in the 1980’s and continued in London until 1996, before starting a cabinetmaking company until 2014. I have been working on digital video-art since 2014.
Because I have always been anti-capitalist as long as I can remember, this is always in the back of my mind when making present day video-work. But the relation between creative and artistic work and activist politics is a complex one, and not just a simple choice of subject matter. It’s a complex interpellation of form and action which is not always productive or even enlightening to either praxis.
Film work before 1976 is held in the Film Archive at the LUX where it is possible to view or hire the films. They form a part of the important intervention into Independent Film-making made between the early 60’s and late 70’s which challenged prevailing preconceptions of filmmaking up until that point, as being largely representational, slavishly tied to narrative structure, and an unconscious part of the modelling of Western reality that gave credence and support to the status quo.
Events / Exhibitions
My work has been referenced in written work over the years by:
• Peter Gidal
• Malcolm LeGrice
• David Curtis
and others.
It has been exhibited from the 1970’s and more recently at:
• Walker Art centre
• Liverpool
• Knokke
• Tate Tanks
The work has also been shown as numerous shows at the LFMC Cinema in the 1960’s and 70’s, and at the Lux in more recent days. Contact the LUX to view or hire films held in their film archive from before 1976.
All video work is free to view on Vimeo at vimeo.com/mikedunfordfilms
Feel free!
Get in touch
Mike Dunford
07973 835611
mikedunford360@gmail.com