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iotacenter, Night of Sights and Sounds: the iotaSalon Resumes Exhibition of Contemporary Works for Los Angeles Visual Music Community, Victoria Meng, April 26, 2006.
Interupt Video Magazine, Dissonanze 2006, May 27, 2006
Le Vif/Weekend, Cadres Dynamique, Baudouin Galler, April 14, 2006
Graphic Exchange, Sounds Like Motion, Bob Kim, Fall 2004
New York Times, Where Psychedelia and Digital Austerity Converge, Stephen Holden, July 14 2004
Isthmus, Recordings: Slither, Al Ritchie, August 1 2003
XLR8R, Mad Slinky, Rob Geary, May 2003
Wire Magazine, Reline: A Video Artist DVD Compilation, Ken Hollings, May 2003
RES, All the Slithers, March/April 2003
Neural.it, Netmage 03 International Live Media Festival, Jan. 2003
Intro, Diverse, Reline - A Video Artist DVD Compilation, T.L. Renzsche, Jan. 2003
Digital Production, Flowing Pictures - Slither DVD, Jan. 11, 2003
musicexpress, J. Egan & J. Mandell: Slither DVD, Dieter Schwenger, Dec. 2002
Keys, Slither reimt auf schlittern…, Dec. 2002
Groove, Technique #79, Man & Machine, Studio Visit 2: The Making of Slither, Jeffers Egan & Jake Mandell, Bob Humid, Nov/Dec. 2002
de:bug, Visuals/Next Generation, Visuals are Dirt, Jake Mandell, Jeffers Egan: Slither, Alexis Waltz, Sept. 2002
musicwoche, DVD of the Week; Slither – A Synthesis of Amoebas and Electronic Sounds, Dieter Schwenger, Sept. 2002
Groove, Slither DVD, Gregor Wildermann, Issue #78, Sept/Oct. 2002
Intro, Autechre, Jake Mandell & Jeffers Egan, DVD Blobs against Rammstein, Michael Krumbein, Sept. 2002
DVD Vision, Slither, Sept. 2002
SPEX, Egan & Mandell, Surroundsoundschlierenschlittern, Frank Eckert, Sept, 2002
XLR8R, Crossing the Lines, Amanda Scotese, Sept. 2002
Intro, Jake Mandell & Jeffers Egan, Slither DVD, Michael Krumbein, Aug. 2002
Beam me Up, Slither Review, Aug. 2002
Phlow.net, Slither Review, Marcus Schlussler, 2002
Phonoclub.de, Slither DVD, 2002
Phosphor Magazine, Jeffers Egan and Jake Mandell: Slither DVD, Volume 116, 2002
de:bug, Jake Mandell DVD Surround Release. K2O Explores New Formats, Aug, 2002
Florida 135, Kanzleramt's First DVD, July 15, 2002
Alias Newspaper, Netmage 2 - World VJ + Live Media Championships, Bologna, Italy, Jan. 19, 2002
Exibart, Netmage 02: International VJ Contest, Jan. 19, 2002
Artweek, 'Second Nature' at New Wight Gallery, Mary-Kay Lombino, Dec. 1998
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iotacenter
Victoria Meng
April 2006
Night of Sights and Sounds: the iotaSalon Resumes Exhibition of Contemporary Works for Los Angeles Visual Music Community
The iotaSalon was auspiciously re-inaugurated on April 26, 2006: over forty art lovers attended this forum for experiencing and discussing outstanding short works in visual music by contemporary media artists. With UCLA’s Design and Media Arts Department’s support in providing a versatile exhibition space, the evening featured nine film, video, digital, and performance pieces. The program’s variety in format and theme, as well as its incorporation of audience feedback immediately after each work, doubly distinguished the iota Salon as a dynamic and participatory event.
Even before Larry Cuba, iotaCenter’s founder, introduced the evening’s program, the audience encountered visual music in the form of Jeffers Egan’s Motion Paintings. These wall-sized looped projections present exquisite examples of Egan’s ambition to literally imbue the tradition of abstract painting with the dimension of time. The two paintings shown, colourperblob and Untitled #1, both employed harmonious palettes and languid movements. In the former, serpentine highlights undulated across a dense bronze-on-black crochet, calling disparate, seductive, and vaguely threatening associations to mind. Untitled #1 entailed both a much longer loop and more nebulous forms that together diverted attention away from the painting’s cyclical structure toward its Kandinsky-esque luminosity and vigor. As the screening room filled and settled, Egan’s mesmerizing paintings set the tone for the works to follow.
“Bati Dominance” was the fourth section of the five-part work, Slither, by Jeffers Egan and Jake Mandell. Like his Motion Paintings, Egan’s video art triggered primordial reveries – words like slither, slide, slick, slip, slink, and possibly, sinister – connections Egan fully exploited in his evocative track names and descriptions. This uncanny conjunction between high technology and primal reactions perhaps recall the anxiety and revelations of one’s first attempts to plumb the focus of a microscope or to fix the significance of an x-ray image: did these alien fissures and forms truly derive from a scraping of my cheek, a flash through my organs? The fluidity of Egan’s compositions rubbed disconcertingly against Mandell’s vertiginous score. Both embodied the curious quality of being simultaneously finely articulated and yet somehow out of focus. Even as one began to grasp a shape or a pitch, it has inexorably morphed or vibrated into something else. Although the Wisconsin-based Egan and Mandell were not present at the Salon, they had shared some information about how they executed the video with iota that Salon participants discussed.
July 14, 2004 New York Times
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Where Psychedelia and Digital Austerity Converge
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Pop culture and experimental art, reality television and virtual reality, trippy psychedelia and austere digital abstraction: these distinctions all begin to break down when you wander around the wild and woolly frontier of video art. That territory, where almost anything goes, technologically speaking, is the subject of the New York Video Festival, which begins today at the Walter Reade Theater and continues through Sunday. A good deal of it is fascinating.
Take the work of the video artist Ben Stokes, which Armond White, a film critic for The New York Press, is presenting at 9 p.m. Friday. Mr. Stokes's delightful, jazzy output encompasses television commercials, music videos and free-standing pieces. They are all in Mr. Stokes's signature style of collage-animation, in which photography and digital animation are edited, rearranged and synchronized with digital beats into witty scenarios with a swirling hip-hop propulsion.
One of the most exciting pieces, "DRUM ATTACK," is a miniature history of beats, from swing to hip-hop, that suggests a historical contest between great live drummers and digital mixmasters. It's organized into a call-and-response percussive jam in which everybody from Gene Krupa to the latest turntable wizards belongs to the same community. Without striking a pedantic note, the piece shows the differences between live acoustic and electronic rhythm while also celebrating the continuity between one and the other and the musicians who give the beats personality.
In its accessible, populist way, Mr. Stokes' work embodies the positive vision of art and technology that is reflected throughout the festival. Since video art is more obviously dependent on technological innovation than the movies, which have a longer tradition of conventional storytelling to draw on, it is a space-age form in which the rules are never set because the frontier is continually advancing.
But as anyone who works on a computer knows from frustrating experience, you can't completely rely on machines, which have a way of malfunctioning when you need them the most. That's why almost all the work being shown demonstrates a kind of technological self-consciousness, often tinged with humor.
Even in the most intimate works being shown, like the French filmmaker Françoise Romand's confessional diary, "Thème Je," which will be shown on Saturday afternoon, you are aware of the video camera's being placed here and there in stagy setups. For all the titillating revelations on display, like the middle-aged filmmaker's kinky relationship with her younger black houseboy who goes around in a dog collar and rope, you're never sure if that relationship is an exhibition staged as a joke or something more serious.
A similar spirit of ironic playfulness envelops the first program, "Road Trip," to be shown tonight at 9. One of its longer pieces, Ada Bligaard Soby's "Rome, NY," offers a sarcastic black-and-white tour of the bleak upstate town in the middle of winter. As the film visits one store after another in a place that seems given over to chain stores, the mocking commentary suggests a stoned-out tour guide thumbing his nose at one of America's dreariest, most banal backwaters. But when we finally meet some of the citizens of Rome, the tone changes. Jolly and fun-loving, listening to Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin records, they seem perfectly content with their lives.
The same tongue-in-cheek humor defines "1.1 Acre Flat Screen," in which the directors, Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger, buy a desolate parcel of land in the Utah desert on eBay for $450 and build imaginary animated structures and landscape their property. They jokingly decide that the only way to make it attractive for development is to convince the nearby Union Pacific Railroad to make a stop there. In the first step of their plan they improvise a refreshment stand near the tracks and try flagging down the passing freights.
The more abstract the work in the festival, the more reverence it gives to technology. Some of the most visually adventurous work is included in "Synaesthesiologists: Global Audiovisuals Now," to be shown tomorrow at 9. The program explores what its organizers, David Last and Benton-C, call "visual music."
Because the technologies of digital imaging and digital music have striking similarities, the works investigate the notion of visual and musical synthesis.
They range from the beautiful abstract blobs and mechanized sounds of Jake Mandell and Jeffers Egan's "Slither," to "Dumb Type," an extended performance piece in which automatonlike dancers interact with a changing digital environment, to an abstract, animated video of an exploding building whose ominous associations with the World Trade Center seem entirely intentional.
XLR8R
Rob Geary
May 2003
MAD SLINKY
"Thats, uh, abstract," says a friend observing Jeffers Egan and Jake Mandell's DVD "experience" Slither ($19; K2O Records). In Slither, five short animations by Egan are accompanied by music in 5.1 surround sound by Jake Mandell, although the audio and visual components would be fascinating on their own. Straying from his more recent techno forays, Mandell's compositions are spacious agglomerations of sound, ranging from slivers of chords to random squawks and clanks; occasionally, these sounds assemble into an aggressive beat, as happens nine minutes into the opening piece, "Crusty Effluvia." Egan's animations are ultra-smooth digital creations that constantly twist and mutate. His combination of slowly evolving pieces interspersed with quick cuts owes something to Stan Brakhage, but his riotous colors and organic shapes recall Miro's surrealism. All this goes out the window, though, when you turn down the lights and allow Egan and Mandell's images and sound direct access to your medulla, rendering cognitive judgment and linguistic reactions irrelevant.
Res Magazine
Sandy Hunter
March/April 2003
All That Slithers
A DVD concept album, Slither is an audio-visual petri dish featuring experimental animation from designer/VJ Jeffers Egan and music alternating between ambient and dark sonic collage composed by musician Jake Mandell. Egan's frames of paramecium-like organisms, microscopic mutations and escapees from and abstract biology class play host to Mandell's chilling, often harsh tonalities. The five tracks on the release (mastered in Dolby Digital 5.1 sound) have titles such as "Crusty Effluvia" and "Fruits Help Disperse Seeds," and offer an esoteric view into a Rorschach-like realm of cells, bacteria and the minuscule components of life. Slither is the latest of several collaboration between Berliners Egan and Mandell, who has released music on labels such as Carpark and Force Inc.
Neural.it
Jan 22, 2003
Netmage 03 - International Live Media Festival
Following the premiere edition of the 2000, and that of the past year, the third edition of Netmage, International Festival of Live Media, opens January 22, this year in conjunction with the Bologna Art Fair. Organized by Xing and sponsored by Diesel, this edition makes use of multiple screens that allow for a spacious showcasing of the works. This past October the Milanese group Otolab and the Florentine Ogino Knauss earned a 'ticket' by winning the Italy Media Live Contest, and will join with other European groups (Bas Van Koolwijk, Mikomikona, Semiconductor, KMH, Monitor Automatique) along with the Americans Mordka(Jeffers Egan + Jarrett Smith with Jake Mandell) in this years competition. The two groups winners will contribute their works to a showreel. Four other events are also planned: the opening night of the festival features three intense activities on the relation between text and image by the producer Tim Etchells; the performance 'First the image then the title' by the Clandestine Theater; and a live presentation by Qubo Gas accompanied by the music of the Scratch Pet Land (Sonig); and finally the project 'Stereo #1' ordered to the Upside-down catanesi Dog and Utmost. The final evening will be opened with the duet Christian Fennesz/Claudio Sinai, and continue with Patrick Tuttofuoco/BHF and their one 'Superstereo', and conclude with the performance of the German group Tarwater, with visuals of Lillevän, along with Pobjoy and to Roman Jollymusic. Afternoon Workshops will be offered 'a la carte' like at the festival Sonar in Barcelona, and visual materials from the artists at the festival complete the program.
Intro
T.L. Renzsche
Jan. 21, 2003
Diverse
Reline - A Video Artist DVD Compilation
(Form Records / www.neither-field.com)
SUBJECT: The musician and video-artist Phoenix Perry has compiled ten films that operate at the intersection of music, art and film, and make reflexive investigations into the state of these mediums.
OBJECT: Each of the contributors concern themselves with developing work that acknowledges and investigates our technologically advanced world, showing how the internet and rapid advances in computer technologies in the last decade are changing the art world. Even with similar conceptual beginnings, the works on the Reline disc are radically different from one another. Perry's work tells the story of her own involvement with new media: from the initial enthusiasm over digital-life, to the financially lucrative period of the dot com days, to the physical and mental breakdown based on the 20 hours-in front of the screen-days. The work of Mordka(Jeffers Egan + Jarrett Smith) functions in a completely different manner. Together they have created an alien-infused Cyberworld (complete with a soundtrack from Twerk). Also working in the digital realm, Scott Pagano and Chris Musgrave create visual compositions that rely on the tactile reduction of form.
EXTRAS: The DVD includes a short text description composed by each artist.
BOTTOM LINE: Very attractive, ambitious work that begs for a longer discussion. Every piece possess a defiant quality and shows a high level of commitment to the medium. Fans of Aphex Twin and Red Crayola will find this disc compelling.
Digital Production
Robert Seidel
Jan. 11, 2003
Flowing Pictures - Slither DVD
Fitting after the large After Effects Filter overview in both the current and last editions, here is a Music/Video DVD, that takes the notions of effects and video editing to new heights. With the assistance of filters from The Foundry, Pinnacle and Digi Effects and Adobe After Effects Jeffers Egan created complex, flowing pictures, that are influenced by the visual masters the 20th Century - Kandinsky, Fischinger, Pollock and Miro. Like a painter, Egan composites and reworks colors, movements and picture fragments over months, in a process that lies at an intersection of Animation, Music Video and Art. The visuals are complemented by audio collages from Jake Mandell, a leading international artist of modern electronic music. The sound is available on the DVD in both Dolby Digital 5.1 and dts, and was produced with the help of Native Instruments Reaktor/Absynth and Magix Samplitude. The resulting work is a 41min Film, which sways between quiet and hectic spaces and is an interesting foil to conventional films, and to be sure required much courage and patience to produce. A proof that with the help of digital technology not only can one work faster and better, but also as technology advances, there exists in the minds of a few people a vision that has existed for a long time, one that can now finally be achieved.
MusikExpress
Dietmar Schwenger
Dec 2002
J. Egan & J. Mandell - High Abstraction and organic mutations integrated with electronic sound worlds.
The reviewer of Music DVDs often stand - one does hardly like to believe it - before a problem, one that has tormented scholars for hundreds of years: the question of form and substance. Should one only asses the music contained on the DVD and its classification in the music historical canon, or should one look also in what packaging and presentation it arrives. SLITHER, the debut work of two American expats, Jeffers Egan and Jake Mandell, does not ask this question. With their work the border between form and substance is dissolved, because here the transforming visuals form a cohesive bond with the electronic sounds that yields an entirely integrated artwork. Instead of the DVD formats that always repeat themselves, such as concert DVDs, clip collections or documentaries, Jeffers created amoeba-laden non-objective visual worlds, that form a fruitful synthesis with Mandell's soundscapes. That this nearly beat-free ambient construction is also deeply indebted to the Techno-Underground, it is no wonder SLITHER appears on K2O, the experimental sublabel of the renowned Berlin based Kanzleramt label from Heiko Laux. **** (Four Stars)
Keys
Dec 02
Slither
With "Slither", Jeffers Egan and Jake Mandell have published a Video-DVD with 5.1 Dobly Digital and DTS surround sound. The organic, undulating graphics from video artist Jeffers Egan create the reference point for the acoustics, which Jake Mandell has effectively designed in Surround.
"Slither" presents itself as anything but pleasing: A wicked sound collage encompasses the spectator on all sides, completely permeating the listener before quickly vanishing into the crevices of the room. Nightmarish, extraordinary sounds and distinctive dynamics make Slither not so easy to digest, but provides for an extremely interesting multi-media performance with an absolutely unique aesthetic.
We spoke with Jake Mandell about the audio production of "Slither" and the problems he encountered.
KEYS: How did you get the idea to produce a surround sound DVD?
MANDELL: Jeffers and I had the idea to produce Slither as a huge cinematic multi-media experience. A DVD with 5.1 sound was the best alternative. Since "Slither" is a completely abstract work, it allowed us great freedom to explore the relationship between sound and visual. In traditional film certain rules are always followed. For example, a gunshot will always be heard from behind, through the rear speakers. With "Slither" we manipulated every convention we could to help create an odd feeling of disorientation within the work.
KEYS: What position does the listener/viewer take in "Slither"?
MANDELL: Our intention was the listener/viewer would be directly in the middle of the events. Sounds occur from each of the channels, the rear two channels provide far more than just the traditional effects.
KEYS: With what system did you produce the audio portion of "Slither"?
MANDELL: The entire production occurred on a PC Laptop. We used Samplitude for mixing, Reaktor 3 for the surround effects and sampling, and Absynth for the synthesizer sounds.
KEYS: What types of problems did you encounter in production?
MANDELL: We had many problems, mostly from the fact that it was our first surround sound project. Working only on a laptop was difficult. We also did absolutely everything ourselves, and there was little to no literature or manuals to help us. Mixing "Slither" was the biggest problem for me. How do I properly EQ and compress a surround-mix? And what about encoding?
KEYS: Is the center speaker essential for music-based surround sound projects?
MANDELL: In Hollywood films the center channel is used specifically for dialogue. For music production it is completely superfluous. For me personally, I use the center channel for sounds that I want to emanate from the center. Another technique I use is to phase shift sounds between the center channel and both front speakers.
KEYS: Is the quality of the AC-3 codec sufficient or is a higher data rate necessary?
MANDELL: The quality is somewhat mediocre. It is not as bad as the data rate might suggest, but unfortunately its not good enough. The fidelity of sounds in the high frequency range are especially compromised by the encoding process. With all the criticism, one has to understand that AC-3 was designed for conventional films and has many features for this purpose, for example settings for normalizing dialogue. Unfortunately very few exist for music. We encoded everything on the DVD in DTS, and it really sounds better. I can barely tell the difference between it and the original. And no wonder, the bitrate of DTS is double that of AC-3. Unfortunately a DTS encoder is still unbelievably expensive.
KEYS: Are you satisfied with the offerings for surround sound software?
MANDELL: Besides ProTools nearly all other software is lacking. Almost no programs exist that have surround-disk-tracks or real surround plugins. A real surprise is Samplitude which offers really good surround sound features. What is missing is a good surround compressor and a good surround EQ for the popular plugin market.
KEYS: Is 5.1 sufficient or do we need 7.1?
MANDELL: If 7.1 makes it to the consumer market it will only be a clever marketing trick. I think in the future, with better algorithms and a few tricks we can squeeze even more out of the 5.1 specification.
Groove
Bob Humid
Nov/Dec 2002
Technique #79, Man & Machine, Studio Visit 2: The Making of Slither, Jeffers Egan & Jake Mandell
Slither rhymes with "Schlitter", and thats exactly what it means. The video artist Jeffers Egan and his audio colleague Jake Mandell have made an astounding piece; a catapulting, twitching, beautifully wobbling, fully organic and abstract work of electronic art. It has the potential to become one of the modern trip-out classics. Enjoyed in the right atmosphere, Slither sends every oxygen-breathing creature to his own psyche and back, several times over, without the need for any psychedelic drugs.
Additionally, Slither is proof that something interesting is actually happening now in surround-sound production. That this Video/Surround project was created only in the deepest recesses of the musical underground on a label like K2O under the musical direction of an electronic magician like Jake Mandell, makes its release all the more momentous.
Jake Mandell hails from the North American midwest. There he met video artist Jeffers Egan while both attended the University of Wisconsin, a self-described "small oasis of books and beer in the middle of hundreds of kilometers of cornfields and farms." .... .... Jake synced, with the assistance of Samplitude's "media connection" subsystem, his audio tracks, beats and DSP musings to the Jeffers Egan's abstract bio dance-delirium - in the classic roll of film composer. Using Samplitude it was possible to place Jeffers' AVI files directly into the musical arrangement, and work with frame-by-frame granularity, viewing the video in full DVD resolution on a second monitor.
OUTLOOK
The potential of combining visuals and surround sound is only in its infancy, and it has an interesting future ahead of it. Perhaps a new scene will develop in the bedroom-studios across the planet, creating works with ever larger visuals and sounds, creating works that combine these mediums in unprecedented ways. Yeah, and a DVD-Burner only costs 300 Euro...
de:bug
Original Magazine Article ..GIF 330k..
Sept 2002
Alexis Waltz
Visuals | Next Generation
Visuals are Dirt
The time has come again to rise up against original design parameters. Using the new video and audio standards of DVD and Dolby 5.1, notebook hero Jake Mandell and video artist Jeffers Egan have generated an effervescent film that lies between abstract surrealism and goa-rave-visuals. Alex Waltz dusts off his Techno and Art History textbooks, and gives us his best Lacan interpretation.
Yes, Visuals are dirt. Visuals are merely addition, metaphor, a story in a room in which storylines are supposed to be disconnected and shorted. They are incorrect repetitions of what one has already directly perceived, they allow what dancers themselves must invent, they can almost never produce a compelling, irreversible point. Jake Mandell's and Jeffers Egan's DVD "Slither" operates in the field of "Visuals", combining the worlds of electronic music and computer animation. However, the duo prefers the work not to be seen projected on the wall at a club, but rather ideally in a cinema setting. Slither is the most advanced and brutal trip imaginable in the current fields of perception and visual art.
Regressions into the imagination, far beyond it and back, are never defined by well-known signs and symbols, but it is now possible with the means of digital imaging technology, to imagine what exists in these spaces. Egan and Mandell construct a Trip-worthy experience, but are extremely careful to avoid connections with well known drug/music/intoxication-cultures. They have succeeded in expressing the starkness of the inner mind using only sound and image: in colorful backgrounds, in elusive areas that constitute space, in extremely dark sounds and in fluidities without endings. Egan creates a surrealistic program without subjecting the (re)viewer to Bataillen-esque criticism; the work always maintains surrealistic liberation, without the threat of alienating the viewer from understanding the work of art. Simultaneously Egan succeeds in developing a work of remarkable depth and originality in regards to contemporary image production, without losing himself by over-referencing art history. Instead of something to represent, the point is, like in contemporary art production, to create in space and depth, to objectify. These concerns however are not limited to an artistic debate, but rather the goal is to locate something meaningful in this analyzation. Because the DVD image is distinct and clearer than the televisual-picture, with its lines and flickering, it matches particularly well with the related Dolby 5.1 Sound spec, with its five channels it produces another empty, clean space, different than stereo, a room waiting to be populated by sound.
DEBUG: "How would you describe your work?"
EGAN: "My work focuses on three distinct yet related areas: abstract motion painting, real-time visualizations, and the intersections between fine art and electronic music. I am really looking to expand the boundary of what is possible in computer art - embracing and developing the new, while grounding myself within the historical and critical foundations of Fine Art.
DEBUG: "What are you attempting to accomplish with "Slither"?
EGAN: " "Slither" is art for the new millennium. It is a hyperreal convergence of painting, sculpture, film, computer animation, video art, and electronic music."
DEBUG: "Why did you generate all the images yourself?"
EGAN: "Artists find techniques of expression that are relevant to the age in which they live. In my opinion, the hypercontemporary artist cannot accurately express this new millennium - nanotechnology, quantum entanglement, human embryo cloning, transhumanity, by using old artistic forms such as photography and film. We need new techniques, new methodologies - a new visual language."
DEBUG: "The space the dvd-image creates has very little to do with the tv-image. it creates a certain opacity, it makes it hard do recognize the source of an image. could you relate to that?"
EGAN: "Yes, its interesting that while I work with the same tools designers use to create broadcast graphics, my work has nothing to do with tv. Television is basically a theatrical medium, comprised of associations between words and images. For someone like Lacan, both language and image are completely inadequate means of expression. In fact, he would describe them both as categorically false. Lacan describes Reality as the raw state, an experience so fundamental we cannot directly perceive it, and yet this is what we all are ultimately searching for. "Slither" works within this context of the raw. It is a look into the unknowable, that ungraspable richness that we can only have an obscure sense of. The irony here is that even though "Slither" is an ineffable virtual world it has the feeling of being more "real" than the televisual experience."
DEBUG: "Dolby 5.1 creates a new acoustic space. how did you relate to that specific space with you images?"
EGAN: "5.1 is an encompassing experience, and to complement that the visual element of "Slither" is meant to envelop the field of vision much the same way a Pollack or Rothko painting would. Standing in front of a color field painting, the viewer is an active participant, they actually become aware of themselves within the context of the painting. You experience this same type of awareness while watching "Slither", and "who" you are and "what" you are become flashpoints of discovery in deciphering the work."
Who one is, who one becomes: most Clubvisuals seem totally uninteresting in comparison. They are metaphorical supplements and cultural footnotes to a night out at the club. Just like the 2Step and the DJ + VJ-broadcast on Viva, Clubvisuals quickly become boring, because music and picture do not act intuitively together. Egan and Mandell have co-ordinated the imagery and music to exact perfection, with the music creating the framework for the viewer to encounter the imagery in a direct and meaningful manner. MANDELL: "Jeffers sent me the first track of the video and I was entirely in shock. I realized I could not use anything which I previously produced. I wanted to develop something special. This was not simple because the music should be synchronized with the video. It should function, whether you begin with the music, the video or vice versa. Beats were no option because no beats occurred in the visuals. I found the video very cinematographic and so I wanted to create an atmospheric, dark music, that enables a massive experience for the viewer. The music becomes rather angry at certain moments, because it had to meet the challenge of living up to what is described in the visuals."
The more interesting video artists, like Steve McQueen, Isaac Julian or Stan Douglas usually work with the performative aspects of film and television in a way that precludes any deconstructive or subjective qualities that the medium could have. The DVD, with its characteristic tactileness, creates a massive new latitude. Clearly one can say, tearing apart subjectivity is not my cup of tea. Having said that, the endless deconstruction of the tv and film picture is also not terribly stimulating. It is time to move away from the historic places - movie theater, TV, club, as well as the black boxes that are reconstructed at art exhibitions, and to invent a new media or new constellation of media, that makes possible a direct access to the Subject.
At a Jumpin-Jack-Frost gig, a one second long Loop of a Tom-and-Jerry-scene ran for hours: Jerry struck Tom on the head with a hammer, Tom took revenge, then Jerry repeated his movement, and so and so on. For his work for the Documenta 11, James Coleman arranged a completely white, rectangular, elongated chapel-like room. On the small nearly quadratic wall, opposite the entrance, a plasma-monitor was embedded, on which a minimally changing picture was visible, that could be either be a photo from a microscope or an elevated relief map. It outlines a scientific picture type, that is at once nothing and yet also extremely real. Slither works in the area found between the Raver-psychosis of the Tom-and-Jerry-Loops and the often indecipherable analysis of contemporary fine art.
Musicwoche
Dieter Schwenger
Sept. 2, 2002
DVD of the Week:
Synthesis between Amoebas and Electronic Sounds - Jeffers Egan & Jake Mandell - Slither
Concert footage, clip collections, and documentaries currently make up the genre of the Music DVD. With "Slither" a new type appears: the DVD Album.
With "Slither" the musician Jake Mandell and his partner Jeffers Egan, have created one of the most unusual and unconventional Music DVDs yet. These two artists behind "Slither" have created a stand-alone audio-visual album, mixed in 5.1 surround sound. This fascinating DVD merges circling sound abstractions with indefinable, constantly changing visual elements. As amoebas float by, one is reminded of Computer Animation, and their organic structure forms a fruitful synthesis with the music.
Groove
Gregor Wildermann
Sept/Oct 2002
Slither DVD
It is unbelievable that within electronic music, a field so dominated by technological concerns, that no one has yet had the courage to produce a DVD. Is it pure laziness, or is it simply too much work? Jake Mandell and Jeffers Egan have known each other since their studies at the University of Wisconsin, and are now reunited in Berlin. Using the digital compositing software, "Adobe After Effects", Egan generated 78,800 Frames on the PC (with a running time of 41min), with five tracks from Mandell that are mixed in Dolby Digital 5.1. While viewing the work, it becomes clear, over and over again, how Image and Sound work together. During the visuals in the longest (15min) and last track "Slide Beside", the visuals sync with the beat, while on first glance the audio/visual elements on the other tracks seem to work by together by chance happenings. The visuals are self-styled as "abstract biology" and clearly show, that Egan himself has difficulty describing the emerging imagery. "Lavalamp meets Clicks 'n' Cuts" is the most banal classification, as one quickly realizes that there is definitely more going on here. As one recognizes the bend of modern laptop music is already towards a Fine Arts project, the nature of this DVD becomes more clear. Internal interaction is not available on this DVD, but this is only a matter of time now.
Intro
Michael Krumbein
Aug. 23, 2002
Authechre/Jake Mandell & Jeffers Egan - DVD-Blobs against Rammstein
For a solid five year the Digital-Versatile-Disc (DVD) has existed in the marketplace as a storage medium. During the last year in Germany DVD finally achieved its massmarket breakthrough and finally sales match that of VHS cassette. Unfortunately, the Music-DVD sector is still dominated by concert-footage albums and Videoclip Collections - original productions are scarce commodities.
And if appears as if this situation will probably remain, especially if musical innovators like Sean Booth and Rob Brown (alias Autechre) can only manage a 3-Track-Single DVD Version of their new "Gantz Graf". Along with the title track, "Gantz Graf" (directed by Alex Rutherford) are other older works from Chris Cunningham ("Second Bad Vilbel" in Re-Edit) and Jess Scott Hunter ("Basscadet").
The Berlin based label K20 goes a substantial step further with their DVD titled "Slither", a co-operation between the americans Jake Mandell and Jeffers Egan. For this year's Popkomm-Musik-DVD-Award, "Slither" is nominated in the category "Best Surround Sound Production", and must compete against Rammstein's "Live In Berlin" in Dolby Digital 5.1. Mandell and Egan met at the New Media Center at University of Wisconsin, where they bonded over an interest in high-end computing equipment. With the only CD burner on the entire campus the pair programmed the first interactive CD-ROM titles for the University. Other outputs at that time included a show at the Walker Art Museum (Minneapolis).
Working together to create the "Slither" DVD only formal questions like the number and length of chapters was predetermined - only on the last chapter, which is beat synchronized, was a tempo chosen. Everything that followed was basic teamwork, made simpler by many years of prior collaboration. Using the video compositing software "Adobe After Effects" Egan generated 78,800 Frames with his PC (with a 41 Minute duration), while Mandell with his PC-Laptop and the programs "Samplitude" and "Reaktor" developed and mixed the music in Dolby Digital 5.1. In current live visual sets most material is prerendered and only triggered live, Jeffers Egan, however, wants to change this paradigm and appear in future live sets with Jake Mandell using Derivative Inc. "Touch" software to manipulate and control 3D visuals in real-time.
On first glance, the visuals from "Slither" appear to be created at times by pure chance, and yet Jeffers Egan describes his working process like a painter, who begins each piece on an empty canvas. There is nothing like a storyboard as in classic film, and the self-described "abstract biology" clearly shows, in stark contrast to Autechre, that preplanned sequencing was avoided. Egan: "The visuals in Slither are not processed video material, rather they are all generated/synthesized using the computer. As I work certain decisions become points of departure, and the work develops from there. Miro summarized this situation quite well, equating painting with the circulatory system of the body. If certain forms are missing or misaligned, the circulation stops, the painting is dead. As I begin, the goal then is simply to bring the work to life!"
DVD Vision
Sept 2002
Slither
Not so easy to consume, is the production by Jeffers Egan and Jake Mandell titled "Slither". Psychedelic color elements waft across the screen and combine with musical rustlings that resemble a 1600-Watt vacuum cleaner at times, and other moments the beginning of Star Trek Voyager. Added to this are titles with challenging syllable combinations like "Crusty Effluvia" or "Bati Dominance". The sound is in DD 5.1, dts, and PCM-Stereo, the DVD is region free. Picture: 3 points Sound: 4 points
Spex
Frank Eckert
Sept 2002
Egan & Mandell - Surround Sound Strata Slithering
"Slither" is a DVD only art project from the two new Berliners, Jeffers Egan and Jake Mandell (originally the two are friends from Wisconsin). Egan has a background as a motion graphic designer and Mandell as a DJ and Techno producer (Mandell with albums on Force Inc, Worm Interface, Carpark). The possibilities of the medium are here fully realized on this DVD, which features evolutionary, ever-changing abstract visuals with an industrial-ambient-filmscore. The audio track, amorphous, erupting Field Recordings that are drawn through sound strata, and only occasionally break into hard Electro-Beats, benefit from the new Surround Sound formats(Dolby 5.1 and DTS), and attains (at least for the Ambient genre) an unaccustomed physicality - the audio also plays on a normal Hi-fi set or a television with "Wide Stereo" and sounds very impressive.
The visual component of these soundscapes finds "Slither" in a microscopic world that is gliding and continually morphing inside and out of itself. Pictures that remind one of the natural sciences, like cell biology, in the family of amoebas, but also the basic principles of atomic chemistry, crystal growth, and the propagation of undulating waves in fluid dynamics. Indeed these pictures look almost too good, are too directly aesthetically pleasing to be of true scientific origin. There are moments that occur within the abstraction, that recall digital video processing, when representational figures seem to appear. Only these associations, merely a few seconds later seem absurd. The pictures posses no "natural" Source, they are Simulacra in a literal sense; Copies without an Original that do not sacrifice their secrets. From this principal indeterminacy and openness of image and sound a tension develops, one that allows "Slither" to also function productively as a contemplative Audio/Video format, like "Space Night".
XLR8R
Amanda Scotese
Sept 2002
The nine artists on Reline manipulate, break, and build technology to link, warp, and
tune a new visual language of graphic abstraction. "It's a language that has a sort of
edginess to it-it's speaking about a break-down, about a dysfunction, and about an
abstraction of narrative," says co-curator Phoenix Perry. Filtering an amalgamation of
techniques through garage sale Macs, new animation software, custom written
computer programs and even electronic sensors attached to a plant, Reline's visual
masters transmit this breakdown, dysfunction and narrative through their reactions
to technology's complicated integration and disintegration into our culture.
Phlow.net Review
Marcus Schlussler
2002
When I saw the packaging of this DVD for the first time, I thought a myriad of Photoshop filters had vomited up next to each other - and yet I was clearly mistaken. The DVD asks the question "Can you call something a shape if it exists in a dimension for only a fraction of a second?" and that is exactly what is wonderful about this DVD - one can not simply describe the visual and aural realms found on this DVD. Here movement is the clear victor over permanent form.
Subdivided into five chapters, Jeffers Egan constructs a previously non-existent world complete with a soundscape by Jake Mandell (Force Inc., Carpark-Records). You could read through the descriptions of the chapters, but I believe words are of little help to understand what is actually happening here. For instance the third chapter, "Composed of Smells", the following explanation is given: "Everything is made of smaller part that alone are not alive". One slithers into a world that is organic in its movements, but nevertheless still very strongly dominated by the aesthetics of computer graphics. The result looks somewhat like a mixture of the blur-effects in Björks Pagan Poetry video and the visual worlds in the later parts of Kubrick's film 2001 - A Space Odyssey, only infinitely more complex and multilayered.
Jake Mandell's soundtrack explores the territory between joy and depression and even ventures, here and there, into anxiety. Unfortunately I didn't have the possibility to listen to the Dolby digitally 5.1-Sound, but the PCM-Stereo version is indeed very impressive. If it is possible, avoid wearing headphones because a large part of the soundtrack's frequencies are on the deep end of the spectrum.
The most interesting part about this DVD is the perfect coordination of image and sound. I highly recommend this DVD to anyone who has no problems with completely abstract works, and also has an affinity towards Clicks 'n' Cuts style electronic music.
Phonoclub.de
2002
Slither DVD
The Slither DVD is a completely rewarding experience. It consists of abstract picture worlds that say nothing, and yet communicate everything. At times, the visuals suggest chemical reactions that eviscerate before the eyes, at other moments, a view into the world of organs, abscesses and ulcers.
One sits in front of the screen spellbound by the mesmerizing content. In the same moment, one can recognize nothing and everything. The mind tries everything to gain traction, recognize and process what it sees, and yet any lasting impressions immediately slip away. This visual accompaniment of Jake Mandell's music is one of the most impressive things that I have ever seen. In addition I must say, that I almost did not purchase this disc, because the cover looked too much like a "Photoshop-filter". However I can assure you that this initial perception was completely inaccurate and has nothing to do with the superb content of this DVD.
Phosphor Magazine
Volume Number 116, 2002
Jeffers Egan and Jake Mandell: Slither DVD
Jeffers and Jake met at the "New Media Center" of the University of Wisconsin in Madison back in the days when computerized audio and visuals required a special lab to do them in. Jeffers went on to study non-narrative motion graphics at the Art Center in LA, and has worked for the Blind Date TV show as a motion-graphics designer. Jake has brought out five full-length albums on labels from Worm Interface to Force Inc to Carpark to Kodama. Jeffers and Jake have performed live together in the States and in Europe on several occasions. Their video/audio collaboration project "Slither" contains nearly undetectable genetic motions mate with kinetic molecules to produce Rorschach worlds of the tiny and the gigantic. This collaborative video/audio project from these artists, now living in Berlin, is one of those interesting occasions you normally only experience during experimental concerts (if you are lucky). Now, you have more than your memory to experience it again.
K2O
info at kanzleramt.com
de:bug
July 19, 2002
JAKE MANDELL + JEFFERS EGAN DVD SURROUND RELEASE
K2O explores new Formats.
Who does not know him, the Berliner with the very appropriate Energie Kotbuss Shirt (it has the words JAKO on it). Jake Mandell, who already has released albums on Force Inc, Worm interface, Carpark and Kodama, as well as a seemingly endless supply of 12" records, and who also works for Native Instruments, the software architects of Traktor, Reaktor, Contact etc., continues to work like a maniac. He has now completed the 5.1 Surround Soundtrack for an audio/visual DVD produced with the filmmaker Jeffers Egan for the Kanzleramt Sublabel K20.
The Teaser-EP "Crusty Effluvia" gives an indication of the soundtracky score that will accompany the "Slither" DVD, when it is released on the 23rd of August. The DVD contains 41 minutes of sound in 3D, for all of you with at home with a Surround unit, and 73,800 frames of film(thats what it states on the web site, we do not know how long that is actually).
Anyone who was recently visited one of the supermarkets for Audio-equipment might have noticed that it is becoming nearly impossible to find a basic Stereo based system. With the exception of the Micro and Mini form factors the Stereo is slowly becoming obsolete.
Is it possible that 5.1 Surround Sound is the wave of the future, and that future is already upon us? Ebay was able to double its profit in little more than a year, and perhaps that serves as an indicator that Vinyl and even CD are on their way out the door. This is a further reason to look at the the statistics of the music industry more closely. For DVD sales, of which one never sees the statistics from GEMA and IFPI, it is a guaranteed that the market will never to go backwards to VHS.
Florida 135
July 15, 2002
Kanzleramt's First DVD
Kanzleramt, Heiko Laux's label and company, announces for August 23 the publication of their first DVD. The 73.800 frames of video in "Slither" are the creations of visual artist Jeffers Egan, while the audio (41 minutes of intense techno in the technologically advanced DD and DTS 5.1 Surround Sound formats) is work of Jake Mandell. After a chance meeting, years ago, in the New Media Center at the University of Wisconsin, the two artists began to work together. The two now live in Berlin, and their work is a culmination of many years of collaboration.
Alias Newspaper
Saturday, January 19th 2002
Netmage 2 - World VJ + Live Media Championships, Bologna, Italy
Mordka(Jeffers Egan)/Jake Mandell (USA)
The team from the USA has worked for the past few years (thanks to the support of two computer software products, Derivative Inc' s Touch and Native Instruments Reakter) to the define a new methodology for creating and performing "live visuals" in real-time. Egan, departing from concepts derived from Kandinsky and Pollock, liberates abstract painting from the static boundaries of the canvas and make them acquire a new fluidity, a dynamic experience, with the use of new technology. In their set, the American's work to form combinations between the weaving minimal electronics from Mandell(Force Inc. Mille Plateaux), and Egan's elegant aesthetic, allowing visual fragments to grow and expand until the last violent techno-breakbeat.
Exibart
Friday, Dec 1st 2001
Netmage '03 International VJing Contest
By now VJing, the live-mixing of images with music, is a well-known phenomenon in Italy. In any club, the social centers of the local underground, VJ sets almost always accompany the performance of the DJ. However, the phenomenon has not received the attention it deserves from art critics - and Exibart, it is necessary to admit, has been one of the first national media outlets of art that has given it series consideration. Netmage 02, the second edition of the festival dedicated to creativity and innovations in art, media and communication, presents the first International VJ Contest, at the conclusion of which two VJs will be presented with the Netmage/Diesel Award. The festival is the creation of Xing, formerly the Link Project, a cultural organization that has previously presented VJ contests in Italy (the first edition - the Tunnel of Milan in 2000, and then two in 2001 - the Link of Bologna). The novelty of this years festival is the international character of the contest, thanks to the sponsorship of Diesel Clothing. An open call for project proposals yielded 110 entrants, that arrived from all of the world, of which 12 were selected from a jury composed of Diesel employees, as well as guest jurists from the creative fields of communication, design and art. The contest borrows its formal structure from the historical precedent set in DJ culture. One is therefore reminded of the amazing scratch and DJ competitions such as Star Wars and the DMC of London, or to local street battles between lyrical and beatbox freestylists. In the VJing contest every VJ or VJ crew is assigned 20 minutes to show their work. The performance are judged using a point system (from 0 to 5) based on three criteria: relationship between sound-image, visual style, and difficulty of execution. Imagery is projected on a multiscreen system specifically designed in the colonnade of the Bentivoglio Stables in Bologna: gigantic screens that are simultaneously viewable from the inside and from the outside of the dancefloor. The normal coordinates of the space are warped and therefore conducive to exploring the trance of the dance: literally "to go outside", an outside that now lacks an inside, or an inside from that succeeds in not having an exterior, like an infinite mental loop. These are concepts borrowed from rave culture. Of the projects chosen to compete in the Championships, those of special interest are the ones that represent the more extreme boundary of the VJing: the simultaneous control of sound and video, thereby creating completely authentic visual music. Safy Sniper, a German-Israeli vdj (video-disc-jockey), creates the musical portion of the show by controlling the video. Exceeda, an English visual crew, modified a Vestax DJ mixer to simultaneously manipulate sound and video. Mordka(Jeffers Egan/Jarret Smith and Jake Mandell) and Visomatic Inc also work by sharing data between audio and video systems. To complement the International VJing contest, Netmage 02 proposes three workshops on audiovisual culture to occur in Paris, London and Rome, chaired respectively by Batofar, Onedotzero and Plug&Play, featuring electric music and DJ sets and special international guests, and also including the show ROOM 101 of the group Motus.
Artweek
Dec 1998
'Second Nature' at the New Wight Gallery
The latest exhibition at the New Wight Gallery demonstrates the gallery's steadfast commitment to young artists. Selected by UCLA faculty and graduate students, Second Nature: Interrogating Technology's Mythic Spaces states as its theme the use of technology in recent art to form artificial space. As the title implies, the show examines the role of technology as a replacement for the real; an imitation of nature that is not only man-made but made from the machines that Man made. This twice-removed status of technology-based art is apparent in each of the eleven works on display.
To the eye trained in the twentieth century, a video image is easily understood as a true representation of reality. Video images retain enough likeness to the world they depict that viewers are able to conceive them as stand-ins for the real. Jeffers Egan removes the functional element from video imagery, rendering it entirely aesthetic. Sounds which recall an outer space atmosphere blend with flickering zones of color and light which changes at varying rates to form a mesmerizing and meditative experience. In Egan's work, video is boosted up to the next level of art evolution. Just as painting began as a medium used to represent reality and gradually diverged to abstraction, with Egan's work video emerges as an abstract art form. In Period (1998), he uses computerized manipulation of video images to create an ever-changing abstract "painting" that pleases the art viewer and at the same time appeases the eye of the techno-head whose attention span was trained on MTV. Questions that arise in Egan's work in the context of this exhibition: where is the artiface and what is it standing in for? Is his image a simulacrum of abstract painting? Or is the "real" hidden in the video images the artist manipulated?
The three videos by Jennifer Reeder, Marc Siegel and Rachel Mayeri are less relevant to the theme than the rest of the work on display. The powerful stories told by Reeder in White Trash Girl: The Devil Inside (1996-97) and Siegel in Such Candor (1998) do present hyperreal views of their subjects but Mayeri is the only one that utilizes technology in an imaginative way. Her video, The Anatomical Theater of Peter the Great (1998), takes the viewers on a journey through the obscure world of seemingly artificial or made-up science. Mayeri blurs the lines between original and imitative as well as old and new, by using her technological skill to present antiquated forms of speech and representation that have more in common with old-fashioned filmstrips than with modern technology.
Aiko Hachisuka removes the hand of the creator from view of focus on the automated act of mark-making. In her piece titled Lollipop (1998), a computer monitor sits on its side on the gallery floor. On the screen a sheet of notebook paper sets the stage for a playful game of seduction and artifcace. An animated sketch of a cutesy schoolgirl appears in different provocative poses. The character 's coy gestures show her lifting up her dress and making other flirtatious gestures with her neatly coiffed head, tiny hands and long lashed eyes. The audio, which features a loud recording of a pencil and eraser on paper, amplifies the invisible act of authorship. Hachisuka toys with the falseness of Japanese animation and calls into question its power to invoke sexual fantasy regardless of its distance from the realistic image, much less the "real thing."
Carlee Fernandez and Oliver Maxwell Irwin show works that transform humans into mechanized animals or vice versa. Fernandez's Peter (1997) takes as its title the humanoid name for the famous rabbit from the children's story, yet its intentions are the opposite of anthropomorphism. Looking through the third eye of a stuffed rabbit head mounted on a wall, the viewer is privy to a world-according-to-rodent view of an event taking place in the human realm. Irwin's Big and Intimidating (1998) manipulates a projected image of himself as an artificial beast, raising his arms above his head and growling like a child imitating a bear. With the simple contrivance of forming a curve in the screen which hovers over the viewer's head, Irwin simultaneously exposes the methods of manipulated imagery and proves its ineffectiveness. These artists highlight the important role of subjectivity and individual viewpoint in the way we receive information in the age of technology.
- Mary-Kay Lombino
Second Nature: Interrogating Technology's Mythic Spaces closed November 6 at the New Wight Gallery, UCLA. Other artists in the show included Brandon Labelle, Lize Mogel, Joe Scola and Rachel Stevens.
Mary-Kay Lombino is a writer and curator based in Los Angeles
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