selected video
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Late Heavy Bombardment (2019)
By Harry Dodge trt: 5:55
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Big Bang (Song of the Cosmic Hobo) (2016)
By Harry Dodge trt: 11 mins video (color/sound) In Big Bang (Song of the Cosmic Hobo), Harry Dodge appears as a low-rent automaton in an urgent quest to launch a small group of cosmic particles back into a state of pure potentiality. In this film, a cyborg (a shirtless Dodge with a Chroma key green cardboard-box robot head) purchases a particle board cabinet at IKEA and, after gloriously smashing it to bits with a sledgehammer, heads out to scatter the dust at a Grand Canyon scenic overlook. In swift order, the work invokes questions about consumerism, materiality, and the possible fecundity of dissolution or destruction.
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Mysterious Fires (2016)
By Harry Dodge trt: 24 mins video (color/sound) In Mysterious Fires, Harry Dodge plays a human-level machine intelligence being interviewed by a concerned interlocutor (played by Cay Castagnetto); the video reflects Dodge's interest in the fast-moving, ethically-charged field of robotics and machine intelligence. The conceptual, pedagogical discussion the two characters engage in is faceted throughout by their amusing interpersonal dynamic and idiosyncratic means of verbal delivery, which extends to include other members of the filming crew, breaking the proverbial “fourth wall.” In short, while performing a script primarily concerned with the terrifying pall of absolute instrumentality (the future of machine intelligence), the characters and crew frequently interrupt themselves with wit, affection, delight, error, flattery, and absurdity...[more]
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Camp is a Tender Feeling (2016)
By Harry Dodge (forthcoming) trt 80:00 Camp is a Tender Feeling will be a 80-minute performative video about a nomadic band of desert lice-creatures—“campers”—engaged in odd anti-authoritarian struggles. Using dubbing, subtitling, perverse costumes, a literary script punctuated by bouts of non-sequitur, the work explores themes of materiality, connectivity, translation, naming, and provisional locale in a mediatized world. The work’s title derives both from Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay “Notes on Camp” (in which camp is an affect associated with homosexuality and defined as functioning on two trajectories at once: artifice and earnestness) and philosophical writing by Arendt and Agamben about refugeeism and “the camp” as a locus outside of nation, and therefore beyond the strictures of conventional human rights as outlined by the state...[more]
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Love Streams (2015)
By Harry Dodge trt: 13 mins video (color/sound), 50" monitor Employing the aesthetics of vintage science lectures so often uploaded to Youtube, Dodge performs a humorous exploration of molecular entanglement, sociality, the poetics of remote connectivity and not least, love.
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The Time-Eaters (2014)
By Harry Dodge trt 39:00 Dodge’s new video, The Time-Eaters (2014, 40 mins.), follows the orientation of a freshly-minted human to earthly matters, both fleshly and phantasmagorical. This orientation, delivered by an ambiguously-gendered guide, is essentially a monologue that plays with comedic and narrative conventions while also exploring foundational questions about language: its relationship to knowledge, time, abstraction, experience, communication, and intimacy. As the title suggests, the video is also interested in the surfeit of information currently at our disposal, the time we take in downloading it, and the relationships forged by human animals in its haze. Featuring Angela McGuire and Phil Davis.
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The Ass and the Lap Dog (or Maladie du Pays) (2013)
By Harry Dodge
trt 34:00
The title, found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, refers to the fable of the ass and the lap dog as told by French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine (1668). In the fable, the lap dog receives caresses when he rubs against his master, but when the ass tries the same action, he is abused and beaten. The Ass and the Lap Dog focuses on similar problems of transposition, or of flawed translation—of being ill-equipped, untrained, displaced, not “passing”—which could also be thought of as a type of homesickness (“maladie du pays”). The video explores such states via a series of heavily-edited monologues by performers, most of whom speak English as a second language. Each of the “interviewees” is taken to a site, and asked how it reminds them of home. Each responds with a confused examination of the site, ultimately confessing that it in no way makes them think of “home.” Perversely, each is then overcome by “a really clear concept of a video” they’d like to make...[more] -
Unkillable (2011)
By Harry Dodge trt 19:00 Unkillable is a black comedy that investigates the potency of images made from language. Performing alone, in a mask, Dodge renders in obsessive detail—shots, cuts, audio—a would-be film, a “text-story” made up of progressively appalling events. While critiquing conventional film grammar and tropes, Unkillable also explores the queasy coexistence of tenderness and brutality, the nature of momentum (narrative and otherwise), and the often incomprehensible wretchedness of irreversibility itself.
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Ipse Dixit (2011)
By Harry Dodge trt 2:00 LOOP Made with the most fundamental tools of Final Cut Pro, this loop is the second in a trilogy (along with Unkillable and Fred Can Never Be Called Bald) concerned with the possible relationships between language and image. Ipse Dixit uses the simplest deployments of the technology to deliver a short transcription on the end of the world. The upbeat, instructional friendliness of the graphics is meant to contrast in an unsettling fashion with the brief, grim tale told as “he said it.”
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Fred Can Never be Called Bald (2011)
By Harry Dodge trt 39:45 Fred Can Never Be Called Bald is a sustained, essayistic meditation on the transformation of matter: into new states or new meanings, and, via digitization, into the virtual world. The title derives from a famous logical fallacy (called a continuum fallacy) in which bivalent thinking (i.e. “bald” or “not bald”) forecloses the apprehension of a change. In other words, in a continuum fallacy, a change is said to be impossible simply because its exact moment of arrival cannot be discerned. Via a distorted collage of YouTube clips, many of which depict explosions and other extreme physical incidents, the video attempts to slow down or otherwise make manifest transformation—to attempt...[more]
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An Analog Comments on Itself (2010)
By Harry Dodge trt 38 secs. LOOP This 38-second loop features a photograph of a (slimy, phallic, sickening) roasted pork loin animated in such a way that it appears to be feverishly disco-dancing. At one point, the loin pauses and—via a crack that opens into a small speaking mouth—says, “I don’t know if you know this but—there are no holes or gaps in the machine.” This piece was originally commissioned by LACMA, and was meant to be a sort of intervention in a highbrow art museum setting in which a gyrating, muttering piece of meat clearly didn’t ”belong.” The video is essentially comedic and visceral, but the line spoken by the pork loin (and hence, the piece’s title) also makes reference to spheres of larger meaning. The line comes from Anthony Wilden’s 1972 essay, “Analog and Digital Communication: On Negation, Signification and Meaning,” in which Wilden describes the analog world as a wholly positivist sphere, defined by continuum, in which holes or gaps simply cannot exist...[more]
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This Beast Called Force (2009)
By Harry Dodge trt 18:00 In This Beast Called Force, a character of unstable identity (and uncertain gender) is videotaped while sitting in a room with the television on. Instructed to be as "free" and "loose" as possible, this test subject spars with the TV images that flow by (weather reports, horror movies, etc.), offers harebrained theories about human digestion and magic brown dwarves, and describes and acts out disturbing movie scenarios. This volatile figure sports three grotesque masks, each marking a different persona: one appears to be made out of elaborate, flowery foam; another, a paint-smeared tote bag; the last, a torn white acrylic fur rug. Whether the character(s) are cogent and articulate or lost in nonsense and stutter, they plunge us into a sustained wrangle with forces that remain unnamable, unclassifiable. On a formal level, This Beast Called Force combines performativity with hypnotic and sometimes disturbing visual collage, forcing questions about the condition of spectatorship and viewer response...[more]
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All Together Now (2008)
By Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn trt 26:45 Presenting a complex universe set in a post-apocalyptic moment hauntingly close to the present, All Together Now follows various "clans" as they forage for resources, develop interdependent relationships, and negotiate what's left of civilization. Facelessness and the sustained absence of language push ongoing interrogation of inextricable relationship between words, thoughts and forms.
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Nature Demo (2008)
By Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn trt 9:19
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Masters of None (2006)
By Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn trt 11:54
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Whacker (2005)
By Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn trt 7:10
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Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out (2004)
By Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn trt 26:00
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Let the Good Times Roll (2004)
By Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn trt 15:22 Two metal fans, one with a camera, wait for the shuttle.
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The Fudgesicle (2003)
By Harry Dodge trt 9:23 The Fudgesicle, a solo performative video in which Dodge, playing a fudgesicle, parries with an unseen interlocutor in a stripped-down, monochromatic setting. The deceptively puerile premise eventually serves as a container for an effervescent (and existential) meditation on shape, legibility, and the limits of articulation.
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Winner (2002)
By Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn trt 15:33
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By Hook or by Crook (2001)
Written & Directed by Harry Dodge and Silas Howard Produced by Steak House, Silas Howard and Harry Dodge Video (Color/Sound) trt 95 mins By Hook or By Crook is a buddy film that chronicles three weeks in the life of a handsome, gender-bending, small-town butch with a nagging messiah-complex. Emotionally defeated, since the death of her father, Shy heads to the big city to sink herself into a "life of crime" when she is distracted by Valentine, a deliriously expressive, wise-acre adoptee on a misguided search for her birthmother. The two freaky grifters join forces and learn the true meaning of "poise under pressure" in this visually stunningand wonderfully acted, anti-authoritarian tale of friendship...[more]
