Mail Day
(2010)
maker: Nicholas Schomburgk.
For a variety of reasons this project was not made within a group. It shows. Let's call a spade a spade here. The work has a simple constraint that could have been very effective - film all the letterboxes along a single street. Except the way it has been realised is that this constraint appears to have been chosen because it was easy to do. Let me stress, there is nothing wrong with a constraint like this, creativity and art are borne from constraint, whether imposed by our media, rules of engagement (genre, language, history), or created arbitrarily (fluxus is a famous example). A constraint like this can be very effective because while one letter box doesn't mean much, when you have a whole series, when the simple single is repeated almost obsessively, then meaning is confered. It is created by virtue of the set (all the letterboxes) and the individual differences of each one, which only get to be recognised as different because they are part of a set. Yes, it is a sort of chicken and egg thing, though the semioticians amongst us will recognise that is as much a description of language in terms of our syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes.
So, if the conceit is good, what is wrong here? It uses video thumbnails. Why? Lot of bandwidth, processing time and power, but they're just letterboxes. A jpeg would do. Each is shot differently, which probably works against the idea - it is perhaps odd but often when a work is made like this, through the repetition of a simple rule, the simple rule usually needs to extend to how the work is made too. For example every shot should be the same scale and point of view. Or if not, then some other thing in which they can be understood to exist in common, apart from just being a letterbox. Remember, the conceit is not to find kooky ones, it is simply to document all the ones in a street, and so that builds for you your data (if you like) but the work is then in doing things with this data. In a K-film this becomes finding patterns. Shape, colour, scale. Perhaps other things. And this lets you build patterns in the work. Here each seems to be treated individually, so I suspect if you viewed the Korsakow project file it would either have one keyword, so all letterbox clips are equal, or a crazy cornucopia of keywords, which while exhibiting a different intent actually produces the same outcome in the published work. Neither allows for identifiable patterns and so makes the work appear random.