It’s already over one week since I returned from the Video Vortex Conference in Brussels, but I’m still deeply moved by the amazing weekend! Thanks again to Stoffel, Maria, Andrea, Bram and the whole team at ARGOS for inviting me and organizing this exciting conference!

I will post some stuff I saw in Brussels within the next days but I’ll start with a selection of abstrakt short films I curated and that was shown at a screening evening at the conference. It’s called “Visual Poems - Abstract video works on the net” and you can see it online at the ARGOS Blog. There you’ll find the short films of the participating artists and some short interviews.

Participating artists are Mate Steinforth, WeWorkForThem, Alec Crichton, Devoid of Yesterday, Curt and Defasten.

“Abstraction has been an important theme in the arts for over a century. Concerning the moving image there has been a strong tradition of abstraction from early experimental films to video art. The exploration of form has always been the exploration of the rules and functionalities of the particular medium.

20 years after the invention of the Internet moving images invade the medium. YouTube is already causing about 10% of the internet traffic worldwide, videos are seen by millions of users. But what is a typical web video? Are there already existing rules and thematical focal points in the YouTube world? Critics complain that you only need someone hurting himself in your video to get the big click on YouTube. Serious content or artistic expressions don’t arrouse enough attention and get lost in the digital nirvana.

So what about abstract or poetic web videos? Aren’t they objecting the rules of the medium by not impressing the viewer with fast food entertainment? Or are they by contrast indeed exploring the rules of the new medium by addressing issues like fragmentation or postmodernity?”