HC Gilje - Cityscapes

Price: ~~25,00 €~~ 23,90 €

CITYSCAPES is a programme of 4 videos by the Norwegian artist HC Gilje, who manipulates and transforms urban images from numerous international cities. His collages recreate the universal spirit of urban life, capturing it's frenetic energy and poetry through construction of visuals and soundscapes.

HC Gilje (1969) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Trondheim, Norway in 1999. His video hkmark1 was soon picked up by festivals all over the world followed by the pioneering VideoNervous project which established Gilje as a name within experimental video. This lead to a one year residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, where he created the large-scale video installation Shadowgrounds (2001). Gilje has alternated between stage projects, mainly the collaboration with the dance company Kreutzerkompani, installations, one channel videos and live video improvisation. In 2001 he started 242.pilots together with Kurt Ralske and Lukasz Lysakowski and released a DVD on the New York label Carpark, which won the image award at Transmediale 2003. Gilje also won a prize for best alternative musicvideo in Germany (2002) with the video Stacking of Different Natures, made in collaboration with the electronica duo Information. In the summer of 2003 242.pilots was presented at the FlashArt Biennale in Prague, where Gilje performed in his new constellation blind, with his audio collaborator kelly davis. Gilje performed with another project at ARS Electronica 2003, Voice, a collaboration with Maja Ratkje, Jazzkammer and Gilje. In late 2003 and early 2004 Gilje produced and toured in the UK and Holland with lab fly dreams, a collaboration with composer Yannis Kyriakides in a large orchestra piece premiering in Queen Elisabeth Hall in London. A new version of labflydreams was presented at Transmediale05. In spring 2004 he created two more stage pieces, one with Kreutzerkompani (twinn) and one with Kyriakides (bufferzone), and played with 242.pilots at Guggenheim in Bilbao. He also finished working on Night for Day with jazzkammer, which premiered in april 2004, and produced a dvd with blind (released on audi0frames in 2005)

DVD Extras:

1 Bonus Film, Interviews, Bios, Filmographies

Movies on this DVD:

01 "H.K. mark1" (1999, 5 min)

This video was created live during the tour with the video-impro-trio 242.pilots february 2002. It is based on the principle of taking just a small part of each video frame and building layers of these fragments on top of each other, the resulting image is a collage of different timefragments.

02 "crossings" (2002, 4 min)

This video was created live during the tour with the video-impro-trio 242.pilots february 2002. It is based on the principle of taking just a small part of each video frame and building layers of these fragments on top of each other, the resulting image is a collage of different timefragments.

03 "Shiva" (2003, 8 min)

based on improvised material from several performances with BLIND (video:gilje, audio:kelly).
the video was finished just in time to be screened at Videoville in Rome in mid september 03, together with the installation sakrofag.
the video has been selected as one of 7 international videoes to be part of transmediale04 touring videoprogram.

04 "Night for Day" (2004, 30 min)

originally comissioned as a live performance for the new started randomsystem festival in Norway, night for day ended up as a half hour audiovisual composition in 13 parts. It is based on material shot and recorded in Tokyo, which through intense hours of improvisation and meticulous editing has been developed into something which can be described as expressionistic impressions from an urban reality, 13 audiovisual poems assembled into a surreal whole. Night for day is a collaboration between video artist HC Gilje and the noise duo Jazzkammer, who have toured twice together, in Europe and Japan, and also collaborated on Twinn, a piece with Gilje´s dance company Kreutzerkompani.

Festivals & Awards

Press Ratings

HC Gilje received the image award at Transmediale03 with 242.pilots and his work has been presented at: Guggenheim, Bilbao; Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal; American Museum of Moving Images, New York; Sydney Opera House; Club Milk, Tokyo; Queen Elisabeth Hall, London; Flash Art Biennale, Prague; Kiasma, Helsinki; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Transmediale, Mutek, Impakt, Taktlose, Electrofringe, ARS Electronica and Ultima festivals.

«Taking images of people crossing intersections at crosswalks, Gilje weaves a tapestry of intersecting lines within each of which the people can be seen. Layer upon layer of lines containing images of people crossing build up over the course of the film’s four minutes to create a nice visual metaphor for the act of making one’s way across the street.»
(Randolph Jordan, review of the hiatus program at mutek 2002, montreal)

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HC Gilje - Cityscapes was added to our catalog on Monday 13 August, 2007.