I’m a little late in posting about our new project with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, designed to accompany the Museum’s exhibit on Andy Warhol’s screen tests.The project was designed to let the public participate in a central part of Warhol’s output:
The films were made between 1964 and 1966 at Warhol’s Factory studio in New York City. Subjects were captured in stark relief by a strong key light, and filmed by Warhol with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film at 24 frames per second. The resulting two-and-a-half-minute film reels were then screened in ‘slow motion’ at 16 frames per second. [Wikipedia]
You can participate in the project yourself by adding your video to the . Jeff and Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up by Bob Colacello, former editor of Warhol’s Interview magazine, and he talks alot about how Andy always tried to remove his hand from the process of making art, preferring to put the machines in the way and watch what happened. So it feels like a very appropriate gesture to be continuing the project by automating the process of Warhol-izing (or maybe Factory-izing) videos that people upload on Flickr and standing by to watch the results.
I’ve been sitting on the project for a while without blogging about it because we ran into some technical snags making the videos linkable, and I wanted to follow through on the idea that the Screen Tests started with:
Many of the Screen Tests were arranged in different compilations such as 13 Most Beautiful Women, 13 Most Beautiful Boys, and 50 Fantastics and 50 Personalities. This was done with the intention of pleasing certain audiences who Warhol was exhibiting his art to. [Wikipedia]
It’s one thing to link to a nice-looking grid of images of people looking into the camera, but it’s a much better thing to be able to link directly to a Screen Test of Jeff:
And … wait for it … it’s another thing entirely to be able to link directly to a Screen Test of a cat, which apparently showed up 3 hours or so after the site launched. Which is very good.
