Oh my Gob Squad!
Gob Squad: Super Night Shot
Join the War on Anonymity
Each of us is just one in a million,
easy to replace and easy to forget
in a city that doesn't really need us.
But don't worry.
We're going to change all that.
We've got a plan.
This city will need us and this film will be our witness.
- Gob Squad
OK peoples, listen up. Gob Squad, a collective of UK and German artists, have declared a War on Anonymity and they need you. Beginning at base camp (ACMI) and armed with video cameras, Gob Squad will take to our laneways and byways to create an impromptu film in real time starring the citizens and streets of Melbourne. There won't be any scripts or rehearsals, but there will be a hero, maybe a villain and possibly a man in a rabbit mask. When the tapes run out (about an hour later), Squad soldiers will return to ACMI where their unedited footage will be played back simultaneously on a partitioned screen, revealing a narrative shaped by chance and unsuspecting Melburnians. It's called Gob Squad: Super Night Shot and it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience where the familiar becomes new and nothing becomes something.
"Super Night Shot throws a completely different frame around the streets of the city in which most of the audience who are watching it live in," says Gob Squad member Simon Will. "It says 'Look at this woman that you walk past everyday and you ignore, look at this phone box that you just think is a phone box and actually see them in a completely different way'." Formed in 1994 by "a bunch of long-haired students", Gob Squad have become an internationally acclaimed arts collective; Super Night Shot alone has been staged across multiple European cities and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The group's War on Anonymity is a universal battle that's risky (what if a camera breaks down?), unpredictable (who knows what that dude outside Maccas will say?) and thrilling. As one critic says, Super Night Shot "is a huge shot of adrenalin in the heart of video art."
Gob Squad: Super Night Shot screens from Thu 3 Feb - Sat 5 Feb, with a special Q&A on Fri 4 Feb. The Gob Squad workshop, Framing Reality, is, sadly, sold out.
Find out Gob Squad: Super Night Shot session times.
Published Thursday, 27 January 2011
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