[spectre] Relaunch: The Bicentennial of the Circus

[Lists]

Announcing the relaunch of a web-based artwork by Charles Kriel.
"'The Bicentennial of the Circus' by Lowell 'Bozo the Clown' Kriel, a Circus
Performer for 27 years", an artwork by Charles Kriel, has been relaunched at
http://www.kriel.tv/Bicentennial/kriel.html

This work was completed in 1998 with the support of London Arts (then London
Arts Board) and Artec, and grew out of a far-more complex CD-ROM based work
of the same name created in 1996. The soundtrack from that work, "Songs for
G", was awarded the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for Computer
Music. The images from that work were displayed as large-format digital
photographic prints at the gallery of Tomato Design, London. These
photographs were presented again as projections in 1999 in the Italian
Pavilion of the Venice Biennale.

Title of work:
The Bicentennial of the Circus by Lowell "Bozo the Clown" Kriel, a Circus
Performer for 27 years
URL of the work:
http://www.kriel.tv/Bicentennial/kriel.html
Artist: Charles Kriel
email: lists at kriel.tv

Description:
Bicentennial is a continuation of my work with circus themes and my identity
as a child circus performer. Lowell ³Bozo the Clown² Kriel was my
grandfather. Shortly after he died, I entered his trailer to take care of
his personal possessions. Among them, I found hundreds of family circus
photos, as well as several hundred pages of manuscript for a history book
titled ³The Bicentennial of the Circus² by Lowell "Bozo the Clown" Kriel, a
Circus Performer for 27 years. Not quite Henry Darger¹s In the Realms of the
Unreal, but then again, Darger wasn¹t a clown.

I was most struck by the rigid voice of my grandfather¹s manuscript, written
as though it were to be read from centre ring. My reaction to the work was
to begin writing my own stories about the circus, digitally manipulating the
family photographs to tell stories about the circus, and creating the circus
music I hear in my head ‹ the stories, the photographs and the music of the
circus I remember.

Some of these visual, sonic and textual stories are too direct to be told
normally, and so they have been written using the structure and language of
jokes, the kitsch imagery of posters and the music of dissonance.

My ³Bicentennial of the Circus² is an example of this strand of work,
rendered for the web. As such, it is built to be absorbed almost instantly
visually. Further exploration reveals a compositional complexity in the
music, a text-based story, and a series of image rollovers creating a
complex matrix of relationships between uncanny circus images.


Bio:
Charles Kriel
Media Artist/Theorist

Charles has been creating film/video and media works since relocating from
Atlanta ten years ago; first to Prague, then Venice and London. Born a
third-generation circus performer, Charles is PhD media art (pending viva)
from Central Saint Martins, and has received awards/grants/commissions from
Prix Ars Electronica, ICA, MOMA-Oxford, London Institute, Royal Festival
Hall, British Council, Dance on Screen, and London Arts. As a media artist,
he has exhibited in the gallery of Tomato Design, at the 1999 Venice
Biennale, and throughout the Middle East, Europe, Russia, the US and
Australasia.

As a composer, Charles has been awarded the Prix Ars Electronica Award of
Distinction, and has composed by commission an opera and several song
cycles. His work has been released by ÖRF (Austria) and Electroshock
(Moscow). As a filmmaker, writer and photographer, he is regularly
commissioned by BBC Radio 1 and BBC 1Xtra and has also been commissioned by
MTV, ITV and Channel 4.

Also a media theorist synthesising the works of McLuhan, Lacan and Freud as
they apply to digital media in his recent work Noise and the Uncanny, he has
delivered papers and talks at Congress of the Americas, University of
Westminster, Institute of Education, London Institute, Oxford Brookes, and a
selection of conferences.

Charles (VJ Kriel) is also a VJ, and has been called ³the world¹s leading
VJ² by the NME, and is resident VJ for BBC Radio 1, BBC 1Xtra and Pete
Tong¹s Essential Selection. He has been cited by The Times as ³club
culture's first superstar VJ,² and regularly performs in Ibiza, Ayia Napa,
and across Europe and SE Asia. Since Spring 2000, he has performed for
nearly 1.5 million clubbers internationally.