INTERVIEW COLOGNEOFF (GERMANY, 2011)
Tell me something about your life and the educational background
Born in Amsterdam, 1967, a brief moment at University (history) was enough to consider the school days over. I had my own ideas, be it that they were not yet completely clear to me at that point, not at all in fact. But I started to write music, poetry and short stories anyway and kept myself alive with all kinds of jobs. It was an uncertain road but the personal path became a gratifying one when I started to be able to reach other people. I ended up in the finals of a music-contest on national radio with a song I wrote and for which I played all instruments. I played live. My poetry started to get published in different literature magazines. My music was asked for in corporate productions, documentaries and national TV. I learned to compose ensemble music, published a poetry book, and started to make video art… under the name of Broekman & Preisner, which stands for video and music as being two different brainparts. When, how and why did you start filming? It came out of the composing work I did for TV, commercials and educational films. But it was all quiet formatted while my interests were lying in other kinds of movies, modern art-music and art in general. So I bought a camera and immediately knew what I wanted for my music, and how that should look like. I worked hard at it: learning pro edit software for video, reading every page of the camera manual, talking with pro camera-men, learning, accepting a camera-job at a university to record classes, reading thousands of pages about video artists and it’s history, filming as much as I could, working and working, trying, failing… What kind of subjects do your films have? Inner circles, the un-represent-able god, movements and moments, sleep, silence, looks, lucid dreams, sounds, and reflections. How do you develop your films, do you follow certain principles, styles etc? The way in which I produce my video work differs from the traditional way of putting a soundtrack to an image, or putting an image to a soundtrack. Likewise the words. There is no copy and paste one after the other. In the creative process, as well as in preparing the technical periphery, interference is not allowed. I work alone: to be able to concentrate in a way similar to that of a writer. During the writing process, for instance with a novel, new ideas and complications evolve on the way. Confronted, the writer has to deal with them, there and then. Find solutions. The unfolding story demands new insights. That's similar to how I work on my video's. Tell me something about the technical equipment you use. A camera, a computer and my imagination. The field of “art and moving images” (one may call it videoart or also differently) is manifesting itself as an important position in contemporary art. Tell me more about your personal position and how you see the future of this field ( your personal future and the future of “art and moving images”) Every artist has it’s strong field in which he works: video art has a short history in compare to painting, writing and the theater. The great thing about video art is that in the near future every other art will be involved in moving images, and the other way around. Because video art differs so much from conventional film making and photography, there is a whole world to discover: and it’s limitless. But with this revolution of heavy loaded computers comes a responsibility and a challenge: within the thousands of choices (a.k.a. freedom) one can make in editing these days, only the strong will survive. More and more it will depend on the imagination of the maker, on his ideas and his philosophy, how strong the end result will be, and not the challenge of overcoming technical limitation (as in the early days of video making). It is now basically the same as the white canvas of a painter 100 years ago, or the universal silence in the ear of the composer… and it is precisely because of this that you have to know what to do, or/and develop strong intuitive powers! How do you finance your films? Working as an text-editor, writing & publishing books, audio (speech) and camera work. There is also some private funding for special projects or travels in relation to my art: I’d like to mention my dear friends Chris Kwik and Jaap Westermann. Do you work individually as a video-artist/film-maker or do you work in a team? If you have experience in both, what is the difference, what do you prefer? The basis of my philosophy is: I work like a writer, with that private concentration, and that’s in every aspect of my video making, in every part of the trajectory. Who or what has a lasting influence on your film/video making? Different people from different arts. Many. What are your plans or dreams as a film/video-maker? I’m living the dream right now: this day and age is beautiful for me personally. It almost seems as if I have waited all my life to be able to make the things I make right now: 10 years ago it wasn’t possible, not the way I work, at least not for an individual artist. |
INTERVIEW FOR THE STREAMING FESTIVAL
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