The RISK mobile cinema presents a selection of short films investigating the relation between content and spectacle, truth, fiction and conspiracy.

Media is political: the medium is the message. Free and independent media is crucial to understanding and transforming the power structures in which we live. In the 21st Century information and recreational media is becoming polarised with increasing corporate and government control of the mass media and an explosion of independent grassroots media distributed through the worldwide web, festivals and micro cinemas.

Alternative print presses, radio stations, film collectives and micro-cinemas have a history of collective working and a commitment to independent production and distribution. This collective model, combined with the open source, open access potential of the internet to both upload and download content has led to new opportunities in filmmaking, promotion and programming.

Collectives are formed as non-heirachical organisational models to skill-share complex technologies and to create alternative social centres. A commitment to horizontal planning, grass roots communities and creating new modes of production and distribution is a core value of Indymedia, micro-cinemas and arts film collectives alike.

Artists use many different strategies to interrogate the relations between aesthetics and ideology in film: from documentary essay work to re-enactment, performance and deconstructed narratives; motivated by personal experience or artistic research; from witness to direct action; exploring the shifting relationship between the political and the aesthetic. Art practice deconstructs the ways in which we make and view film, functioning as a process of cultural evaluation, offering alternative narratives and conceptual strategies for investigation.

The Mobile Cinema has the potential to travel, taking experimental and independent film to our cities, towns, villages and summits. The Mobile Cinema has a temporary website on Open Mute: Mobile Cinema

Order of play:
Total programme approx 1 hour 30 mins

Planet of the Arabs Jacqueline Salloum, USA 2004, 10 mins

Meen Erhabe (Who's the Terrorist) Jacqueline Salloum, USA 2004, 4 mins

Archiving is a Bourgeois Art Andrea Crociani, UK, 2000, 2 mins

GNU / London Gavin Hill, UK 2005, 26 mins

How Software Patents Actually Work Gavin Hill, UK 2005, 2 mins

Prayers to Products The Vacuum Cleaner , UK 2003, 5 mins

Mishapen Pearl Torsten Lauschmann, UK 2003, 8.33mins

Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (Raad (Bachar)), Atlas Group 2000, 18min

Envoy Ross Birrell, NYC, 5 November 2000, 7 mins

Smile Harold Offeh, UK 2001, 2 mins

Screening Notes:

Planet of the Arabs
Jacqueline Salloum, 2004, 10 mins.

Jacqueline Salloum is a Palestinian-American who lives and works in New York. Her films in this exhibition use popular culture to create highly accessible work that conveys a serious political message. In the videos shown here she pours scorn on attempts to present Arabs as the evil ?other? who must be feared and excluded. Planet of the Arabs is a montage spectacle of Hollywood's relentless vilification and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims. Inspired by the book 'Reel Bad Arabs' by Jack Shaheen.

Archiving is a Bourgeois Art
Andrea Crociani, UK 2000, 2 min

How do systems of classification and taxonomy aestheticise the process of collecting and the content of archival material? Andrea Crociani¹s short animation presents a series of 84 technical drawings of military aeroplanes ­ from plan, side and frontal perspectives. The obsessive interaction can be seen to transform the formal beauty of the drawings into a sign of violence.

Meen Erhabe (Who's the Terrorist)
Jacqueline Salloum, 2004, 4 mins

Salloum constructed this music video to accompany the song Meen Erhabe (Who's the Terrorist?) by the Palestinian Hip Hop group, DAM3. The hard-hitting lyrics are politically powerful but cannot be reduced to mere propaganda due to the fact that Hip Hop is a genre of music known for its frank socio-political commentary. The group's use of contemporary music places their political message within a broad context of youth culture and its criticisms of the establishment. http://www.DAM3rap.com

GNU / London
Gavin Hill, UK, 2005, 26 mins

The GNU Project was launched in 1984 to develop a complete UNIX style operating system which is free software : the GNU system. (GNU is a recursive acronym for ìGNU's Not UNIXî; it is pronounced ìguh-noo.î) Variants of the GNU operating system, which use the kernel Linux, are now widely used; though these systems are often referred to as ìLinux,î they are more accurately called GNU/Linux systems . The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is the principal organizational sponsor of the GNU Project. FSF receives very little funding from corporations or grant-making foundations. They rely on support from individuals who support FSF's mission to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of Free Software users. The FSF supports the freedoms of speech, press, and association on the Internet, the right to use encryption software for private communication , and the right to write software unimpeded by private monopolies. www.gnu.org

How Software Patents Actually Work
Gavin Hill, UK, 2005, 2 min

How software patents actually work, making a case for open source software.

Prayers to Products
The Vacuum Cleaner, 2003, 5 mins

Brothers and Sisters let us come together in prayer and worship. Let us be engulfed with beauty in the glittering cathedrals of consumption. Let us be filled with desire, open our arms and the let the brand overwhelm us. Let shopping save you, Hallelujah, sisters and brothers, hallelujah!

This video shows the new international trend of Praying to Products, from resent worshipping in London, Glasgow and Nottingham. The Vacuum Cleaner are art activists based in London and Glasgow. They also work with CIRCA and are part of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (lab of ii). Prayers will be led in various stores across the UK, as part of the upcoming lab of ii/CIRCA tour, including Glasgow on the 26th of June, 2005.
www.labofii.net/tour05
http://www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk/prayers.html

Torsten Lauschmann
Misshapen Pearl, 2003; DVD, 8:33 mins

"What is a Streetlamp? I only pay her my attention if she bugs me, or if her light is too intense, or defective, or missing, or like now, if I give her my attention by breaking through the accepted everyday. In every other situation the streetlamp is for me just part of that disrespected environment, which I take for granted and which was created to be disrespected".
Misshapen Pearl is a film adapted from Vileem Flusser's book "Dinge und Undinge". It is a phenomenological investigation of the streetlamps function in our consumer society.

Atlas Group
Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (Raad (Bachar)), 2000. 18min
I Think it would be better If I Could Weep, Operator #17, 2000. 6.28min

The Atlas Group is a project established by Walid Raad in 1999 to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon. ìOne of our aims is to locate, preserve, study and produce audio, visual, and literary artefacts that shed light in the contemporary history of Lebanon. In this endeavour, we produced and found several documents including notebooks, films, videotapes, photographs and other objects. Moreover we organise these works in an archive, The Atlas Group Archive. The project's public forms include mixed media installations, single channel screenings, visual and literary essays, lectures/performances.î

Hostage: The Bachar Tapes, was included in the RISK Mobile Cinema programme.
I Think it would be better If I Could Weep, was shown before the feature in the CCA cinema on April 8th, 12th and 20th, 2005.
The Atlas Group Archive can be viewed at: www.theatlasgroup.org

Envoy, NYC
Ross Birrell, NYC 5 November, 2000, 7 min

Envoy is an ongoing series of site-specific actions and interventions began (1998 ñ present) in St. Petersburg, the Hague, the North Sea, New York, the Gulf of Finland, Lapland, the Norwegian-Russian border, the Barents Sea, Democracy Square, Gwangju and the Yellow Sea, Korea.

Undertaking a series of journeys in order to deliver a package or gift to a specific institution (gifting a copy of Thomas More's Utopia to the International Court of Justice, the Hague and to the United Nations, New York) or travelling to a specific site in order to throw a sealed package or symbolic object into the sea, or simply reading certain texts in significant cultural or political contexts, each action references the failure of utopian ëgrand narratives' of modernity and democracy. These works combine the individual and the ideological in an exploration of the social function of the artist ñ as a ëcourier' of packages and objects or as an ëenvoy' sent by an unknown power for an unspecified end.

Like Utopia, Envoy has a double meaning. An envoy (envoi) is not only an accredited messenger, courier, agent or representative (from French envoyer: to send on a journey), but also the object (letter, postcard, package, gift) which is dispatched and that may or may not reach its destination. In this way, ëenvoyë refers not only to the social role of the artist but also to the uncertain destination of the work of art.

Smile , 2001,
Harold Offeh

Offeh has filmed himself holding a smile for the duration of Nat King Cole's song with the same title. He starts off with a sincere smile, but soon the face is strained with pain by the efforts to keep on smiling.

Offeh has cleverly magnified the duplicity of appearances and exposes the alienation of social conventions. Smile is a 34 minute uninterrupted experiment in endurance, divulging tensions that reside within the affected and the concealed. A 2 minute excerpt was presented in the Mobile Cinema Programme.

A programme of feature films were screened throughout the RISK exhibition in the CCA Cinema.
Feature Films Programme