a.o.k
2021 | HD | Stereo | 14m
a.o.k is a hybrid video documentary about the experience of making pop videos and pop music. Using only behind the scenes and B-roll footage altered with animations, it is a painting of the emotional experience behind and in front of the camera. It is as much about the content as it is about the making of it.
The project revolves around a series of music videos created to original tracks but the end results are neither seen nor heard; what remains visible, however, are the sensations of the contributors during the production. It is a journey that cramps with discomfort at the beginning but opens up, softens and releases into something tender and compassionate. The result is relentless and unforgiving but it is an ode to the loving images we create of ourselves.
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Pop-culture is more than entertainment, it shapes our reality; it constructs and deconstructs stereotypes, it catalyses real-world violence but also collective transcendence. a.o.k began with some urgent questions: Can this framework be broken and put back together on our terms? What do we lose or gain when we play pretend?
a.o.k took a year and half to edit. It was a fluid and sculptural process that required listening not just to the material but also to the moods, sensations and emotions during the making of the film. The film uses high resolution cameras, low resolution iPhone footage shared on whatsapp and is all interwoven with hand drawn and digital animations to convey a sense of the confusion, energy and melancholy. The result of a.o.k is the space between pretending and becoming, a loving gesture to the images we create of ourselves, no matter what.
Collaborators -
Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski
Bess Barkholt
Nadja Voorham
Victoria Kaldan
Ofelia Jarl Ortega
Sheroy Katila
Masayuki Watanabe
Guido Tarricone, Joshua Leon
Elisa Grasso
Ryan Kalkman
Jazbo Gross
Conway Ellis
Direction, Editing, Animation - christopher tym
Additional Animation - Daniel Swan, Andrea Zavala Folache
Sound Design, Additional Music - christopher tym
Mixing, Additional Structuring - Joris Benjamins
Original Tracks - BESS
Click here to listen to the original soundtrack on soundcloud
Click here to listen to the original source tracks by BESS
© christopher tym 2021
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Premiered at Rencontres Internationales, Paris 2022
Further Screenings
V2 Lab for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam
Intersección, A Coruña
Festival Ecrã, Rio
Rencontres Internationales, Berlin
Light Matter Film Festival, NY
Chat Show
2015-2020 | 2K | 14m
A talk show begins to evolve around a 5 year old, as the images around him are produced they begin to detach and dissolve. Snaking through the host, the guest, the audience and the producer via Barcelona, New York, Amsterdam and Chiloé, the show revisits our protagonist five years later for the season finale.
Chat Show is an enquiry into how we construct our own image and how the environment in which we place this image becomes warped. The 'Chat Show' becomes the nexus for this construction, the host presents culture to the audience and we learn how to be, just like the classroom. What happens if a child begins to disrupt this hegemony? Can we deviate from from the scheduled programme?
This video was produced during the Homesession Residency Barcelona in 2015.
A new chapter filmed in Chiloé, Chile was added in 2020.
Contributors to the project —
Lautaro Vial, Andrés Vial, Rosario Ateaga, Andrea Zavala Folache, Sol Prado, Simone Zanni, Olivier Collet, Julien Debey, Carmen Dusmet Carrasco
The text in the intertitles is borrowed from Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.
© christopher tym 2020
Guidance
BTS
Veni Vidi Nescio
2014 | HD | 4:3 | 10m
Shot in a Japanese theme park that reconstructs a Dutch town, Veni Vidi Nescio follows a sound recordist through replicas, mountains and the water that surrounds it all. Exploring projected realities, the body that holds the microphone records the sensation of dislocation and transience.
The theme park named Huis Ten Bosch in Sasebo contains 1:1 replicas of Dutch palaces, windmills and canal houses and was built to honour Japanese-Dutch trade relations. The Netherlands was the first Western country to trade with Japan but they were not allowed to step foot on the mainland and so commerce was limited to a small Island just offshore: A separated connection. Therein today lies a hyperreal Dutch enclave embedded into the mountains of Nagasaki Prefecture where cicadas chirp and the red sun leaves deep impressions on the waves that surround the island, a place neither here nor there.
This film was inspired by the writing of Dutch author Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh (aka Nescio), a specialist in de zee van tijd, the sea of time.
“Again the day came to an end, again the bright red above the horizon grew pale, the water in the distance kept it’s colour, but barely, darkness crept up everywhere, out of the earth, now the canal in the distance had vanished in the night. We were gloomy about all the things that had passed, and about how our lives would end while all these things continued to exist. The sky would be red again and the canal would still be there too, most likely, gold in the twilight, and they wouldn’t notice any difference.“
This film was funded in part by the Young Amsterdam Artfund (YAA) and the European Exchange Academy (EEA)
Exhibited at àngels Barcelona
and WOW Amsterdam
© christopher tym 2014